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H.M. Forester Biography

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“°Fake it till you make it,° the inner voice advised. °I mean it. As long as you remember that you are consciously acting, you can play the As If experiment. Act “as if ...” you are relaxed and confident in social positions. Act “as if ...” you really know . I don’t mean acting in a superior manner or bragging; just that you adopt a more positive attitude to life and to your newfound studies.°”

“It’s not simply a matter of accumulating data points, though in the early stages there is a necessity to take the raw material on-board. If anything, rather than carrying a large inventory, knowledge arrives “just in time”, without the expensive overhead of warehousing, in response to the needs of time, place, people and circumstances.”

“Have you come across a phenomenon which we might call “parallel conversations” before? What do I mean by that? I mean where one thing can be said at a rational and everyday level, and yet something else, some other message or signal, modulates that basic carrier wave. ... [S]omeone might use a metaphor or a common saying (either knowingly or unconsciously) such as “There's no point in mending fences while the wind s up”, which might rationally fit in with a physical task that they were carrying out at home over the weekend, and yet might convey other meanings to whomever they were talking to.”

“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not back to the 1950s, but further back: to Dickensian times and to (corporate) feudal fiefdom. They want to wind the clock back to a time before the hard-won battles for civil rights, social reforms, and worker representation. A time long, long before the “woke virus”, “illegal immigrants”, and gender identity, when life was more conservative and white lives mattered; though with a new, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist (or Islamist, or ultra-Zionist, or even atheist) and isolationist twist. And some will go to any lengths – and I do mean any desperate, violent, draconian lengths – to bring this vile and unholy vision about. [From Preface]”

“[I]f you’re looking to me to give you a Red Pill to magically transport you to the mundus imaginalis, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Red Pills are few and far between. ... However, ... what I can suggest is that much the same effect may be obtained by cutting down on one’s intake of Blue Pills, which are in far, far more abundant supply, sadly.”

“Only later – much, much later, and after losing all hope and undergoing a seemingly interminable Dark Night of the Soul – would Louie begin to see how Shah’s own work tied in with others. Not only among Sufis, nor in the general fields of spirituality and mysticism, nor in the work of Shah’s own family, friends of Shah, and friends of friends of Shah, and people who quoted people quoting Shah, but in diverse fields and in the town’s marketplace, mucky alleyways and smoke-clouded taverns of everyday life. That was a whole new vista, a continent beyond Shah’s own island – vast, exotic, and apparently self-contained as it had been, and yet not all and everything. Looking back, this wonderful caravanserai had been a very necessary, and much loved, step or two along the way.”

“All this attending educational lectures and reading is greatly tempting, of course, and a great many would-be students spend their whole lives in such study. But in reality they have reached an unseen or unobserved impasse, and are merely milling around base camp and congratulating themselves and their fellow wayfarers on having achieved such dizzying heights.”

“Creating distrust, division, confusion, and chaos, leading to massive societal dysfunction and collapse, is not a bug in the MAGA plan due to incompetence in personnel picks and policy: it’s a very deliberate design feature, and it will have dire global consequences. And for accelerationists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Christian nationalists, it’s all a part of the big plan for the End Times.”

“°I quite distinctly heard you mulling it over, and my own ears seldom deceive me. But anyway, that’s beside the point. The reason that you are kept waiting – and this is just one “for instance” out of many other possible examples – is that what you see and experience is a reflection in the outer world of you keeping yourself and others waiting. It’s as if a mirror had been held up to your own face. Please excuse the vernacular, but if you really had your shit together as you think you have, Louie, then you wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. It’s as simple – and yet currently difficult – as that.°”

“We are living through an extraordinary era and face massive upheaval and grave existential threats that are affecting our lives as individuals, in social and work groups, in societies, and increasingly on a global – dare I say even a cosmic – scale. We are caught in turbulent and traumatic times as we transition between the death of the old world order and the uncharted territory of rebirth into something new. Something unknown, uncertain, frightening or even threatening to many of us. [From Preface]”

“As well as this, there were of course many sceptics and detractors, not only of Shah but of his students and his would-be or wanna-be students. They’d say things like “You’ve been studying for – what? – 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And where has it got got you, eh? Eh? Nowhere.” And there really was no answer to that, other than to simply try to show a good example, and hope that some might sense subtle signs of progress having been made. But no: they wanted to see Gandalf with his whizz-bangs. Unlike Rabia, we couldn’t magically produce an onion out of thin air – an incontrovertible act – and later retort: “What? Do you think that God is a greengrocer, or something?”