Robert S. de Ropp > Quotes

“Life games reflect life aims. And the games men choose to play indicate not only their type, but also their level of inner development”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“Here then is a scientific answer to the question, “What went wrong?”. Man is the victim of an evolutionary error, an error in brain building. Nature or the Mind Force was in too much of a hurry. It created our truly magnificent neocortex without setting up a clear chain of command to ensure that the new brain, seat of the reason, would dominate the old brains, seats of the instincts and emotions. The result was a highly suggestible, unstable naked ape that lived largely in the world of fantasy, was full of paranoid delusions and chronically liable to panic.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life

“From a strictly Darwinian standpoint flowers would seem a needless extravagance. Evidently the Life Force has no use for Darwin or Darwinism. The Life Force is an artist.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life

“This ridiculous object has been strutting around saying I this and I that and all the while it has no more I than a scarecrow and no more will than a puppet.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“It is true that you are a sorry lot, unbalanced, hysterical, half-completed creatures with a tendency to go mad en masse and a habit of thinking of yourselves as the Lords of Creation. But you are not the lords of anything. You are slaves. You like your slavery. You would rather be slaves than free. But why find fault with me? If I left you incomplete it was to see if you could complete yourselves. I gave you the power to carry out this work of self-completion. Stop complaining and do it or I’ll throw you out and put something else in your place!” There speaks Old Mother Hardass.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life

“So warped, however, are the standards by which men measure criminality that players of these games are more apt to be regarded as “pillars of society” than dangerous lunatics who should be exiled to remote islands where they can do no harm to themselves or others.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“The spiritual level of a civilization can be measured by the amount of objective art it generates. By this criterion, our technological civilization is not much better than a gadget-infested barbarism.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life

“Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man…. Lo! I show you the last man. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like the ground flea; the last man lives longest.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“He does not identify the self with the physical body or attach much importance to the possessions of that body. He feeds it, dresses it, cares for it and regulates its behavior. In due course he leaves it. One of the powers conferred by entry into the fourth room is the capacity to die at will.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“Sooner or later the Curse of the Cult blights every group that sets out to attain the heights. They close the circle, form a tight little mutual-admiration society, deify their leader (especially after the leader is dead), despise nonmembers as uninitiated barbarians, flatter themselves that they alone hold “the keys of the kingdom,” and turn into spiritual fossils while deluding themselves into thinking that they are High Initiates.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“Intentional dying is possible only for one who has attained a high degree of mastery over his physical functions, who knows how to project the principle of consciousness out of the physical body, who is able to tell, by certain inner signs, when his time has come, and who is able with full awareness and without artificial aids to let the life process come to a halt so far as this particular body is concerned.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“Contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world, concerns himself with outer, not inner space. But the Master Game is played entirely in the inner world, a vast and complex territory about which men know very little. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. The”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“If one wants to find out what lies beyond the frontier, the only way to do so is to go beyond it and see. On this journey one will do well to obtain both a map and a guide but he will have to travel every step by his own efforts.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“The phrase suggests that within the psyche of man are secret rooms, vast chambers full of treasures with windows looking out on eternity and infinity. Man does not enter these rooms, or does so only rarely. They are locked. He has lost the key. He lives habitually in the lowest, dreariest, darkest part of his inner habitation. Concerning this, the mystics of all times and all religions are agreed. But do psychedelics offer the key to those locked rooms or does their use constitute a form of spiritual burglary which carries its own hazards and penalties? Before”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant—all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol, none of their drawbacks.” Nothing”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“If life is as meaningless as death, if guilt is as questionable as perfection, if being is no more meaningful than nonbeing, on what can one base the courage to be?”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life

“It is our privilege as human beings to live either as Warriors or slaves. A Warrior is the master of his fate. No matter what fate throws at him, fame or infamy, health or sickness, poverty or riches, he uses the situation for his own inner development. He takes his motto from Nietzsche: That which does not destroy me strengthens me. The slave, on the other hand, is completely at the mercy of external events. If fortune smiles on him, he struts and boasts and attributes her favors to his own power and wisdom—which, as often as not, had nothing to do with it. If fortune frowns, he whines and weeps and grovels, putting the blame for his sufferings on everything and everybody except himself.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Warrior's Way: A 20th Century Odyssey

“To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates. Among”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

“I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thru’ it not with it.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, Self-Completion: Keys to the Meaningful Life

“The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego.”
― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness