*image by Ben Harubin

 

 

As he walked through the jungle, a man composed a rhyme to the rhythm of his steps:
"Oh you can --
look at a tree,
look at a bear,
look at the tangles,
or at a bare wall.

Looking to the left,
looking up and down,
but thoughts wanna make you
stare just at them."

(...He began to sense his step, heartbeat, breathing, and thoughts in synch
-- mechanical, automatic, and meaningless synch, as regards one of them.)

The waves forever lapping against the hull of a ship will cause vibrations
which groggy boaters will interpret as their own internal circumstances.

A man asked an oracle, "How the hell can there be such a thing as internal circumstances."
And the wise one replied, "There the hell can't! How many times I gotta tell you the hell that?"

When one man first heard the term "futile striving," he thought, "What redundancy."
Later in life, when he heard the phrase used regarding the enlightening, he thought,
"What dangerous redundancy -- what dangerous, foolish, meaningless redundancy!"

One man (had we been able to hear him) would have been heard to repeat
Over and over again to himself these words,
"Circumstances cannot change me -- not my body, you stupid oaf!
Circumstances cannot change me -- not my body, you stupid oaf!
Circumstances cannot change me -- not my body, you stupid oaf!"

A certain man decided that one way to fight the automatic, sequential flow of thought-consciousness
would be to always say the opposite of what he actually meant. But suddenly he was confronted by a problem – where to begin? For he obviously couldn't start there, or else his decision would never get executed."Hmmmm," he mused, "a tricky thing, consciousness entangled in thought."

And now the weather:
There was once a man who invented a gun that, when fired,
would send a bullet racing down the barrel the wrong way, that is to say,
racing toward itself.

But he couldn't get a patent! He couldn't get a patent, for no one
who looked at his plans could comprehend his intention. ...Well-l-l, they said they couldn't.
Yes, fair and mild -- for a little while.