In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.
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"Making Sense of AIDS" (1985)Martin Amis
Now how can destructive powers be used for transformation ? First of all, when people know that there are destructive powers manifesting, they start fearing. They get afraid. That we'll be destroyed, so we must take to God. That's one of the ways. Secondly, if a person comes to know about any destructive disease like cancer, he wants to find out a method. And there is no method available on a human level. So then he thinks of God and wants to come nearer to God. The fear brings him closer to God. He depends on God more than on his rationality, than on his ego, or superego. And he wants to depend on God's powers to cure him or to save him from this destruction. So today we are going to pray that this force has to transform America through its capacity to frighten people so that they come to Sahaja Yoga. Because when things have reached this stage of ego, then when people say What's wrong? -Like in England when I started talking first, they said this is a Victorian woman, out of date, absolutely useless. I said "alright, I don't say anything. But you'll have such diseases that you'll have to come back". That was the time they pass the law that homosexuality should be allowed, permissiveness should be allowed, and all these things should be allowed. And now you have A.I.D.S. You have AIDS now here already operating. Now the AIDS has given the fear of the Ekadasha. Now have it ! What's wrong ! What about that ? So this awe and this fear is very important. Is an extremely important thing that you must have the awe and the fear that God is Almighty, and we are nothing before him. [17 September 1983, New York City]
Mataji Nirmala Srivastava
From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the horror of AIDS turned gay activists into raging nihilists and monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the government and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose errors of judgement materially aided the rise and consolidation of the far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily by gay men.
Camille Paglia
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.
Thomas Merton
Cross and resurrection, suffering and the overcoming of death were central themes in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's exegetical and theological work. Again and again during his lifetime ... he focused on these themes, trying to disclose their relevance for human life and actions, and to answer the question regarding just what Christian life really is.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality, violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change. To bring about a change within oneself and therefore within society, one needs this radical energy, for the individual is not different from society — the society is the individual and the individual is the society. And to bring about a necessary radical, essential change in the structure of society — which is corrupt, which is immoral — there must be change in the human heart and mind. To bring about that change you need great energy and that energy is denied or perverted, or twisted, when you act according to a concept; which is what we do in our daily life. The concept is based on past history, or on some conclusion, so it is not action at all, it is an approximation to a formula. So one asks if there is an action which is not based on an idea, on a conclusion formed by dead things which have been.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Amis, Martin
Amos, Tori
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