Ken Elmgren > Quotes

“While conscious thoughts are self-forgiving, life-flashes, as I was also discovering, are raw and unfiltered. I envisioned instances when I
had been selfish, kind, petulant, generous, and emotionally careless, but mostly I saw myself as having been inattentive, not
absent-minded, more in the sense of being oblivious.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“People seek to live within a natural harmonious order but become fatigued and disillusioned by the rigors and seeming absence of reason and logic in daily life. They readily fallback on the convenience of the comforting certainty provided by faith and ideologies. Given a choice between believing in a world confined to the workings of natural phenomenon or one that enjoys the supernaturalism of deities, the majority will (and has) chosen to believe in the supernatural.”
― Ken Elmgren, Imagine: An Inquiry into Spirituality, Political Economics, and Personal Autonomy in a Modern World

“Time disconnects from physical reality during periods of great joy, immense pain, and, as I was discovering, impending death.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“Confidence that your misdeeds and mistakes will be forgiven or forgotten is empowering and enabling. My mind flashed on times when an off-hand remark caused a hurt of which I was not even aware or at least pretended to not be aware.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“We’ve progressed so far, we understand most things,
we can measure and collide particles in a ring.
But the concerns of humanity don’t seem to progress,
we still feel hate, love, dissatisfaction, and stress.”
― Ken Elmgren, Imagine: An Inquiry into Spirituality, Political Economics, and Personal Autonomy in a Modern World

“Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s rarely the most welcomed.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“I prided myself on living in the moment. ‘carpe diem’, ‘go for the gusto’, ‘take the opportunity’, mantra level stu" for a testosterone fueled 18 year old surfer.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“The only thing of which we are certain is death, and religions have convinced us that even death can be denied.”
― Ken Elmgren, Truths and Their Consequences: Imagine a world where acknowledgment of cause and effect drives decisions, actions, and accepted truths

“Certainty may be found in the belief in a Supernatural god, in Dharmic Celestial Laws, in the scientific Laws of Nature, or through Introspection. Introspection is the most difficult, the most uncertain, and the one least pursued.”
― Ken Elmgren, Imagine: An Inquiry into Spirituality, Political Economics, and Personal Autonomy in a Modern World

“Those individuals burdened with the gift of diversity whether gender identity, race, or neuro and those otherwise possessed by an overly reflective mind develop an emotional mask to hide the introspection that their diversity forces upon them. Sometimes it’s humor, sometimes it’s introversion, but most often it’s self-deprecation.”
― Ken Elmgren, Truths and Their Consequences: Imagine a world where acknowledgment of cause and effect drives decisions, actions, and accepted truths

“Future blindness absolves us from accountability. A consequence realized long after the cause has been forgotten is easily attributable to bad luck or injustice. Our predisposition for short-sightedness also, however, relieves unethical actors from culpability.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“We all want certainty, we all want purpose,
we want to find meaning in this man-made circus.
We want to believe in miracles in case we get in a bind,
we want a guardian angel to protect our bodies and corral our minds.”
― Ken Elmgren, Imagine: An Inquiry into Spirituality, Political Economics, and Personal Autonomy in a Modern World

“I dubbed the current age as being characterized by ‘Convenient Delusionism’ wherein people are willing to believe in things which are false or misleading when believing such things is more agreeable or convenient than facing a more fact-based concept of reality.”
― Ken Elmgren, Truths and Their Consequences: Imagine a world where acknowledgment of cause and effect drives decisions, actions, and accepted truths

“I pressed on, “Perhaps our life is constantly flashing before our eyes, but it’s only when we think our time is up that we actually pay attention.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“I tried to get off the phone quickly as I had a pounding headache and couldn’t stop thinking about why, if Jesus was going to save me, he couldn’t have made the wave break a little closer to shore and save me from what had been a wholly unpleasant experience.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“It’s unnerving to foresee consequences, to know the cause, and yet to have no ability to prevent them from happening. It was like reliving the swirling action of being pummeled by the wave with both mind and body beyond my control.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“I prided myself on living in the moment. ‘carpe diem’, ‘go for the gusto’, ‘take the opportunity’, mantra level stuff for a testosterone fueled 18 year old surfer.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“People value certainty over truth, which is convenient because certainty, a state of mind, is easily attainable, truth is more elusive. Certainty is merely being certain about what you choose to believe, truth requires verification and universality.”
― Ken Elmgren, Imagine: An Inquiry into Spirituality, Political Economics, and Personal Autonomy in a Modern World

“It turns out that your life really does flash before your eyes during those final few moments. I thought that was just a myth designed to make dying seem more entertaining.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“While conscious thoughts are self-forgiving, life-flashes, as I was also discovering, are raw and unfiltered. I envisioned instances when had been selfish, kind, petulant, generous, and emotionally careless, but mostly I saw myself as having been inattentive, not absent-minded, more in the sense of being oblivious.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“It is those moments when you’re existence is vacillating between the physicality of your body and the unearthly state of pure consciousness that your mind becomes uncontrollably and uncomfortably free.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“Futures don’t usually reveal themselves in flashed visions; they unfold over time.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“The distinction between the Unverifiable and the Unknowable became blurred with the advent of the subatomic world of quantum physics, which dwells in the non-perceptible world of math and probabilities. Our confidence in a math and science defined world is dependent on a grounding in physical matter, tangible, testable, and measurable. In quantum physics and, as we will see, in probability theory that grounding has been lost.”
― Ken Elmgren, Imagine: An Inquiry into Spirituality, Political Economics, and Personal Autonomy in a Modern World

“Unspecified angst is a silent killer that targets the overly thoughtful and the inherently ungrounded. Drew was ungrounded because his self-perception was dependent on the opinions of people over which he had no control.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“A disregard for consequences is legitimized by religious doctrines which grant forgiveness for harmful actions, even when such actions are taken knowingly and with bad intent. Christianity holds that, because humans are inherently !awed, transgressions are to be expected. God’s true gift, in sacri"cing his son, was not merely forgiveness, it was the gift of a consequent free life. When forgiveness is a given, and unaccountability the norm, however, an aspiration to moral excellence is merely an option to be weighed against other less ethical choices”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“It was like a mental filter had been turned off. I saw my own thoughts and actions with a new unwelcome insight, devoid of the comforting delusion that normally softens our perceptions of our actions and true motives.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“My mind was flashing, non-chronologically, through prior experiences in rapid fire succession. Good, bad and indifference were all jumbled into a sudden awareness that so many of my actions had been based on vanity, pride, or selfishness. I had lived a life of gratification without consequences. Such actions take on a different level of importance when you realize that they may define you for eternity.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“The human brain is not capable of absorbing things beyond what the senses reveal and the human mind is usually not capable of conceiving of things beyond the boundaries of logical cognition.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“Seeing the world without the protective shade of bias, self-forgiveness, and delusion subjects one to judgement by the angriest of gods, raw unforgiving truth.”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin

“Father-son relationships are particularly tricky as each must grow and mature in sync”
― Ken Elmgren, Our Name is Joe: Let the Disinfo Battles Begin