A Human Strategy: Toward a Genuine Spirituality, Second Edition 2nd edition

a collection of aphorisms from the notebooks of Matt Berry: 

Our minds are circumscribed by our immediate reality, but we stop short at the thought of it.


The proud mind denies the existence of the stimulus in an argument, and so does not see or feel the force of the necessary response, creating the illusion that it is not the perceiver but the world that is twisted.


One can strive for greatness and fail ... and fail with probability. One can strive for a genuine dignity and succeed ... with certainty. And if we wed the two, what child is born? For his dignity forbids that he give up his highest ambition, and this ambition requires the dignified acceptance of his probable failure. So, how does the child of this union, this genuine failure, conduct himself? He is pricked with the failure of his ambition but makes his querencia on precisely this plot of ground. He refuses any justification other than that he is here ... that the earth under his feet is his to the end ... on the confidence that for as long as he holds onto dignity, the value, even of failure, increases. 


Why formulate hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems when there are real problems at hand? ... the first problem being our desire to flee from the necessary by burying our heads in the hypothetical.

The "mind" is a fly in a jar. As long as it respects its limits, remains in the center, it can see far and clear and feel its freedom, but as soon as it tries to fly "beyond" its reality ... tries this angle and that ... to get "behind" the fact ... beneath the surface ... "in the world but not of the world" ... as soon as it flies off in a buzzing fury toward the "ultimate," we hear nothing but the frenzied pit-pat of its own scared ideas. Do not misunderstand me here. To be the fly in the jar is not the despair, but quite the contrary, to be the fly and believe that there is no jar is the madness. We need not transcend reality - reality is the goal - we must transcend "mind" ... to see through the glass but never forget that it is there.