Harry Houdini, RIP
At Houdini's funeral:
The St. Cecile Lodge of Masons and the Society of American Magicians formed squares in turn about the bier. Tribute was read and “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” sung. Then a white lambskin was laid upon the bier and each Mason filed by and dropped a bit of evergreen, emblematical of the immortality of the soul.
The New York Times, 1926
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: as waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking candle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its history, and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience, which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing - atoms with curiosity - that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders.
Richard Feynman
Perennial Philosophy is the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.
The Perennial Philosophy
Aldous Huxley
Voltaire thought he was dying in February 1778 and said: I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.
When he died on May 30, 1778, his last words were: For God's sake, let me die in peace.
Harry Houdini, RIP.jpg)
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
The Second Coming
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its history, and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience, which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing - atoms with curiosity - that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. 
Perennial Philosophy is the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.
Voltaire thought he was dying in February 1778 and said: I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.