Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
Issue #2786 -
One: Essential Writings
on Nonduality http://nonduality.com/one.htm
The Nondual
Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Kurt Vonnegut died on
Wednesday.
One good newspaper
article is here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/04/12/entertainment/e050234D18.DTL. It's worth reading.
In this issue are
entries about Vonnegut that have appeared in the Nondual
Highlights and Nonduality Salon over the last 8 or 9 years.
From Nondual Highlights
#758
JERRY
My observation is that
one thing we all have in common is a natural
attentiveness to consciousness itself. One can have a spouse,
best friend,
child, or other loved one, that has no interest in consciousness
itself.
Because of our common natural attentiveness, we might feel closer
to each
other than to family or our children. This inclination isn't the
result of
having an interest in consciousness, as such. If we were all
naturally
inclined toward an interest in the varieties of dry cleaning, the
same
tendency would hold.
martinizingly, jerry
*martinizing: a form of
one-hour dry cleaning that every dry cleaner can
provide, but that no human being has actually ever used. I'm not
sure what
the parallel is in spiritual-practice circles.
MATTHEW
for sure, and this is
noted by the profoundly humorous critic of the human
condition, kurt vonnegut as being a Gran Falloon, which is the
assumption
we make that since we have something in common with a complete
stranger
like being from indiana, or belonging to the elks club, or having
the same
alma mater, or in this case being on the same list, that there is
an
automatic connection, a bond of sorts. Yes it could even be dry
cleaning.
after referencing Kurt
Vonnegut i piqued my own curiosity and dug up some
fun stuff from various sites:
One of the basic concepts
of Bokononism, the secretive island religion of
Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, is that of a granfalloon. A
granfalloon is a
recognized grouping of people that, underneath it all, has no
real meaning.
The prototypical granfaloon in Vonnegut's book is Hoosiers: the
main
character of the book finds himself journeying to an island
nation in the
company of fellow Indianans, but other than the fact that they
hale from
the same state they have no significance in each other's lives.
The opposite of a
granfalloon, or at least one alternative, is the karass.
These are the people whose lives are entwined in yours in
mysterious yet
profound ways. Often they are not part of any of your more
obvious
granfalloons, but in the end it is their presence on this earth
that has
great influence of the direction of your own life. Recognizing
members of
your karass is not an easy thing and some you may never identify,
but part
of the spiritual mission of Bokononists is to celebrate their
karass.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Nondual Highlights
#2601
Graphic: Kurt Vonnegut,
from A Man Without a Country
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Nondual Highlights
#2472
"To the
as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps
of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have
caught life. I
have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated
nothingness, and
then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound
poured in.
Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they
said could be
appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was
that.
They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was
in
City
They never shut up. Year
after year they piled detail upon detail. They do
it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982,
and that I
am fifty years old. Blah blah blah..."
--Kurt Vonnegut, in
"Deadeye Dick"
posted by Wayne Ferguson
to The Power of Silence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From #2059
Tomas Diaz de Villegas:
I got another one for the
nonduality movie list- just saw it this weekend-
"American Beauty" and, it was beautiful. I give it two
thumbs up. go out
and see it- have fun!
Petros:
Yes, it was excellent.
I also recommend
"Breakfast of Champions," with Bruce Willis. It's based
on
the Kurt Vonnegut novel about a car dealer and small-town
celebrity who
suffers a crisis of identity (early in the film he asks himself
"Who Am
I?") and basically goes wacko until he encounters a science
fiction writer
whose novel (in the form of a letter written from God to
humanity) explains
the mystery of the universe, viz., "I put you here as a test
to see how
much you can take."
It is getting lousy
reviews, but I enjoyed the concept of the film. I
presume Vonnegut's book is far more complex and I plan to read
it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From #710
JOHN METZGER
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Breakfast of Champions"
Kilgore Trout once wrote
a short story which was a dialogue between two
pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of
life as they
ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their
limited
intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were
making
champagne.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from Nonduality
Salon:
:) oh yes... i consider
philip k. and kurt vonnegut jr among the sanest
writers in 20th century, along douglas adams and stanislaw lem...
yosy
ps. :) on my last
birthday i received a whole collection of philip k dick
in... polish!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from Nonduality
Salon:
--- In NondualitySalon@yahoogroups.com, "lucreziag_2000" <lucreziag@a...>
wrote: This is one of my favorite book excerpts. Eye really like
it:
"There was a message
written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel.
This was it:
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF
Trout plundered his
pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the
question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt
match. So he
left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have
written, if he
had found anything to write with:
To be the eyes and ears
and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you
fool."
From _Breakfast of
Champions_ by Kurt Vonnegut
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
calsfbob contributed to
Nonduality Salon:
From Breakfast of
Champions, Kurt Vonnegut ____"Now It Can Be Told."
Kilgore Trout_____
The premise of the book
was this: Life was an experiment by the Creator of
the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was
thinking of
introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with the ability
to make
up its own mind. All the other creatures were fully-programmed
robots.
The book was in the form
of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe
to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the
creature and
apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator
invited him
to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf
Astoria Hotel
in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr.,
would sing
and dance.
And the experimental
creature wasn't killed after the banquet. He was
transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced
from the
palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation
didn't hurt at
all.
And then the cells were
stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They
would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons
went by.
Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will.
Trout didn't give the
experimental creature a proper name. He simply called
him The Man.
On the virgin planet, the
Man was Adam and the sea was Eve.
The Man often sauntered
by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve.
Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an
invigorating swim.
She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would
dive into
an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain.
He screamed when he dived
into the icy water, screamed again when he came
up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he
scrambled up
rocks to get out of the water.
He panted and laughed
some more and he thought of something amazing to
yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The
Creator
had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he
was going to
do next - and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man
yelled this:
"Cheese!"
Another time he yelled,
"Wouldn't you really rather drive a Buick?"
The only other big animal
on the virgin planet was an angel who visited The
Man occasionally. He was a messenger and an investigator for the
Creator of
the Universe. He took the form of an eight hundred pound male
cinnamon
bear. He was a robot, too, and so was The Creator, according to
Kilgore
Trout.
The bear was attempting
to get a line on why The Man did what he did. He
would ask, for instance, "Why did you yell, 'Cheese'?"
And The Man would tell
him mockingly, "Because I felt like it, you stupid
machine."
Here is what The Man's
tombstone on the virgin planet looked like at the
end of the book by Kilgore Trout:
NOT EVEN THE CREATOR OF
THE UNIVERSE KNEW WHAT THE MAN WAS GOING TO SAY
NEXT. PERHAPS THE MAN WAS A BETTER UNIVERSE IN ITS INFANCY.
-------------------------------------------
A few quotes I found on
the internet:
Life happens too fast for
you to ever think about it. If you could just
persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
Kurt Vonnegut
Thinking doesn't seem to
help very much. The human brain is too
high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular
universe.
Kurt Vonnegut
"The Universe is a
big place -- perhaps the biggest." -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
