In religion all words are dirty words.

Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed with carbolic soap p.43 If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are. Concentration, abstract thinking, spiritual exercises systematic exclusions in the realm of thought. Asceticism and hedonism systematic exclusions in the realms of sensation, feeling and action. But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences; so be aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practicing. P. 44 God has nothing to do with it, Ranga retorted, and the joke isnt cosmic, its strictly man-made. These things arent like gravity or the second law of thermo-dynamics; they dont have to happen., if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we havent allowed them to happen, so the joke hasnt been played on us. P. 94 After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didnt/ NO harbor, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about it being Gods will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. P.95 Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by famine, pestilence, and war: or else he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint p.96 Do you have to see a lot of her? Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world Mother is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been dully fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called mother establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they dont, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isnt equated with loving isnt regarded as anything particularly creditable. P.104 We all belong, Susila explained, to an MAC a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teenagers. P.104 Take one sexually inept wage-slave, she went on, one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own Juice. Our recipe is rather different. Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection. P.104

Dont you sometimes despair? he asked. *+ Not even when you read history? Not even when I read history. *+ By remembering what history is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma. P. 136-137 The cruise of the Melampus lasted for a full three years. They called at Tahiti, they spent two months on Samoa and a month in the Marquesas group. After Perth, the islands seemed like Eden but an Eden innocent unfortunately not only of Calvinism and capitalism and industrial slums, but also of Shakespeare and Mozart, also of scientific knowledge and logical thinking. It was paradise, but it wouldnt do, it wouldnt do. P.140 People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom. P.151 Patriotism is not enough. But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do. P. 154 p.161 about moksha-medicine So now you have enough to eat. More than enough. We eat better than any other country in Asia, and theres a surplus for export. Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war. P.169 To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being over-populated, we have plenty. But although we have plenty, weve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to the temptation to over-consume. We dont give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We dont hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we dont spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World Wars baby brother, Local War MMMCCXXXIII. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, youd collapse. And while you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. Ignorance, militarism, and breeding, these three and the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until thats under control. As population rushes up, prosperity goes down. P.171 Id begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern or rather of two kinds of built-in pattern; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving trouble-makers dont belong to a single species. Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species the Muscle People and the Peter Pans. Ive specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans. P.176

The most recent, as well as the best and biggest, was Adolf Hitler. *+ A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or cooperating. Envying all the normally successful boys and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here, unfortunately, he couldnt draw. His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for non-stop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Pan paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolfs retarded maturation. *+ Thats why we try to nip them in the bud or rather, since were dealing with Peter Pans, thats why we try to make their nipped buds open out and grow. P.177-78 It isnt hard. Particularly if you start early enough. Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination. Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X-ray their wrists and give them an EEG. All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately. Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal. A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolutions sake has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed adandena asatthena without punishment and without a sword. P. 178 Then, Think of the other great dictator, he said to Will, think of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Hitlers the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan. Stalins the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man. Predestined, by his shape, to be an extravert. Not one of your soft, round, spill-the-beans extraverts who pine for indiscriminate togetherness. No the trampling, driving extravert, the one who always feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubt or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility. In his will, Lenin advised his successors to get rid of Stalin: the man was too fond of power and too pat to abuse it. But the advice came too late. Stalin was already so firmly entrenched that he couldnt be ousted. Ten years later his power was absolute. Trotsky had been scotched; all his old friends had been bumped off. Now, like God among the choiring angels, he was alone in a cosy little heaven peopled only by flatterers and yes-men. And all the time he was ruthlessly busy, liquidating kulaks, organizing collectives, building an armament industry, shifting reluctant millions from farm to factory. Working with a tenacity, a lucid efficiency of which the German Peter Pan, with his apocalyptic phantasies and his fluctuating moods, was utterly incapable. And in the last phase of the War, compare Stalins strategy with Hitlers. Cool calculation pitted against compensatory day-dreams, clear-eyed realism against the rhetorical nonsense that Hitler had finally talked himself into believing. Two monsters, equal in delinquency, but profoundly dissimilar in temperament, in unconscious motivation, and finally in efficiency. Peter Pans are wonderfully good at startingwars and revolutionsl but it takes Muscle Men to carry them through to a successful conclusion. P. 179 Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned. Theyre never given a chance to work up an appetite for power. We cure them of their delinquency before its had time to develop. But the Muscle Men are different, Theyre jus as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So

why dont they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any large scale. Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they aways have an alternative innumerable alternatives to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination but satisfy it at nobodys expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful. So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people is that it? p.181 We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way p.201 And if ones to believe your Old Raja, said Will, literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features beside your climate incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration, and unnecessary guilt. p.207 About religion And do you high-brows encourage this kind of thing? We neither encourage or discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders cant help making fly-traps, and men cant help making symbols. Thats what the human brain is there for to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly close to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often theres a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; thats religion. P.209 In fact Id say that practically all the couples who decide to have a third child now go in for A.I. [ artificial insemination]. So do quite a lot of those who mean to stop at number two. Take my family, for example. Theres been some diabetes among my fathers people; so they thought it best he and my mother to have both their children by A.I. My brothers descendent from three generations of dancers and, genetically, Im the daughter of Dr Roberts first cousin. P.221 In the early days, said Vijaya, there were a good many conscientious objectors. But now the advantages of A.I. have been so clearly demonstrated, most married couples feel that its more moral to take a shot at having a child of superior quality than to run the risk of slavishly reproducing whatever quirks and defects may happen to run in the husbands family. p.220

This technique was one of their happiest discoveries. Stroke the baby while youre feeding him; it doubles his pleasure. Then, while hes sucking and being caressed, introduce him to the animal or person you want him to love. Rub his body against theirs; let there be a warm physical contact between child and love-object. *+ Pure Pavlov. But Pavlov purely for a good purpose. Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion. Whereas you prefer to use Pavlov for brain washing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals, and tycoons. P.222