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Dead Toad Scrolls Quotes
Reality does not create the entire womb of human life. We have eyes that witness truth and beauty. We are creatures that think, plan, dream, and remember. The lambent luminescence supplied by human memory reveals that we live in a dream world. Human imagination tied to memory tells us how to live today and forevermore.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer’s tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The conscious mind and the unconscious mind jointly govern human beings’ desires, thoughts, and behavior, which unified totally in a singular human body houses what we term the self. The conscious mind frequently assist facilitate the agenda of the unconscious mind. Incompatible cravings of the conscious and unconscious mind generate tension and emotional turmoil, which can manifest itself in erratic behavior that produces self-doubt and self-questioning. One of the main conundrums of human beings is that the unconscious mind, which guides important aspects of human behavior and motivation, is virtually unknowable. The power of conscious thought – the ability to rationalize – misleads us into thinking we are primary logical entities, when we live most of our lives by unconsciously scanning external stimuli and reacting to events in real time without conscious reflection.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Any person striving to accomplish anything worthwhile will risk their personal vivacity by assuming responsibility that exceeds their talent and abilities and work beyond their physical strength and emotional stamina. A motivated person will endure loneliness and despair and open-mindedly accept righteous criticism.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person interprets the silence that surrounds him or her. The eternal silence of the universe that we exist in is terrifying because it forces each of to ask what our purpose is, why are we here, and what should I do?
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We gain knowledge about the interworking of our personal mind through observation of the external world and personal introspection. Contemplation requires a degree of stillness, the willingness to consider deep thoughts.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Living is a creative and active process of diligent learning that entails industrious human action, attentive awareness, and thoughtful reflection. Learning is one facet of human beings innate capacity that can provide a sense of worthiness to human life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We use the mind to create ourselves. Stuck amid the inevitable gaps between the mint of imagination and the postholes of actuality, we stutter step through the stratum of objective and subjective reality. We constantly amend our internal mental maps. Each day we awaken from the nighttime dream world with a revised identity of ourselves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A mature person reaps joy in the commonplace acts of living, appreciates the serenity of just being, while balancing the responsibilities that come naturally about when deeply immersed in family and community affairs. Directing their attention outward, assisting other people in their troubled times, while denying themselves the indulgence of self-absorption frees a person’s bidding mind from a jumble of discordant thoughts, wants, and unholy bequests.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our attitudes and personal values create outcomes. The consequence of any venture shapes our evolving ethical precepts, and the product of a sundry of worldly experiences in turn establishes our personality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our personal experiences and mental reasoning skills establish the range of our perception of reality. Our physical and mental abilities determine the outer perimeter regarding what we can experience and learn. Our inaugurating dreams are unlimited by physical reality and our genetic composition. There will always be an unbridgeable rift between countless combinations of human dreams and the infinity of reality, unless we accept what we are without wishing to be something else.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our essential humanity is dependent upon humankind’s ability to join the past and the future with the present. Recollections and future projections grant us the ability to cogitate, analyze, and evaluate. Contrasting memories enable us to ascertain what is true and false, and determine what is charming, attractive, stunning, or sublime. Remembrance of the past serves to comfort us, awareness of the future offers us hope, while our dutiful engagement in the present is capable of arresting our complete attention.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person’s irregular surfaces are what make us interesting.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cannot suppress our defining humanity and innate spirituality. The quivering pulsation of life force buried within the scarlet corpus of our blood waits like a winged angel adamant to erupt from a cocoon of unholy encapsulation whenever we return to ligature of our primitive essence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The mysteries of life include the external and the internal conundrums that each person encounters in a world composed of competing ideologies and agents of change. Conflicting ideas include political, social, legal, and ethical concepts. Agents of change include environmental factors, social pressure to conform, aging, and the forces inside us that made us into whom we are as well as the forces compelling us to be a different type of person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The personal eloquence of other people expressing aspects of nature and human condition inspire us, as do persons whom exhibit courage to gain strength when dealing with the hardships and struggles of a mortal life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The goal of all principled people is to recognize truth. Simple or complex thoughts and feelings standing alone rarely express any universal truths. Thoughts and feelings combine to create profound truths and compose extravagant falsities. Truth making exposes certain falsehoods, and lies shed light upon irrefutable truths. Art reveals the pageantry of nature along with the unmitigated grotesqueness that accompanies an earthly life. The search for truth begins with an intellectual journey into darkness whereas the search for beauty requires an imaginative act trussed with the classical beauty of Apollonian lightness. Aesthetic appreciation represents the perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of humankind’s animalistic nature. Similar to aesthetic experience – contemplation of beauty without imposition of a worldly agenda – love depends upon human sensory-emotional values, a judgement of values and sentiments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The paramount terror that plagues humankind is to live a meaningless life of an exile, an incomplete person whom fails to experience the rapture of living in an astonishing manner.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must make peace with oneself before they will find peace with the world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Pain is essential for survival, pain is the tangible material that creeps into our mind and screams at us to recognize that something is terribly wrong.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Cockiness – the state subjective or intuitive state of self-assurance – is a sign of ignorance. Maturity comes with encountering the horrible and learning about what a person can withstand.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal struggles, mistakes, and perseverance are part of every person’s life story. A proper mindset can turn failure into a gift. Specific human qualities such as intelligence and adaptive skills can be cultivated through applied effort to assist a person overcome a resounding failure. Each person would be wise to ask how does a person cope – grapple – with failure? We derive strength from our struggles.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person’s life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person’s maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting being. Writing our personal story, we discover new dimensions of our being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Change is part of life. Civilizations rise and fall, the tides wax and wane, the planet undergoes periods of climatic revolution, the young grow up, and the old die. What will come is that what shall be. Survival as individuals and as a species demands fluidity of human thought and the demonstrated ability, temperament, and perseverance to change.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
One of the salient facts of a self is that a person is constantly undergoing a series of actions in the immediacy of time that they must later reflect upon and synthesize new experiences, thoughts, feelings, and mental impression along with their latent memories into a collaborative sense of being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A great deal of the global stimuli that we view comes to us without major effort. Daily a person scans and screens a wide barrage of solicited and unsolicited material. What information a society pays attention to creates the standards and principles governing citizens’ life. A nation’s discourse translates its economic, social, and cultural values to impressionable children.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There are many standards to measure if a person was successful including did they fill a niche role in society, invent something useful, attain professional distinction, or achieve great wealth. A person might also judge someone a success in life if they laughed frequently, were kind to children and animals, and were truthful, loved by their family, and respected by their friends.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The foundation stone of all philosophy is self-knowledge and being true to thy self. A person must address an inner necessity in order to realize the fundamental truth about oneself, seek self-improvement, and gain knowledge through experience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-mastery involves a studious account of all aspects of human life and developing a comprehensive philosophy for living without fear or anxiety throughout the remaining years of a person’s life. A person must live within the limits of the human condition, which does not justify giving into all of our destructive impulses or living a pleasurable and guiltless life. Self-mastery does not require a person to live a life without passion; rather, it entails channeling vibrant personal passions into living in a virtuous manner of created beings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Change is essential for survival. All life forms must adapt to their fluctuating circumstances. All form of life result from the process of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance. The universe is in a constant state of chaos. We each have chaos implanted into our bones. Nature wires all of us for change.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every plant, tree, and animal is a blessing and every person has a purpose for living. Courage, curiosity, and generosity produce noble spirits. Enduring life honorably results in wisdom. Knowledge passed down from one generation to the next along with humankind’s tradition of performing charitable and self-sacrificing deeds creates principled legacies for future generations to emulate.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must move beyond guilt and unexamined thoughts and motives in order to discover a purpose for living vibrantly.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
High performers whom exhibit tremendous self-control tend to be burden by their own competence. Studies indicate that being extraordinary competent can place a person under an unusual amount of stress because it raises other people’s expectation of them. The more task that an exemplary employee produces with a ‘go-getting personality’ while maintaining high quality relationships with peers and clients, the more an organization tends to underestimates their actual effort and the more it expects of them. Other people do not comprehend how difficult it is for a high performer to complete multifaceted tasks. They also tend to underestimate how much effort an enterprising person exerts who maintains a positive and pleasant attitude while completing difficult assignments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A poet warrior realizes both the brutality and the beauty in life, and apprehends that the suffering we tragically endure is partly what makes us human. What also makes us human is the ability to love, the ability to stand in nature’s presence, and to nurture this earthly paradise to tend to our family’s needs.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Music has the ability to express in the upbeat every brilliant aspect of existence, while on the downbeat convey the anguish that a human being experiences when apprehending the fleeting nature of time, and the mysterious torture of living and dying. Music stands alone in its ability to communicate the symbols and phases of life, both being and nonbeing.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are the directors of our own life, creating our own version of truth, which can be humorous, pleasurable, miserable, brutal, or stupid. Reconciling loss and misfortune can provide a sense of sublimity or catharsis.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The great beauty of life is its mystery, the inability to know what course our life will take, and diligently work to transmute into our final form based upon a lifetime of constant discovery and enterprising effort. Accepting the unknown and unknowable eliminates regret.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A voice is a product of the writer’s own Pandora Box of insight, insecurities, bravado, modesty, humility, affection, understanding, and confidence. In short, a voice reflects the writers’ sangfroid. The tenor of the writer’s voice also reflects their insecurities, self-doubt, egotism, testiness, and the ability to identify with their mental and physical infirmities. The inflection that distinguishes a writer’s pitch from other wordsmiths’ tone reflects their collective lifetime of mundane, tranquil, disturbing, and passionate experiences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A program of active reading and writing might be the hardest form of thinking, but it is also the most organized methodology of self-education. Reading exposes the mind to a world of ideas heretofore unimaginable and encourages the novice learner to write. Reading is a form a joint mediation and writing represents the product of several authors’ collective and collaborative minds at work.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We become the product of our recurrent thoughts. Writing is one method of explicating upon our thoughts, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas, and editing our fragmented beliefs.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Despite the personalization of life’s events, all people largely experience the same general transformative stages of life and eventually we all encounter a row of similar tragedies. We do not experience identical lives or exemplify replicable personalities. Every person is a receptacle whom is capable of experiencing the full gamut of the entire human condition. Our lives act as a period of apprenticeship, which we devote laboring to discover the truths that we can live by.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Fateful encounters with a cruel world reveal our character. No human is immune from heartbreaking loss. Regardless of our socioeconomic status, eventually everybody shall suffer a grievous personal loss, a body blow that inflicts pain of inexpressible magnitude.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Living deeply requires more than a static vivisection of a person’s history and a cold survey of the world. Living a meaningful life entails immersion in the continuous flow of life through passionate thinking, observation, and directed action.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Many aspects of the human condition are beautiful and many others are vile. Betrayal and personal agony represent a maddening part of being human. A person can maintain personal dignity by exercising restraint, remaining true to their conscience, and preserving under difficult conditions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I seek to sensitize and clarify the essential elements of my soul. I will leave striving for the flags of fame and fortune behind and go where the soul beckons without fearing the decisive outcome. I will travel in a world without boundaries and embrace danger and awe. I will stand as a witness to comedy, beauty, and tragedy and apply the principles of artistic and ascetic forms of awareness to overcome the inherent frustration of enduring a fundamentally painful human existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cannot anticipate in advance how anyone will respond when they first rub elbows with Eros’ malady of passion and madness. Eros arrives on a wing of a devious angel to take control of our body, encapsulate our mind, and seize command over the quality of our life. In its purest manifestation, romantic love guarantees to rip us asunder, because we are unwittingly dispossessed of our precious sense of self-control.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The closet bond that we share with our brethren is that of grief. Every community knows sorrow.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Generations cometh and generations passeth, but the earth abideth forever. While successive generations live and die, and all things change, man can never rest until death claims us. I choose to use my time alone to contemplate human existence, probe the human condition, and trace what it means to be one man in our modern world. There can be no profit from my labor, no lasting yield realized from this laborious and painful sojourn. We will leave everything behind. The earth shall dissolve all of our acquisitions and obliterate all traces of our petty affections. Passage of time shall alter, not annihilate the products of any artistic labors. The substance of our artistic enterprises shall continue forward in a renewed and redefined state.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Summertime is a period for youthful explorations, a joyful time when we learn lessons without grand expectations or harsh consequences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A creative person aspires to devote the core state of their mind fixated upon performing the surge of work that expresses the raw passion driving an evolving notion of their quintessence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind devotes much of its collective energy to managing personal and institutional anxiety and dealing with unsuccessful efforts of its civilians to cope with the tides of shifting social and economic conditions. Every city corridor houses downtrodden citizens whom have given up on life, the dopers, smoke hounds, crack heads, and unrepentant drunkards whom spend their days pushing shopping carts and their nights sleeping in gutters. In marked contrast to these filthy and wretched souls whom inhabit the skid row of every city’s streets, all animals display an admirable state of hygiene and a zest for life. Except for poor critters sentenced to live confined in a zoo and domestic animals held captives in deplorable harvesting pens, all animals live a carefree existence that is preferable to living off stress sandwiches of modern humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No one wants to occupy a black hole of sadness and despair or slip on the tight rope that separates sanity from insanity, and reside in a vortex devoid of reality. I entered the world as a freeman and desire to escape a state of existential vertigo. I yearn to discover a synthesizing spirit of my being and hold my head high, free of doubt, and devoid of fear. I wish to foment the cerebral energy to stave off premature destruction and forevermore blunt an intolerable state of anguish.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our sacrosanct obligation is to tend to our own personal wounds and furiously love the entire world irrespective if the world loves us back.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When a person understands the problem that vexes them, and comprehends the choices that created them, they begin a journey of the mind seeking personal liberation from suffering.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The metaphysical poetry of our innovative life springs from the aesthetic, scenic, and systematic processes of inventiveness, the creative impulse of an active mind generating aesthetical intuition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The mind provides a person with the mental fortitude to survive any physical or spiritual crisis. For the present time, I am satisfying myself by building a little shop in the back of my mind, a place where stillness resides and a jangle of thoughts can come and visit. I am building a room of my own, a room that I can retreat to when needed, a place where I am always welcomed regardless of the trappings of this ordinary and finite life. I do not need much as far as earthy rewards, but I certainly will not spurn food, drink, companionship, love, affection, friendship, or other physical, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic, and sensuous pleasures that find their way to my humble doorstep.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nature attunes children to receive the coded messages that parents issue how to live a joyful and virtuous life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every time that we consider our past, examine our present environment, and speculate about the future, we engage in mental projection. Contemplation merges into thinking, and thinking unspools into theorizing suppositions. Every act of attentiveness expands our state of awareness. Deductive surmises represent an ongoing process of making applicable connections between theories and facts. Devising working hypothesis represents one of the highest intellectual achievements of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human mind has a tendency to observe unsystematic events and assign a pattern to the results. A habitual risk-taker reorganizes the stream of random events and retrospectively attributes the outcome of indiscriminate trials to their own gambling “strategies.” We often hear people say that they are lucky or unlucky, when in actuality they can claim no ownership in the occurrence of chaotic outcomes. A false sense of the existence of luck can cause people to discount the value of their actual effort, skill, and training.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The most important thing in life it to be true to ourselves, to never give up attempting to become the very finest version of what we wish to be, no matter how arduous that proves to be.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human labor, the manual work that people engage in to build their world, both physical and spiritual, defines the realization of their conceptual realm.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Some people never stop working, especially the demanding type of person whom the world never seems to touch, the indomitable person whom is determined to make the world their own place.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life will never meet all of our expectations. We must nonetheless accept all disappointments without becoming bitter and cynical. We must always remain mindful of the opportunity to extend kindness and work to improve our character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A life of living free and taking endless satisfaction from a person’s promiscuous meanderings entails intermittently retooling oneself to meet a desired future. Perhaps the most difficult challenge of life is detecting when the ground moves beneath us and then nimbly shifting our mental perspective.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every human being asks pertinent questions regarding how to live, what to believe in, and what we aspire to become. Throughout life, we question what desires and principles to value and prioritize – love, friendship, freedom, happiness, creativity, wealth, security. We make difficult decisions based upon what we trust constitutes ethical behavior. We balance out work and play by considering what a person’s time is worth. We encounter both joyful and unpleasant physical experiences. As we age, we modify some of our youthful assumptions and question the existence of a mystical and divine world. We engage in formal and informal educational activities, which edifying foundation support modest or dramatic shifts in our instinctive and learned behavior patterns, and alter our intellectual and emotional perspective. Each person aspires to live honorably and age gracefully despite encountering physical adversity, financial hardships, sickness, or injury.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Courtrooms are battlegrounds where society’s bullies and the oppressed clash, where the victims of abusers seek recompense, and where parties cheated by scalawags seek retribution. Because of the high stakes involved, the parties are not always honest, and justice depends upon an array of factors including the prevailing case precedent, the skills of the legal advocates, and the merits of each party’s claims and counterclaims.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Children do not always appreciate their parents encouraging them to explore and grow. The selfishness of a child manifests itself in his or her intent to remain a child and never enter an adult world of distress, disappointment, and jadedly surrendering an envisioned life by making commitments that limit boundless options.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Expressing doubt is how we begin a journey to discover essential truths.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life includes unforeseen incidents that prove critical to promote personal growth. Life rarely gives us what we want. We are lucky if life gives us what we need in order to fulfill the path that was in place at our birthing.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-slaughter is an extravagant enactment of feeling sorry for oneself. Suicide is stingy act, because no matter how wretched our life may currently be, a person can always rise tomorrow and perform some small act of kindness for other people, care for a pet, or perform some other caring act that works towards preserving nature’s graciousness. To die of their own hand is to cheat other people and shortchange Mother Nature; it is taking without giving back in kind. What combats suicide is a sense of gratitude, a willingness to give to other people, and to cease living life as a taker. Without a profound appreciation for all that is living and devoid of a sincere willingness to contribute to the flourishing of all life forms, one can callously write off the value of their own life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each person must implement their preferred problem solving method to address existential questions pertaining to life and death, living and loving, working and playing, resting and restructuring.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The soul evolves as a person addresses the chaos, vagaries, and perplexities of enduring an earthly life. We each ultimately become our own version of an ideal self by stage-managing who we become.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Language is the gateway of the mind and a bridge that connects us to other human beings. Language enables a person to share their clandestine inner world with other human beings and to learn about other people’s mysterious world of logical thoughts and poetic sentiments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Though there are many barriers to expressing unreserved love, no such impediments to a developing a loving and generous heart deter a spiritual warrior. He who is without love is bereft of richness of life. Compassion, empathy, kindness, tenderness, and patience are essential for love. Anger, frustration, jealously, greed, and hatred are the antonym to love. When we love other people with all our ferocity, we transcend the misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, anguish, erotic obsessions, unaccountable confusion, and self-absorbed personal ambitions that, if left unchecked, numb our earthly existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reflective writing produces distinct rewards. A writer does not claim to live exclusively in the moment. A pensive writer retreats into oneself in noble attempt to meld memory, thought, faith, doubt, and other strong emotions into thought capsules while exploring the inscrutable web of creation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The highest degree of human attainment comes when a person is blissfully at peace with his or her own nature and the natural world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each generation produces its oracles and sages, independent thinkers whom serve as cultural bearers. Every generation produces perceptive individuals whose special radiance answers the trumpet call of the pernicious challenges bestowed by their times. These compassionate mavens provide worthy insights on humankind’s gallant attempt to escape its balmy pond of alienation and frigid sea of desolation. Conversations conducted by past and present essayist speaking in consonance between parallel times judiciously reflect the polyphonic cadence of robust jubilation wrought through living purposefully. The coruscating voices of the muses from times of yore manufacture the accordion spine of humankind’s expanding éclat anthology.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A personality alters itself through a series of self-referential experiences. We are not the same as the day before. Much as a person can never set foot in exactly the same river on any given day, we are different each day. Yesterday made us, but the past cannot contain nor restrain us. We can never mentally scroll backward and be who we used to be. We must move forward in the stream of life until the day that our life force dries up and we return to dust.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are what comes to us and by what we choose to fulfill. We learn love by experiencing other people loving us and by cultivating compassion for all humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Ruthless destruction of an ego is a rather simple matter. Preserving the host deprived of an ego is a more delicate affair. How does a person engage in momentous battle with the self while simultaneously struggling to maintain their cerebral, emotive, and spiritual equilibrium in the thin air of consciousness? How assiduously does an agitated mind need to work in order to achieve the elusive degree of emotional and mental quietness that I seek?
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is fleeting we must master it in the present.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When our environment changes we change, and this combination of transformative deeds create a synergistic effect. Seemingly, insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes can eventfully lead to fundamental qualitative changes in the way a group of people function as a society.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person whom lives by faith is not bound to feel hopelessness or the agony of infinite despair.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. Wisdom, compassion, and courage are essential ingredients for love. To love other people we must begin by forgiving them. If we do not bring forth the part of us that is capable of love and compassion, it will destroy us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Love is the ultimate salvation of the soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author’s personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The grandest form of delusion is misconstruing the obvious. Persons with an open, inquisitive, and intuitive mind can detect hidden clues that aggressive, narrow-minded, and impatient rationalist fail to perceive.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer’s amulets include explication, free association, parallelism, antithesis, and epiphany to create a silhouette of that which heretofore did not exist and now speaks with an autonomous, ghostly reverberation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Feelings of regret represent our aversion to reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person writes his or her life story similar to how a musician composes music. Author Milan Kundera noted, ‘Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.’ Guided by their aesthetic sense of beauty, a person transforms the intentional and fortuitous events of their life into an expressive episodic motif, which artistic creation assumes a permanent place in the composition of his or her conscious mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Idealistic notions that guide a younger person frequently prove unsustainable. Concluding any stage of life demands that a person rebuilds oneself after living destroys our ideological beliefs.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Most new ideas come to us not through pure logic, but through a fusion of memory and imagination. If new ideas were purely a product of rationality, other people would quickly grasp and embrace novel solutions. People’s lack of imagination prevents them from comprehending the significance of an innovative idea.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The one factor that nobody can deny in life is the influence of weather; it makes demands upon human beings, every person faces its reality. Weather reminds us that the world is not composed of technological gismos and climate controlled office buildings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Witnessing the moonrise each month, a person cannot resist noting a modest sense of optimism tugging at his or her enclosed capsule of bodily fluids.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Hate springs from fear. Violence is released hatred. Behind every hateful crime and act of human brutality is an admission of fearfulness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A principled life begins by accepting the evident truth that we must die. Death becomes us. Knowledge of the impermanence of our existence reassures us that how we live does make a difference. Because our allotted time for living is finite, we must make the most of each day.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Everyone wants to be happy and live mindfully. Books teach us how to resuscitate the body and soul and how to recognize what in our own personal lives is worthy of noticing. Writers’ considered opinions and subtle observations regarding the joys, paradoxes, pains, tragedies, and truths of living provide us with a jumpstart in analyzing how best to integrate our personal experiences and disjointed thoughts into a cogent belief system. An artistic person understands their passions demand a struggle. Reading allows me unobtrusively to discover how other people freed themselves from suffering a destructive life of attachment, delusion, and disablement.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All people express a fondness for truth and sincerity, yet many people prefer to live with their illusions and delusions. A person’s sincere desire to believe only what is true oftentimes does not trump their ingrained resistance to truths that fail to coincide with their deeply held desires. People reject truth because it undercuts what they wish was true and despise or discredit anyone whom offers a different version of truth than they are prepared to accept.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Parents’ transmit their attitude towards education to children via soundless, aphonic messages.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A theatrical spectacle is inherent whenever family members congregate and reacquaint themselves with powerful universal themes educed from homecomings including hugs, food, drink, conversation, politics, games, music, conflict, terror, mercy, smiles, tears, prayers, misfortune, and self-discovery.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No person can escape the germs of their eventual deterioration and destruction. A round-table of physical breakdown and death awaits the rich person and the poor person, as well as the common people and world leaders. The skulls of noble men and savages alike litter the streets of ancient cities. Modern humans live longer than the ancient people did, but eventually we all succumb to the same wretched infirmities.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Quietude is the hermit’s humble tool. An intrepid person might attempt to wring out of him or herself a translucent state of creative consciousness by deliberately cutting oneself off from all outside stimuli. When the exterior world forms a wall of impenetrable silence, in our state of exile we can hear the unique cadence of the subtle mind’s authentic ringtone.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No construction of thought represents a label, barrier, or a full stop. Each sentence, paragraph, and page represents an exploratory probe into the unknown; each statement is an act of experimentation, investigation, creation, and growth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Unless we understand how the twists and turns of life operate to make us, we cannot comprehend who and what we are. Without self-awareness, we are blind to registering the intertexture of other people’s inner life. Gracefully enduring personal hardships expands our minds to extend sympathy and empathy for other people. By casting our personal life experiences into a supple storytelling casing, we create the translucent membrane that quarters the fusion of our flesh, nerves, blood, and bones. Self-understanding is an essential step in loving the entire world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is the constant process of self-creation. We constantly make and remake our personal version of the self. Personal introspection is critical to ascertain who we want to become by ascertaining what traits we wish to eradicate and what qualities we wish to embody.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must treasure our memories just as we cherish our dreams because without dreams and memory human life would be sad, brutal, and meaningless.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The origin behind myths and religion is human terror of annihilation. Human societies invented mythology and religion in order to militate against people’s fear of living a mortal life. People fear time as a destroyer of human happiness, human beings, and human societies.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every road leads to sorrow. All aspects that make life beautiful – friendship, love, art, and truth – will end. All aspects that make life hideous – pain, poverty, illness, betrayal, hate, crime, war – will also end. The fact that human life is a mere blip on a cosmic scale is no reason for personal angst as we came from nothingness and will return to the great void that birthed us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Death does not mark the end of a chapter in a man’s life, but the end of a book of man, the beautiful conclusion to his yearnings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The greatest challenge in life is to be our own person and accept that being different is a blessing and not a curse. A person who knows who they are lives a simple life by eliminating from their orbit anything that does not align with his or her overriding purpose and values. A person must be selective with their time and energy because both elements of life are limited.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person devolves his or her hardiness from the ark-like powers of love to create, protect, and destroy. When we are in love, we discover what we long to become, we also discover what we lack. When we are in love, we are empowered to seek out our destiny. When we lose at love, our confidence is devastated. In the wake of a breakup with a lover, we languish in solitude. Caught in the riptide of incompleteness, we suffer terribly.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Whole life is a search for the splendor of love, companionship, and beauty. When I found you, my search ended, and we began a magnificent journey of one heart, one mind, and one destiny.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Parallel to tenderness and cruelty, the cataracts of pleasure and pain are interrelated. Painful and pleasurable sensations instruct us of our physical boundaries. The collective scorecard of physical pain and pleasurable sensations define the evolving self. Our internal clockworks comprised of remembrances of times past, both painful and pleasurable, provide each of us with a telling emotional autobiography. What we primarily recall – pain or pleasure – is revelatory. How we act with kindness and tenderheartedly, or hardheartedly and cruelly is equally telling.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Time is quixotic because it can torment us. When we have insufficient stimulus to fill our lives, we resent the relentless quality of time, and we engage in activities designed to “kill time.” Time that passes slowly creates insufferable boredom; time that passes to quickly makes us aware of our accelerated death march. A person’s perspective on time depends mostly on what they are most afraid of, boredom or death.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. Terrified of squandering our existence, we each seek to break out from our muteness and strike an accord with our brothers and sisters whom share our inherent desire to reach a global consilience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No one can claim they are mature until they experience the hallucinogenic ramifications of being in love, and undertaken an urgent personal assessment and soul-searching discernment that is mandated after experiencing the bitterness of losing in the love game.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All philosophical and inquisitive men share doubts, experience dread, endure pain, and suffer loneliness. The thinking man accepts that the quest is as much a part of life’s adventure as the final destination. The journey we take is as critical to experiencing a meaningful existence as is our actual arrival at the sought after objective. Whether we successfully arrive at our sought after designation, is only part of the equation. The ultimate objective is not reaching some point on the faraway hills, but gaining self-knowledge and increasing self-awareness on the long trek through time.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Everything that occurs to us in life is a resource, an experience that we can learn from and grow from.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The ability to experience bliss requires the gift of attentive awareness, curiosity, and constant learning. We are ultimately the product of what we want – our personal obsessions – and how we think. Thoughts merge into feelings that determine if we are happy or sad. Feelings can manifest into thoughts that drive our ambitions and guide our personal actions, which enable us to live an intensified life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
What gives a person’s brief time on this planet meaning is engaging in small acts of kindness. Bestowing an act of kindness upon other people is the greatest gift that a person will ever give to other people and such acts shall renew the gifting person. When we unreservedly accept and love our brethren, we become the ineluctable wind that vivifies the lives of other people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are each authors of a self-concocted depiction establishing our present day identity. Our persona is woven from a range of truths interweaved with inspired imagination and occasionally bounded by convenient falsehoods. Creating our personal story generates an identity myth that allows us to carry on.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Art translates human souls. Each passing eon’s public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing a sincere narrative account of personal adversities and misfortunes is one way to become acquainted with the rifts of a person’s inmost self, the smothered pieces of want that lie separate and undetected amid the customs, habits, vices, and tedium that encases us in the hubbub of daily living.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In the wink of an eye, all quaint days of the past, the present, and future will meld together into the bottomless unknown of perpetuity. Only trace evidence of our invertebrate existence will anoint future generations. In the crinkle of time, our houses will crumble apart. Companies that we worked for will go out of business or merge with other nameless conglomerates. What will survive us are our children and our words.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Extreme anxiety, fear, exhaustion, and lack of other viable options are what cause a person to surrender everything. Desperation is also the raw material of drastic change. Crisis spurs critical, dramatic shifts in a person’s psyche. Only a person who is willing to lose everything will transform himself or herself. Only by moving outside our comfort zone of the past – letting go of a former being – will a person expand their state of conscious awareness. Now that I am desperate, I am dangerous. I am also ripe for transformation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing and other efforts to produce an enduring piece of artwork is a gallant response to the prospect of death. Every person knows that they must die, and consequently people build elaborate symbolic defenses mechanism to shield themselves from knowledge of their impermanence. Every person possesses autonomy of the will, the ability to choose how to conduct their life. The freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless; it provides a person with no sense of meaning and supplies no purpose to life because a mere collection of objects will not transcend their physical demise. An artist does not deny their impermanence but embraces the prospect of their death by laboring to create a monument of their existence that will survive their expiry.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Many life-affirming questions lead to an endless spool of disconcerting propositions and contradictory conclusions, and even more troubling, some queries prove unanswerable.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must cultivate their personal tutelary spirit in order to achieve their ultimate visage.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All things want to float as light as air through the world witnessing all that is. I am a mote of dust floating freely in the firmament, a person who merely is, and I feel full of joy for all worldly treasures, the immaculate gift of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-questioning – an effort to get in touch with our essential self – is an endless stream of thought.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Any attorney with a conscience always speaks the truth. An attorney can and should practice law in a scrupulous manner, but some dishonest attorneys disregard ethical mandates in order to win. Unethical attorneys shape their clients stories, which is a fancy way of assisting them tell a fib.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An examined life, an enigmatic investigation of reality, is required in order for a person to realize a transcendent spiritual journey. A contemplative soul is bound to live life more intensely than someone whom is concerned exclusively with living an external existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person imbued with compassion and self-understanding can readily love oneself and exhibit endless sympathy for all people. A person who is unkind to their self can never transcend their corrupt barriers much less run into the world with open arms enthusiastically embracing humankind and all of nature with uninhibited friendliness and goodwill.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person whom works exclusively for money places a price tag on his or her soul. A person whom labors to attain fame seeks a false form of adulation. The writer ignores the lure of a glamorous life by seeking to penetrate the darkness of their own being and meditate the larger issues that frame existence. A seeker knowingly follows a path that is barren, bleak, desolate, and unproductive in terms of attaining recognition and exulted social and financial status.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing allows a person to explore both physical reality and the internal workings of their mind. Writing places us in touch with our unconsciousness. Writing purposefully, applying the white heat of self-examination, can act to transform oneself. Writing allows a person with sufficient resolve to anneal their basic constitution, make their mind more flexible.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Collegiate life presents a student with innumerable opportunities to engender personal growth by responding to a dynamic social, athletic, and academic environment. Students instigate personal development by making calculated and rash personal decisions pertaining to what activities to pursue and by measuring their string of reactions to new experiences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-knowledge is the foundation stone of every principled person, and any changes of a person’s mutable character commences with an extensive course of self-evaluation. Personal evolution is a product of the independent choices we make. Progress in the development of oneself depends upon how honestly a person judges oneself, and what corrections a person makes to align their character with an ideal version of a self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Character is fate. Every day is training day.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A life of conflict and greediness causes a person to suffer from the rheumatism of sadness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In the vast spectrum of space-time’s coeternal continuum, I am but a glint of bundled energy held together by the translucent fiber of creative consciousness. The misty dew of private thoughts that inhabit my streaky underworld briefly forms a splintery part of the glittering arena of the cosmos. In the ether-like dawn of my awakening, my minuscule arch appears intravenously injected amid the dark matter of the nightscape. Reminiscent of the morning’s dew, my comet’s tailed reflection disintegrates and dissipates without a lasting trace in the dawn of a new age. I shall never wholly cease to exist, since my filtrate potentiality – a trace of my essence – remains suspended forevermore in celestial wonderment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Serenity of mind produces an expanding awareness that fosters creative selflessness, which in turn enables us to experience unabashed harmony communing in rhythmical bliss with nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All people intuitively seek emotional equanimity, freedom from anxiety, distress, and trepidation that might cause a person to lose symmetrical balance of their mind. Nature intended for human beings to live in an enthusiastic and curious manner, always exploring, striving, and creating.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person achieves enlightenment only through a purposeful engagement with life and by resolutely searching for truth and shedding artifices.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All knowledge begins with an expression of curiosity pertaining to the unknown or unknowable. Expressions of uncertainty and a doubtful nature lead a person to useful discoveries.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Love and marriage represent the cumulative product of several judgments. Love is an instinctive human emotion that entails deliberation and reflection. The first decision is whether to love, then whom to love, and finally whether to pledge spending a lifetime together. Love is a feeling and similar to other strong feelings it might vanish. A person does not marry every time that they fall in love. Marriage requires a person to foresee that their love will endure the mutual wants and needs of both people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
How to earn a viable standard of living while giving vent to their desire to perform creative activities is the quintessential challenge for modern humans. Some people settle for jobs filled with drudgery and in their free time immerse themselves in hobbies that provide them with personal happiness. Other people prefer to find work that makes them happy, even if this occupation requires them to live a more modest standard of living. The greater their impulse is for curiosity and creativity, the less likely that a person will exchange personal happiness for economic security.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The soul is a cloister, its parameters frame both realized and failed dreams.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person who cultivates any interest in self-improvement will necessary encounter successes and failures, both of which life lessons can be useful to remember when seeking distant mileposts. Failure stimulates evaluation and new learning. Success stimulates development and retention of good habits.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Feelings and emotions as well as thoughts and opinions are evanescent; they change over time because they reflect our transient being. Feelings and emotions are judgments that spring from the hidden source of the unconscious mind, and only take on power whenever the conscious mind acknowledges them, and then chooses to convey an idea in some format that shares the rhythm of a person’s own being with another person. Unuttered thoughts and inexpressible feelings experience a short half-life. Without proper nourishment, voiceless thoughts wither and indefinable feelings wane. Lucid thoughts and inexpressible feelings form imperceptible currents that propel us along in our inimitable journey exploring the tributaries of the stream of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We employ education and the convictions gained through the intermeshing of personal experiences and fresh ideas to establish the configuration of our being that in actuality was our mysterious potentiality from the very inception of our birth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We discover part of our true self only by conspicuous inspection of the depths of our conscience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must master many subjects in order to implement our dreams. Our personal journey begins by gathering appropriate learning experiences and awakening our minds to observe, evaluate, and recall what we experience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in “The Book of Disquiet” of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. “I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real – only then do I find myself comforted.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is understandable why a person might shirk a brutal self-assessment until the unforgiving talons of a reckless life rips their thin skin covertures into shreds leaving a person ensnared in their destructive thoughts and lacerated with bolts of self-incrimination.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Families share relationships based not only blood, but also the unique affiliation of a terribly long cord when measured in comparison with any other undertaking in a person’s life, from cradle to the grave if you will. These intimate associations create a bond of love, affection, goodwill, and joy that we seek to duplicate when we marry and begin creating our extended families.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person who is fearful of generously loving other people is already half dead. Loving another person brings out the courage in all of us to live a heightened existence, the inner resolve to map out a course of action and follow it to the end. Just as importantly, love awakens us to the knowledge that personal happiness comes not from achieving some corporal objective, but from the quality of thoughts that accompany a person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Philosophic concepts are a form of sentiment. Conflicts between lofty ideas and vouchsafed values are endemic for any thinking person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The biggest impediment to loving life is our inflated egos. Only by suppressing our ego and controlling our selfish thoughts can we truly comprehend the immaculate beauty of every day unfolding before us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Joy always follows on the heels of pain. If a person escapes a mindset that current events represent an ongoing tragedy, they will encounter and comprehend all the beauty that surrounds them. We find bliss by living alertly and unequivocally accepting whatever is occurring in the present moment. If a person realizes that the present moment is all that matters, they will gain an inner stillness and appreciate the beauty and joy of each day.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human mind houses a rich depository of positive emotions. It also builds a penitentiary that contains cells of ugly emotions. Love and laughter are two of the most esteemed emotions. Hate and jealously are the two of the most odious emotions. Hate is the rawest of all emotions, making hatred the most difficult of all emotions to curb.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our actions reflect the distilled wisdom that we possess of the innermost self. Our personal philosophy is an activated way of living. A peaceful person delves the truest definition of the self by maintaining an attentive state of conscious awareness and ceases escaping from reality with mindless diversions. Self-inquiry is the principal method to remove ignorance, increase self-awareness, and abide in a tranquil existence
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal essay writing that incites the mind and instigates personal growth involves examination and re-examination, a process of noticing and reflecting upon what a person perceives. Essayistic writing is an osmotic process wherein a person intuitively absorbs information and ideas, allows inchoate thoughts to gestate in the unconscious mind, and then consciously places the emergent strands of language and logic into an orderly and expressive format.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human mortality linked to the human ability consciously to choose how to act by exhibiting free will, humility, hard work, kindness, and compassion provide exemplary opportunities to learn and develop self-discipline.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and fear death. We must decide whether we wish to embrace all experience and encounters in life or seek escape from various aspect of human nature. How we resolve to address existential anguish becomes a large part of our personal story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county’s domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We derive courage from love. Bravery borne from love trumps the ingrained desire for self-preservation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The greatest act of personal courage is conscientiously to mature, by resolutely striving to achieve self-actualization and self-realization. A person who knows their true self and lives their life in an authentic manner while pursuing their honest passions will lose his misery.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When one verse in life ends in ignominy, we can use the glimmering marvel of nature’s splendor and frayed edges culled from the black linen of past failures to write uncanny poems that give voice to the fissures in our hollow, reflective poetry that echoes our supple inner world of cherished dreams colliding with the serrated edges of savage realism.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writers cheat death by constructing an immortality vessel.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind’s sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature’s plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Meditative thoughts assist people escape a vapid fantasy life and reconnect with ultimate reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The nonessential employees, the type of workers whom remain at home when it snows, are the quickest to complain about how the talented persons of an organization behave.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We hold within ourselves the medicinal materials to mend self-inflicted injuries sustained while traversing the thorny obstacle course of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must exude a sense of proportional gratitude that humankind’s exquisite texture is composed of a feeling soul and an intelligent will, which people refer to as memory of the heart.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us wages a private battle to thrive. Whenever a person fully immerses oneself in life’s aromatic flower garden of pleasures and encounters life’s warship of armor-plated rigors, they blend and bend to make reasonable accommodations for surviving. Scripted and unscripted encounters with superior militant forces bruise us mightily and eventually cut us to the core. Every person’s life contains a minefield of obstacles that function as potential barriers to achieving our ultimate manifestation. The expended labor of continuously hefting oneself over one contentious hurdle after another is what leads a conscientious person onto the path of needing to write in order to create emotional poultices to ameliorate painful wounds.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Fate demands that we continue suffering, until we willingly seek out and discover the sacred path of righteousness. Until we surrender to the sameness of life, we are unable to experience the absolute ground zero of reality. Only by surrendering our desires, by readjusting our consciousness to a state undefined, unbound, and unmotivated by passion and desire, will we experience life transformed.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Creating art is paradoxical because an artist seeks to express truth by penetrating and destroying illusions. Art is always the outpouring of a mind striving to achieve the impossible reconciliation of all the fragmented shards that make people human: frivolous amusements, idle moments, feelings of tenderness and pain, stored memories, future expectations, and unquenchable thirst to experience love and witness beauty.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn’s amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A journey of the mind – a written vision quest – has only one goal: to interact with the world and attempt to develop the dormant intellectual and spiritual awareness of the author.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There is more than one road to spiritual salvation. We discover a philosophical way of living by encountering the world, culling knowledge from all available resources, and thinking reverently about life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We might respect a serious person with an austere and rigid personality, but we adore merry, kindhearted, and artistic people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are the product of our past. We start each day where we left off the day before. Changing the way we dress, where we work and live, or even changing a name does not alter our basic constitution. Transformation of the self requires a radical alteration in the way that we perceive the world and derive meaning.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Suffering becomes beautiful whenever a person bears great calamities with cheerfulness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The tragedy of life is not death, but fearing to live, allowing parts of us to wilt and die instead of flower and rejoice.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We foster personal meaning out of life by exulting in all of nature, exhibiting a reverence for people, animals, plants, and by expressing compassion and sympathy for the entire community of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A feistiness of spirit girds us in the most treacherous of moments. A metamorphosis of spirit often occurs after a person conscientiously surveys the resultant outcome of surviving a momentous ordeal and they transfigure personal heartache into a magnanimous manner of living in a just and righteous manner.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us experiences the perpetual revival of the self. We constantly recast our connate emotional index by perceiving each encounter in life as a marvel, impedance, problem, disaster, or nothing at all. Living in the moment allows us to escape the lonely landscape of self-interest and be part of a larger world filled with beauty, reverence, and adoration.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Inside each of us is a deep well of translucent water. A fluidity of thoughts and luminous feelings surrounds you and me. In the world of water, all life floats, the incandescent soul of the living begins, where you and I are indivisible, where I experience you inside of me. I see your beauty, feel your need for love and affection, hear your compassionate poems, and know the fragrant mysteries your great heart brews; by law divine, with sweet emotion, you and I shall mingle forevermore.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The path towards living in a spiritual manner begins by eliminating inculcated cultural biases, destroying personal illusions, and gratefully accepting the world without sentimental artifice. Emotional detachment provides for clarity of vision.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every day is an opportunity to stand in awe when witnessing the overpowering presence of nature, an apt time to pay reverence for the inestimable beauty of life. I must remain mindful to live in an ethical manner by paying attention to the threat of injustice towards other people and resist capitulating to the absurdity of being a finite body born into infinite space and time. I am part of the world, a spar in a sacred composition, a body of energy suspended in the cosmos. I seek to create a poetic personal testament to life. When I pivot and turn away from fixating upon the cruel artifices of my encysted orbit to face and outwardly embrace the cleansing swirl of heaven’s windmill, I feel gusting in the shank of my marrow the thump of onrushing primordial truths, the electric flush of those ineffable couplets of life that one may not utter.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Pent-up anger is oftentimes more destructive than a good quarrel.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Because survival and love are the immortal truths of humankind, no generation is a total stranger to the forerunner generations of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Irrespective of what religious or intellectual philosophy guides an enlightened person’s life plan, self-mastery plays an important, if not quintessential role.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is foolishness to want what never was or will never will be, lament the passage of time, and live in fearfulness of an uncertain future. The moods generated by regret including depression and self-loathing congeal in our sentient consciousness creating the painful landscape of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The self is a subjective entity created by our thoughts and deeds. All sense of happiness and emotional wellbeing turns upon how a person organizes their stream of consciousness into a creation and development of a positive or negative self-image.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Attempting to express a person’s objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is up to each one of us to immunize ourselves from any disabling bolts of anger and defend ourselves from the thunderstorms of hatred. No matter how maliciously anyone might act towards us, humankinds’ ability to express empathy, compassion, and mercy is the only life-sustaining panacea. Whenever we foster empathy and compassion and display mercy towards other people, we overcome the vilest actions and greatest atrocities committed by other persons. If we love everyone, we can never feel victimized or hate anyone. If we love ourselves, we will never act in a degrading manner.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person’s conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Memory, imagination, and passionately responding in accord with the deeply embedded impulse to act with decency are pliable mechanisms that we can employ to attain happiness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A bird with a broken wing cannot survive nor will a man with a broken spirit endure.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reflecting on various aspects of our lives is essential for a person to grow and adjust to changing phases in their life. Self-analysis entails examining a person’s existing level of self-esteem and documenting the inner voice that speaks to a person, which is frequently either affirming of self-defeating. Failure to periodically engage in self-analysis, make crucial revisions in our personas, and modify our thinking patterns when we encounter transformative events in life can lead to mood disorders, burnout, and other emotional maladies.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The items people own reveal something about the owners. Every quaint item that a person selects to surround themselves with has a basic quiddity, the essence, or inherent nature of things. As a people, we assign a value meaning not only to the things that we presently possess, but also to the items destined for one generation to hand down to the next generation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life’s most precious moments are not all loud or uproarious. Silence and stillness has its own virtues.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human being’s possess the cognitive ability to survey and study the biological and cultural constraints that influence us in order to gain an enhanced understanding of who each of us are. Comprehension of what comprises a self allows human beings to monitor and regulate their thoughts and actions and therefore revise and modify their sense of self. How much conscious control we assert over our minds as well as what decisions through default we leave essentially unregulated and in the sole providence of the unconscious mind determines our self-identity. Self-identity in turns affects personal decision-making, which alters our external world. The combined impact of millions of people making conscious choices exerts a profound impact upon reality, the physical world that is constantly in flux.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears’ stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors’ saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the sacrosanct obligation of telling their kith and kin the memorable story of the scenic days they spent as children of nature splashing about in their naked innocence in the brook of infinite time and space. We must scrupulous document our family’s history as well as scrawl out our personal story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each generation searches their memories for time lost, feels the urgent exigencies of the present, and worries about the uncertainty of the future. Akin to preceding generations, how we live, the choices we make for surviving and loving, is our story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Childhood is an exploratory period of calculated investigation. The nagging feeling that a child’s life has not really began until he or she attains adulthood makes growing up both a whimsical and fretful time. Childhood is not all merriment since a child realizes that seamless youthful days are an experiment for adulthood.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We inhabit an internal world that is subject to diversification. Every day we undergo personal transformation based upon experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
They say that the personal transformation that gives rise to self-realization – the transcendent function that leads to the highest echelon of human attainment – takes place on the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, and that when we dream we dissolve the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. In other words, we dream a world into being, and we are the collective product of our lifetime of immanent dreams. If the oracles are correct, I dreamed you into being, and you represent the real point of intersection between dream and reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Condemning war has not curbed armed conflict. Religion and education did not eliminate war. Warfare did not terminate more wars. Armed combat simply breeds endless wars.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us encounters many diverse experiences that make us grow and transform, but we seek to return to our roots, which is quietude.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Living in a spiritual manner, exhibiting a joyous and mindful embrace of the manifold wonders of an earthy existence, enhances life. A person develops spirituality by spending solitary time thinking about the larger issues in life. Scripting a personal philosophy for conducting a person’s life is a spiritual testament. A spiritual person seeks a system of general truths that encoded statement transforms their character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is a solitary venture. Making use of a soundless void in the vortex of time the author enters the realm of restoration, an undertaking where he or she explores that private psychic space of the self. In this mystical state of heightened awareness, the writer investigates the soul’s grievances, and diagnoses and treats their grim afflictions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind demonstrates an unerring ability to witness beauty. By observing nature’s beauty and striving to create beautiful things, humankind brokers its own salvation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person’s capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Pain is a crucial part of our reality; it awakens a person from a mental stupor. A person must never be afraid to discover where their pain originates, follow pain to where it emanates from, learn from its messages, and reject the mindless business and busyness of contemporary culture in order to fuel an artistic vision of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We earn the respect of our peers by laboring to quell our critics’ justified disapproval. We earn self-respectability by schooling the wisdom to ignore unfair condemnation. We learn goodness by witnessing other person’s lives and by performing unsolicited acts of kindnesses.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We fear change because it insists we discard long held structures that no longer function suitably.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal discontent and lost illusion is the catalysis and the principal theme for every book ever written. The sign of maturity is when a person finally realizes that they would rather live truthfully than persist indulging his or her comforting delusions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must account for the life that we lived. A person inevitably will ask himself or herself on their deathbed, ‘what was the aim of my life, ’ ‘what did I accomplish, ’ ‘what did I not accomplish, ’ ‘what would I alter if I could live my life all over again’? What we discover on our deathbeds is that material luxuries afford no solace. We cannot purchase, possess, or legally acquire what is pure: love, beauty, truth, goodness, and imagination.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Conflicting egos destroy many relationships. Lasting, stable marriages are a true treasure because they demand that both parties adjust to the constant cellular flux of their partner as they metaphase through changing seasons of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A noble journey through the travails of time calls for a person to disregard conventional social, cultural, and moral contexts and strive to cleave a personal meaning that guides their existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind’s greatest gift is that we are indeterminate beings. Unlike the tough and leathery seed of an acorn, which will grow into a magnificent oak tree, none of us has a predetermined final configuration of our ultimate essence. Our mental temperament is pliable. We make conscious and subconscious choices that govern who we become.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal writing takes up where public education leaves off – with intent to know what is important about life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The universal laws of nature including the thermodynamic principles of entropy govern the relationships between interconnected organisms. The notion of internal thermodynamic equilibrium assure us that the powerful energy reserves of one person will always rush in to fill the void or vacuum in another person. Thus I will always register your mystical presence in my quiescent mind, your hallow echo fills the hollow space of my very being. You are the external reflection of my innermost want, the personification of a world that lies outside my conscious reach, ethereal substance of the soul, the guiding hand that my unconscious mind instinctually gropes for in order to make me complete.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person’s unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person’s exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
People whom live in a world dominated by science and technology are losing belief in God and turning away from religion. Science eliminated the traditions that formerly made living an art form including the rain celebration of spring and traditional harvest festivals.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Novel ideas are unsettling, innovative concepts about important matters in human affairs is disruptive of the internal harmony that people prefer. There is a tendency even for the most logical and classically educated people steeped in rational scholastic traditions to assume that if any new hypothesis were correct, a scholar would already written it in a book.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every book adds a grain of humility and humanity to the communal ground that we tread. Writing is the one method that the modern shaman employs to interpret reality and create messages that will provide a beacon of light to other members of our tribe. So long as ignorance, misery, and confusion remain on earth, and people look to expand their state of awareness, books that contribute to the aesthetics of despair, a world composed of mist and shadows cannot be useless. Writing is a personal effort to coexist with the banality, tedium, and anguish of living a fated life. Writing is a shamanistic act of faith because seeking to link thoughts together in order to understand how one fits into nature’s wonderland is a quest for unity and wholeness, the ultimate medicinal poultices that all self-disciplined shaman and alchemistic writers aspire to achieve.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The universe is eternal; every person appears in the stream of time, and then disappears. The ego does not survive. Life is significant despite that it ends. The products of human life that we cherish – love, happiness, beauty, art, kindness, – have value without being everlasting. We must conquer human fearfulness in order to live a dignified life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Sorrow and strife comes to all persons. Mature people expect hardships and setbacks and patiently and determinedly work to accomplish their goals. Immature people lash out in anger and frustration when circumstances conspire to blunt their short-term objectives.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Only the shallowest person believes that they can attain true happiness by maximizing their wealth at any cost. In absence of morality, ethics, and a sustainable philosophy to guide us in an ethical search for happiness, we will always perceive life’s random countervailing forces of adversity and unpleasantness as inflicting a great personal injustice upon us. Through application of a deeply embedded personal philosophy, we can push back against the negative implications of a life of suffering. We can use a philosophical stance to gain the perspective needed to say ‘yes’ to all of life, both its rosy path of ineffable joys and a blackened trail of tears. We must learn to accept life as it truly is and not waste precious time in wistfulness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must live a genuine life in order to discover personal happiness and self-fulfillment. Understanding that a person is living a lie is the first step into realizing what is possible. No matter how frightful such a proposition is, we must dare to be an original self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Living is a constant process of debunking our romantic notions of how our personal life will unfold. Reality oftentimes fails to meet a person’s glamorous expectations.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life goes on without regard to our whims. What we make of life is what counts, how we address the challenges in our lives determines our respective levels of personal accomplishment and happiness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Everyone who loves life is an artist at heart. Although it is sometimes difficult to love our world and our lot in life, failure to find the ability to love life and express appreciation for our world is tantamount to not existing at all.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Witnessing the panoply of beauty in all of nature takes us out of our shell of self-absorption and makes us realize that we are merely bit players in the game of life. Witnessing the majesty of beauty confirms that the real show lies outside us to observe and appreciate and not inside us to transfix us. True beauty charms us into seeing the grandeur of goodness that surrounds us and by doing so, the pristine splendor of nature releases us from wallowing in the poverty of our self-idealization. The bewitching spell cast by the exquisiteness of nature levitates our souls and transforms our psyche. When we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch what is beautiful, we cannot suppress the urge to replicate its baffling texture by singing, dancing, painting, or writing. Opening our eye to the loveliness of a single flower is how we stay in touch with the glorious pageantry of living.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We choose the prism that we use to view life. Life can be a mystical tour or an outright bummer. We can live our life with the taint of aftermath or look forward to embracing each beguiling day with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human beings are self-motivated. The two desires that spur human action are hunger and love. Without memory, humankind would no longer hunger for love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
What work a person does to earn a viable income shapes their thinking patterns, buttresses their sense of self-worth, and affects how they adapt to predictable and unpredictable obstacles.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist’s case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person’s life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person struggles with the self to find and kindle their special radiance, which comes from cultivating kindness, charity, and love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A miserable scrooge whom lacks charity for the entire world is a menace to society. Spiritual sullenness destroys men quicker than gunfire.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is fundamentally a mental state. We live in a dream world that we create. Whose life is truer, the rational man of action pursuing practical goals of personal happiness and wealth or the philosophic man who lives in a world of theoretical and metaphysical ideas? We ascribe the value quotient to our lives by making decisions that we score as either valid or invalid based upon our personal ethics and how we think and behave.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The impeccable watchmaker geared the noble self to suffer. The ineluctable part of being human is perpetual sorrow, grief, and misery. Suffering is part of living. Life begins joyously and regretfully ends in tragedy. The cold realities of the world triumphantly crush each one of us. Between birth and death is comedic conjugation, the haunting prelude to the end of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human mind – a product of the brain – controls our ability to adapt to a hostile or friendly environment. Human beings are composed of fields of energy, some of which forces are positive, and other force fields are negative. We can use constructive reason to penetrate only a limited segment of the human mind, which projects discernible logical thought process. A person’s mind also houses dark areas of reality, the mysterious apparatus that eludes the grasp of human reason. We can never express the truth of a person with a precise lucid principle. A person must travel beyond realism in order to explore every facet of his or her being and live his or her most cherished dreams.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind’s gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind’s self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation’s effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal disillusionment accompanied by self-pity and self-loathing are the Achilles’ heel of modern humankind, representing the weakness of the human spirit.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents’ house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A narrow hallway is all that separates rational from irrational, creativity from insanity, and intelligence from stupidity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our most intense joy comes not from personal feats, but from helping other persons achieve their goals. We become suppler human beings when we find true joy in witnessing other people’s successes and unabashedly share in their joyful accomplishments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind’s amazing grace is the ability to choose right from wrong, and assume personal responsibility for our conduct. With the judicious exercise of composure and appliance of self-discipline, we exceed our humble origins and blossom into a final rendering of whatever type of person we aspire to become.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing requires a prolong period of academic education supplemented by studiously scrutinizing society and its customs. Writers also analyze their own nature and physical surroundings, a self-directed exploration of their internal and external environment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling still matters in the digital age, because commencing in adolescences and continuing through adulthood, people receive training in using stories to describe the human contestants, organize the facts, communicate the moral message behind the messy human conflict, evaluate competing ethical issues, and render a final value judgment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life and death issues are a universal concern. A person can learn about life by investigating the psychological and social aspects related to dying.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The phrase ‘Boys will be boys, ’ reflects that a male child is expected to be unpredictable and occasionally troublesome.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cannot achieve personal enlightenment – a clarification of our souls – until we cease deluding ourselves. We must accept that life includes witnessing and personally experiencing pain.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person is a creator. We create with our ideas and beliefs. Our daily labor creates a worldly cocoon that enfolds us. We mold out of a granite substance not yet hardened the tutelary angels whose ideological formation will guide our passageway through the jungle of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In order to grow sometimes we must cease striving to meet other people’s expectations and begin establishing new goals that develop our personal potential. If we live a life to satisfy all the direct or implicit anticipations of other people, we end up living a life full of regret because we failed to develop into a complete manifestation of our being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is full of unanswerable questions including how to live and what to live for. It takes extreme courage to live honestly by a person’s beliefs and never rest until a person achieves the type of life that he or she envisions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Joy cannot be confused with the mere absence sorrow, misinterpreted as experiencing minimal despair, or misunderstood as living without crippling trepidation. Bliss necessarily encompasses uncompromising acceptance of life’s defining permutations. Emotional harmony necessitates beholding the pleasant and unpleasant exigencies of life while expressing unstinting appreciation for the ordinary and the extraordinary events in our lives. Joyfulness transcends the variations in physical and emotional demands exerted upon us. Elation for life allows us to rise above environmental determinates and associated stresses that might otherwise vex our souls including death and other sorrowful events.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We can only come to terms with our own place in the world by compassionately commiserating with the pang of longing that our brethren experience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The act of writing involves documenting and studiously examining interactions of all aspects of the self, the environment, and culture. Writing is an illustrious act of self-expression. Writing resembles a ‘coming of the age’ story because the ongoing process of defining a person’s personality and character is representative of the synergistic product of the continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world, the constant process of developing psychological, social, cognitive and ethical self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Time possesses emotional potency. For persons whom suffer from of bereavement, time possesses a healing capacity. Passage of time cures heartache by dimming the mind’s attunement to painful occurrences. For some people, the passage of time is akin to placing a welcomed physical boundary between themselves and past horrors. Passage of time allows us to forget and the ability to forget is medicinal. Time acts as a mental barrier between our present mental state and the pain that we once felt.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must face the root cause of their relentless personal pain. Irrespective of whatever bricks buttress our youthful personal philosophy, pain avoidance, and pain therapy are likely two of its foundation stones.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person’s greatest limitations are not genetic, but imposed by self-doubt, insecurities, indecision, and timidity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us is impermanent wave of energy folded into the infinite cosmic order. Acknowledgement of the fundamental impermanence of ourselves unchains us from the strictures of living a terrestrial life stuck like a needle vacillating between the magnetic pull of endless desire and the terror of death. Once we achieve freedom from any craving and all desires and we are relieved of all titanic fears, we release ourselves from living in perpetual distress. Once we rid ourselves from any impulse to exist, we discover our true place in the universal order. The composition of our life filament is exactly right when we accept the notion of living and dying with equal stoicism.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must claim the meaning behind his or her existence. How we live is our final testament to what we believed in and our journey through the corridor of time determines our decisive character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beardless, sensuous, and androgynous sculptor, the redeemer and the transformer of my naked self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Thinking is a personalized activity that can lead us into a state of happiness or cause us to be sad. Who we are becomes a product of how we think. What we think about and how we integrate knowledge into a comprehensive schema regulates our evolving self-identity. The precision of the human mind and the interplay between cognitive thinking and reactive emotions plays a central role in self-identity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life surrounds us. Each day we witness the plenteous gifts of nature. Even following the most bitterly cold winter, new life waits feverishly to erupt. The flower head sown in the prior season quickens to bloom in the eternal spring of wilderness gardens. Each of us hankers to blossom. Life is the active resistance to disintegration and death. A state of grace comes from a life devoted to seeking the pinnacle of human attainment. None of us should suppress our own or another person’s quest for transcendence. Each day we must give full measure to our internal life force. With all our energy and intuition, we must determinedly seek out what is the best part of us. We must faithfully tap our potential for goodness, unapologetically rip ourselves apart if need be, bravely go where we fear, and boldly tread where we must go in order to carry out the sacred blueprint for leading a meaningful life that is imbued in the deepest alcove of our unbidden souls.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must each ascertain our own way to quantify the world. We can choose to peer at life harshly or benevolently. The prism that we select to view the world ultimately is the same standard that we employ to judge ourselves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We nurture our own being by respecting all people and consciously working to mitigate the pain of the world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Scholars postulate that the only thing that does not change is the every varying world. Other renowned thinkers postulate that the natural state of all things is to remain the same. Perhaps both propositions are vital. Perhaps it is normal to resist change because it threatens our present state of being. Perhaps it is natural to attempt to preserve the status quo because we are part of the external world and we wish to persevere, not expire. Perhaps it is inevitable that we all change. The natural forces are impossible to blunt.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
By simplifying our lives, we rediscover our child-like stalk of innocents that reconnects us with the central resin of our innate humanity that knows truth and goodness. To see the world through a lens of youthful rapture is to see life for what it can be and to see for ourselves what we wish to become. In this beam of newly discovered ecstasy for life, we realize the splendor of love, life, and the unbounded beauty of the natural world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Age 50 is the mile marker where any mildly perceptive person becomes acutely aware that he or she alone is accountable for the content and coherence of their character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human mind’s innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our thoughts and feelings make us whereas love and beauty sustain us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Through our work and play, each of us eventually becomes a personification of what we cherish in life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Awareness of our lost youth and charged with foreknowledge of our fate is terribly burdensome. Nonetheless, awareness of inexorable forward march of time and comprehension of our transience is a key component of our humanness. Awareness of time serves as a constant jab in our flank. It shapes our sense of being and toys with our mental equilibrium.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We can learn personal humility from episodes that generate shame and guilt. After retiring from worldly affairs and drawing useful lessons from personal disgrace, we must resume living an expedient life devoted to appreciating truth, beauty, and love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Without opposition, there could be no creation. All life would cease without resistance. Emotions also have their polar opposites: attraction – repulsion, love – hate, aggression – meekness, and mercy – callousness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All life depends upon the opportunistic interplay between elemental forces, the mysterious dualities of the numinous universe. Ying and yang forces of the natural world (lightness and darkness, fire and water, expansion and contraction) create tangible dualities that are complementary, interconnected, and independent. Without the firmament in the midst of the waters, without both sunshine and water, no life forms could subsist on this rocky orb. Without the rich soil surrounded by a canopy of an illimitable sky how could we feed ourselves, how could we breathe?
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person fails, nobody achieves everything that he or she set out to achieve. Nobody, regardless of how many personal triumphs they enjoy, no matter how rich or powerful they become, goes through life without encountering failure. You cannot fail unless a person valiantly tries to accomplish a task. The most audacious person readily attempts difficult projects, despite feeling uncertain if they can prevail. Successful people exhibit the character to respond positively to failure. Some failures prove instrumental in altering a person’s outlook, and their revised perspective leads to brilliant successes
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must always be ready to kindle the candle in their heart and fill the void in their soul by unveiling into a courageous, peaceful, and loving person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Laughing and crying are closely related. Smiling and grimacing both involve a person showing their teeth as does laughing and growling. Crying and laughing always represents the expression of actual emotion.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is important to measure ourselves at least once in life, undertake a personal odyssey that constructs a clarifying prism of our being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The most regretful behavior always leaches from a wound to our sanctimonious pride.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We can imprison ourselves with our wants, wishes, and false dreams.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nothing cuts a neural route faster through the brain then a pinch of pain. Periods of unhappiness penetrate and scar the brain. Experiencing intense periods of unpleasantness incites us to grow. If we can bunt the destructive forces of extreme pain and embrace its forceful impact for its educational value, experiencing profound pain causes us to appreciate the pleasure of simply living in the moment, enjoying each blade of grass in nature’s glorious bouts of beauty.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In the world of personal development and spiritual growth, a seeker embarks on a path of self-discovery and self-improvement. A seeker desires to discover knowledge and use an enhanced level of personal awareness to alter their behavior, opinions, beliefs, and point of view in order to experience reality in a different and more wholesome manner than the prior path that lead to self-rejection.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In the modern world, human beings display little tolerance for waiting. We are addicted to fast food, instant messaging, and other conveniences of life. Patience is a lost virtue.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
How we respond to tragedy is the hallmark of character. Suffering a great loss places us at a spiritual milepost. The wind of our souls can either sour and wither or rejoice and thrive.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person can only see their shadow if they awaken their eclectic soul. Self-understanding commences by admitting to the shadowy presence of the primordial unconsciousness. The unconscious mind is a magical concoction of logical and irrational thoughts and feelings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Character modification requires active participation in challenging new experiences, but without reflection upon our encounters in life and the purposeful alteration in our base philosophy new experiences alone will not result in core personality changes. Our thoughts become our habits, and our habits reveal our character. Only by thinking and acting differently will a person attain the quality of character that they seek.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An inexhaustible capacity to engage in sin is what makes human beings capable of living a virtuous life. To err is human; to seek penance is humankind’s unique act of salvation. Whenever a person fails, it is often their overwhelming sense of anguish that drives them forward to make a second attempt that is far more bighearted than they originally envisioned. The need for redemption drives us to try again despite our backside enduring the terrible weight of our greatest catastrophes. There is no person as magnanimous as a person whom finally encountered tremendous success after previously enduring a tear-filled trail of hardships and repeated setbacks. In an effort to redeem our lost dignity, in an effort to regain self-respect, we find our true selves. By working independently to better ourselves and struggling to fulfill our cherished values, we save ourselves while coincidentally uplifting all of humanity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-healing requires tremendous action, a willingness to go beyond the normative to discover something transcending.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our exterior world affects our internal landscape, our inner world affects our interpretation of physical sense impressions, and the combination of emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations influences how we address reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Daily life is an ongoing adaptation process of imprinting our memory’s storage center with useful data and the ceaseless expurgation of undesirable facts, exfoliation of destructive thoughts, and weeding out annoying emotional quirks that seemingly sprout out of thin air.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The greatest crime in human history was not the creation of the armaments of warfare and destruction of life, but the invention of hand mirror, which enticed humankind to peer at their surface appearance instead of seeking spiritual salvation. Prior to the invention of the mirror, people saw themselves through other people’s eyes or by looking deep within themselves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human inertia induces us to believe that our lives will never change unless we relocate.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The strongest principle of personal development is every person’s ability to make conscious decisions how to act and determine what purpose he or she attempts to fulfill. People with a fixed mindset believe that their basic personal qualities such as intelligence, talent, and other skills are traits that are predetermined or fixed and they ignore opportunities for personal development. A person’s growth mindset represents a belief that there are certain basic qualities that a person can cultivate through applied effort, if they exhibit a passion for learning, a resolute willingness to stretch their personality, and through fortitude make personal improvement despite experiencing initial hardships.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Virtually every tribe in the march towards civilization developed its tailored made initiation practices. In America, sports are part of the test for a young man’s initiation into manhood.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All roads taken lead us only to ourselves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We distill happiness from garnering joy in the ordinary fragments of life, while dedicating personal effort to creating a body of work that one can look back on their deathbed and be satisfied with achieving. Happiness comes from living beautifully, which necessarily involves reason in thought and speech (logos), and leading an ethical and virtuous life devoted to achieving worthy goals.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The purpose of life is to become acquainted with the deepest recesses of a person’s own mind by reflecting upon what a person reads, witnesses, and personally experiences. Wisdom is a form of power. Lacking knowledge of the world and without comprehending the essence of humanity, we can never know the truth of our own being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We live in a world of shadow and light, pain and joy. We spend our entire lives investigating the many possible patterns of human experience including interactions between humankind and nature and with one another. We must learn from our chronicles and assist future generations by living a fully engaged life attempting to ascertain how to live in an authentic and joyous manner.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We learn to love by basking in the love of other people. We learn how to express our love and our warmest feelings whenever other people grace us with the privilege of besetting upon them many acts of kindness. We unleash a germinal of internal tenderness by affectionately doting upon pets and by generously spending time admiring the natural world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Similar to a how a flower grows incrementally, people also blossom in stages. As we age, we expand our knowledge of how the world works and how other people respond to our deeds. We also expand our language skills in order to communicate both our thoughts and feelings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Childhood introduces children to the wounds of the world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The negative feelings of anger, bitterness, guilt, regret, resentment, and sadness represent a failure of a person to accept that the past is an event that holds no power over the present. The thought that the future will bring salvation is an illusion. We must exist in the present.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are all the products of nature composed with essential elements. Every natural force has an opposite. The components of earth, wind, water, and fire comprise nature. Similar to nature, we contain complementary, contradictory, and counterpoising elements.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Exile from society allows person to disengage from meaningless activities and develop conscious awareness. A person’s courageous struggle to eliminate the trepidation of social exile produces insights into what it means to be human. We can displace emotional disquiet by living a heightened state of existence. How a person’s resolves the tremendous anxiety and dizziness that impetus comes from contemplating the inevitability of death, human freedom of choice, the moral responsibilities attendant to living in a selected manner, existential isolation, and the possibility of nothingness establishes a governing philosophical framework. A person must not rue ouster from society because release from moral and societal constraints spurs learning and advanced consciousness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Any person whom seeks to live a historical existence must devote their efforts to learning about the world, care about people and nature, and seek to express their thoughts in the artistic methodology most appropriate to their particular talent. A person cannot fake self-awareness or imitate an artistic nature. A person must honestly earn a heightened level of conscious awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In its own unique and indefinable manner, music indirectly communicates the joys of life along with the pains and terrors overwhelming humanity. The universal language of music quantities the human experience, its range of variation encapsulates the scale of humankind’s exuberance for living as well as expresses our apprehension of suffering and death. Because music articulates the quintessence of life and yokes a myriad of human events into an expressible format, music is a critical act.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Alarm clocks are the bane of humanity. Sleep inertia, the decline in motor dexterity, subjective feeling of grogginess, and impaired state of awareness and mental performance is normal after awakening from even a light sleep. Scientific studies reveal that abruptly awakening from a deep sleep amplifies the severity and duration of sleep inertia.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All of us share conscious recognition of our individual self. Each of us is more than a product of our conscious thoughts. The dictation of our unconscious mind also affects our behavior. The unconsciousness cogitates upon problems that are too harsh to submit to conscious resolution. The unconscious mind frequently directs us to take action that a rational, conscious mind would eschew. Resembling a two-sided coin, both our conscious and unconscious minds contribute to our thought processes. Collaborative thoughts lead to action, and repeated actions result in the development of behavior patterns, and ingrained behavior patterns lead to a sense of identity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
For the philosopher, language, thought, and passion are the same. Ideas are personal to a philosopher; they express their human passion and articulate their novel ideas in language. Ideas are more than mere concepts, trifles that the philosophical mind toys with. Ideas provide both the structure and inner vitality that holds great thinkers’ conceptual structure together.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Disparate from animals, human beings are constantly interpreting who we are. The mental rhythm of the human mind is a stream of thought that is constantly in motion. The development of conscious awareness is a lifetime process of interpreting the external world by employing the tools of observation, memory, and imagination; supplemented by rational thoughts, meditative reflections, intuition, and freelance conjure. Every day we can consciously work to alter our being or remain mentally stagnant.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person who finds grace never lacks the courage to endure, remain resolute in principles and action in the face of an easy collapse into anger, insanity, and self-destruction when living in an increasing chaotic world filled with armed conflict, terrorism, and cultural discord.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
American culture has regressed because of contemporary society’s glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nature blessed every person with the innate capacity to express wonder and awe for the eternal world and act with a kind and unstinting soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We each possess the ability creatively to respond to the ontological mystery of our existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-questioning is the road to personal liberation and spiritual enlightenment. Self-questioning spurs the mind to consider new opportunities to arrive at truth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human beings can learn valuable lessons in conservation of necessary personal resources for accomplishing the fundamental tenants of life by observing a judiciously paced turtle determinedly and stealthily traversing the world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A “critique, ” a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer’s use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader’s malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The only manner to blunt in a wholesome and righteous manner the emotional trauma of living under a death sentence is by making every day count, living passionately, and dedicating the journey stumbling through time to accomplishing a master life plan. We can assist each other find meaning in life and undertake a path that make every person’s life a worthy endeavor, but each person bears the personal responsibility for living their life, establishing who they are, and behaving in a manner that provides credence to their self-imposed ideology. If a person persists in shifting personal responsibility for their way of life onto someone else, they he or she fails to discover the meaning of his own existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Recounting the narrative of our personal story in a methodical and chronological manner helps us see our life in a historical perspective. Telling our personal stories allows us to bring hibernated memories out of seclusion. Reexamination of our historical existence under the light of growing conscious awareness assist us make psychological breakthroughs. Analyzing the elemental substance of our personal story from a sundry of viewpoints employing techniques of literature, philosophy, logical reasoning, and abstract thinking assist us perceive our discrete chronicle in symbolic terms and in mythological context.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Hope is a form of conscious dream making.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human beings possess the gift of personal freedom and liberty of the mind. We each possess the sovereignty over the body and mind to define ourselves and embrace the values that we wish to exemplify. Personal autonomy enables humans to take independent action and use reason to establish moral values. We are part of nature. Consciousness, human cognition, and awareness of our own mortality allow us to script an independent survival reality and not merely react to environmental forces.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Professing not to care is a primordial defense mechanism. Whenever a person finds oneself mired in failure and despondency, rebelling is a viable option to preserve false personal pride.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Perception of a self is not simply about actuality. Human beings’ identities are self-generating and people constantly revise and recreate the story of their being. Coming-into-being, not being, is the highest expression of reality. We only attain the fullest knowledge of a living thing including ourselves when we know what it was, understand what it now is, and understand what it can become. We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human mind is the principal agent of creation. How we think is the prism for how we perceive reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Mentorships, similar to other important relationships, usually end. Ideological differences and a need to chart a personal path might preclude parties from maintaining the original balance that stabilized a mentoring relationship. Conflict between an apprentice and his master is not always bad; in fact, it is almost inevitable, if the apprentice’s destiny is to exceed the accomplishments of the master.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person can transfigure the disquiet of solitude in a positive or negative manner. Periods of enforced solitude can cause a person to develop eccentricities of conduct and character, parley with a number of mental aberrations, partake in self-destructive diversions, or use their time productively to contemplate worldly issues and diligently work on self-improvement.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling is the distinctly human implement designed to synthesize our purposeful interaction with reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person begins to live a moral life when they cease asking what life will provide them and begins to determine what he or she expects from oneself.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. Ideas derived from real world experiences lead to acquisition of knowledge, and the accumulation of time-tested principles leads to wisdom.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Behind every creative act is a statement of love. Every artistic creation is a statement of gratitude.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We create a meaningful life by what we accept as true and by what we create in the pursuit of truth, love, beauty, and adoration of nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The dimension of space and time, represented by what is transpiring in the here and now, is all that we will ever know. Unlike the continuum of perpetual time and infinite space, everything that we know will experience disruption, dissolution, disintegration, dismemberment, and death. The inevitability of our ending represents the tragic comedy of life. Much of our needless suffering emanates from resisting our impermanence rather than embracing our fate. Only through acceptance of the events and situations that occur in a person’s life including suffering, and by releasing our attachments, will a person ever experience enlightenment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In lieu of fixating upon details of our life which can lead to sadness or madness, we achieve an enhanced perspective regarding the perplexity haunting our being by thinking abstractedly, a process that allows us to discern the essential principles of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard’s sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The supreme artist lives as closely as possible to replicating the perfect dream, with life unfolding in a manner that a person could never conceive or direct.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Summers end to soon just as childhood ends before we apprehend the effervescent of our youth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-questioning is bound to arise at the outset of any worthy quest attempting to gain self-knowledge, and this disconcerting sense of uneasiness will continue to surface akin to a petulant sea serpent until a person undertaking a vision quest either discovers a safe haven or perceptively changes the trajectory of their destructive life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
How we begin and how we end any relationship is a product of planning, fortuity, and personality. Many enterprises commenced in good faith spiral into confusion, discord, and disarray, generate turmoil and corruption, sunburn the sensitive parties, and conclude in a cesspool of regret and animosity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A life premised upon honest effort and questing for love is bound to generate regret and remorse.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us, along with our ancestors, inhabits the same cosmos. When we tell stories, we enter the stream of human consciousness; we take with us into the Ring of Time the people whom we crossed paths with in our earthly sojourn.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We view art in order to escape our own skins, to get outside of the commotion inside our skulls.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are condemned to be free people, liberated people who must make life-defining decisions. Freedom requires choices and all choices entail value decisions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person’s level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The best way to determine a person’s character is to judge them when their world is falling apart.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In absence of consciousness, human beings would merely be animated material objects. Without the synergistic impact of consciousness, free will, and perception of a cohesive self, which act to direct human conduct, many of the qualities that we associate with our humanness would be moot or superfluous delusions including laughter and pain, memories and thoughts, love and anger, imagination and dreams. Without consciousness and free will, humankind would lack the ability to choose right from wrong and there could be no mental discipline directing each person’s lifestyle, attitudes, and belief systems.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person’s work allows their character to form and provides a creative outlet for their inner world of imaginative thoughts and creative impulses. A person whom fails to find suitable work that allows their soul room to grow will quickly begin eroding into a withered and desiccated being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
As we go through life, we essentially grow a personality. Our personality branches out in many directions to assist us organize our thoughts, feelings, values, ideas, and coping mechanisms. Our exhibited behavior – the way we organize and deal with life – becomes an external representation of our central self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person experiments in life and reflects upon those events in order to discover how to lead a meaningful life. We conduct a quest searching for the source our essential being. What we seek is inside us waiting for us to discover. Until we realize the vital inner source that provides direction for our life, all our efforts are in vain. The ego with its craving and fearful protection strategies is what prevents us from perceiving the transparency of the world in which we belong. When we cease clinging to the past and no longer daydream of the future and unreservedly accept whatever is occurring while sacrificing ourselves in service of other people our sense of self vanishes and we exist only as conscious and nonjudgmental witnesses of reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We each act as the creator of the self, and therefore, we strive to attain self-realization by understanding what we were in various stages of life including what we began as and what we transmuted into becoming.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The ego resists change. False pride is an impediment to change.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The more a person knows the less they talk. I shall cease speaking and endeavor to instill a large band of silence inside myself in order to forge a deeper and closer relationship with all of nature. Only when I attain absolute quietude shall I understand the supreme virtue of humanity and understand the meaning of both life and death. Only when I achieve absolute stillness shall I come to a perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life flows at ease whenever a person ceases complaining about the past, worrying about the future, lives in the now without resisting pain, and accepts the moral sublimity of living in a state of grace.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cannot turn back the clock and relive cherished pastimes. We move beyond our origins. A person must make their way in an evolving social, political, and economic world order. We must not be too quick writing off the influence of our prior experiences, because the long tentacles the past remain vibrant strands within us. While the past does not cast our future in stone, its durable mold shapes our present. The ingrained strumming of our personal histories, sentimental or otherwise, also portents what might come along in our future.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Consciousness and free will are necessary in order for human beings to live meaningful lives by supplying agency to our intentions. The innate capacity for consciousness and directed free will plays a linchpin role in making human curiosity a viable concept. We would lack an ability to learn without an inquisitive mind and the ability to act. A premeditated act of human free will enables us to apply what we learn and make calculated adjustments when our plans need alteration. Human beings’ cognitive processes and a liberal range of free will allows us to study the past for learning rubrics to employ in the present and cogitate upon a future course of action.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There are times in life when the best part of our life and the worst part seemingly coincide, especially those periods that demark commencement of significant personal transformation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Because a child is bound to grow, society is intent upon cultivating the child’s mind to mature into a very specific type of responsible person. Children take great pleasure in small things that have no practical purpose in their dreamy world where they can be as wild as wind. Each year a part of the child dies, as it is burden with adult responsibilities.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In our formative years, every person begins creating a self that can keep him or her company through later stages in life. It requires concentrated effort to create self-hood. The task of creating a fully developed human being is an ongoing process, an open-ended assignment. The goal of self-hood is to evade slipping into a state of thoughtlessness, where we fail to take ownership of our thoughts, deeds, and lifestyle.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-knowledge, a spiritual metamorphosis, precedes understanding other people and comprehending the beauty of being part of the spontaneous interplay of the natural world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The only recourse for an escape artist from world affairs is to explore their inner sanctum where hopes, dreams, insecurities, and despair collide.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writers use both their blood and their brains to explore the darkest recesses of their pooling self. Writing allows us to harness the whimsy of the collaborative mind and body, pull our tissue apart like taffy, and expose the composition of our life sustaining organs. Telling our personal story forces us to account for any actions that made us laugh, cry, scream and shout, or hide behind a cloak of mootness. Critical examination of the self allows one to disintegrate the envelope of their present personality and make up a new imaging.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No person can claim to be anything more or anything less than his or her individual assimilation of a lifelong symposium of inimitable physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual occurrences. Simply put, we each place our own individualized stamp upon the meaning of life. How we live, how we struggle, and how we die reflects what life means to each of us. We are all students of life, we are a product of what we pay attention to, what we observe, and experience, and what subjects arrest our minds.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Tact by its nature entails staying mum, prudently electing to forgo urging other people to pursue an alternative course of action. Creation of silent spaces in our own life and equitable distribution of periods of respite that allow for periods of equable inner reflection is necessary to spur personal growth. It is equally important to honor other people’s intrinsic need for periods of introspection, uninterrupted by unsolicited advice
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must never live a lie. We free ourselves to live a full life by discovering the courage to face our illusions and live a true life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Imagination and recollection of cherished memories of the pastimes are closely related. We do not recall memories verbatim. As our perspective changes regarding our place in the world, we shift through our recollections and revise our memories. People possess the ability to edit their memories by repressing unbearable episodes and highlighting incidences that generate fond memories. How we perceive and comprehend ourselves in the past, the present, and the future shapes our evolving sense of self. Humankind’s ability to repress unpleasant events and humankind’s ability to act as the solo editors of our germinating awareness of the world that we occupy is ultimately responsible for activating our metamorphosing sense of identity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An enlightened person strives to live a meaningful life, defined by their personal humility joy, passion, and profound reverence for life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Courage is an act of grace when it is not required; it originates from an inner necessity to honor, love, and cherish people, and respect oneself.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person can escape an ingrained pattern of mental incapacity or ‘non compos mentis’ (“no power of the mind”) by reading, writing, thinking, and studying their environment for telling external determinates that will shape a journey of the mind, body, and soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A pensive personality and ambivalent attitude towards power and money can cause other people to take a high production or creative person for granted.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person only experiences the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars that constitute reality by giving up the distorting spectacles of our egotistical appetites and repulsive pretensions, shedding artificial attachments, living without grand illusions, and free of deceptive delusions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person experiences anxiety when they realize their insignificance in the cosmic field, which present state of angst can exacerbated by other confusing life questions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Beauty surrounds us, but oftentimes it takes a person with a poetic perception, an artist’s way of looking at the world, to first notice the sublime, and then stagecraft the splendor of nature so that other people can perceive their synoptic vision. The spirit and aesthetic intention behind the work is what assigns the work its artistic quality. Great works of poetry and writing, for instance, express not simply a criticism of life, but also encompass a philosophy for living.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We each want nothing more than to live for the moment. Nature hardwired us perpetually to follow the call of the wild, cull all the highs in life, and rejoice in life by dancing, singing, jumping, building nests, creating beauty, and playing with our young. We each find ourselves happiest when we are engaging in conduct that makes us feel alive.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person’s attitude creates the tone of his or her life. The highest expression of human dignity is to live a purposeful life devoted to principles and exhibiting compassion for other people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Without parlaying with the renunciation of the world, a person must establish a means to live in harmony with the uncertainties of a chaotic world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading books exposes us to the consistency and uniqueness of being human. Book reading is an investigatory process. We read books in order to encounter the orchestrated words that describe emotions and observations that we too have experienced but are unable to glean the right alignment of words that fully embody the resonance that we seek.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All philosophic propositions, every attempt to think including all acts of oral or written articulation of an argument and metaphorically expressed ideas, are subject to the dynamics and limitations of human language. The spoken thought is only part of any philosophic message; the other part is unsaid because it is unsayable. The crux of any philosophic proposition reverberates in the echo of silence, the thought that lies in-between the lines.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person experiences time by traveling through the environment consisting of time and space, and encounters a variety of sense impressions. Time is the combined experience and cataloguing what is taking place now, a recollecting what took place before now, and the anticipation or expectation of a person registering future physical and mental sensations. Time is a happening that will arrive from the future and it will last for about as long as it takes to a person to inhale and exhale one deep bodily breath. In each recognizable segment of time, a person experiences in a thematic breathing cycle a tangible sense perception of either seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or some combination thereof. Then that distinct morsel of life detected by the physical senses passes from the slipstream of now and lodges into the silted fold of bygone memories.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We derive insightful perception by observing and studying, comparing and contrasting. Without investigating why we prefer the veil of life to the cloak of death and without considering how to create dangerously, live honorably, and die gloriously without remorse and regret, we risk dissipating what precious little shelf life our brittle humanity grants us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It takes extraordinary mental discipline to transmit human experience without perversion. Truth telling is unnatural. Lying is an important aspect of humanity. We lie to other people to prevent hurt feelings and we deceive ourselves in order to protect our noble sense of being a good person. Dishonesty and inaccuracy preserves our quest seeking uninterrupted personal pleasure. I shall eschew pleasure seeking and cultivate precision of mind and moral character that precious truth telling necessitates. Reading and writing, along with observing nature and studious reflection on vivid personal experiences is the process methodology that will bring me closest to discovering inviolate verity of existence and becoming a doyen for all the immaculate truth, beauty, and goodness in this world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nothing that remains static is truly ever alive. Nature does not abide idleness. All energy sources of the natural world and the cosmos are in a constant motion, they are in a perpetual state of fluctuation. All forms of living must make allowances for the seasons of change. The Earth itself is twirling through space, spinning on its axis analogous to a child’s top. The unpredictable forces of instability brought about by a combination of motion, change, and flux propels the miraculous dynamism of existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Exiting from any long-term relationship comes at great personal expense, which explains why so many people are understandably reluctant to endure the cost of severance. Beginnings and endings are always dramatic and occasionally traumatic. Youthful brio allows us to engage in transformation. As we age, we carefully weigh the spectacle of continuing enduring harrowing situations or seeking melodramatic renovation of our core being. Analysis of the respective cost benefit ratio, consideration of the known versus the unknown, can delay or permanently deter us from altering our environment, leading our persona to become more rigid as we mature. Transformations in life are disconcerting to people who resist change.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each person is chargeable with the essential task to make his or her thought processes as refined as possible. Every person must declare what important distinctions will allow him or her to live a vivid and reflection filled life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We employ our personality, what we know, think, and believe, in order to interpret the world, making self-understanding a critical act because it establishes the baseline for our philosophical and intellectual approach towards life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person’s outlook on life colors their interpretation of specific events. Human beings’ behavioral and thinking patterns enable people to thrive or cause them to live in despondency and despair.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Americans share an affinity to establish a distinctive identity and know one’s self in a physiological, psychological, and spiritual sense, and we strive to attain self-actualization, self-realization, and/or bliss.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person archives self-realization by engaging in deliberate contemplative acts that serve to unify of all aspects of the self. To deny part of the self, a person risks spiritual decay.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Grace represents the sublime glamour of human souls, the ability of physically courageous and emotionally brave people to give part of them in order to protect other people regardless of adverse consequence that they might personally endure.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-questioning and a desire to gain self-understanding is the fêted act of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The evil components of our shadow are the part of us that we deplore, the part of us that we prefer not to admit. One must set themselves free from all inhibitions in order to initiate close encounters with their innermost monster. By standing toe-to-toe with the part of ourselves that we most detest, a person is in a position to slay their fiendish sense of self and, by doing so, undergo a soulful transformation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A wise person strives to reach self-transcendence by engaging in delicate contemplation, while avoiding the snare of self-denigration’s negative invocation. An overshadowing sense of a caustic self can be destructive, whereas an encircling sense of a kindhearted self allows a person to express the profundity and elation of a feral creature curiously exploring nature’s glorious playground.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All forms of art are parallel expressions. Writing is not unlike painting or other artistic endeavors. Each artistic endeavor is an expression of the mystery of the world. The job of the artist is to deepen that mystery, express reverence for the mystery of life, and explore the enigmatic aspects of human nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer is not born but made through study and sheer willpower and ability to embrace beauty and agony.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Without thoughtful effort and purposeful change, human life does not improve. The key to living a meaningful life is to accept reality. There is no inherent meaning to life just as there is no hidden meaning behind death. Life is limited and death is simply an ending. The only meaning to life is what each person passionately commits their life to accomplishing.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Philosophic questions are attempts to understand the root nature of reality, existence, and knowledge.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There are times in life that we ascribe qualities or traits to other people that are inaccurate or fail to recognize other aspects of their being because we are emotionally invested in that person fulfilling a specific role in our life. When we claim that the other person changed it is not so much that they altered their core composition, but we now must admit to ourselves that our original perception of them was imprecise.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cannot replicate other people’s lives. We must each institute and broker a personalized meaning to our exclusive existence. We must each serve as our own Zen master, awaken to our inviolate personal truth, and strive to fulfill our sui generis (unique) nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Drinking caffeinated drinks including high potency energy drinks, and consuming other enablers, we do not need to develop an internal source for the energy, effort, endurance, and enthusiasm needed to confront each day.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Spiritual grace adds to a life and it is crucial ingredient in any person’s quest to attain self-realization.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There may not be an emotion more complex than the dual stations of pride. The positive connation of pride – the telluric current resulting from both natural causes and interactions of human beings – flows from the conception of applying a person’s best effort to accomplish worthwhile tasks. The negative connotation of pride refers to an inflated sense of one’s personal status or accomplishments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There exists a universal order that we each play a distinct role in carrying out. Light always struggles to emerge from darkness. Each of us is the bearer of our own lantern. We find ourselves when we realize our place in an interconnected world. The struggle to pierce the darkness that shrouds us from realizing a state of perceptive awareness is the biggest part of both our individual story and our communal storyline.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are born with the innate capacity to express empathy. Experiencing our own cuts and bruises, encountering our own difficulties and disappointments, expands our cognitive world and rouses the universal desire to understand and comfort other people in pain.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The aim of all life is death. Life is the apprenticeship that we serve preparing for death. Life is the fleeting spark of divinity that precedes a deathless eternity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
With every passing day, we add a page to our personal story, an illustrative script that casts our character shaped by an implacable external environment and fashioned by our supple state of inwardness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Both oral and written stories are an important aspect of culture. Stories are a ubiquitous component of human communication. People use stories to explain historical events and to illustrate ideology. Stories teach ethical principles through parables.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Dreams fuel human beings imaginative response to existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We tend to live down to other people’s expectations, especially the people closest to us. It is more difficult to obtain approval of people who hold us in high regard than to accept the lower standards that other people hold of us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each soul must awaken from the aloneness of a private dream world to greet the morning sun, view the sweet earth, apprehend the great silence, and demonstrate an appreciative thanks to everyday of life by living in a rapt state of attentive awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The elements of trial and error, similar to earth and sky, and fire and water, delineates the constituent modules of our lives. Living robustly includes more failures than successes. We achieve adeptness to living by exhibiting a willingness to make good faith mistakes and learn from each misadventure. Every effort that fails to achieve our expected result is understandably frustrating. The fact is that without ideas and dreams and devoid of occasional crash landings, a person can never hope to achieve any worthy acts to temper resounding personal disappointment. Meaningful success is ultimately defined when a person dies, when an entire life’s work devoted to performing passionate and compassionate enterprises can be judge as a whole unit.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Tedium and boredom are related, but not identical. Tedium comes from a person lacking an ideology to live by; the dulling fear fomented in the soul after confronting the paucity of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We script our own psyche. We each journey alone. The path that we take through life proves to be every person’s supreme test of mental, physical, and emotional stamina, and the final determiner of his or her intellectual, ethical, and spiritual attainment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The epitome of our life force turns on the seam where our tempered idealistic expectations meet the annealed exigencies fueling the cataclysm of a pressing personal crisis. Many of us do not decipher who we are and what we truly cherish until we experience the terror of an inconsolable loss. Failure and suffering lead to self-scrutiny.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Periods of silent solitude spent in introspective reflecting are sacred and a source of great strength and comfort. We can learn from listening to the rhythms of nature and from appreciating the eternal hush of the cosmos.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human beings intuitively divide time into the past, the present, and the future. We perceive the past as immutable and fixed, the present as reflecting actuality, and the future as undefined and nebulous. As time passes, the moment that was once was part of the present becomes part of the past; and a moment of the heretofore previously unrealized future arrives and becomes the new present. The past is a record, the present is real, and the future is an imaginary thought.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A true understand of oneself is vital. Writing enables us to act as a sun in our own universe, to become the perfect overseer, and observe the innumerable changes in the seasons of life. Writing is an intense form of self-exploration, and through thoughtful encounters with the humble self, we grow, and that growth diminishes unhappiness and creates joy.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All of life is an amphitheater where we each serve as an appreciative member of the audience until the sublime play ends with our death. The chapters and verses in our life story reflect what we value – how appreciative we are for our time to work, play, laugh, cry, and create.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We unthinkingly build the pilings of our lives upon whatever comes along. Like it or not, we play the hand that fate deals us. If fate is kind, some people credit their fortuitous circumstances to their ingenuity and resoluteness. If fate is cruel, some people curse God. The truth is that an unenlightened person resists suffering, they continually wish for a world different than it is, whereas an enlightened person learns how to suffer heroically.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
To ask who we are represents a primary reflex in human consciousness. Every person seeks to understand him or herself and reach a verifiable and cohesive image of his or her own identity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person whom is unhappy with life realizes that their construction of a self-image is incompatible with their earthly reality. An unhappy person must alter their internal or external world; otherwise, their sadness, sorrow, grief, and misery will remain unabated. Misery and desperation can lead to change, but only if a person is willing to learn, explore, and try.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Indecision and fear can cripple any chances of succeeding and lead to maelstroms of regret that fuel our most fantastic nightmares.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Living with love for all humankind and worshiping nature’s immense beauty cures heartache and restores bliss. Respecting the splendor of nature awakens us to the beauty inscribing our own humanity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Intelligence in a spouse is a timeless quality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human life is inherently dualistic. It consists of or is explicable as two fundamental entities, including rivalries between subject and object, mind and matter, and conflict between the benevolent and the malevolent forces. Opposition in the universe creates a dynamic living universe composed of good and evil, body and soul. Human thoughts and feelings are the communal products of the conscious and unconscious mind’s interpretation of a constant flow of coded and symbolic dialogue.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person’s manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person’s mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We employ free will to design of our own being and therefore we must accept responsibility for our actions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
With endless pharmacological supplies at our fingertips, we do not need to penetrate the motives behind our actions, feelings, transgressions, dreams, and phobias. High on chemical substances we can remain stagnated in an infantile mental state. Without introspection, we foreclose ourselves from gaining the insight that allows us to navigate adulthood’s ceaseless demands.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person’s industrious and creative mindset can overcome great obstacles that besiege their existence. Humankind’s greatest unraveling is our propensity to panic when confronting the pealing silence of nothingness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Governments predicate the call for war upon very terrible lies: that it will restrain evil men, make honest and courageous men out of boys, and the outcome depends upon the moral virtuousness of the combatants. Warfare is obscene, an evil waste of life, and a destroyer of civilization. Society can salvage no virtue or rectitude from the larger waste of destroying cities and killing people. There is no moral message deduced from warfare. All warfare is barbaric and inhuman.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our compassion, spirituality, and appreciation of beauty provide us with the capacity to love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our life force is a form of flowing energy, a blast of verve renewed through our ongoing daily interactions and the inevitable collisions between the id and the ego.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Liberating a prejudiced mind from its preconceived notions and scripting a life of purposefulness requires constant postulation, observation, evaluation, and synthesizing.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person shattered by their loss in faith must come to terms with the underlying fear and tension of his or her austere solitude and knowingly accept that the universe is utterly indifferent to a person’s survival. Establishment of an ethical code – a philosophical stance – that enables a person to accept the absurdity of living in a world indifferent to them is the ultimate challenge.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We can only hope to live a meaningful life by serving as earnest witnesses to life’s tragic beauty.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A human beings’ perception of reality emanates from viewing the universe, which is in a constant state of creation and destruction. The universe in which we move and work in outlasts human interests, hopes, expectations, and joy, and all forms of aversion, effort, pain, and humiliation. The world outlasts our dreams, love songs, bouts of inanity and anxiety, it outlast regrets, remorse, and shame.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We find an abundance of anger and the desire to destroy the opposition in any competitive human environment. Hate sparks contest, and in the modern world, attorneys are the paid gladiators of warring parties. Attorneys are for hire to the highest bidder. Attorneys ply their trade by dealing in the commerce of anger and hatred.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every child matures, which is both a blessing and a damn shame. Children can imagine worlds that never exist, worlds far more interesting and consoling than an adult knows.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person realizes inner calm and a state of rapturous peacefulness with nature whenever they stand in solitude and contemplate their existence in an infinite world filled with multiple galaxies.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons’ minds.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every form of life must struggle. Life is an aberration; death is ordinary. Life requires obstruction, conflict, reverses, and resolve. Life requires questing. Questing provides the meaning that we seek, a purpose to justify the inevitable struggle to live knowing the absurdity that we must die.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-realization is largely a matter of achieving a person’s formative personality definition. People whom lack self-realization oftentimes fail to integrate their desired personality traits into all phases of their life including social life, family life, and work life. In order to achieve satisfaction with oneself, a person must know what they wish for, know how to go about achieving their goals, be capable of recognizing where they now stand, and understand how they must change in order to attain their ultimate visage.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cradle in our nucleus emotional ingots gathered through studied immersion of the incongruities of life. In an elusive quest to disinter meaning out of life, we must cull joy from our daily rituals while conscientiously striving to nourish the nucleus of our buried innate essence. By discovering inner peace blossoming amongst the rubble of daily life, while determinedly searching out the cytoplasm our innate essence, a person’s reveals their inspirational tranquility.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Accepting that a person will die and shucking off any aversion to this blunt thought awakens the mind to realize what is possible in a human life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is mental exercise and the preeminent method to train the mind to achieve a desirable state of mental quietude. Meditative writing, a single pointed concentration of mental activity, induces an altered state of consciousness. Writing is studious rumination, a means to converse with our personal muse. Writing entails a period of forced solitude that enables us to meet and conduct a searching conversation with our authentic self. This contemplative dialogue with our true self is transformational. Writing is not a mere act but a journey of the mind into heretofore-unknown frontiers of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Each of us is the enactor of our personal saga; we create the phantom of the self. We are the principal character in our personal story, as well as witnesses and reactors to the storylines of other persons whom we adore. We are each the composers of our evolving personal story; we are the protagonist of our personal life story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A life without a storm would lack drama. Pounding waves of a tempestuous sea test a person’s mettle. A fearless sailor climbs the rigging and shouts out at the top of their lungs into the wind and rain whipping across their face that they will not go quietly into the good night without a fight.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every encounter with the external world presents a conflict with a person’s cherished inner world. How we resolve these ongoing boarder conflicts between reality and ideas results in tectonic shifts in our mental makeup, which influx we incorporate by responding to the never-ending chaos of a worldly life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We each possess the capacity for self-development. We also possess the capacity for self-destruction. The path that we chose to take – to pursue lightness or darkness – is the story that we take to our graves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There are diverse styles of learning, problem solving, and a range of methodologies that a person can draw from in order to structure their thoughts or intentionally revise ingrained personal habits including both systematic and unsystematic approaches. Problems solving styles are reflective of personal differences in the manner that people prefer to position themselves in respect to the phenomena in the world and efficiently react to alterations in the external environment. Problem solving strategies encompass numerous variances in what manner a person approaches new concepts, how they manage their daily affairs, and respond effectively to new opportunities and complex challenges.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A dreamer rises above their inherent fearfulness that they will always produce inferior work and grants oneself a license to put forth their best effort.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The transience of humanity frames the tragedy of all people. There are no happy conclusions to life, we all die, and until we die, we will experience both happiness and pain. Acceptance of the tragedy of humankind without remorse is a shattering experience; it enables us to relinquish mawkish misconceptions, destructive obsessions, and crippling attachments. Only by accepting the tragedy of life as an integral part of the incandescent beauty of life, will I understand what it means to rejoice in the indelible bloom of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A life of leisure never satisfies anyone who possesses a lively mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A plaited link exists between every person and his or her ancestors, not simply through genealogical records, but in the same manner that the soul of a child, from which we sprang from, traces a direct connection to the matured soul of the adult.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
None of us commences life utterly alone. We each carry within our granular mass the protoplasm residue of past generations’ ideas, customs, values, infatuations, prejudices, ethics, and mores. The lees wrought from our seedlings contribute to the social order that oversees a newborn’s future. How we conduct ourselves in the here and now emulates our heritage, delineates the parameters of the present culture, and sets the embryonic stage for the emergent ethos of our future and for the generations of people whom we will never meet.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In the blackness of the midnight sleep world, immunized from the harsh glare of daytime reality, the active imagination of the soul dances in the mind of a dream weaver. Safely shrouded in the all-encompassing blanket of darkness supplied by nighttime sleep, our secret wishes speak to us by channeling the collective mythology of the primordial mind. During the wee hours of night, right before first light, we summon our personal muse to tell us in operatic fashion what it means to be human. If we listen carefully, our muse’s heart songs shares with us what it means to experience both the tragedy and comedy of life, and encourages us to unreservedly embrace in a moral manner the banality, brutality, beauty, and splendor of nature that occurs eternally in the cosmic world that swaddles us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-realization, which leads to purity of the soul, requires forgiving our enemies and working on the most horrendous modules of oneself.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A living philosophy entails a conscious act of awareness. Without a living philosophy to guide and support us, we are not living as receptive, thinking, and emotionally responsive human beings; we are merely surviving as people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person whom writes begins by putting down what they know about loneliness, shame, love, and heartache. In writing fully, they discover many other aspects of themselves that they never suspected including doubts, beliefs, ironies, and farcicalities.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We came from some place and we are trending in a particular direction. Without memories, we do not know where we come from, and we cannot project our future trajectory. Without a keen awareness of our history, we cannot pose any meaningful hypothesis or engage in any useful speculation regarding the future of humankind. Without knowing where humankind came from and failing to contemplate where humankind is going, we could never touch upon a comprehensive understanding of the mythology and mystery of human nature. Such a spectacle would preclude us from comprehending what it truly means to be human. Melodious memories assist us to feel in our bones what being actually entails in its full aesthetic splendor.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The principles of storytelling are immutable, explaining why we see shards of ourselves in other people’s stories. All enduring stories predicate its themes upon humankind’s ability to exercise free will. Without a character’s ability to make choices of how to act, there can be no story. In absence of free will, there is no humanity. Only after God evicted them from the Garden of Eden, could Adam and Eve experience what it means to be human.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-deception and vanity are grievous sin. The ego is the cause of all human suffering. We suffer from life only when we fail to examine the cause of our sorrow. Letting go of destructive illusions and freeing oneself from egotism of self-pity enables a person to sense the rich intertexture of their inner world, which is the only facet of reality that we exercise exclusive dominion and control.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Lies, greed, pettiness, and ugly emotions ensnare a person. We are free people whom construct our own cages that we allow to suppress our vital instinct to live a wholesome life. Truth telling demands an awareness of what sins cage a person in. Truthfulness also commands that a person fess up to the role that he or she played in scripting unpleasant scenes in a tarnished personal history.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All revered spiritual leaders, political leaders, and diplomats, captains of industry, intellectuals, and winning generals exhibit genuine humility that empowers them to act with integrity and courage under the most distressing circumstances.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Talented writers etched the story detailing the travails of broken souls numerous times. The poets recounted an equal amount of times the lucent tears of human laughter and weeping sorrow. Everyone understands bitterness and joy. Conversely, the most evocative aspects of human beings, the bewildering clarification of their ambiguous natures, are virtually indefinable and therefore unutterable. Written testaments to love, truth, beauty, and adoration of nature are inherently weak because words fail to convey what a person experiences inside the spaces that compose their chemical field.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person is the master of his or her own destiny. What we think about alters our character. Our character organizes our personality, and our personality scripts how successfully we interact with other people and respond to a changing environment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person lives bounded by the structural formation of human anatomy and the provincial demands of the human condition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-reflection enables every person to alter the trajectory of their personal storyline by reviewing a series of episodic occurrences and making value judgments regarding the past. How we perceive our history colors the present, our deeds of today script the future outcome of individual persons, and the outcome of many people making conscious decisions using their cognitive processes including the ability to remember and share memories influences the direction of human development and the progress of society.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal dignity begins by accepting responsibility for our actions, acting humbly, and extending compassion to other people. Personal humility requires choosing living with quietness of the heart over living in the depths of animosity, despair, and discord.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every day of our lives, we create a poetical statement of our being – the locus of emotions that we call the soul – by how we think, act, and express opinions and sentiments. Our interlinked verses making transforms and continues to alter the world for present and future generations by reconciling thought with time and matter, and harmonizing people with a physical and social world.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No age of life is inglorious. Youth has its merits, but living to a ripe old age is the true statement of value. Aging is the road that we take to discern our character. Fame and fortune can elude us, but character is immortal. We must encounter a sufficient variety of experiences including both failures and accomplishments in order to gain nobility of character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We learn invaluable life lessons from people whom exhibit courage and grace under extraordinary circumstances.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All people share doubts. The lingering question that eventually worms it way into all thinking people’s brain is how to live splendidly and how to die without remorse and regret.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All of our thoughts – ideas – are traceable to a sensation, an encounter with the world that leaves an impression upon the mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We each appear only one time in history. Whatever occurs in our life will never occur again. Our life is significant and worthy of living if we are brave, love fearlessly, and remain optimistic regardless of our earthly hardships.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Sharing stories that fill our chambers with an explosion of unique voices is a means to instigate an inclusive exploration of the intricacies of what it encompasses to be human. Stories enable us to comprehend the ultimate concerns of human existence and explicitly address the unalterable part of humanity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now, ” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Enlightenment – whether defined as spiritual awakening, liberation, or other form of illumination and attentiveness – requires inner transformation brokered by study of our limitations and application of a welcoming spirit of conscious appreciation. Self-knowledge commences by looking for the sacred light of awareness essential to spawn profound change in a person’s character.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Time is inexplicable because it moves – clicks away – at steady increments, while increasing the past and bringing the future into the present. Time has a necessary affinity with both heaven and the earthly reality. ‘Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it is the soul of the world.’ Plato said that time and heaven must be coexistent. Without time nothing can be created or generated in the universe, nor is anything intelligible without eternity. Time is no accident or affection, but the cause, power, and principle of the symmetry and order that confines all created beings, by which the animated nature of the universe moves.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An invisible, yet active current of mental energy, underscores any book as well as any other form of artistic creation. A creative burst of psychological energy ignites any creative project. The emotional energy that underlies the artistic work propels it forward endowing it with articulation, texture, rhythm, and movement. When the expressive energy of the artist flags, the work comes to a stopping point and it takes on its final composition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Sex and love represent one of the numerous absurdities and hopeless incongruences demarking human nature. A person whom only seeks out sex and eschews love will live a barren existence. Sex without love is a brute display of physical reproductive capacity. Sex is not a worthless or stupid activity when it forms a cog in a loving and affectionate relationship. Sex and love might not make the world go round, but when joined they make it a better place to live in.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Relationships abhor a vacuum. Whenever one person refuses to mark and fight for their territory the other person will occupy the treasured ground either by default or by committing an act of aggression.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The emotional ingredients that sustain long-term relationships are kindness, thoughtfulness, and compassion.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Personal experiences that disrupt stale routines result in the phenomena of cognitive dissiliency, jolting our minds and enhancing our ability to internalizing new information.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The goal of any spiritual person is to strive towards attaining self-realization by living spontaneously in the present moment of physical reality, free from anxiety and distress, unencumbered by frivolous affections, and liberated from specious attachments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die. Every day is also an apt time to learn and express joy and love for the entire natural world. Each day is an apt time to make contact with other people and express empathy for the entire world. Each day is perfect to accept with indifference all aspects of being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A teenager boy is a monstrous cyborg, an unfeeling, beastly machine, not fully human, and not housebroken. Rumbustious teenage boys are an infernal organism disdainful of everything, yet intent of contributing to human evolution.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The great gift of American democracy is freedom to think, act, and carry out our lives in a manner that imbues meaning not only to our own life but enhances other people’s lives through our everyday actions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Regret comes in four tones that operate in unison to shape our lives. First, we regret the life that we lived, the decisions we made, the words we said in anger, and enduring the shame wrought from experiencing painful failures in work and love. Secondly, we regret the life we did not live, the opportunities missed, the adventures postponed indefinitely, and the failure to become someone else other than whom we now are. American author Shannon L. Alder said, ‘One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.’ Third, we regret that parts of our life are over; we hang onto nostalgic feelings for the past. When we were young and happy, everything was new, and we had not yet encountered hardship. As we age and encounter painful setbacks, we experience disillusionment and can no longer envision a joyous future. Fourth, we experience bitterness because the world did not prove to be what we hoped or expected it would be.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are always in the process of becoming. Self-identity is a fusion of our prior decisions and our current thoughts.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
People are inherently wary and fearful. What is a person more afraid of, the paucity of their dreams or the satanic magnitude of their nightmares? Poetic inventions containing elements of truth comprise all of our nighttime dreams and ephemeral daydreams.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person employs human reason and intellect to guide our earthly expedition. We can stumble through life satisfying the unconscious dictates of the mind or take control of our life by increasing our level of conscious awareness. Philosophy always commences with an act of consciousness. We must follow our moral passions. We create our reality by what we perceive as truth. We imagine a life that we wish to experience. Live the life that you envision. Do not allow other people or external determinates to control your conception of the self, because otherwise you are living someone else’s life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We are each warriors of our own times. When we step out of our protective shell, we each encounter forces much more powerful than we are. What we learn through testing ourselves on the combat zones of our eon becomes the textbook protocol for how we shall live out the remainder of our life. The glorious skirmishes and daunting conflicts that we encounter, and what we learn from vigorous engagements on the battlefield of time, inscribe the story of our lives. Spiritual leaders help guide us in our times of doubt and self-questioning. Recognizing the value of the mentorship of spiritual guides in their self-questing ventures, persons who endure immense adversity wish to reciprocate their love of humanity by sharing the scored story of their episodic journey through the corridors of time and relay the incisive truths they discovered to any other travelers with a willing ear.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Growing old is humbling and it takes effort to accomplish this stage of life with dignity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Attempting to succeed in a competitive external environment, we can lose track of how to live without anxiety.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The pathos of the human life teaches one that idolatry of the ego is a sham. Only by living in harmonious accord with the entire world can a person distill happiness that flows from cultivating a state of mindfulness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We discover truth by asking rapier-like questions that cut through the thick fog of doctrinarism. Artists and philosophers must be subversive: we need these rebellious cynics to ask questions, they must resist cultural norms; seek out truths that are not self-evident and challenge everything. Doubt, not blind belief, is essential for discovering truth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The life of hero is the tale of a person overcoming personal hardship and obstacles while striving to achieve an exultant victory that voices repressed citizens’ ecstatic thoughts and dreams.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Failure generates its own majesty. Defeat becomes a panoptic stain on the soul; it creates its own all-embracing pathos. Reverses engulf us in fleshy feelings of self-pity, sorrow, and apathy. Resounding setbacks might even be subtlety attractive because it means we can give up trying. It is tempting to accept defeat, surrender to our insecurities, and admit that because of failing to accomplish one particular goal that the best part of our life was wasted. Cynically writing ourselves off as a failure, we are free to capitulate to the emptiness of our lives.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A common human error is a tendency to recognize personal truths as universal truths.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas implementing change can establish internal harmony and instate joy in a person’s life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We learn about life by exploring the texture and depth of space that composes our private inner world. In solitude we revisit our wounded feelings, sins, doubts, and deepest despair, replay poignant memories of loved ones, project what we are becoming, and ascertain the purpose of our being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The tangible and factual components of reality along with the intangible strands of memory and imagination constitute the framework that houses our vital life force. A person is likewise composed of contradictory and complementary forces of pain and pleasure, darkness and lightness, and clashing and harmonizing bands of thoughts and feelings. The web and root of all persons consists of both the expressible and the unsayable. Who has not held imaginary conversations with gods, devils, and spirits? Persons whom enthusiastically cultivate an inner life, ardently experience the quick of nature, and willingly immerse themselves in all aspects of everyday living will experience renewal. Analogous to the heat source of fire, we need the spark of desire to fuel our hearts and the spirit of the breeze to spread our heart songs.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human spirit’s unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The foremost calling of the human brain is to script a safe, secure, and joyous future for a person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our ability to detect and measure the passage of time is burdensome. The conception and sensation of time bears down upon all of us. It weighs us down; it compresses our souls. There is a variety of ways to escape the dull passage of time or the fearfulness of our accelerating march towards death. We must choose our mechanisms for dealing with the inexorability of time and our finiteness. We can fill our void with work or pleasure, laughter or pain, and fretfulness or courage. We can seek a sense of purposefulness or acknowledge the meaninglessness of life. We can seek to escape the drudgery and pain of life through alcohol, drugs, or pleasure seeking, or by working to support our families and create artistic testaments to our worldly existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Large families are communities unto their own.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Doubt is the stock in trade all philosophers as well as all scientific persons. Conversely, certainty is the cane that all religious fanatics and other zealots wield with outrageous righteousness. Only by allowing for doubt can we probe our ignorance. Doubt, therefore, is the essential seed of thought.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people’s stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Gifted people of discernment, intelligence, and talent flourish in virtually every occupation. Every field produces perceptive and prescient persons whom exhibit the rare capacity to observe what eludes most people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Engaging in meditative self-reflection and gaining increased control of inner experiences provides a person with a sense of control over fear and trembling and the chaos of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must be in tune with the light and dark forces of their nature and remain in harmony with the bands of their own multivariate being.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We all must determine what types of anatomical castanets vest in our central core. For aught we know, we still tend to think of ourselves as a complete and fixed product. In reality, analogous to an unfinished paper, working from the inside out, we are retooling ourselves every day whether we recognize the minor or major tinkering taking place or not. In a neurological sense, the brain is constantly working to build and rebuild itself. In a psychological sense, every day the human mind is altering who we are. We constantly take in new information that modifies and enhances our understanding of the world and our place in the environment. Every day we are using the sense of self and our accumulated knowledge to adapt to our world and modify our thinking and behavior.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Mindfulness can serve as an antidote to living a fragmental life riven with deleterious delusions and illusions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An authentic life facing reality without mental equivocation is the simplest type of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Patriotism is the surefire wingnut that binds our diverse society. Rulers historically used patriotism to manipulate the populous. Patriotism serves as the trump card to justify going to war and mandatory inscription of young men into military service. Patriotism is becoming synonyms with state justified coercion and murder of less powerful people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The road to enlightenment requires a life dedicated to self-study, accepting the minor tragedies of life as an ineluctable part of the human condition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person must escape artificial constraints and unfold the myth of their own being. There is only one path for a thinking person in life, and that is to assume the role of a compassionate observer. I can only achieve personal freedom – liberty of the mind, body, and soul – by stop worrying about how other people perceive me and no longer judge myself in terms of fame and fortune.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We live by choice and by necessity. We choose the mechanisms that are essential to ensure satisfaction of our baseline survival. What labor we willingly endure in order to meet our minimalistic subsistence requirements and what activities we elect to pursue in order to mollify our desire for living joyfully and attain self-realization defines our essential self’s core personality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An array of behavioral decision options establishes opportunities for personal growth. The knowledgeable choices that a person makes in a constantly varying physical setting and capricious social milieu reflect their character, and their evolving personality continues to affect their social and intellectual growth.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Aristotle declared that, ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’ Does the intrinsic tension between opposing ideas create a lamplight of stereoscopic vision? Does the mental friction generated by antinomy, a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles, lead to war within the mind or does the natural rasping of abrasive thoughts spur the mind to create soothing metaphorical thoughts in order to attain conceptual peace?
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Understanding of oneself is the first act in establishing a transformative philosophy for living a vivid and a reflective existence. Knowing thy self is essential to designing and instigating a meaningful life that is self-directed instead of exclusively controlled by innate traits and external determinates.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing is an exemplary means to make contact with the whole of the self. What ultimately makes up the self is a collation of personal knowledge derived from physical, mental, and emotional experiences. The only way to divine the self is to understand what comprises its constituent components. The self is what we do, think, and act. Writing is not merely a documenter of the actions of the self. Writing, similar to other artistic activities, is one of the fundamental activities that a self can perform.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We measure time through a mental framework trussed with two major stakes: memory and expectation. Memory is that spottiness that takes place behind the eyes: memory takes place in the cloistered theater that houses diffused still pictures. We file mental pictures that encapsulate our prior life into mental shelves for a wayward librarian to cull through and forward select recollection to the recall center whenever summoned. Expectations arise from thoughtful consideration of our future prospects in life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It is ultimately the ebony of our pain, our blackest monuments, which lead us to seek an enlightened way of living. We are unable to hear the voice leading to our own salvation until we fall into the depths of an abbess manufactured by living a heedless life. From this state of floundering in the gloomy lagoon, we can awaken to find the light bearing the seeds of truth that will redeem us. Looking inward, we overcome stubborn resistance, and we revivify long lost and forgotten powers. The experience of soul-searching perspicacity transfigures us. We might even feel as if we died a spiritual death and then we were reborn. From our dark pit, a shaft of light emerges.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Narcissistic pleasure seekers routinely avoid developing the humility required to manufacture a life of full measure. Shallow persons such as me hide their insecurities behind a false persona of bravado, boasting of their inconsequential deeds, pyrrhic victories, and adamant refusals to tackle any task that they fear.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Pain avoidance is part of life. A campaign to minimize hunger and lessen pain drives us to develop systems that will provide us with nourishing food and protective shelter. Pain is a trickster. It can send us true or false signals that confine us to our beds or spur us to roam long and far. Pain has a lifesaving function. Pain can signal us to implement evasive action or attack our problems head-on. Pain has a putative role. Pain can torture us for engaging in careless deeds. Pain performs a restorative role. Pain can tell us when we must rest. Pain is tutor and a healer. Pain implores us to take heed of our physical and mental infirmities, urges us to call out for help, and compels us to adopt modified strategies.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An emotionally locked person refuses to let go of their sad memories and live in the now.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No beautiful aspect of humankind is foreign to person with a lucid soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-education is a lifetime affair. In life, as in science, there are unsuccessful experiments. Difficult personal and professional experiences are not for naught. Every experience contains a lesson. If we do not achieve the results we want and stop searching out solutions, it is not the experiment that is unsuccessful, but the person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Undergoing personal change is a difficult but necessary process of maturing into the ultimate manifestation of a desirable self. True personal transformation requires a person honestly to assess their inner spirituality and adopt a clear vision of who they want to be. An earnest person experiencing inner transformation of their values and belief system is apt to feel conflicted, confused, and disorientated. Change of self is displacement, disarticulation, and loss of self. Alteration of our self-image results in disrupting, dislocating, and modifying a person’s perspective of what is significant.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must discover our own path to joy and a sense of leading a purposeful existence. I spent the first part of life attempting to discern what a man ought to be, and spent the latter years attempting to reconcile why I was not the man whom I always aspired to be. A person endures a tragic consumption of the spirit when they discover that they are not what they desired to become.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person devoted to attaining self-realization would be foolish to ignore the well-intended advice of people whom care about them. Although it is essential for each of us to seek individual growth, other people can offer astute personal observations that might otherwise elude us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Unerring solitude forces a person to confront their morality and aloneness. Solitude makes personal confession possible.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person is not born as a finished product; we create ourselves every day. Resembling reality, no person is a fixed and unchangeable entity. Each of us is in the process of becoming. A person’s perspective on their life experiences depends upon reviewing and integrating an emotional gamut of reconciling values with applied effort.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Every person’s story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person’s story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person’s selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person seeks to quantify their existence. Do we measure a person’s life by its longevity or by assessing the warmth of its blaze? Do we measure a person by their brainpower or by the heartiness of his or her spine? Do earthy deeds count for more than intellectual opinions? What is more important, the work that a person produces or the quality of life that effuses from their being? Does it matter how we live and how we die, if we love or hate, are kind or mean, generous or stingy? Does it matter that we struggle to express personal doubts and toil in an effort to obtain redemption for our personal lapses?
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A willingness to let go of an old self and allow creative thoughts to remake a person into a better version of oneself requires an act of courage.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We develop our whole character from our thoughts, actions, attentive observations, and from the resolute pursuit of our inspirational dreams.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Paroxysms of pain and twinges of desire leach from universal sources. All human suffering buttons itself to the pang of wanting.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Love is a form of energy, and similar to all forms of energy, it is both essential for life and dangerous. Love can enrich a person’s life or destroy a person’s world. Love is a catalytic agent of change because it makes us dare to become the best person that we can be. Falling in love for the first time drives a person to the cusp of madness, while the bitter aftermath of a love lost irrevocably alters the positive and negative aspects of a person’s character. Withstanding rejection by a lover, we discover within us those ingredients that we will need in order to find our life mate and complete ourselves as man and woman.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We wait too long to tell the people we love that they are the very reason that we exist. We assume that our wife, child, other family members, and friends understand our love and affection. We assume that people we care about understand our enigmatic idiosyncrasies and willingly accept the shrouded reasons behind our demonstrable oddities. We assume that other people sense that we struggle valiantly in our blackened landscape. We presume that other people comprehend our struggle to glean meaning amongst the ashes spewed from the absurd circumstances that we operate. Sometimes we need to stop and tell the tenderhearted persons whom we care about that we love them and explain that our awkward strangeness is not a rejection of them.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An act of redemption, the ultimate act of personal grace, is an undervalued form of courage.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
War provides some people with a sense of purposefulness. The drumbeat of war quickens the pulse of neighbors, relatives, tribes, and nations. Hostile nations amass weapons of destruction claiming that they seek peace through deterrence. When war comes, advocates of arms galvanize the citizenry by proclaiming the inevitability of conflict. Each side’s propaganda machine cast the campaign of present war as the next Great War. Generals brashly promote armed conflict as the war to end all other wars. Saber-rattlers proclaim that the opposition’s militant disciples instituted this ordeal of conquest and destruction.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There is no pre-mapped intellectual topology path leading to truth. Truth is a process of conducting a searching investigatory dialogue with oneself in an attempt to examine and discern the contents of a person’s own mind. Every person must ask himself or herself what is essential in life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-transformation commences with a period of self-questioning. Questions lead to more questions, bewilderment leads to new discoveries, and growing personal awareness leads to transformation in how a person lives. Purposeful modification of the self only commences with revising our mind’s internal functions. Revamped internal functions eventually alter how we view our external environment.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Hope is a form of conscious dream making
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Art translates human souls. Each passing eon’s public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind’s gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind’s self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation’s effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All forms of writing are an act of conception; writing must lead to creation. Each time that we write, we begin again. Writing is an act of self-affirmation. Each time that we place our thoughts onto paper, we receive a new opportunity to claim our reality. Writing is also an act of explication and deconstruction. Writing empowers us to shape and modify our fiery constitutions. Writing allows us to explore the essential ingredients that lead to a life of serenity by exhibiting compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person who magnanimously exhibits their passion allows us to witness their authentic personality whereas a cold and calculating personality remains inscrutable.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We bring happiness into the world one day at a time by accepting pain and returning understanding and compassion.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-development requires direct action. Knowledge must precede action. The self’s relation to the world must be grounded in reality through ideas and thoughts. Self-reflection and introspection expands our appreciation of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Telling other people our life story changes us in a startling and profound way. The act of telling demands selection, prioritization, evaluation, and synthesis, which intellectual activities increase understanding, make us more sensitive to key distinctions in principles, and expand our empathy for other people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Love, reverence, and adoration, are multifaceted emotions. Similar to a painting by an artist, how we respond to a beautiful woman, nature, and the world that we encounter reveals the spectator and not life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Mythology and religion are relevant and remarkable, as they each represent imaginative truths – projections of human beings innermost desires – intermixed with fragments of factual reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our thoughts shape us. We become our obsessions. Our thoughts can enslave us or save us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
When people pass on we must choose how to remember them. While our loved ones sleep for eternity we must carry on with our daily toil. We can elect to harbor adoration and love in our precious memories or cling to animosity and detestation. We can kindly remember our ancestors or continue to feel embedded enmity towards people who no longer walk this earth. Regardless the human frailties of the recently departed, it seems that we should aspire to clutch the best part of our ancestors being fast to our hearts. A book encapsulating a departed person’s life has many pages; we must choose which chapters to treasure and what chapters to disregard or downplay.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person tied to the world of sorrows can return to nature for inspiration. Nature provides solace to troubled hearts.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Hard edges make truth and by necessity, truth is unbending. Unlike truth’s absolutism, justice is a qualitative substance; it is not an absolute tenet. Justice must be pliable in order to meet the needs of more than one person or one group. Justice goes against separation; it is a form of human superglue. Justice is what binds us as people. No human is capable of measuring out or dispensing unqualified justice. Justice naturally seeks conciliation and demands compromise.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer’s vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We live a life bounded by the perception of the self. Existence entails tabulating our personal contact with reality and plumbing the substance of the self. The loftiest task of all is to dream a worthy life and then go live it without fearing the unknown. It is wonderful to live; we must cherish our time by loving other people and adoring nature. We find ourselves through trial and error. We must not allow failure, pain, disappointment, heartache, or sour feelings to daunt us because each of these emotional indexes interprets our dream world intermixing with reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist’s life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All overt and covert emotions would shrivel without the beam of contrast and comparison to supply context and implication. We need the value of counterpoise to recognize and distinguish between similar and dissimilar concepts. How do we identify the importance of hope if we never felt despair? How do we appreciate the value of society and companionship until we experience solitude and loneliness? What would any relationship be unless draped with the boughs of thoughts and feelings, without the ongoing interaction between conscientious action and unreserved devotion, without endless empathy fused with boundless love? In the ring of time, without the verve supplied by both the real and the imaginary, life would be bland, insipid, and lackluster.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person without a philosophy for living is at the tender mercy of other people.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
One redeeming feature of human beings is that we must work to sustain our survival. Working attaches people to reality; it creates a survival identity, and provides structure to our life. Work provides a person with a temporary purpose and an accompanying sense of security that there is a fitting place in this world for a person of their temperament and talent.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Advancing towards a person’s dreams with confidence enables a person to move beyond restrictive boundaries and meet with uncommon success. Liberated from personal insecurities and eliminating useless second guessing enables a person to live an imagined life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing’s tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight’s powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person lives a false life whenever they are afraid to make contact with his or her authentic self. A sensitive ego – one that protects a person from pain – can also prevent a person from maturing mentally and emotionally by causing a person to distort truths and refuse to admit unpleasant facts.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A storm-filled life replete with piercing and unearthly sounds ravages the soul of any thoughtful person. In contrast, the genteel wind of restoration moves silently, invisibly. Renewal is a spiritual process, the communal melody that sustains us. Inexpressible braids of tenderness whispering reciprocating chords of love for family, friends, humankind, and nature plaits interweaved layers of blissful atmosphere, which copious heart song brings spiritual rejuvenation. For when we love in a charitable and bountiful manner without reservation, liberated from petty jealously, and free of the toxic blot of discrimination, we become the ineluctable wind that vivifies the lives of other people. The mellifluous changes in heaven, earth, and our journey through the travails of time, while worshiping the trove of fathomless joys of life, constitute the seeds of universal poetry.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Living is a process of developing oneself. Without experiencing pain from disconcerting periods of our lives, we would be different person, perhaps a lesser person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person’s cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We must be able to love other people or forever endure the stain of disgraceful loneliness. By recognizing and expressing empathy for other people, we come to accept our own fallibility.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person begins childhood with a mind that is essentially a blank slate – a tabula rasa – before receiving outside impressions. Early childhood experiences and perceptions begin the formulation of a state of conscious awareness, the infantile steps in forming a personality, developing social and emotional behavior, and acquiring practical and book knowledge. Childhood plays a critical role in forming our final version of a self-concept.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person’s understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Transitional periods in life are unsettling because a person’s latent fears constantly whisper warnings.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The human mind is a rover, it constantly returns to think about times past, cogitates upon the future, and actively considers the entire range of alternative plans to meet our daily survival demands.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We cannot measure a person’s value to the human race by tabulating the size of his estate. We must judge each person by his or her final contribution to humanity and nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Religion is a cultural relic inherited from ancient civilizations that doctrinal influence persists globally in modern times. Religious people rely upon their notional belief in the primal innocence of human beings in order to support the abstract supposition of inherently benevolent God guiding human souls.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life never ceases having a meaning for a humble person. The freedom of choice, the sovereignty that we hold over our own souls, enables a person to discover the meaning of his or her own life every day, even in suffering or death.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The most evocative life memories, which produced a synesthesia of emotions, consist of a host of small pleasures intertwined with the homespun stitches of love, affection, kindness, humility, and appreciation of nature.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person of large dreams does not allow other people’s opinion to damper his or her zestfulness. Overcoming fear of making an irreversible, lifetime mistake is the first step of living an artistic existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life introduces us to the gentle, cosmic rhythms of an extraneous world. What is objective truth might exceed human capacity to ever fully perceive, comprehend, and explain.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Any meaning of life derives from amiably accepting our anonymous role in the singular order of the universe. Such gracious reception of life’s turbulences stems from willingly capitulating to whatever fomented experiences life brings us without harboring a disconsolate degree of remorse or regret.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nature is never static. It is always changing. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Nothing endures. Everything is in the process of either coming into being or expiring.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our daily habits – honorable and dishonorable, noble and ignoble, vital and vile – are revelatory. Our sense of self is fashioned partially by what we employ to crank us up in order to charge through every day, or stated otherwise, what vices we partake of and what substances we are addicted to using.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In a suspended psychic state, writers cull words and symbols from the mystical world of memory, imagination, and intuition.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
All nightmares are a peephole through which we see the unsettling particles of our trampled past, whereas all uplifting dreams are a portal to escape the inexplicable undercurrents that worry our survival.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A principled person’s greatest disappointment will always be his or her own failures to respond to setbacks in a dynamic and positive way.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Alterations in the environment place us under personal stress. Changes in our routines and the physical, social, cultural, and economic environment forces us to make decisive decisions, we cannot continue our robotic ways. We must adapt to fresh encounters with the peripheral world. Variation in our external domain brings about shocking revolutions of our internal realm of thoughts and emotions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person can hurry through or sleep walk through life, but whenever they stop to catch their breath or awaken from a long nap, they will find apprehension, disquiet, and fretfulness waiting their directed attention.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The fresh and crisp air of the country reminds us that our blood surges from of the natural world and how tied we are to the sprung rhythms of earth and sky, weather and season.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Disturbing encounters in life spur reflective thinking that jars a person from his or her exhausted ideologies and way of living. A person who lives passionately will develop a philosophic outlook because the road of excess leads to knowledge. Enthusiasm will frequently make a person look foolish, and result in intermittent periods of despondency and self-questioning, yet only exuberance and a degree of risk-taking leads us to wisdom.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Time provides all of us with the opportunity to change, alter our belief system, and create new perspectives that challenge a person’s character and teach him or her how to become a happier and wiser person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person’s shadow is embodied in a person’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Life presents innumerable possibilities for love, friendship, compassion, and self-fulfillment, but we must be willing to give in order to receive. Persistence, sacrifice, a quest for knowledge, along with acquaintance with our true self is essential in order to achieve our dreams. Panic, fear, worry, doubt, anger, and a negative attitude are the biggest impediments to self-realization. The most important battle we undertake in life is not with other people; rather it takes place in the human mind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A person is bound to experience troubling doubts when attempting to forge a viable philosophy for living. When we are young, the world appears as a dream, no desire is unattainable, and no goal is impossible. We do not entertain the notion that the world will blunt our passionate aspirations, we assume that the world will yield to our resolute will. Misfortune, poverty, illness, and death crush a person’s hopes, awakening us to parts of oneself and the world that we previously denied. When fate has spoken harshly we initially feel ruined, life appears as a bleak wasteland. We must then chose to accept a misery ridden existence or rally the courage and fortitude to turn our thoughts from bitterness and regrets, surrender vain notions that we are somehow special and immune from the terrors of a life when reality does not care a wit for our survival.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Without curiosity and passion, the world will seem to lack possibility and everything in life will appear pre-ordained. It is important for a person to spend the majority of the day pursuing their passionate interests and enlisting their innate inquisitiveness. Life is so much sweeter when we contemplate pleasant as opposed to distasteful thoughts. We feel most alive when we create an apt channel for our creative impulses, and engage in thoughtful discourse relating to our concordant values.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Humankind’s struggle against a hostile environment causes people throughout the ages to deploy their full armory of logic, training, strategy, imagination, inventiveness, and creativity. We are born with the natural ability to strategize. The most influential tool in humankind’s intellectual tool kit is the ability to regenerate a sense of unruffled alertness, to establish a poised stance that leads to intuitive discoveries generated by the conscious and unconscious mind constantly filtering a plethora of data, selecting critical facts, and producing elegant solutions to seemingly insoluble dilemmas.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Nature endowed human beings with two teleological components that define our essential humanity: consciousness and memory. Consciousness enables people to make decisions, and memory allows us to learn and share our accumulated knowledge. Cognitive endowments of consciousness and knowledge allow people to ascribe a meaning to existence, by establishing a direction and purpose to their life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
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