Questing – Here, There, and Everywhere
1. PRACTICE
Consider
the knowledge you already have – the things you really know you can do.
They are the things you have done over and over; practiced them so
often that they became second nature. Every normal person knows how to walk
and talk. But he could never have acquired this knowledge without practice.
For the young child can't do the things that are easy to older people without
first doing them over and over and over. … Most of us quit on the first
or second attempt. But the man who is really going to be educated, who intends
to know, is going to stay with it until it is done. Practice!
2. ASK
Any
normal child, at about the age of three or four, reaches the asking period,
the time when that quickly developing brain is most eager for knowledge.
"When?" "Where?" "How?" "What?" and
"Why?" begs the child – but all too often the reply is "Keep
still!" "Leave me alone!" "Don't be a pest!"
Those
first bitter refusals to our honest questions of childhood all too often
squelch our "Asking faculty." We grow up to be men and women, still
eager for knowledge, but afraid and ashamed to ask in order to get it. …
Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he
knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the
asker seem foolish or childish – rather, to ask is to command the respect of
the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, likes
you better and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his
knowledge with you.
Ask!
When you ask, you have to be humble. You have to admit you don't know!
But what's so terrible about that? Everybody knows that no man knows
everything, and to ask is merely to let the other know that you are honest
about things pertaining to knowledge
.
3. DESIRE
You
never learn much until you really want to learn. A million people have
said: "Gee, I wish I were musical!" "If I only could do
that!" or "How I wish I had a good education!" But they were
only talking words – they didn't mean it. … Desire is the
foundation of all learning and you can only climb up the ladder of knowledge by
desiring to learn. … If you don't desire to learn you're either a numb-skull or
a "know-it-all." And the world wants nothing to do with either type
of individual.
4. GET IT FROM YOURSELF
You
may be surprised to hear that you already know a great deal! It's all
inside you – it's all there – you couldn't live as long as you have and
not be full of knowledge. … Most of your knowledge, however – and this is the
great difference between non-education and education – is not in shape to be
used, you haven't it on the tip of your tongue. It's hidden, buried away
down inside of you – and because you can't see it, you think it isn't there.
Knowledge
is knowledge only when it takes a shape, when it can be put into words, or
reduced to a principle – and it's now up to you to go to work on your own gold
mine, to refine the crude ore.
5. WALK AROUND IT
Any
time you see something new or very special, if the thing is resting on the
ground, as your examination and inspection proceeds, you find that you
eventually walk around it. You desire to know the thing better by looking
at it from all angles. … To acquire knowledge walk around the thing
studied. The thing is not only what you touch, what you see; it
has many other sides, many other conditions, many other relations which you
cannot know until you study it from all angles.
The
narrow mind stays rooted in one spot; the broad mind is free, inquiring,
unprejudiced; it seeks to learn "both sides of the story."
Don't
screen off from your own consciousness the bigger side of your work. Don't be afraid
you'll harm yourself if you have to change a preconceived opinion. Have a free,
broad, open mind! Be fair to the thing studied as well as to yourself. When it
comes up for your examination, walk around it! The short trip will bring
long knowledge.
6. EXPERIMENT
The
world honors the man who is eager to plant new seeds of study today so he may
harvest a fresh crop of knowledge tomorrow. The world is sick of the man who is
always harking back to the past and thinks everything worth knowing has already
been learned. … Respect the past, take what it offers, but don't live in it.
To
learn, experiment! Try something new. See what happens. Lindbergh
experimented when he flew the Atlantic. Pasteur experimented with bacteria and
made cow's milk safe for the human race. Franklin experimented with a kite and
introduced electricity.
The
greatest experiment is nearly always a solo. The individual, seeking to
learn, tries something new but only tries it on himself. If he fails, he has
hurt only himself. If he succeeds he has made a discovery many people can use.
Experiment only with your own time, your own money, your own labor. That's the
honest, sincere type of experiment. It's rich. The cheap experiment is to use
other people's money, other people's destinies, other people's bodies as if
they were guinea pigs.
7. TEACH
If
you would have knowledge, knowledge sure and sound, teach. Teach your children,
teach your associates, teach your friends. In the very act of teaching, you
will learn far more than your best pupil. … Knowledge is relative; you possess
it in degrees. You know more about reading, writing, and arithmetic than your
young child. But teach that child at every opportunity; try to pass on to him all
you know, and the very attempt will produce a great deal more knowledge inside
your own brain.
8. READ
From
time immemorial it has been commonly understood that the best way to acquire
knowledge was to read. That is not true. Reading is only one way to knowledge,
and in the writer's opinion, not the best way. But you can surely learn from
reading if you read in the proper manner.
What you read is important, but not all-important. How
you read is the main consideration. For if you know how to read, there's
a world of education even in the newspapers, the magazines, on a single
billboard or a stray advertising dodger.
The
secret of good reading is this: read critically!
Somebody
wrote that stuff you're reading. It was a definite individual, working with a
pen, pencil or typewriter – the writing came from his mind and his only.
If you were face to face with him and listening instead of reading, you
would be a great deal more critical than the average reader is. Listening,
you would weigh his personality, you would form some judgment about his truthfulness,
his ability. But reading, you drop all judgment, and swallow his words
whole – just as if the act of printing the thing made it true! … If you
must read in order to acquire knowledge, read critically. Believe
nothing till it's understood, till it's clearly proven.
9. WRITE
To
know it – write it! If you're writing to explain, you're explaining it to
yourself! If you're writing to inspire, you're inspiring yourself!
If you're writing to record, you're recording it on your own memory. How often you
have written something down in order to be sure you would have a record of it,
only to find that you never needed the written record because you had learned
it by heart! … The men of the best memories are those who make notes, who
write things down. They just don't write to remember, they write to
learn. And because they DO learn by writing, they seldom need to consult
their notes, they have brilliant, amazing memories. How different from the
glib, slipshod individual who is too proud or too lazy to write, who trusts
everything to memory, forgets so easily, and possesses so little real
knowledge. … Write! Writing, to knowledge, is a certified check. You know
what you know once you have written it down!
10. LISTEN
You
have a pair of ears – use them! When the other man talks, give him a chance.
Pay attention. If you listen you may hear something useful to you. If you
listen you may receive a warning that is worth following. If you listen, you
may earn the respect of those whose respect you prize.
Pay
attention to the person speaking. Contemplate the meaning of his words, the
nature of his thoughts. Grasp and retain the truth.
Of
all the ways to acquire knowledge, this way requires least effort on your part.
You hardly have to do any work. You are bound to pick up information. It's
easy, it's surefire.
11. OBSERVE
Keep
your eyes open. There are things happening, all around you, all the time. The
scene of events is interesting, illuminating, full of news and meaning. It's a
great show – an impressive parade of things worth knowing. Admission is free –
keep your eyes open. … There are only two kinds of experience: the experience
of ourselves and the experience of others. Our own experience is slow, labored,
costly, and often hard to bear. The experience of others is a ready-made set of
directions on knowledge and life. Their experience is free; we need suffer none
of their hardships; we may collect on all their good deeds. All we have to do
is observe!
Observe! Especially the good man, the valorous deed. Observe the winner that you yourself may strive to follow that winning example and learn the scores of different means and devices that make success possible.
Observe!
Observe the loser that you may escape his mistakes, avoid the pitfalls that
dragged him down.
Observe
the listless, indifferent, neutral people who do nothing, know nothing, are
nothing. Observe them and then differ from them.
12. PUT IN ORDER
Order
is Heaven's first law. And the only good knowledge is orderly knowledge!
You must put your information and your thoughts in order before you can
effectively handle your own knowledge. Otherwise you will jump around in
conversation like a grasshopper, your arguments will be confused and
distributed, your brain will be in a dizzy whirl all the time.
13. DEFINE
A
definition is a statement about a thing which includes everything the thing is
and excludes everything it is not.
A
definition of a chair must include every chair, whether it be kitchen
chair, a high chair, a dentist's chair, or the electric chair, It must exclude
everything which isn't a chair, even those things which come close, such as a
stool, a bench, a sofa. … I am sorry to state that until you can so define
chair or door (or a thousand other everyday familiar objects) you don't
really know what these things are. You have the ability to recognize them
and describe them but you can't tell what their nature is. Your
knowledge is not exact.
14. REASON
Animals
have knowledge. But only men can reason. The better you can reason the
farther you separate yourself from animals.
The
process by which you reason is known as logic. Logic teaches you how to derive
a previously unknown truth from the facts already at hand. Logic teaches you
how to be sure whether what you think is true is really true. … Logic is
the supreme avenue to intellectual truth. Don't ever despair of possessing a
logical mind. You don't have to study it for years, read books and digest a
mountain of data. All you have to remember is one word – compare.
Compare
all points in a proposition. Note the similarity – that tells you
something new. Note the difference – that tells you something new. Then
take the new things you've found and check them against established laws or
principles.
This is logic. This is reason. This is knowledge in its highest form.
(James
T. Mangan - You Can Do Anything!)
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth;
not going all the way, and not starting. (Buddha)
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.
(William Shakespeare - All's Well That Ends Well)
Fix
reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one,
he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. (Thomas Jefferson)
Intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of the world - - - is the feeling from which true scientific research draws its spiritual sustenance. (Albert Einstein)
Reason
is the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to
serve and obey them. (David Hume)
Every
species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their
subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilized
society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of
subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species;
and it can so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children. (Adam Smith - An Inquiry
into Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
Five
senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set
of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more
than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. How much of
total reality can such an apparatus let through? (C.S.
Lewis)
Zen is the integration of the spiritual and the mundane, an attempt
to see the sacred in the ordinary. It is what turns one's humdrum life, a life
of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaces, into one of art, full of genuine inner
creativity. (Daistz T. Suzuki)
In
David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order, the world we seem to live in – the
world of classical objects, the world of Newtonian physics - Dave referred to
as the ‘explicate order.’ He felt that what we take for reality is only one
particular level or perception of order. And underneath that is what he called
the ‘implicate order,’ the enfolded order, in which things are folded together
and deeply interconnected, and out of which the explicate order unfolds. The
explicate is only, you could say, the froth on top of the milk and the
implicate order is much deeper. It includes not only matter, but consciousness;
it’s only in the explicate order that we tend to break them apart, to see them
as two separate things. Dave spent a great deal of time in the last decades of
his life trying to find a mathematical expression for this vision of reality.
The
whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and each thing is enfolded
in the whole. This implies that in some way, and to some degree, everything
enfolds or ‘implicates’ everything. However, this takes place in such a manner
that under typical conditions of ordinary experience, there is a great deal of
relative independence of things. The whole is in a deep sense internally
related to the parts. Since the whole enfolds all the parts, the parts are
internally related to each other, though in a weaker way than they are related
to the whole. Bohm gave examples such as:
1. Think of small region of space in front of your
eye. In this region, there is a movement of electromagnetic waves that carries
the information you use as the basis for constructing your visual experience.
This movement somehow contains or ‘enfolds’ information about the whole room;
2. If you happen to be on top of a mountain on a clear
night, watching the night sky, then the movement contains or ‘enfolds’
information about the whole universe of space and time. This enfolded
information is then unfolded by the lens of your eye, and later in a very
complex process by your brain, resulting, when combined with information
supplied by your brain, in your visual experience of a three-dimensional world
with objects in it.
Just
as light waves in a small region can enfold information about the whole
universe, so the waves that underlie each ‘elementary particle’ can similarly
enfold information about the whole universe. (F.
David Peat)
The Implicate order is not static but basically dynamic in nature, in a constant process of change and development. Its most general form is the holomovement. All things found in the unfolded, explicate order emerge from the holomovement in which they are enfolded as potentialities, and ultimately they fall back to it. They endure only for some time, and while they last, their existence is sustained in a constant process of unfoldment and re-enfoldment, which gives rise to their relatively stable and independent forms in the explicate order. (David Bohm)
The
implicate order concept applies even more directly and obviously to mind than
it does to matter. In the mind, there is a constant flow of evanescent
thoughts, feelings, desires and impulses, which flow into and out of each
other, and which in a certain sense, enfold each other [as, for example, we may
say that one thought is implicit in another, noting that this word literally
means ‘enfolded’]. (David
Bohm)
These
sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and
reinforce basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the
overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear
of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd
bewildered. (Dr.
Noam Chomsky)
History
is fables agreed upon. (Francois
Voltaire, French philosopher and author, 1694—1778)
If
Sparta and Rome perished, how can any state hope to live forever? The Body
Politick, like the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born; it
contains the seeds of its own destruction. (Rousseau
- Social Contract)
Theorists
are converging from quite different quarters on a version of the global
neuronal workspace model of consciousness … On the eve of the Decade of the
Brain, Bernard Baars had already described a gathering consensus in much the
same terms: consciousness, he said, is accomplished by a "distributed
society of specialists that is equipped with a working memory, called a global
workspace, whose contents can be broadcast to the system as a whole”. (Daniel C. Dennett)
Like
other cognitive architectures, Global Workspace (GW) theory may be thought of as
a theater of mental functioning. The theater metaphor is too simple, but it
offers a useful first approximation. Consciousness in the metaphor resembles a
bright spot on the stage of immediate memory, directed there by a spotlight of
attention, under executive guidance. The rest of the theater is dark and
unconscious.
This
approach leads to specific neural hypotheses. For sensory consciousness
the bright spot on stage is likely to require the corresponding sensory
projection areas of the cortex. Sensory consciousness in different modalities
may be mutually inhibitory, within approximately 100-ms time cycles. Sensory
cortex can be activated internally as well as externally, resulting in the
‘internal senses’ of conscious inner speech and imagery. Once a conscious
sensory content is established, it is distributed widely to a decentralized
‘audience’ of expert networks sitting in the darkened theater, presumably using
corticocortical and corticothalamic fibers. This is the primary functional role
of consciousness: to allow a theater architecture to operate in the brain, in
order to integrate, provide access, and coordinate the functioning of very
large numbers of specialized networks that otherwise operate autonomously. All
the elements of GW theory have reasonable brain interpretations, allowing us to
generate a set of specific, testable brain hypotheses about consciousness and
its many roles in the brain….. Conscious stimuli mobilize large areas of
cortex, presumably to distribute information about the stimuli. Consciousness
serves to mobilize and recruit many unconscious specialized networks, to serve
the active elements of mental life that always need to be conscious -- input,
recall, rehearsal, inner speech, visual imagery and report – recruitment of those
specific widely distributed unconscious functions is needed to carry out the
conscious tasks.
Global
Workspace theory suggests that consciousness enables multiple networks to
cooperate and compete in solving problems, such as retrieval of specific items
from immediate memory. The overall function of consciousness is to
provide widespread access, which in turn may serve functions of coordination
and control. Consciousness is the gateway to the brain, enabling control even
of single neurons and whole neuronal populations. None of these control
functions become directly conscious, of course, but conscious feedback seems
required to recruit control by prefrontal networks. In the metaphor of the
theater, it is as if each specialized audience member can decide locally
whether or not to be driven by input from the bright spot on stage. Executive
functions -- the director behind the scenes -- are also largely unconscious,
often using the actor in the spotlight on the stage of working memory capacity
to recruit and trigger specific functions. (Bernard
Baars)
The global workspace model of consciousness has received consensus in the past two decades. Although different perspectives have yielded different frameworks, the core of the theory remains a global availability of information in the brain, provided by attentional amplification. The well-explained functional aspect of the model is contrasted by a poorly understood origin of this global workspace. In the list of some hypothetical candidates for this model, the electromagnetic field of the brain holds a special position, given its ability to explain some important aspects of this global access phenomenon. The theory remains controversial due to our inadequate understanding of the spatiotemporal patterns of the electromagnetic field of the brain. (Ravi Prakash)
The
conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field theory, claims that
consciousness is that component of the brain’s electromagnetic field that is
downloaded to motor neurons and is thereby capable of communicating its
informational content to the outside world. The theory deals with the
relationship between electromagnetic fields, information, the phenomenology of
consciousness and the meaning of free will. Using cemi field theory it can be
seen that awareness and information represent the same phenomenon viewed from
different reference frames. (Johnjoe
McFadden)
By
definition, democracy means "rule of the people," monarchy means
"rule by one," oligarchy means "rule of the few," and so
forth. Anarchism means only "no rule." It doesn't mean
"chaos," "disorder," or "violence." Like so many
words, its true meaning has been misappropriated and twisted. The popular
perception of an anarchist is a man dressed in a black cape skulking about with
a round bomb, fuse lit. And certainly there have been violent anarchists, just
as there have been violent Americans, violent Christians, violent parents and
violent doctors. But that's never been an essential or even an accidental characteristic
of any of them.
Paradoxically, anarchism is the gentlest of political systems. It is the
political manifestation of the ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy, what
philosopher Alan Watts called the "watercourse way," where everything
flows unrestricted, at its own pace, to its own level. Some have suggested that
I abstain from using the word anarchy because it carries so much emotional
baggage and arouses atavistic fears. But ideas should speak for themselves, and
semantics should be used to clarify, not obscure, their meaning.
In many ways, reality is just a creation of widely shared opinions. Nothing
should be accepted just because it exists, including the state. Concepts take
on lives of their own, unless someone challenges them. And the concept of the
state is sorely in need of a challenge. (Doug
Casey - The International Speculator, April 2006)
I
think that we – humankind – are connected to everybody we think of and to all
the places we are attached to through our extended minds. Our minds are vast,
far-reaching, and spatially extended networks of connections in space and time
– networks of immense scope in which the brains inside our heads are but a
portion… It is important not to
envisage this connection as some amorphous field, a kind of Universal Mind. I
don’t think we should make a large leap from the concept of a contracted mind
to a boundless universal mind. The extended minds are not God. In fact, for the
morphic fields of the extended mind to have a mental connection I believe there
has to be something that links you to the other person.
In
Indian culture, the idea of what we might call ‘other realms’, the supernatural
or spiritual, was simply taken for granted by practically everybody… There is a
sense of another dimension to life, everywhere you looked, and everywhere you
went. (Rupert Sheldrake)
If it comes to pride with a philosopher then it is a great pride. His work never refers him to a public, the applause of the masses, and the hailing chorus of contemporaries. To wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature of the philosopher. His talents are the most rare, in a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same time exclusive and hostile even to kindred talents. The wall of his self sufficiency must be of diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken, for everything is in motion against him. His journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded than any other and yet nobody can believe more firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the goal by that journey. He has truth; the wheel of time may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from truth. It is important to hear that such men have lived. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1890)
To
inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or that of all
creatures has always seemed absurd from an objective point of view. And yet
everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and
judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in
themselves – this ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals which
have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life
cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth. Without the sense of kinship
with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the
eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would
have seemed to me empty. The trite objects of human efforts-possessions,
outward success, luxury … have always seemed to me contemptible.
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always
contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other
human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never
belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with
my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of
distance and a need for solitude – feelings which increase with the years. One
becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual
understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses
some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely
independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the
temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations. (Albert
Einstein - Ideas and Opinions)
When
forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and
space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter. (ibid)
Greek
philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous fancy, with the proposition that
water is the origin and mother-womb of all things. Is it really necessary to
stop there and become serious? Yes, and for three reasons: firstly, because the
preposition does enunciate something about the origin of things; secondly,
because it does so without figure and fable; thirdly and lastly, because it
contained, although only in the chrysalis state, the idea: everything is one.
..That which drove him (Thales) to this generalization was a metaphysical
dogma, which had its origin in a mystic intuition and which together with the
ever renewed endeavors to express it better, we find in all philosophies – the
proposition: everything is one! (Friedrich
Nietzsche - The Greeks)
In
Indian philosophy, the main terms used by Hindus and Buddhists have dynamic
connotations. The word Brahman is derived from the Sanskrit root brih - to grow
- and thus suggests a reality which is dynamic and alive. The Upanishads refer
to Brahman as 'this unformed, immortal, moving', thus associating it with
motion even though it transcends all forms. The Rig Veda uses another term to
express the dynamic character of the universe, the term Rita. This word comes
from the root ri- to move. In its phenomenal aspect, the cosmic One is thus
intrinsically dynamic, and the apprehension of its dynamic nature is basic to
all schools of Eastern mysticism. They all emphasize that the universe has to
be grasped dynamically, as it moves, vibrates and dances. ... The Eastern
mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are
dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves and grows and changes
continually. (Fritjof
Capra - The Tao of Physics)
If
we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and
we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go
wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets, the point is to not hate
ourselves for having them… We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect
things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret
doesn't remind us that we did badly – it reminds us that we know we can do
better. (Kathryn Schulz – TED talk)
When
people recover from depression via psychotherapy, their attributions about
recovery are likely to be different than those of people who have been treated
with medication. Psychotherapy is a learning experience. Improvement is not
produced by an external substance, but by changes within the person. It is like
learning to read, write or ride a bicycle. Once you have learned, the skills
stays with you. People do not become illiterate after they graduate from
school, and if they get rusty at riding a bicycle, the skill can be acquired
with relatively little practice. Furthermore, part of what a person might learn
in therapy is to expect downturns in mood and to interpret them as a normal
part of their life, rather than as an indication of an underlying disorder. This
understanding, along with the skills that the person has learned for coping
with negative moods and situations, can help to prevent a depressive relapse.
Like
antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on
a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part
of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the
relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's
expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment.
It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry,
not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for
psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment
in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the
hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These
tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can
mobilize the meaning response – and that it can do so without deception – is
one of its strengths, not one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a
fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific
treatment for it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective
treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this
most effectively and that can do without deception.
For
people who are depressed, and especially for those who do not receive enough benefit
from medication or for whom the side effects of antidepressants are troubling,
the fact that placebos can duplicate much of the effects of antidepressants
should be taken as good news. It means that there are other ways of alleviating
depression. As we have seen, treatments like psychotherapy and physical
exercise are at least as effective as antidepressant drugs and more effective
than placebos. (Irving
Kirsch - The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth)
Remembering
that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help
me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external
expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things
just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap
of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no
reason not to follow your heart…
No
one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get
there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped
it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best
invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way
for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you
will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but
it is quite true.
Your
time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped
by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t
let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. (Steve
Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford in 2005)
Like
a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of
mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our
days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar.
What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn't really necessary and that the
mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little
pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that
feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every
inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be
hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible
mechanisms and visible answers. The placebo, then, is an emissary between the
will to live and the body.
(Norman
Cousins - who cured himself of the medically incurable ankylosing spondylitis)
Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it. (Dr. Irving Kirsch)
The
existence of the Zero Point Field implies that all matter in the universe is
interconnected by quantum waves, which are spread out through time and space,
and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to every other
part. The idea of The Field might just offer a scientific explanation for the
spiritual beliefs of many religions that there is such a thing as a life force.
Human
beings, on their most fundamental level, are packets of quantum energy
constantly exchanging information with this heaving energy sea. Frontier
scientists have amassed evidence showing that living things emit a weak radiation,
and that this may be one of the most crucial aspects of biological processes. A
German physicist called Fritz-Albert Popp has discovered that humans emit
highly coherent photons - the tiniest particles of light. One of the most
essential sources of these are DNA, which may mean that DNA uses the wave
frequencies of this 'light' to drive all the processes of the body. Other tests
show that animals of the same species 'suck' up the light emitted from each
other. This activity could explain the silent communication that occurs between
animals, and why flocks of birds or schools of fish, for instance, are able to
achieve incredible, instantaneous feats of synchronized movement.
Scientists
have also discovered that the bases of all the brain's functions have to do
with the interaction between the brain and the Zero Point field. New evidence
shows The brain's conversations with the body might also occur on the quantum
level, with waves and frequencies, rather than with chemical or electrical
impulses alone. In fact, studies in America on humans and animals show that the
cerebral cortex responds to certain limited bands of frequencies.
A
series of studies in Texas have shown that one person's brain waves begin to
synchronize with another person's during ESP, but the person with the most
'ordered' brain patterns will influence the other and nudge it to a greater
degree of order. This provides a good explanation for the success of remote
spiritual healing.
The
Zero Point Field may provide a scientific explanation for many of the most
profound human mysteries, including many phenomena that we have not been able
to provide an adequate explanation for. Ordinarily, the capacity of our
brains to receive information from this energy field is strictly limited – like
a radio with only a certain limited bandwidth. It appears that this
bandwidth expands during ESP and remote viewing or clairvoyance – allowing us
the ability to 'see' things beyond ordinary distances, giving us more access to
information in the Field than we would have ordinarily. (Lynne McTaggart - The Field: The
Quest For The Secret Force Of The Universe)
The beautiful and imperishable comes into existence due to the suffering of individual perishable creatures who themselves are not beautiful, and must be reshaped to form a template from which the beautiful is printed (forged, extracted, converted). This is the terrible law of the universe. This is the basic law; it is a fact… Absolute suffering leads to — is the means to — absolute beauty. (Phillip K. Dick – The Exegesis)
The
difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is
certainly one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and
intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory,
attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be
found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the
lower animals. (Charles
Darwin - The Descent of Man)
The
source of life — what is it? No one knows. We don’t even know what an atom is,
whether it is a wave or a particle — it is both. We don’t have any idea of what
these things are. That’s the reason we speak of the divine. There’s a
transcendent energy source. When the physicist observes subatomic particles,
he’s seeing a trace on the screen. These traces come and go, come and go, and
we come and go, and all of life comes and goes. That energy is the informing
energy of all things. Mythic worship is addressed to that. (Joseph
Campbell – in dialogue with Bill Moyers, 1988 series The Power of Myth)
Not
all can be agreed on matters of aesthetics, but we secular humanists and
atheists and agnostics do not wish to deprive humanity of its wonders or
consolations. Not in the least. If you will devote a little time to studying
the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be
scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful —
and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding — than any creation or ‘end of
days’ story. (Christopher
Hitchens)
Almost
anything that does not change and retain a flexible capacity to adapt itself to
the ebb and flow of beliefs, revelations and new knowledge, must ultimately
crystallize and shatter, losing its usefulness and effectiveness. (David
V. Tansley - Radionics: Science or Magic?)
To
get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of
potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on
this knife edge of improbability…. You
have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because
the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random
particles. (Francis
Collins - geneticist and Director of the National Institutes of Health)
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. (Ernest Hemingway)
There
isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is
a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse.
All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see
beyond when you know. (ibid)
All
my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. (ibid)
First,
there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must
be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of
what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter
in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and
disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these things in one
person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The
hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work
done. (ibid)
You
get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the
chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn't nourish you. You
assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden
calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out
much that is rich and juicy and fascinating. (Anne
Lamott)
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. (Albert Einstein)
The
people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use
their intuition instead, and the intuition is far more developed than in the
rest of the world… Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than
intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work. (Steve
Jobs)
Western
rational thought is not an innate human characteristic, it is learned and it is
the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they
never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as
valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and
experiential wisdom. (Steve
Jobs)
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Breathe
in experience, breathe out poetry. (Muriel
Rukeyser)
Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created – nothing.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Immature
poets imitate; mature poets steal. (T.
S. Eliot)
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Write
without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years,
sawing wood is what you were intended for. (Mark
Twain)
You
think this is just another day in your life. It’s not just another day — it’s
the one day that is given to you, today. It’s given to you, it’s a gift. It’s
the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is
gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the
great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the
first day in your life, and the very last day, then you would have spent this
day very well. (Louie
Schwartzberg)
Science
at its highest level is ultimately the organization of, the systematic pursuit
of, and the enjoyment of wonder, awe, and mystery.... Science can be the
religion of the nonreligious, the poetry of the nonpoet, the art of the man who
cannot paint, the humor of the serious man, and the lovemaking of the inhibited
and shy man. Not only does science begin in wonder; it also ends in wonder.
(Abraham
Maslow - The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance)
The
same age which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals
and poets, usually abounds with skillful weavers, and ship-carpenters .... The
spirit of the age affects all arts: and the minds of men, being roused from
their lethargy, and put into fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and
carry improvements into every art and science. (David
Hume - Writings on Economics)
David
Hume's economic aphorisms, can be
paraphrased as follows:
·
A nation's strength
lies in its productivity
·
Trade benefits
everyone: state and people, rich and poor
·
Luxury, economic
growth and refinement in the arts are compatible and complementary
·
The flow of money
from nation to nation is the instrument of economic evolution and progress
·
The rate of interest
is an indicator which, read by an experienced eye, tells of the health and
growth of the economy
·
Free trade is to be
desired
·
A country cannot
become rich by beggaring its neighbors
·
A government should
not tax the rewards of effort lest it destroy the incentive to growth
·
The public debt in
the hands of judicious magistrates can have beneficial effects, but can also be
dangerous
·
No utopia existed in
any past golden age.
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. (Donald Rumsfeld)
Now,
of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one
of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life with a soft and easy
tranquility, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living, without which
all other pleasure would be extinct. … The end of our race is death; ’tis the
necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to
advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think
on’t; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness?
They must bridle the ass by the tail:
‘Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards?’ (Lucretius)
’Tis
no wonder if one be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright people with the
very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it were the name of the
devil. And because the making a man’s will is in reference to dying, not a man
will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to that purpose, till the physician has
passed sentence upon and totally given him over, and then betwixt and terror,
God knows in how fit a condition of understanding he is to do it.
…
The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their
ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a
periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one
has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ … provided there was any mention
of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation. … I
make account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a
man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what? Young
and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life otherwise than if
he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit,
who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to
come. Fool that thou art! Who has assured unto thee the term of life? Thou
dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience.
According to the common course of things, ’tis long since that thou hast lived
by extraordinary favor; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life.
And that it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before
they arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have
ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare lay a
wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after five-and-thirty years
of age. … How many several ways has death to surprise us?
Let
us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight Death. And to begin to deprive
him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary
to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us
converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts
as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every
shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least
prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and
what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify
ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the
remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves
to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of
reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours
tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The Egyptians were
wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth,
caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a
memento to their guests:
‘Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as
unexpected, will be the more welcome.’
(Horace – Epodes)
Where
death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The
premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die
has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly
comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers
us from all subjection and constraint. In truth, in all things, if nature do
not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to
purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is
nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of
death, even in the most wanton time of my age.
We
should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and,
above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but
one’s self:
'Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so
many projects?' (Horace – Epodes)
A
man must design nothing that will require so much time to the finishing, or, at
least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought to perfection. We are
born to action:
'When I shall die, let it be doing that I had
designed.' (Ovid)
I
would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and
spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages,
indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.
If
I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the
various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time
teach them to live.
Peradventure,
some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceed all
manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be quite out of his play when
it comes to the push. Let them say what they will: to premeditate is doubtless
a very great advantage; and besides, is it nothing to go so far, at least,
without disturbance or alteration? Moreover, Nature herself assists and
encourages us: if the death be sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear;
if otherwise, I perceive that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally
enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado
to digest this resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when
languishing of a fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities
of life, by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so
much I look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further
I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall the
more easily exchange the one for the other.
Not
only the argument of reason invites us to it — for why should we fear to lose a
thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented? — but, also, seeing we are
threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not infinitely worse eternally to
fear them all, than once to undergo one of them? … What a ridiculous thing it
is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from
all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death
is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not
be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not
alive a hundred years ago. … Long life, and short, are by death made all one;
for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.
All
the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life
itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.
You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death,
when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead
after life, but dying all the while you live; and death handles the dying much
more rudely than the dead, and more sensibly and essentially. If you have made
your profit of life, you have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.
Life
in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make
it. And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like
to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this
moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same
your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity.
Give
place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is the soul of
equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all
are involved?
Wherever
your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the
length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet
lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends
upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of
life.
I
believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations
wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new,
quite contrary way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the
visits of astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and
blubbering servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds
environed with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and
horror round about us; we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death
that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials. (Michel
de Montaigne - The Complete Essays)
Originally,
the Zeigarnik effect was believed to be the brain's way of ensuring goals are
eventually accomplished, by prodding you into urgency until they are. But
recent research has shed new light on the relationship between the conscious
and the unconscious in our cognitive to-do lists. It turns out that this
dynamic is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated
until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an
indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the
unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead,
the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious
mind apparently can't do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make
a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is
formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders. (John Tierney & Roy F.
Baumeister - Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength)
The
amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded.
And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your
right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are
all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements
- the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution
- weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear
furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those
stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you
could be here today.
(Lawrence Krauss - A Universe From Nothing)
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (Paul Tillich)
Quantum
theory is perhaps the prime example of the infinitely esoteric becoming the
profoundly useful. Esoteric, because it describes a world in which a particle
really can be in several places at once and moves from one place to another by
exploring the entire Universe simultaneously. Useful, because understanding the
behaviour of the smallest building blocks of the universe underpins our
understanding of everything else. This claim borders on the hubristic, because
the world is filled with diverse and complex phenomena. Notwithstanding this
complexity, we have discovered that everything is constructed out of a handful
of tiny particles that move around according to the rules of quantum theory.
The rules are so simple that they can be summarized on the back of an envelope.
And the fact that we do not need a whole library of books to explain the
essential nature of things is one of the greatest mysteries of all. …
The
picture of the universe we inhabit, as revealed by modern physics, is one of
underlying simplicity; elegant phenomena dance away out of sight and the
diversity of the macroscopic world emerges. This is perhaps the crowning
achievement of modern science; the reduction of the tremendous complexity in
the world, human beings included, to a description of the behaviour of just a
handful of tiny subatomic particles and the four forces that act between them.
…
Consider
the world around you. You are holding a book made of paper, the crushed pulp of
a tree. Trees are machines able to take a supply of atoms and molecules, break
them down and rearrange them into cooperating colonies composed of many
trillions of individual parts. They do this using a molecule known as
chlorophyll, composed of over a hundred carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms
twisted into an intricate shape with a few magnesium and nitrogen atoms bolted
on. This assembly of particles is able to capture the light that has travelled
the 93 million miles from our star, a nuclear furnace the volume of a million
earths, and transfer that energy into the heart of cells, where it is used to
build molecules from carbon dioxide and water, giving out life-enriching oxygen
as it does so. It’s these molecular chains that form the superstructure of
trees and all living things, the paper in your book.
You
can read the book and understand the words because you have eyes that can
convert the scattered light from the pages into electrical impulses that are
interpreted by your brain, the most complex structure we know of in the
Universe. We have discovered that all these things are nothing more than
assemblies of atoms, and that the wide variety of atoms are constructed using
only three particles: electrons, protons and neutrons. We have also discovered
that the protons and neutrons are themselves made up of smaller entities called
quarks, and that it is where things stop, as far as we can tell today.
Underpinning all of this is quantum theory. …
A
key feature of quantum theory is that it deals with probabilities rather than
certainties, not because we lack absolute knowledge, but because some aspects
of Nature are, at their very heart, governed by the laws of chance.
(Brian Cox &
Jeff Forshaw - The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen)
A thought transfixed me – for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set down by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is through love, and in love. (Viktor Frankl)
To
maintain life requires a capacity to escape from danger. The galaxy is an
evolving, intermittently violent environment. The organic colonies that inhabit
certain regions within it may or may not survive depending on how fast they
recognize danger and how well they adapt, modify it or escape from it. Looking
out over the beautiful blue Pacific one sees tropical paradises, and on one
mountain top, standing on barely cool lava, is the Earth's biggest telescope,
looking out into the universe for answers. Can humankind collectively
understand these answers? Can they collectively ensure their continued
appreciation of the beauty of existence. (Halton
C. Arp)
My
own working hypothesis for gravity is that gravitons are very low mass
particles with a huge De Broglie wavelength compared to photons. Since their
wavelength is so long they have much less interaction with the intergalactic
medium. So they far exceed the normal velocity of light in vacuum (i.e. the
vacuum that light in our locality of the universe sees). In other words the
photon is transmitted through the average cosmic false vacuum, material vacuum
or zero point energy field – to use just a few names given to the old fashioned
concept of aether. But the graviton interacts with much less of this molasses
and hence moves much faster. One might speculate that there is a vast amount of
matter in the universe which radiates at very long wavelengths …. Since the
particles of matter in the universe grow as they age and communicate with ever
more distant parts of the universe they have to receive information. In the
variable mass theory, this electromagnetic communication is at the speed of
light, c. The gravitons travelling much faster than the speed of light,
however, must also carry information. (No one could argue that knowledge of the
direction of an adjoining mass is not information). So the old relativistic
shibboleth that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of
light falls by the wayside. (Halton
C. Arp)
Facts
create oughts! The more clearly something is seen or known, and the more true
and unmistakable something becomes, the more ought-quality it acquires. The
more ‘is’ something becomes, the more ‘ought’ it becomes — the more
requiredness it acquires, the louder it ‘calls for’ particular action … This is
the same as saying that the facts themselves carry, within their own nature,
suggestions about what ought to be done with them. … The characteristics of
being are also the values of being. As revealed in peak-experiences and
exemplified in the lives of self-actualizing people, these “B-values” are
truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness,
uniqueness, perfection, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity,
richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency. (Abraham Maslow - Farther
Reaches of Human Nature)
Fiery
gods driving golden chariots across the skies are simpleminded comicbook fare
compared to the ravishing strangeness of contemporary cosmology, and the
recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make Bergson’s élan
vital about as interesting as Superman’s dread kryptonite. When we understand
consciousness – when there is no more mystery – consciousness will be
different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe. (Daniel
Dennett)
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(T.S.
Eliot - Little Gidding)
Our
cultural inheritance is something we take for granted today, but its invention forever
altered the course of evolution and our world. This is because knowledge could
accumulate as good ideas were retained, combined, and improved upon, and others
were discarded. And, being able to jump from mind to mind granted the elements
of culture a pace of change that stood in relation to genetical evolution
something like an animal’s behavior does to the more leisurely movement of a
plant …. Having culture means we are the only species that acquires the rules
of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors rather than
from the genes they pass to us. Our cultures and not our genes supply the
solutions we use to survive and prosper in the society of our birth; they
provide the instructions for what we eat, how we live, the gods we believe in,
the tools we make and use, the language we speak, the people we cooperate with
and marry, and whom we fight or even kill in a war.
Social
learning is really visual theft, and in a species that has it, it would become
positively advantageous for you to hide your best ideas from others, lest they
steal them. This not only would bring cumulative cultural adaptation to a halt,
but our societies might have collapsed as we strained under the weight of
suspicion and rancor.
So,
beginning about 200,000 years ago, our fledgling species, newly equipped with
the capacity for social learning, had to confront two options for managing the
conflicts of interest social learning would bring. One is that these new human
societies could have fragmented into small family groups so that the benefits
of any knowledge would flow only to one’s relatives. Had we adopted this
solution we might still be living like the Neanderthals, and the world might
not be so different from the way it was 40,000 years ago, when our species
first entered Europe. This is because these smaller family groups would have
produced fewer ideas to copy and they would have been more vulnerable to chance
and bad luck.
The
other option was for our species to acquire a system of cooperation that could
make our knowledge available to other members of our tribe or society even
though they might be people we are not closely related to — in short, to work
out the rules that made it possible for us to share goods and ideas
cooperatively. Taking this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of
accumulated wisdom and talent would become available than any one individual or
even family could ever hope to produce. That is the option we followed, and our
cultural survival vehicles that we traveled around the world in were the
result. (Mark
Pagel - Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind)
Whatever
I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But
occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust
completely those who have deceived us even once. (René Descartes)
We
now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need
art: it teaches us how to live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the
ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John
Keats called this romantic impulse 'negative capability.' He said that certain
poets, like Shakespeare, had 'the ability to remain in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' Keats
realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws
of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our
knowledge, all we have is art.
But
before we can get a fourth culture, our two existing cultures must modify their
habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences.
Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must
heed his call and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. Every
humanist should read Nature.
At
the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only
truths. No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. That simple idea will be the
starting premise of any fourth culture. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of
science, wrote, 'It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources
of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our
errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to
grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority
beyond the reach of criticism.’ (Jonah
Lehrer - Proust Was a Neuroscientist)
When
I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe,
we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than most of those facts is
that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many
people feel small, because they're small, the Universe is big – but I feel big,
because my atoms came from those stars. There's a level of connectivity –
that's really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to
feel relevant. You want to feel like you're a participant in the goings on and
activities and events around you. That's precisely what we are, just by being
alive.
Some
of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly
irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic
and inventive expressions of our species. How else could the sentence 'He's
either a madman or a genius' be understood?
It's
okay to be entirely rational, provided everybody else is too. But apparently
this state of existence has been achieved only in fiction where societal
decisions get made with efficiency and dispatch, devoid of pomp, passion, and
pretense.
To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between – as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings and nonempirical philosophies – you need politics. At its best, politics navigates all the minds-states for the sake of the greater good, alert to the rocky shoals of community, identity, and the economy. At its worst, politics thrives on the incomplete disclosure or misrepresentation of data required by an electorate to make informed decisions, whether arrived at logically or emotionally. (Neil DeGrasse Tyson)
One
can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist
Eightfold path and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which
religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community,
inspire travels, train minds and inspire gratitude at the beauty of spring. In
a world beset by fundamentalists of both religious and secular varieties, it
must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective
reverence for religious rituals and concepts. … It is when we stop believing
that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely
daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognize that we
invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and
which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill:
firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our
deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And secondly, the need to cope with
terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional
failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay
and demise. …The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects
of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been
dismissed. … A sermon wants to change your life, and a lecture wants to give
you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon
tradition. (Alain
de Botton - Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of
Religion)
At
first I thought that we have dreams only in a definite state of sleep, near
awakening. Later I became convinced we have dreams all the time, from the
moment we fall asleep to the moment we awake, but remember only the dreams near
awakening. And still later I realised that we have dreams continuously, both in
sleep and in a waking state. We never cease to have dreams, though we are not
aware of this. …
As
the result of the above I came to the conclusion that dreams can be observed
while awake. It is not at all necessary to be asleep in order to observe
dreams. Dreams never stop. We do not notice them in a waking state, amidst the
continuous flow of visual, auditory and other sensations, for the same reason
for which we do not see stars in the light of the sun. But just as we can see
the stars from the bottom of a deep well, so we can see the dreams which go on
in us if, even for a short time, we isolate ourselves whether accidentally or
intentionally, from the inflow of external impressions.
It
is not easy to explain how this is to be done. Concentration upon one idea
cannot produce this isolation. An arrest of the current of usual thoughts and
mental images is necessary. It is necessary to achieve for a short period
"consciousness without thought". When this consciousness comes, dream
images begin slowly to emerge through the usual sensations, and with
astonishment you suddenly see yourself surrounded by a strange world of
shadows, moods, conversations, sounds, pictures. And you understand then that
this world is always in you, that it never disappears. (Ouspensky - A New Model Of The Universe)
Language
is unique among cognitive functions in the degree to which – in the best
co-evolutionary tradition – it both helps and is helped by social interactions.
As social animals, we revel in group play, which is what language evolves to
promote and we evolve to master. Happiness and misery being the two-pronged
stimulus with which evolution prods its pack animals, is it any surprise that
we can be moved to tears or to laughter by a few well aimed words?
Both
in language and in cognition in general, mastery comes down to the same two
abilities: first, understanding the world by seeking patterns in sensorimotor
activity and learning to relate them to a wider context, including your own and
other people's experiences and mind processes; and second, using understanding
to support foresight. The big picture is in fact even simpler than that:
understanding and foresight are really two sides of the same coin, because they
both hinge on knowledge of the causal structure of the world. … A persistent
cluster of such conceptual knowledge as information pattern recognition accrued
by a mind becomes the effective Self. … Cognitively transparent – hence
peaceful – gradual self-change of the kind that promotes well-being and
happiness is helped along by the accumulation of experience.
That
life experience is good for your practical wisdom has been noted by
philosophers; more importantly, this notion turns out to be very much along the
lines of what science has learned about the role of experience in cognition.
When
fishing for happiness, catch and release. (Shimon
Edelman)
When
we tell stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect
to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem
was impossible. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthrough. We tell the
happy ending first.
The
danger of this scenario is that the act of feeling frustrated is an essential
part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can
even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that
a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and
lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive. (Jonah
Lehrer)
If
it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations
of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier;
it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes
have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The
"independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and
dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological
imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our
memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes;
that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides,
as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among
species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting
cranes of our memes. (Daniel
Dennett)
Every
living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be
alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived
have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors,
going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You
spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and
those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of
a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion
today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in
your past. (Daniel
Dennett)
Not
a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares. (Daniel Dennett)
Isn't
it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our
environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there
also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck.
This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum
bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the
causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps
of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in
our environment. (Daniel
Dennett)
Philosophers'
Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity. (Daniel Dennett)
Science
does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to
improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts
against the universe and seeing whether they match. (Isaac Asimov)
One
thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against
reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we
have. (Albert
Einstein)
The
most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious -- the fundamental
emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. (Albert
Einstein)
Science is not formal logic -- it needs the free play of the mind in as great a degree as any other creative art. It is true that this is a gift which can hardly be taught, but its growth can be encouraged in those who already possess it. (Max Born)
The
heart of the scientific method is the reduction of perceived phenomena to
fundamental, testable principles. The elegance, we can fairly say the beauty,
of any particular scientific generalization is measured by its simplicity
relative to the number of phenomena it can explain. (E.
O. Wilson)
Science
alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of
belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding
generation. (Richard
Feynman)
There
are a lot of facts to be known in order to be a professional anything — lawyer,
doctor, engineer, accountant, teacher. But with science there is one important
difference. The facts serve mainly to access the ignorance. … Scientists don’t
concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but minuscule, but rather
on what they don’t know …. Science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is
driven by it. Mucking about in the unknown is an adventure; doing it for a
living is something most scientists consider a privilege. … Working scientists
don’t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don’t care all that
much for facts. It’s not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that
they don’t see them as an end in themselves. They don’t stop at the facts; they
begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out.
Facts
are selected, by a process that is a kind of controlled neglect, for the
questions they create, for the ignorance they point to. … Real science is a
revision in progress, always. It proceeds in fits and starts of ignorance. …
Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in
mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an
experiment than to be certain of its outcome. … Science, then, is not like the
onion in the often used analogy of stripping away layer after layer to get at
some core, central, fundamental truth. Rather it’s like the magic well: no
matter how many buckets of water you remove, there’s always another one to be
had. Or even better, it’s like the widening ripples on the surface of a pond,
the ever larger circumference in touch with more and more of what’s outside the
circle, the unknown. This growing forefront is where science occurs. … It is a
mistake to bob around in the circle of facts instead of riding the wave to the
great expanse lying outside the circle. … Perhaps the most important
application of ignorance is in the sphere of education, particularly of
scientists… We must ask ourselves how we should educate scientists in the age
of Google and whatever will supersede it… The business model of our
Universities, in place now for nearly a thousand years, will need to be
revised. … Instead of a system where the collection of facts is an end, where
knowledge is equated with accumulation, where ignorance is rarely discussed, we
will have to provide the Wiki-raised student with a taste of – and for –
boundaries, the edge of the widening circle of ignorance, how the data, which
are not unimportant, frames the unknown. We must teach students how to think in
questions, how to manage ignorance.
W.
B. Yeats admonished that ‘education is not the filling of a pail, but the
lighting of a fire.’ … Science produces ignorance, and ignorance fuels science.
We have a quality scale for ignorance. We judge the value of science by the
ignorance it defines. Ignorance can be big or small, tractable or challenging.
Ignorance can be thought about in detail. Success in science, either doing it
or understanding it, depends on developing comfort with the ignorance,
something akin to Keats’ negative capability. (Stuart
Firestein - Ignorance: How It Drives Science)
Just
as the consciousness of an individual determines the quality of his thought and
behavior, so also there exists another type of consciousness for a society as a
whole; a collective consciousness for each family, city, state, or nation,
having its own reality and the possibility of growth. The quality of the
collective consciousness of a society is a direct and sensitive reflection of
the level of consciousness of its individual members. (Maharishi)
The
proposition, foisted upon us by a materialism based on classical physics - that
we human beings are essentially mechanical automata, with every least action
and thought fixed from the birth of the universe by microscopic clockwork-like
mechanisms - has created enormous difficulties for ethical theory. These
difficulties lie like the plague on Western culture, robbing its citizens of
any rational basis for self-esteem or self-respect, or esteem or respect for
others. Quantum physics, joined to a natural embedding ontology, brings our
human minds squarely into the dynamical workings of nature. ...
It
is curious that some physicists want to improve upon orthodox quantum theory by
excluding 'the observer', who, by virtue of his subjective nature, must, in
their opinion, be excluded from science. That stance is maintained in direct
opposition to what would seem to be the most profound advance in physics in
three hundred years, namely the overcoming of the most glaring failure of classical
physics, its inability to accommodate us, its creators. The most salient
philosophical feature of quantum theory is that the mathematics has a causal
gap that, by virtue of its intrinsic form, provides a perfect place for Homo
sapiens as we know and experience ourselves. …
The
falseness of the classical deviation of science must be made known, and
heralded, because human beings are not likely to endure in a society ruled by a
conception of themselves that denies the essence of their being. (physicist
Henry Stapp - Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating
Observer)
A
writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart,
and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do
feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the
duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not
full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers
do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life. (E.B.
White - interview 1969)
Nature
abhors a vacuum and the same applies in your head. The trouble is, if there's
nothing to replace the gap left behind when you clear out all your old rubbish
then some new rubbish will come along to fill it. … So, where do the new ideas
come from to fill the void left by eliminating your old ones? This question of
the derivation of ideas was one that was approached by an advertising man
called James Webb Young in 1939. His short book, A Technique for Producing
Ideas, became the seminal book on how to get ideas, good ones, into your head…
Webb Young suggests the following five-step plan to generating great ideas:
[1]
Gather the raw material
[2]
Digest the material
[3]
Don't think
[4]
Wait for the 'Ah ha!' moment to appear (and be ready when it does. Keep a
notebook by your bed)
[5]
Expose your idea to the light of day and see if it stands up to the glare.
(Ian
Gilbert)
It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don't ordinarily go together that marks out the person who is truly creative. … We create the new not generally through some mad moment of inspiration in fictionalized accounts of ancient Greeks in baths (though the conditions for this can be forced into existence), but by putting things together that do not normally go together; from taking disciplines (or curriculum areas) and seeing what happens when they are forced into unanticipated collision. … The mind, at its best, is a pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order onto chaos; making links between disparate entities or ideas in order to better understand either or both. It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don't ordinarily go together that marks out the person (or teacher) who is truly creative. (Phil Beadle)
The
universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is only the reflection
of all the others in a fantastic interrelated harmony without end. … Concepts
can at best only serve to negate one another, as one thorn is used to remove
another, and then be thrown away. Only in deep silence do we leave concepts
behind. Words and language deal only with concepts, and cannot approach
Reality. (Ramesh
Balsekar)
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant,
systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day,
you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike
and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't
just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body and our soul exists in space
and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated
with impunity. (Boris
Pasternak)
Bertrand
Russell’s Decalogue: The Ten
Commandments that, as a teacher, Russell should wish to promulgate:
1.
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2.
Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence
is sure to come to light.
3.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your
children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal
and illusory.
5.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary
authorities to be found.
6.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the
opinions will suppress you.
7.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once
eccentric.
8.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if
you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more
inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise,
for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Sometimes
people hold a core belief that is very strong, When they are presented with
evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It
would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive
dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they
will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the
core belief. (Frantz
Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks)
Western
civilization’s science and technology bring society tremendous benefit. Yet,
due to highly developed technology, we also have more anxiety and more fear. I
always feel that mental development and material development must be
well-balanced, so that together they may make a more human world. If we lose
human values and human beings become part of a machine, there is no freedom
from pain and pleasure. Without freedom from pain and pleasure, it is very
difficult to demarcate between right and wrong. The subjects of pain and
pleasure naturally involve feeling, mind, and consciousness.
For
quite some time I have had a great interest in the close relationship between
Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism, and Western science. My basic aim as
a human being is to speak always for the importance of compassion and kindness
in order to build a better, healthier human society, and a brighter future. (The
Dalai Lama)
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a
tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.
But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe
somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is
speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is
perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never
knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. (Carl
Sagan)
In
today’s world, most of the traditional functions of cognitive synthesis have
atrophied and are ignored and neglected. What is needed is a “conceptual
synthesis” to help fill the need for meaningful engagement in such a world.
Conceptual synthesis performs at least five basic functions in the guidance of
human affairs. They are the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological,
the pedagogical or psychological, and the editorial functions. The
mystical function inspires in man a sense of mystery and profound meaning
related to the universe and of himself in it. The cosmological function
forms images of the universe in accord with local knowledge and experience,
enabling men to describe and identify the structure of the universe and the
forces of nature. The sociological function validates, supports and enforces
social order, representing it in accord with the nature of the universe, or as
the natural or right form of social organization. The pedagogical or
psychological function guides individuals through stages of life, teaching ways
of understanding themselves and others and presenting desirable responses to
life’s challenges and trials. Finally, the editorial function of
conceptual is to define some aspects of reality as important and credible and
hence to be attended to, and other aspects unworthy of serious attention. (Ervin
Laszlo - A Strategy for the Future: The Systems Approach to World Order)
They Sit
Together on the Porch
.
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes – only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons –
Small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows.
They have one mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
(Wendell Berry - from A Timbered
Choir)
Lower
animals with no cerebrum appear to be conscious...even plants such as the
sunflower that turns towards strong light may have a vague awareness of warmth
and comfort. There are many degrees of consciousness and it is my
contention that it is integrated at many levels like other important functions
of the central nervous system. (neuropsychiatrist
Stanley Cobb)
Blood
ties do not necessarily create bonds between Spirits. The body comes from the
body. But the Spirit does not proceed from the Spirit, since the Spirit already
existed before the formation of the body. The parents do not create the Spirit
of the child; they do nothing more than supply the material wrapping, although
it is their duty to help the intellectual and moral development of their child,
in order to further its progress.
Those
incarnated in the same family, especially as close relations, are as often as
not congenial Spirits linked by past relationships, which express themselves
during their earthly lives by their reciprocated affections. But it can also
happen that these people are complete strangers to each other, or they may be
distant from each other due to past aversions which while on Earth are
translated into mutual antagonisms which serve as probations. The real family
ties are not those of blood then, but those of mutual sympathy and the
communion of ideas which hold spirits together, before, during and after their
incarnations. From this it follows that two people born of different parents
may be more like brothers or sisters than if they were of the same blood. They
can attract each other, search for each other and so feel happy together;
whereas two blood brothers may be repelled by each other, as is frequently
seen. This moral problem is one that only Spiritism can resolve through the
explanation of the plurality of existences.
So,
there are two kinds of families: Families through spiritual ties and families
through bodily ties. In the first case these ties are durable and strengthen
with purification, perpetuating in the spiritual worlds by means of the various
migrations of the soul. In the second case, the ties are as fragile as the
physical body itself, extinguishing with them and in many instances dissolving
morally even in the actual existence.
This
was what Jesus was trying to make comprehensible when He said to His disciples:
"Here is my mother and my brothers by spiritual ties, because all those
who do the bidding of My Father, who is in Heaven, are my brothers, my sisters
and my mother."
The
hostility felt by His blood brothers is clearly expressed in this narrative
from Saint Mark, when it says that they had intentions of laying their hands on
Jesus, under the pretext that He had lost His Spirit, or gone out of His mind.
On being informed of their arrival and knowing full well the sentiments they
harboured against Him it was only natural for Jesus, speaking in spiritual
terms, to refer to His disciples as His brothers and sisters. Although His
mother was accompanying His brothers, Jesus generalised the teachings which in
no way implies He intended to declare that His mother, according to the
physical body, was nothing to Him in spirit nor that she deserved only indifference,
as He proved on many occasions. (Allen
Kardec – The Gospel According To Spiritism)
As
a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the
study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much:
There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of
a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most
minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the
existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all
matter.
(Max Plank,
founder of quantum mechanics - In a lecture in 1944, near the end of his life
looking back)
Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end.
There is existence without limitation; there is continuity without
a starting-point.
Existence without limitation is Space.
Continuity without a starting point is Time.
There is birth, there is death, there is issuing forth, there is
entering in.
Ethical
transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do
(acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We
tend to judge the former far more harshly. The origin of this imbalance remains
a mystery, but it surely relates to the value we place on a person’s energy and
intent.
Doing
something requires energy, and most morally salient actions require conscious
intent. A failure to do something can arise purely by circumstance and requires
energy to rectify. The difference is important. It is one thing to reach into
the till and steal $100; it is another to neglect to return $100 that one has
received by mistake. We might consider both behaviors to be ethically
blameworthy — but only the former amounts to a deliberate effort to steal.
Needless to say, if it would cost a person more than $100 to return $100 he
received by mistake, few of us would judge him for simply keeping the money. (Sam
Harris – Anatomy of Lying)
At
least one study suggests that 10 percent of communication between spouses is
deceptive. Another has found that 38 percent of encounters among college
students contain lies. However, researchers have discovered that even liars
rate their deceptive interactions as less pleasant than truthful ones. This is
not terribly surprising: We know that trust is deeply rewarding and that
deception and suspicion are two sides of the same coin. Research suggests that
all forms of lying — including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others
— are associated with poorer-quality relationships. (ibid)
But
what could be wrong with truly ‘white’ lies? First, they are still lies. And in
telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in
our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual
understanding — these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the
moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are
ever discovered. (ibid)
And
while we imagine that we tell certain lies out of compassion for others, it is
rarely difficult to spot the damage we do in the process. By lying, we deny our
friends access to reality — and their resulting ignorance often harms them in
ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to
solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good
information. Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we
care about. … These tiny erosions of trust are especially insidious because
they are almost never remedied. (ibid)
As
it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most
forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. ...
Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It
condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a
failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to
recoil from relationship. … By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it
is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often
determines the choices they can make — and in ways we cannot always
predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to. (ibid)
There
has come a necessity for the knowledge that Spiritism brings touching the
connections between the spiritual and material principals and the nature of the
soul; its creation in a state of simplicity and ignorance; its union with the
body; its progressive, definitive march through successive existences; and
through worlds which are so many rungs of the ladder on the way to perfection;
its gradual release from the influence of matter by the use of its free will;
the cause of its leanings toward good or evil and of its aptitudes; the
phenomena of birth and death; the state of the spirit in its erraticity, and at
length its future reward for efforts made in the improvement of its condition
as incentive to its perseverance in well-doing, which throw light upon every
part of the spiritual Genesis.
Thanks
to this light, man knows henceforth whence he comes; where he goes, why he is
upon earth, and why he suffers. He knows that his future is in his own hands,
and that the duration of his captivity here below depends upon himself.
Genesis, which previously appeared as a mean and shallow allegory, now appears
grand and majestic, worthy of the goodness and justice of the creator.
Considered from this point of view, Genesis will both confound and vanquish
incredibility.
(Allan Kardec - Genesis: The Miracles and
Predictions)
Dreaming
is a mechanism for regulating negative emotion and the relationship between REM
sleep and depression. The more severe the depression, the earlier the first REM
begins. Sometimes it starts as early as 45 minutes into sleep. That means these
sleepers’ first cycle of NREM sleep amounts to about half the usual length of
time. This early REM displaces the initial deep sleep, which is not fully recovered
later in the night. This displacement of the first deep sleep is accompanied by
an absence of the usual large outflow of growth hormone. The timing of the
greatest release of human growth hormone (HGH) is in the first deep sleep
cycle. The depressed have very little SWS [slow-wave sleep, Stages 3 and 4 of
the sleep cycle] and no big pulse of HGH; and in addition to growth, HGH is
related to physical repair. If we do not get enough deep sleep, our bodies take
longer to heal and grow. The absence of the large spurt of HGH during the first
deep sleep continues in many depressed patients even when they are no longer
depressed (in remission).
The
first REM sleep period not only begins too early in the night in people who are
clinically depressed, it is also often abnormally long. Instead of the usual 10
minutes or so, this REM may last twice that. The eye movements too are abnormal
— either too sparse or too dense. In fact, they are sometimes so frequent that
they are called eye movement storms.
Brain
imaging technology has helped to shed light on this mystery. Scanning depressed
patients while they sleep has shown that the emotion areas of the brain, the
limbic and paralimbic systems, are activated at a higher level in REM than when
these patients are awake. High activity in these areas is also common in REM
sleep in nondepressed sleepers, but the depressed have even higher activity in
these areas than do healthy control subjects. This might be expected — after
all, while in REM these individuals also show higher activity in the executive
cortex areas, those associated with rational thought and decision making.
Nondepressed controls do not exhibit this activity in their REM brain imaging
studies. This finding has been tentatively interpreted… as perhaps a response
to the excessive activity in the areas responsible for emotions.
Despite
differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a
common thread — they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes,
not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what
psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours
into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those
that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved.
One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the
mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates
disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as
well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this
theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this
is accomplished has had less attention.
I
propose that when some disturbing waking experience is reactivated in sleep and
carried forward into REM, where it is matched by similarity in feeling to
earlier memories, a network of older associations is stimulated and is
displayed as a sequence of compound images that we experience as dreams. This
melding of new and old memory fragments modifies the network of emotional
self-defining memories, and thus updates the organizational picture we hold of
‘who I am and what is good for me and what is not.’ In this way, dreaming
diffuses the emotional charge of the event and so prepares the sleeper to wake
ready to see things in a more positive light, to make a fresh start. This does
not always happen over a single night; sometimes a big reorganization of the
emotional perspective of our self-concept must be made — from wife to widow or
married to single, say, and this may take many nights. We must look for dream
changes within the night and over time across nights to detect whether a
productive change is under way. In very broad strokes, this is the definition
of the mood-regulatory function of dreaming, one basic to the new model of the
twenty-four hour mind I am proposing.
In
good sleepers, the mind is continuously active, reviewing experience from
yesterday, sorting which new information is relevant and important to save due
to its emotional saliency. Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best
understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the
interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory
networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it
is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation.
They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued
experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories.
Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our
behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream
dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience
and serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input.
Sleep
is a busy time, interweaving streams of thought with emotional values attached,
as they fit or challenge the organizational structure that represents our
identity. One function of all this action is to regulate disturbing emotion in
order to keep it from disrupting our sleep and subsequent waking functioning.
(Rosalind D. Cartwright - The Twenty-four Hour
Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives)
6
Rules For Creative Sanity:
·
To stay sane in an
insane world as a creative man or woman he or she must:
·
Keep one’s life
financially independent.
·
Continue unabated
to exercise one’s power of creativity in concrete, strenuous tasks, always
seeking perfection as near as possible.
·
Carefully cherish
LOVE of a partner with full gratification, of the total emotional being if
possible, of the body in a clean way if necessary.
·
Keep out of the
trap of confusion by the average man and woman, helping others to keep out of
the trap too as best they can.
·
Keep one’s
structure clean like brook water through knowing and correcting every mistake,
making the corrected mistake the guiding lines to new truth.
·
Never yield to the
expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless or where the main
line of development is not impeded for the duration of one’s life.
[Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) - Where’s the Truth?
Letters and Journals, 1948-1957]
[These
excerpts from Bergson reflect his exploration of the fields of science
and nature, lensing into an individual’s creative process and the role of
intuition and its supremacy over rationality]
·
We see that the
intellect, so skillful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it
touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life
of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the brutality of an
instrument not designed for such use. …
·
The intellect is
characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the
contrary, is molded on the very form of life.
·
While intelligence
treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If
the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into
knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could
reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only
carries out further the work by which life organizes matter – so that we cannot
say, as has often been shown, where organization ends and where instinct
begins. When the little chick is breaking its shell with a peck of its beak, it
is acting by instinct, and yet it does but carry on the movement which has
borne it through embryonic life. Inversely, in the course of embryonic life
itself (especially when the embryo lives freely in the form of a larva), many
of the acts accomplished must be referred to instinct. The most essential of
the primary instincts are really, therefore, vital processes. The potential
consciousness that accompanies them is generally actualized only at the outset
of the act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by itself. It would
only have to expand more widely, and then dive into its own depth completely,
to be one with the generative force of life.
·
It is impossible for intelligence
to reabsorb instinct. That which is instinctive in instinct cannot be expressed
in terms of intelligence, nor, consequently, can it be analyzed.
·
A man born blind, who
had lived among others born blind, could not be made to believe in the possibility
of perceiving a distant object without first perceiving all the objects in
between. Yet vision performs this miracle. In a certain sense the blind man is
right, since vision, having its origin in the stimulation of the retina, by the
vibrations of the light, is nothing else, in fact, but a retinal touch. Such is
indeed the scientific explanation, for the function of science is just to
express all perceptions in terms of touch. But we have shown elsewhere that the
philosophical explanation of perception must be of another kind. Now instinct
also is a knowledge at a distance. It has the same relation to intelligence
that vision has to touch. Science cannot do otherwise than express it in terms
of intelligence; but in so doing it constructs an imitation of instinct rather
than penetrates within it.
[French philosopher and Nobel Prize in Literature
winner Henri Bergson (1859-1941) - Creative Evolution]
I
am a romantic reductionist … reductionist, because I seek quantitative
explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of
billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses;
romantic, because of my insistence that the universe has contrails of meaning
that can be deciphered in the sky about us and deep within us. (Christopher
Koch – Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist)
The ever-increasing complexity of organisms, evident in the fossil record, is a consequence of the unrelenting competition for survival that propels evolution. … It was accompanied by the emergence of nervous systems and the first inkling of sentience. The continuing complexification of brains, to use Teilhard de Chardin’s term, enhanced consciousness until self-consciousness emerged: awareness reflecting upon itself. This recursive process started millions of years ago in some of the more highly developed mammals. In Homo Sapiens, it has achieved its temporary pinnacle. … But complexification does not stop with individual self-awareness. It is ongoing and, indeed, speeding up. In today’s technologically sophisticated and intertwined societies, complexification is taking on a supraindividual, continent-spanning character. With the instant, worldwide communication afforded by cell phones, e-mail, and social networking, I foresee a time when humanity’s teeming billions and their computers will be interconnected in a vast matrix — a planetary Übermind. Provided mankind avoids Nightfall — a thermonuclear Armageddon or a complete environmental meltdown — there is no reason why this web of hypertrophied consciousness cannot spread to the planets and, ultimately, beyond the stellar night to the galaxy at large. (ibid)
With
infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor
do great-grandparents, great-aunts… and so on, back through the generations,
all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their
fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…
Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
(Alan
Lightman - Einstein's Dreams)
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy - opening line of Anna Karenina)
If,
in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only
one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement
would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the
atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move
around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little
distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one
sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the
world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied. (Richard Feynman,
physicist)
Rage and rage against the dying of the light … do not go gentle into that good night. (Dylan Thomas, to his father)
Human
beings as made up out of each other through their interactions, their shared
language, their intense responsiveness. The social man, always outside of
himself, knows only how to live in the opinions of others; and it is, so to
speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own
existence. (Jean
Jacques Rousseau - Second Discourse (1754)
There are four types of men:
One
who knows and knows that he knows... His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.
One who knows, but doesn't know that he knows... He is fast asleep, so you
should wake him up!
One who doesn't know, but knows that he doesn't know... His limping mule will
eventually get him home.
One who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know... He will be
eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!
(Ibn Yami, 13th-century Persian-Tajik poet)
Stories are powerful because they transport us into other people’s
worlds but, in doing that, they change the way our brains work and potentially
change our brain chemistry — and that’s what it means to be a social creature. (Paul Zak – neuroscientist)
We
are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every
smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. Nothing
we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. (William
James - Habit)
Habit
is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative
agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves
the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by
those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at
sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow;
it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone.
It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because
there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.
It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five
you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial
traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young
counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the
character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop,' in a
word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can
suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not
escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the
character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. (Ibid)
Let
no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line
of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may
safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on
waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his
generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all
the details of his business, the power of judging in all that class of matter
will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away.
Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has
probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths
embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together. (Ibid)
As
far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as
far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
(Albert Einstein)
To
trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing,
gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety
attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing
states. First principle: any explanation is better than none… The
cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Very
few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really
ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have
already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of
consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door
to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner. (Anne
Rice - The Vampire Lestat)
Most
people have the ridiculous notion that anything they do which produces an
income is work – and that anything they do outside 'working' hours is play.
There is no logic to that. … Your life is too short and too valuable to fritter
away in work. If you don't get out now, you may end up like the frog that is
placed in a pot of fresh water on the stove. As the temperature is gradually
increased, the frog feels restless and uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable
enough to jump out. Without being aware that a change is taking place, be is
gradually lulled into unconsciousness. … Much the same thing happens when you
take a person and put him in a job which he does not like. He gets irritable in
his groove. His duties soon become a monotonous routine that slowly dulls his
senses. As I walk into offices, through factories and stores, I often find
myself looking into the expressionless faces of people going through mechanical
motions. They are people whose minds are stunned and slowly dying.
Actually,
there is only one way in this world to achieve true happiness, and that is to
express yourself with all your skill and enthusiasm in a career that appeals to
you more than any other. In such a career, you feel a sense of purpose, a sense
of achievement. You feel you are making a contribution. It is not work. … The
greatest satisfaction you can obtain from life is your pleasure in producing,
in your own individual way, something of value to your fellowmen. That is
creative living! …
When
we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn't it rather tragic
to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the
planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of
creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women,
capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for
popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity;
men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while
they babble the confused monotone of the mob?
For
you, life can be a succession of glorious adventures. Or it can be a monotonous
bore. Take your choice! …
Often,
success or failure turns on the question of human relations. … Any time you do
not enjoy the human relations involved in any job, sooner or later that job's
bound to be work, not fun.
If
you were to spend an hour alone with the loud tick of a clock, or better yet,
if you could spend an hour completely alone with an hour-glass, watching the
sands of Time quickly slip through that vessel, and realize that 100 years from
now you and i will both be gone, then you would begin to appreciate that TIME
is the ONLY thing you really DO HAVE and that you alone can do anything you
wish with the Time that is yours. …
'What
our friends and associates think' influences us more than we realize. We like
to live the life and stay in the role which others expect of us. … Each of us is
somewhat like an electric light bulb, deriving its power from some central
force. Just as the bulb accumulates dust and soot from the air around it until
it is darkened, then blackened, so our individuality becomes dulled at first
and then entirely blotted out from the accumulation of advice and interference
which is superimposed upon us by family and friends. If you examine their
advice, you will find that they are continually offering counsel based on their
own experience in connection with a situation that is quite different from the
one you are facing. … You will neither venture anything nor achieve anything if
you permit yourself to be unduly influenced by others. … Remember this. Only
one sound mind is needed to create an idea. (William
J. Reilly - How To Avoid Work)
Take it that you have died today, and your life's story is ended;
and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted
surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature. (Marcus Aurelius – Meditations)
We
have no respectworthy evidence that the human being has morals. He is himself
the only witness. Persons who do not know him value his testimony. They think
he is not shallow and vain because he so despises the peacock for possessing
these qualities. They are deceived into not regarding him as a beast and a
brute, because he uses these terms to disapprovingly describe qualities which
he possesses, yet which are not possessed by any creature but himself. On his
verbal testimony they take him for every creditable thing which he particularly
isn’t, and (intentionally?) refrain from examining the testimony of his acts.
It is the safest way, but man did not invent it, it was the polecat. From the
beginning of time the polecats have quite honestly and naively regarded
themselves as representing in the animal kingdom what the rose represents in
the vegetable kingdom. This is because they do not examine. …
However,
moralless man, bloody and atrocious man, is high above the other animals in his
one great and shining gift — intellectuality. It took him ages and ages to
demonstrate the full magnitude and majesty of his gift, but he has accomplished
it at last. For ages it was a mean animal indeed that was not vastly his
superior in certain splendid faculties. In the beginning he had nothing but the
puny strength of his unweaponed hands to protect his life with, and he was as
helpless as a rabbit when the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the mastodon and
the other mighty beasts came against him; in endurance he was far inferior to
the other creatures; in fleetness on the land there was hardly an animal in the
whole list that couldn’t shame him; in fleetness in the water every fish could
excel him; his eyesight was a sarcasm: for seeing minute things it was
blindness as compared to the eyesight of the insects, and the condor could see
a sheep further than he could see a hotel. But by the ingenuities of his
intellect he has equipped himself with all these gifts artificially and has
made them unapproachably effective. His locomotive can outstrip all birds and
beasts in speed and beat them all in endurance; there are no eyes in the animal
world that can compete with his microscope and his telescope; the strength of
the tiger and the elephant is weakness, compared with the force which he
carries in his mile-range terrible gun. In the beginning he was given
‘dominion’ over the animal creation — a very handsome present, but it was mere
words and represented a non-existent sovereignty. But he has turned it into an
existent sovereignty, himself, and is master, of late.
In
physical talents he was a pauper when he started; by grace of his intellect he
is incomparably the richest of all the animals now. But he is still a pauper in
morals — incomparably the poorest of the creatures in that respect. The gods
value morals alone; they have paid no compliments to intellect, nor offered it
a single reward. If intellect is welcome anywhere in the other world, it is in
hell, not heaven. (Autobiography
of Mark Twain)
We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form
of waiting. (Kahlil
Gibran)
There
is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and
your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make
sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an
animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all
entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But
in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not
be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The
alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The
only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers
and perturbations of love is Hell. (C.S.
Lewis – The Four Loves)
Love
is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the
sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog
that burns with the first daylight of reality. (Charles
Bukowski)
People
sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d
never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad
argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through
the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of
little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside
feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside
things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the
voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence. (Richard
Dawkins)
Love,
n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage. (Ambrose
Bierce - The Devil’s Dictionary)
Love
is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it
subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots
have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement,
it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire
to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night
imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am
telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this
is both an art and a fortunate accident. (Louis
de Bernières)
Love
does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love
is a war; love is a growing up.
(James Baldwin)
When
the moon paints everything silver and white in the stillness of night, when all
others sleep and only we ourselves wake, and are watchful and sad, then we hear
the voice of thought, and come face to face with ourselves, with the brevity of
life, with the lack of all we once had and have lost; and yet, also, once we
have been patient awhile and continued to listen, we come face to face with
hope. (AC
Grayling - The Good Book: A Humanist Bible)
A
man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after millions
of years of non-existence: He lives for a while, and then again comes an equally
long period when he exists no more. The heart rebels against this, and
suffers at the thought. Of every event in life we can say only for one moment
that it is; for ever after, that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a
day. It makes us mad to see how rapidly our short span of time ebbs away; This
might lead us to believe that the greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of
the present the supreme object of life, because that is the only reality, all
else being merely the play of thought. … Yet such a course might as well be
called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more,
and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth serious consideration. (ibid)
There
are no eternities other than grief while it lasts, no certainties other than
that grief must come, no escape other than from life itself and what it asks us
to endure. (ibid)
Do
not regret having lived, but while yet living live in a way that allows you to
think that you were not born in vain. And do not regret that you must die: it
is what all who are wise must wish, to have life end at its proper time. For
nature puts a limit to living as to everything else, and we are the sons and
daughters of nature, and for us therefore the sleep of nature is nature’s final
kindness. (ibid)
When
the multitude hate a man, it is necessary to examine the case. When the
multitude love a man, it is necessary to examine the case. For the multitude
can hate what should be loved, and love what should be hated. (ibid)
They
know the water best who have waded through it.
They
are wrong to blame the sea who have twice survived shipwreck.
Experience
is the mother of knowledge, the father of wisdom.
Who
suffers, remembers. (ibid)
Observe
with utmost attention all the operations of your own mind, the nature of your
passions, and the various motives that determine your will; and you may, in a
great degree, know all mankind. (ibid)
It
is a wonderful and grand thing to be oneself and part of all, and to have the
dignity of the capacity for thought. (ibid)
The
good is two freedoms: freedom from certain hindrances and pains, freedom to
choose and to act. The first is freedom from ignorance, fear, loneliness,
folly, and the inability to master one’s emotions; the second is freedom to
develop the best capacities and talents that we have, and to use them for the
best. (ibid)
Though
we cease as we now are, what we are never ceases. We are part of the whole, and
always so. (ibid)
You
can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. (E.
M. Forster - A Room with a View)
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return
unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return. (Genesis
3:19)
Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to
take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit
his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure
and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life. (Book
of Common Prayer – 1662)
For
a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. … Speech is carried off by the
wind; the written word can never be obliterated. (2012
Nobel Literature Prize laureate Mo Yan of China – acceptance speech)
My
mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. We buried her in a peach orchard east
of the village. Last year we were forced to move her grave farther away from
the village in order to make room for a proposed rail line. When we dug up the
grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted away and that her body had merged with
the damp earth around it. So we dug up some of that soil, a symbolic act, and
took it to the new gravesite. That was when I grasped the knowledge that my
mother had become part of the earth, and that when I spoke to mother earth, I
was really speaking to my mother. (Ibid)
Our
Taoist master Laozi said it best: “Fortune depends on misfortune. Misfortune is
hidden in fortune.” I left school as a child, often went hungry, was constantly
lonely, and had no books to read. But for those reasons, like the writer of a
previous generation, Shen Congwen, I had an early start on reading the great
book of life. (Ibid)
Possibly because I’ve lived so much of
my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound
understanding of life. I know what real courage is, and I understand true
compassion. I know that nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of
every person, terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms
of right and wrong or good and bad, and this vast territory is where a writer
gives free rein to his talent. So long as the work correctly and vividly
describes this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain, it will inevitably
transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence. (Ibid)
One
last story, one my grandfather told me many years ago: A group of eight
out-of-town bricklayers took refuge from a storm in a rundown temple. Thunder
rumbled outside, sending fireballs their way. They even heard what sounded like
dragon shrieks. The men were terrified, their faces ashen. “Among the eight of
us,” one of them said, “is someone who must have offended the heavens with a
terrible deed. The guilty person ought to volunteer to step outside to accept
his punishment and spare the innocent from suffering. Naturally, there were no
volunteers. So one of the others came up with a proposal: Since no one is
willing to go outside, let’s all fling our straw hats toward the door.
Whoever’s hat flies out through the temple door is the guilty party, and we’ll ask
him to go out and accept his punishment.” So they flung their hats toward the
door. Seven hats were blown back inside; one went out the door. They pressured
the eighth man to go out and accept his punishment, and when he balked, they
picked him up and flung him out the door. I’ll bet you all know how the story
ends: They had no sooner flung him out the door than the temple collapsed
around them. (Ibid)
The mind gives an order to the body
and is at once obeyed, but when it gives an order to itself, it is resisted.
(Saint
Augustine - Confessions)
My present Me is felt with warmth and
intimacy. The heavy warm mass of my body is there, and the nucleus of the
‘spiritual me,’ the sense of intimate activity is there. We cannot realize our
present self without simultaneously feeling one or other of these two things. (William
James - Psychology: Briefer Course)
When I enter most intimately into
what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other,
of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can
catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any
thing but the perception. If there is an essential “I” beneath all that, I
can’t find it. Perhaps it doesn’t exist—perhaps we are not sum, only parts:
nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions. (David Hume)
In
all species, nature works to renew itself as it works to nourish itself, and to
protect itself from danger, each by its kind and for its kind, in the great
work of continuation that is evolution. In humankind the work of renewal lies
in the work of affection, the bond of one to another made by desire. (AC
Grayling - The Good Book: A Humanist Bible)
All
things gathered into one thing: the universe of nature, in which there are many
worlds: the orbs of light in an immensity of space and time, and among them
their satellites, on which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,
and can ponder its beauty and significance, and seek to understand it: this is
humankind. … All other things, in their cycles and rhythms, exist in and of
themselves; but in humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good
and its opposite. In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of
things. (ibid)
He
is the master of every other person who is able to confer or remove whatever
that person wishes to either have or avoid. Whoever, then, would be free, let
him not wish too earnestly for anything that depends on others. (ibid)
If
you are fond of a specific cup, remind yourself that it is only a cup. Then, if
it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your
wife, say that you kiss what is human, and prepare to bear the grief that is the
cost of loving, should you lose them. (ibid)
The
evil of our own death is not death itself; it is the fear of death that is
evil. To be free of fear of ones own death is to be free indeed. The death of
others is the true sorrow of death; and the remedies of sorrow are love,
courage and time. (ibid)
We
learn, if we are brave, the power of mind, which is the greatest thing in man;
of how, though man is small before nature, his mind can encompass all nature, in
thinking of it, and singing about it, searching it in science, and celebrating
it in poetry. … So I think all the sages found both courage and modesty through
the mind’s contact with nature, and these two things are the begetters of hope.
… Is there proof that they were right to hope? Well, only consider: it is many
centuries since the first sages paced their groves, and their words and
thoughts are with us today, and we speak of them; Though nature conquered their
bodies and their bodies are dispersed into the elements once more, the fruit of
their minds is with us still. (ibid)
No laws, however stringent, can make
the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such
reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial;
by better habits, rather than by greater rights.
(Samuel
Smiles, 1859 – Self Help)
They
say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There
are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is
simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone. The trouble
then seems something fated, not to be questioned, like life itself; and nature
is built to face it and to see it out. (George
Santayana - Persons and Places)
Each
generation breaks its egg-shell with the same haste and assurance as the last,
pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just
as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by
experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions, and rushes down
any un-trodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or become
wise too late and to no purpose. (George
Santayana – Soliloquies In England and Later)
I
am profoundly selfish in the sense that I resist human contagion, except
provisionally, on the surface, and in matters indifferent to me. For pleasure,
and convivially, I like to share the life about me, and have often done it; but
never so as, at heart, to surrender my independence. On the other hand, I am
not selfish in a competitive way. I don't want to snatch money or position or
pleasures from other people, nor do I attempt to dominate them, as an unselfish
man would say, for their own good. I sincerely wish them joy in their native
ways of living, as if they were wild animals; but I decidedly refuse to hunt
with them unless the probable result recommends itself to me independently. To
heartlessness of this kind I am ready to plead guilty, and see clearly that it
is unhuman. Sympathy with nature, however, is the source of it, and not any
aggressive selfishness. (George
Santayana – My Host, The World)
No
doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is
what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we
may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. (George
Santayana – Winds of Doctrine)
Don’t
pity the humble painter. He can be lord of all things. Whatever exists in the
universe, he has first in his mind, and then in his hand. By his art, he may be
called a grandchild of God. (Leonardo
Da Vinci)
Our
intuition is shaped by context, and that context is deeply informed by the
world we live in. It can thus serve as a blinder — or blind spot — of sorts. …
With mindfulness, however, we can strive to find a balance between
fact-checking our intuitions and remaining open-minded. We can then make our
best judgments, with the information we have and no more, but with, as well,
the understanding that time may change the shape and color of that information. (Maria Konnikova - Mastermind:
How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes)
As
neurologist Marcus Raichle learned after decades of looking at the brain, our
minds are wired to wander. Wandering is their default. Whenever our thoughts
are suspended between specific, discrete, goal-directed activities, the brain
reverts to a so-called baseline, ‘resting’ state — but don’t let the word fool
you, because the brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, it experiences tonic
activity in what’s now known as the DMN, the default mode network: the
posterior cingulate cortex, the adjacent precuneus, and the medial prefrontal
cortex. This baseline activation suggests that the brain is constantly
gathering information from both the external world and our internal states, and
what’s more, that it is monitoring that information for signs of something that
is worth its attention. And while such a state of readiness could be useful
from an evolutionary standpoint, allowing us to detect potential predators, to
think abstractly and make future plans, it also signifies something else: our
minds are made to wander. That is their resting state. Anything more requires an act
of conscious will. (Ibid)
The
modern emphasis on multitasking plays into our natural tendencies quite well,
often in frustrating ways. Every new input, every new demand that we place on
our attention is like a possible predator: Oooh, says the brain. Maybe I should pay attention
to that instead. And then along
comes something else. We can feed our mind wandering ad infinitum. The result?
We pay attention to everything and nothing as a matter of course. While our
minds might be made to wander, they are not made to switch activities at
anything approaching the speed of modern demands. We were supposed to remain
ever ready to engage, but not to engage with multiple things at once, or even
in rapid succession. (Ibid)
Attention
is a limited resource. Paying attention to one thing necessarily comes at the
expense of another. Letting your eyes get too taken in by all of the scientific
equipment in the laboratory prevents you from noticing anything of significance
about the man in that same room. We cannot allocate our attention to multiple
things at once and expect it to function at the same level as it would were we
to focus on just one activity. Two tasks cannot possibly be in the attentional
foreground at the same time. One will inevitably end up being the focus, and
the other — or others — more akin to irrelevant noise, something to be filtered
out. Or worse still, none will have the focus and all will be, albeit slightly
clearer, noise, but degrees of noise all the same. (Ibid)
Ever
since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as
unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the
underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and
where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification
enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete
description of the universe we live in. (Stephen
Hawking – A Brief History Of Time)
Four key strategies for optimizing your attention:
Be Selective
Our
vision is highly selective as is — the retina normally captures about ten
billion bits per sec of visual information, but only ten thousand bits actually
make it to the first layer of the visual cortex, and, to top it off, only 10
percent of the area’s synapses is dedicated to incoming visual information at
all. Or, to put it differently, our brains are bombarded by something like
eleven million pieces of data — that is, items in our surroundings that come at
all of our senses — at once. Of that, we are able to consciously process only
about forty. What that basically means is that we ‘see’ precious little of
what’s around us, and what we think of as objective seeing would better be
termed selective filtering — and our state of mind, our mood, our thoughts at
any given moment, our motivation, and our goals can make it even more picky
than it normally is. … Our minds are set [for selective attention] for a
reason. It’s exhausting to have the Holmes system running on full all the time
— and not very productive, at that. There’s a reason we’re prone to filter out
so much of our environment: to the brain, it’s noise. If we tried to take it
all in, we wouldn’t last very long. Remember what Holmes said about your brain
attic? It’s precious real estate. Tread carefully and use it wisely. In other
words, be selective about your attention.
At
first glance, this may seem counterintuitive: after all, aren’t we trying to
pay attention to more, not less? Yes, but the crucial distinction is between
quantity and quality. We want to learn to pay attention better, to
become superior observers, but we can’t hope to achieve this if we
thoughtlessly pay attention to everything. That’s self-defeating. What we need to
do is allocate our attention mindfully. And mindset is the beginning of that
selectivity.
Be Objective
It’s
psychologist Daniel
Gilbert’s theory about believing what we see taken a step further:
we believe what we want to see and what our mind attic decides to see, encode
that belief instead of the facts in our brains, and then think that we saw an
objective fact when really, what we remember seeing is only our limited
perception at the time. We forget to separate the factual situation from our
subjective interpretation of it. … Setting your goals beforehand will help you
direct your precious attentional resources properly. It should not be an excuse
to reinterpret objective facts to mesh with what you want or expect to see.
Observation and deduction are two separate, distinct steps — in fact, they
don’t even come one right after the other.
Be Inclusive
Attention
is about every one of your senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch. It is
about taking in as much as we possibly can, through all of the avenues
available to us. It is about learning not to leave anything out —
anything, that is, that is relevant to the goals that you’ve set. And it is about
realizing that all of our senses affect us — and will affect us whether or not
we are aware of the impact.
To
observe fully, to be truly attentive, we must be inclusive and not let anything
slide by — and we must learn how our attention may shift without our awareness,
guided by a sense that we’d thought invisible.
Be Engaged
When
we are engaged in what we are doing, all sorts of things happen. We persist
longer at difficult problems — and become more likely to solve them. We
experience something that psychologist Tory Higgins refers to as flow, a
presence of mind that not only allows us to extract more from whatever it is we
are doing but also makes us feel better and happier: we derive actual,
measurable hedonic value from the strength of our active involvement in and
attention to an activity, even if the activity is as boring as sorting through
stacks of mail. If we have a reason to do it, a reason that engages us and
makes us involved, we will both do it better and feel happier as a result. The
principle holds true even if we have to expand significant mental effort — say,
in solving difficult puzzles. Despite the exertion, we will still feel happier,
more satisfied, and more in the zone, so to speak.
What’s
more, engagement and flow tend to prompt a virtuous cycle of sorts: we become
more motivated and aroused overall, and, consequently, more likely to be
productive and create something of value.
Psychologist
Yaacov Trope argues that psychological distance may be one of the single most
important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision-making. It can
come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past);
spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from
something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and
hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened). But
whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all
require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require
you to take a step back. (Maria
Konnikova - Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes)
There is a pattern in the past of civilization
after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its
environment, overexpanding, overpopulating. They tend to collapse quite soon
after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That
pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient
Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other
examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very
things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to
exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster
in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A
Short History of Progress’, the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an
industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we
do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our
demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled
in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between
rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can
never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about
2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s.
That’s not progress. … If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an
orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe,
sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide
but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must
transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a
suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves
on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve
the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our
civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.
(Ronald
Wright, in conversation with Chris Hedges, 2013)
In
other pleasures, it is said, we gratify our senses and passions; in the
contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are
silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to
possess.
(George Santayana - The Sense of Beauty: Being an
Outline of Aesthetic Theory)
Beauty
is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects
our senses and which we consequently perceive.
It exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not
felt, and a contradiction. (Ibid)
Unless
human nature suffers an inconceivable change, the chief intellectual and
aesthetic value of our ideas will always come from the creative action of the
imagination. (Ibid)
Our
practical and intellectual nature is deeply interested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us for that
reason; it has an inalienable interest. However unpleasant truth may prove, we
long to know it, partly perhaps because experience has shown us the prudence of
this kind of intellectual courage, and chiefly because the consciousness of
ignorance and the dread of the unknown is more tormenting than any possible
discovery. A primitive instinct makes
us turn the eyes full on any object that appears in the dim borderland of our
field of vision - and this all the more quickly, the more terrible that object
threatens to be. (Ibid)
When
a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it from a universal
standpoint. He has nothing more to live
for, but if the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to
live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute to himself
a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself with what is
eternal. He speaks of himself as he is,
or rather as he was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I have been, says he, this I have done.
(Ibid)
This
is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of interest or length of years
has brought balance and dignity. The
sacerdotal quality of old age comes from this same sympathy in disinterestedness. Old men full of hurry and passion appear as
fools, because we understand that their experience has not left enough mark
upon their brain to qualify with the memory of other goods any object that may
be now presented. We cannot venerate
any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And this elevation and detachment of the
heart need not follow upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest
where it is the gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a
natural piety. (Ibid)
Our
consciousness of the ideal becomes distinct in proportion as we advance in
virtue and in proportion to the vigor and definiteness with which our
faculties work. When the vital harmony
is complete, when the act is pure, faith in perfection passes into
vision. That man is unhappy indeed, who
in all his life has had no glimpse of perfection, who in the ecstasy of love,
or in the delight of contemplation, has never been able to say: It is
attained. Such moments of inspiration
are the source of the arts, which have no higher function than to renew them. (Ibid)
Satisfaction
of our reason, due to the harmony between our nature and our experience, is
partially realized already. The sense of beauty is its realization. Beauty is a
pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently
a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good. (Ibid)
For this is the
journey that men make; to find themselves. It doesn't matter what else they
find, fame, fortune, many loves, revenge, when the tickets are collected at the
end of the ride, they are tossed in the bin marked failure. … But if a man
happens to find himself; the extent of his courage, the limit of his
dedication, the position in life from which he can no longer retreat, he has
found a mansion he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life. (James A. Michener - The
Fires of Spring)
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the
only true good. (Soren
Kierkegaard)
In
addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate
confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no
wonder, then, that I return the love.
(Ibid)
Life
can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. (Ibid)
People
demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which
they seldom use. (Ibid)
Life has its own hidden forces which
you can only discover by living. (Ibid)
A man who as a physical being is
always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him,
finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him. (Ibid)
I see it all perfectly; there are two
possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my
friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both. (Ibid)
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor
at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last
extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could
be intended for enjoyment. (Ibid)
Faith is the highest passion in a
human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes
further. (Ibid)
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr
dies and his rule begins. (Ibid)
Just as in earthly life lovers long
for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other,
to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment
when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God. (Ibid)
Because of its tremendous solemnity
death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become
transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences. (Ibid)
The more a man can forget, the
greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can
remember, the more divine his life becomes. (Ibid)
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a
veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins
to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid. (Ibid)
There are, as is known, insects that
die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most
splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death. (Ibid)
An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a
people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a
people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda,
is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. (Bill
Moyers)
Love
would seem to belong to the person who feels it. Defining love as positivity
resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among
people — within interpersonal transactions — and thereby belong to all parties
involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together,
albeit temporarily. … More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs
not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within
connections. … Love’s second precondition is connection, true sensory and
temporal connection with another living being. You no doubt try to ‘stay
connected’ when physical distance keeps you and your loved ones apart. You use
the phone, e-mail, and increasingly texts or Facebook, and it’s important to do
so. Yet your body, sculpted by the forces of natural selection over millennia,
was not designed for the abstractions of long-distance love, the XOXs and LOLs.
Your body hungers for more. … True connection is one of love’s bedrock
prerequisites, a prime reason that love is not unconditional, but instead
requires a particular stance. Neither abstract nor mediated, true connection is
physical and unfolds in real time. It requires sensory and temporal co-presence
of bodies .The main mode of sensory connection, scientists contend, is eye
contact. Other forms of real-time sensory contact — through touch, voice, or
mirrored body postures and gestures — no doubt connect people as well and at
times can substitute for eye contact. Nevertheless, eye contact may well be the
most potent trigger for connection and oneness. … Physical presence is key to
love, to positivity resonance. (Barbara
Fredrickson)
Nature
abounds in… antitheses, What are our ugliness or beauty, our cleanliness or
dirt to her? Out of filth she creates a flower; from a little manure, she
extracts the thrice-blessed grain of wheat. Notwithstanding their disgusting
occupation, the Dung-beetles are of a very respectable standing. (Jean-Henri Fabre)
Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form,
and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it. (Boris
Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago)
Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console
the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the
living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all
these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't
big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded
out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life. …
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable
combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn.
You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose
from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. (Ibid)
The great majority of us are required to
live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be
affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you
grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. (Ibid)
He realized, more vividly than ever before, that art had two
constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and
it is always thereby creating life. (Ibid)
Even so, one step from my grave,
I believe that cruelty, spite,
The powers of darkness will in time
Be crushed by the spirit of light.
(Ibid)
What is laid down, ordered, factual is
never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of
every cup. (Ibid)
It’s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him.
It shows he isn’t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But
if you can’t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is
what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of
immortality. (Ibid)
And now listen carefully. You in others - this is your soul. This
is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and
enjoyed throughout your life - your soul, your immortality, your life in
others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in
others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory?
This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it. (Ibid)
Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every
step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories.
Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of
imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.
(Ibid)
An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks
as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is
ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface
is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song
slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly
reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes
to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its
words.
(Ibid)
If it is so painful to love and to be
charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman
and to be the current, and to inspire love. (Ibid)
Life was all treachery and ambiguity. Any single thread was as
fragile as a cobweb, but just try to pull yourself out of the net! It only held
you tighter. Even the strong are ruled by the treacherous and
weak. (Ibid)
What
is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a
buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset. (Unknown
Blackfoot warrior – 1890)
AMERIND WISDOM SAYINGS (collected by Guy A. Zona - The
Soul Would Have No Rainbow if the Eyes Had No Tears)
·
It is
less a problem to be poor than to be dishonest. (ANISHINABE)
·
We
will be forever known by the tracks we leave. (DAKOTA)
·
Do not
wrong or hate your neighbor, for it is not he that you wrong but yourself. (PIMA)
·
I seek
strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy -
myself. (PUEBLO)
·
He who
is present at a wrongdoing and does not lift a hand to prevent it is as guilty
as the wrongdoers. (OMAHA)
·
Always
look at your moccasin tracks first before you speak of another's faults. (SAUK)
·
Before
eating, always take a little time to thank the food. (ARAPAHO)
·
Seek
the ways of the eagle, not the wren. (OMAHA)
·
One
has to face fear or forever run from it. (CROW)
·
Wishing
cannot bring autumn glory nor cause winter to cease. (KIOWA)
·
When a
man prays one day and steals six, the Great Spirit thunders and the Evil One
laughs. (OKLAHOMA)
·
Seek
wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is the past; wisdom is the future. (LUMBEE)
·
Work
hard, keep the ceremonies, live peaceably, and unite your hearts. (HOPI)
·
Don't
walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow.
Walk beside me that we may be as one.
(UTE)
Our
stories us a sense of identity and, most importantly, serve to integrate the
feelings of our right brain with the language of our left. … We are primed to
use stories. Part of our survival as a species depended upon listening to the
stories of our tribal elders as they shared parables and passed down their
experience and the wisdom of those who went before. As we get older it is our
short-term memory that fades rather than our long-term memory. Perhaps we have
evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the
stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to
subsequent generations if they are to thrive.
Be
careful which stories you expose yourself to. The meanings you find, and the
stories you hear, will have an impact on how optimistic you are: it's how we
evolved. … If you do not know how to draw positive meaning from what happens in
life, the neural pathways you need to appreciate good news will never fire up.
… The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good
news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.
Optimism
does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk
about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude
ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the
positive fall-out of an event than on the negative, and on being optimistic
enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow
into flowers. … If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe
them as though we are taking a bird's eye view of our own thinking. When we do
this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an older, and different, story
to the one we are now living. … We need to look at the repetitions in the
stories we tell ourselves, and at the process of the stories
rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with
changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story
and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck. (Philippa
Perry - How To Stay Sane)
Be
careful to leave your sons well instructed, rather than rich, for the hopes of
the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant. (Epictetus)
The
core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in
parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the
contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and
defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to
alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to
wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that
powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies
were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale.
Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge – not
even in the long run. (John
Gray – Heresies)
The
most pitiless warriors against drugs have always been militant progressives. In
China, the most savage attack on drug use occurred when the country was
convulsed by a modern western doctrine of universal emancipation – Maoism. It
is no accident that the crusade against drugs is led today by a country wedded
to the pursuit of happiness – the United States. For the corollary of that
improbable quest is a puritan war on pleasure. (John
Gray – Straw Dogs)
What
could be more natural for a species that has exterminated its animal kin than
to look into a mirror and find that it is not alone?
(John Gray – Straw Dogs)
People
need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events. (John Gray – Heresies)
From its humble beginnings as a means of stocktaking
and tallying debts, writing gave humans the power to preserve their thoughts
and experiences from time. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a
world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality. The development of
writing has enabled them to construct philosophies in which they no longer
belong in the natural world. … In comparison with the Genesis myth, the modern
myth in which humanity is marching to a better future is mere superstition. As
the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know
more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our
madness. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid
ourselves of what we know . . . The message of Genesis is that in the most
vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle
with our nature. … Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or
make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false
quietude of oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being. There is no redemption
from being human. But no redemption is needed.
(John Gray - The Silence of
Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths)
The roles of both individual and group selection are indelibly stamped (to borrow a phrase from Charles Darwin) upon our social behavior. As expected, we are intensely interested in the minutiae of behavior of those around us. Gossip is a prevailing subject of conversation, everywhere from hunter-gatherer campsites to royal courts. The mind is a kaleidoscopically shifting map of others, each of whom is drawn emotionally in shades of trust, love, hatred, suspicion, admiration, envy and sociability. We are compulsively driven to create and belong to groups, variously nested, overlapping or separate, and large or small. Almost all groups compete with those of similar kind in some manner or other. We tend to think of our own as superior, and we find our identity within them.
(Edward O. Wilson)
Time
has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You
find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.
This place hasn’t changed so terribly much, and so by an extension of logic I
must not have changed much, either. … Coming back is the thing that enables you
to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you
to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later
takes you to another door, which aided by several detours — long hallways and
unforeseen stairwells — eventually puts you in the place you are now. Every
choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you
there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where
you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn’t a bread crumb in sight —
there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland
creatures. You glance from left to right and find no indication of which way
you’re supposed to go. And so you stand there, sniffing at the wind, looking
for directional clues in the growth patterns of moss, and you think, What now?
… Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we
could possibly have imagined. (Ann
Patchett – What Now?)
From James Webb Young - A
Technique for Producing Ideas
The production of ideas is just as definite a process as the
production of Fords; the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line;
that in this production the mind follows an operative
technique which can be
learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool. … In learning any art the
important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method.
This is true of the art of producing ideas.
Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of
so-called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.
So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where
to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which
all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.
… The first principle is that an idea
is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements. … The second
important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into
new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.
Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to
the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of
knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships
and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a
general law applying to a whole series of facts. … Consequently the habit of
mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the
highest importance in the production of ideas.
STEP 1: GATHERING RAW MATERIAL
Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds.
It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time
that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering.
Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit
around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to
get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we
dodge the preceding steps. … Every really good creative person whom I have ever
known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no
subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say,
Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for
him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.
For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk. … The
process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The
kaleidoscope, as you know, is an instrument which designers sometimes use in
searching for new patterns. It has little pieces of colored glass in it, and
when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical
designs. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new
relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such
new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number
of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and
striking combinations.
STEP 2: DIGESTING THE MATERIAL
What you do is to take the different bits of material which you
have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the
mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different
lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see
how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where
everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.
STEP 3: UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING
It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just
as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to
do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious
mind and let it work while you sleep. When you reach this third stage in the
production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever
stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or
movies, read poetry or a detective story.
STEP 4: THE A-HA MOMENT
Out of nowhere the Idea will appear. … It will come to you when you
are least expecting it — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are
half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.
STEP 5: IDEA MEETS REALITY
It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit
the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work.
And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is
often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting
part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a
work-a-day world.
Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at
this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.
When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a
good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who
see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will
come to light.
POSTSCRIPT (YEARS LATER)
From my own further experience in advertising, government, and
public affairs I find no essential points which I would modify in the
idea-producing process. There is one, however, on which I would put greater
emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer’s
reservoir. … I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience
best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you
are pursuing it as an end in itself.
My Lord God, I have no
idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for
certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I
think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I
believe that the desire to please you does in fact please. And I hope that I
have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything
apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the
right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you
always, though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death. I will not fear,
for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thomas Merton - Thoughts
in Solitude)
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to
cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of
all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless,
but disastrous. (Thomas
Merton - The Wisdom of the Present)
Science offers a rational splendor that explains
everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly
visible and beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow
outside the usual arena of scientific criticism, certain gestures of ideas and
rituals of interpretation, and a requirement of total commitment. In return the
adherent receives what the religions had once given him more universally: a
world view, a hierarchy of importances, and an auguring place where he may find
out what to do and think, in short, a total explanation of man. And this
totality is obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an
encasement of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention,
such that everything that is not explained is not in view.
(Julian
Janes - The Origin of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
I have no answer to the question: what is the
meaning of life. Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe
itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the
history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is
only awe.
(in lecture, Julian Janes – author of The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
Madness is rare in individuals - but
in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. (Friedrich
Nietzsche)
By
a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved,
an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only
confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process
impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.... Those to whom the system
brings windfalls, become “profiteers” who are the object of the hatred.The
process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin
was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the
existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all
the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it
in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. (John
Keynes – 1919)
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
Until, in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
(Aeschylus
- Agamemnon)
The
scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and
this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t
know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what
the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the
result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount
importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave
room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees
of certainty– some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely
certain. … We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not
unreasonable that we grapple with problems. There are tens of thousands of
years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we
can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave
the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can
make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if
we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all
discussion, all criticism, saying, 'This is it, boys, man is saved!' and thus
doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of
our present imagination. It has been done so many times before. … It is our
responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a
satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of
freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt
is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as
our duty to all coming generations. (Richard
Feynman)
Be
still. Listen. Like you, the Earth breathes. Your breath is alive with the
promise of flowers. Each time you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen
that might grow to be a new plant. (Elin
Kelsey & Soyeon Kim - You Are Stardust)
The
sun is new every day, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus said. The sun of
poetry is new every day, too, because it is seen in different ways by different
people who have lived under it, lived with it, responded to it. Their lives are
different from yours, but by means of the special spell that poetry brings to
the fact of the sun – everybody's sun; yours, too – you can come into
possession of many suns: as many as men and women have ever been able to
imagine. Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the
world. … Part of the spell of poetry is the rhythm of language, used by poets
who understand how powerful a factor rhythm can be, how compelling and
unforgettable. Almost anything put into rhyme is more memorable than the same
thing in prose. Why this is, no one knows completely, though the answer is
surely rooted far down in the biology by means of which we exist; in the
circulation of the blood that goes forth from the heart and comes back, and in
the repetition of breathing. (James
Dickey)
A scholar knows many books; a well-educated person has knowledge and skills; an enlightened person understands the meaning and purpose of his life. … Ignorance in itself is neither shameful nor harmful. Nobody can know everything. But pretending that you know what you actually do not know is both shameful and harmful. … There are two very clear indications of real science and real art: the first inner sign is that a scholar or an artist works not for profit, but for sacrifice, for his calling; the second, outer sign is that his works are understandable to all people. Real science studies and makes accessible that knowledge which people at that period of history think important, and real art transfers this truth from the domain of knowledge to the domain of feelings.
(Leo Tolstoy)
The
emotions of the animals which are called irrational…only differ from man’s
emotions to the extent that brute nature differs from human nature. Horse and
man are alike carried away by the desire of procreation, but the desire of the
former is equine, the desire of the latter is human…Thus, although each
individual lives content and rejoices in that nature belonging to him wherein he
has his being, yet the life, wherein each is content and rejoices, is nothing
else but the idea, or soul, of the said individual…It follows from the
foregoing proposition that there is no small difference between the joy which
actuates, say, a drunkard, and the joy possessed by a philosopher.
(Baruch Spinoza)
I
do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main
characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops
us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his
surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside
or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be
wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
(Vladimir
Nabokov – Pnin)
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in
a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not
mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We
open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we
must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly
harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor
and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child,
that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by
time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety
forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring
to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold
and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by
a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the
road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine
dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery
ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early
in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his
children. (Bryan Doyle - Joyas
Voladoras)
Scientists can account for the organization of the physical universe.
They can trace how the individual things and forces within it causally
interact. They can shed light on how the universe has, in the course of
history, evolved from one state to another. But when it comes to the ultimate
origin of reality, they have nothing to say. This is an enigma best left to
metaphysics, or to theology, or to poetic wonderment, or to silence. (Jim
Holt - Why Does the World Exist?)
What
are we here for if not to enjoy life eternal, solve what problems we can, give
light, peace and joy to our fellow-man, and leave this dear fucked-up planet a little
healthier than when we were born. … No matter what you touch and you wish to
know about, you end up in a sea of mystery. You see there's no beginning or
end, you can go back as far as you want, forward as far as you want, but you
never got to it, it's like the essence, it's that right, it remains. This is
the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize
so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it. And it's meant to be
that way, do y'know. And there's where our reverence should come in. Before
everything, the littlest thing as well as the greatest. The tiniest, the
horseshit, as well as the angels, do y'know what I mean. It's all mystery. All
impenetrable, as it were, right? (Henry
Miller)
The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a
self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of
creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own
will. (Nietzsche - Thus Spake
Zarathustra)
The
key factors of success? Perseverance is the chief; but perseverance must have
some practical end, or it does not avail the man possessing it. A person
without a practical end in view becomes a crank or an idiot. Such persons fill
our insane asylums. The same perseverance that they show in some idiotic idea,
if exercised in the accomplishment of something practicable, would no doubt
bring success. Perseverance is first, but practicability is chief. The success
of the Americans as a nation is due to their great practicability. … I am a
believer in unconscious cerebration. The brain is working all the time, though
we do not know it. At night, it follows up what we think in the daytime. When I
have worked a long time on one thing, I make it a point to bring all the facts
regarding it together before I retire; and I have often been surprised at the
results. Have you not noticed that, often, what was dark and perplexing to you
the night before, is found to be perfectly solved the next morning? We are
thinking all the time; it is impossible not to think.. …I believe it to be a primary principle of
success; ‘mens sana in corpora sano’ — a sound mind in a sound body. The mind
in a weak body produces weak ideas; a strong body gives strength to the thought
of the mind. Ill health is due to man’s artificiality of living. He lives
indoors. He becomes, as it were, a hothouse plant. Such a plant is never as
successful as a hardy garden plant is. An outdoor life is necessary to health
and success, especially in a youth. (Alexander
Graham Bell)
ECCE PUER
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
["Ecce Puer" – meaning "Behold the Boy-child,"
was written in 1932, by James Joyce, soon after his father died and his
grandson Stephen was born, and contains that same unguarded honesty of his
earlier poems. It shows a man in transition from a son to a grandfather and
torn between "joy and grief," finally realizing his need for
reconciliation – and forgiveness.
Real wisdom is
not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are
necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to
know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well,
that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in
one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study
this, the most important knowledge. (Jean
Jaques Rousseau)
Excerpts
from Cambridge University philosopher Stephen Cave – (Immortality: The Quest to
Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization)
On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the
conclusion that we – like all other living things around us – must one day die.
Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is the very
state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents
itself as both inevitable and impossible. … Both halves of this paradox arise
from the same set of impressive cognitive faculties. Since the advent some two
and a half million years ago of the genus Homo, the immediate ancestors of modern
humans, our brain size has tripled. This has come with a series of crucial
conceptual innovations: First, we are aware of ourselves as distinct
individuals, a trait limited only to a handful of large-brained species and considered
to be essential for sophisticated social interaction. Second, we have an
intricate idea of the future, allowing us to premeditate and vary our plans –
also an ability unseen in the vast majority of other species. And third, we can
imagine different scenarios, playing with possibilities and generalizing from
what we have seen, enabling us to learn, reason and extrapolate.
… If you have an idea of yourself and of the future and can
extrapolate and generalize from what you see around you, then if you see your
comrade killed by a lion, you realize that you too could be killed by a lion.
This is useful if it causes you to sharpen your spear in readiness, but it also
brings anxiety – it summons the future possibility of death in the present. The
next day you might see a different comrade killed by a snake, another by
disease and yet another by fire. You see that there are countless ways
in which you could be killed, and they could strike at any time: prepare as you
will, death’s onslaught is relentless. …
We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time
cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. … This is the central theme
of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortal. … Since we
attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, ‘death has us by the
scruff of the neck at every moment.’ No matter what we do, no matter how hard
we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war
we are doomed to lose. … The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our
deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. … We
therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our
powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one
doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the
imagining.
Modern cognitive psychology gives a scientific account of this
ancient intuition. Our acceptance of new facts or possibilities depends upon
our ability to imagine them – we accept, for example, that playing with matches
could cause our house to burn down because this is something we can easily
picture. But when our minds come across an obstacle to imagining a certain
scenario, then we find it much more difficult to accept. Our own death is just
such a scenario, as it involves the end of consciousness, and we cannot
consciously simulate what it is like to not be conscious.
And thus we have a paradox: When we peer into the future we find
our wish to live forever fulfilled, as it seems inconceivable that we might one
day cease to be. Thus we believe in our own immortality. Yet at the same time
we are painfully aware of the countless possible threats to our being. … And
thus we believe in our own mortality. Our very same overblown intellectual
faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not,
both that death is a fact and that it is impossible. … The paradox stems from
two different ways of viewing ourselves — on the one hand, objectively, or from
the outside, as it were, and on the other hand, subjectively, or from the
inside. When we deploy reason to view ourselves as we do other living things
around us, then we realize that we, like them, will fail, die and rot. From
this outside, objective perspective, we are mortals. But when we switch to our
own perspective and try to make sense of what this means subjectively, then we
encounter the imaginative obstacle – the inability to accept the prospect of
annihilation. Our introspection tells us we are imperishable as the angels,
indivisible and everlasting; yet when we look in the mirror we see ourselves as
others see us … an imperfect and impermanent creature fated to a brief
existence.
It
is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so
we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. … Therefore,
at bottom no one believes in his own death … for in the unconscious every one
of us is convinced of his own immortality. (Freud)
To
lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as
to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
(Michel
de Montaigne)
All phenomena are metaphysical, wherefore … life is but a dream. (Buckminster Fuller)
The
aim of life is to live. . . . No why or wherefore… (Henry Miller)
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the
human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any
situation, even if only for a few seconds. … The attempt to develop a sense of
humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned
while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of
living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the
human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way. … Every day, every hour, offered the
opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would
or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very
self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the
plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into
the form of the typical inmate.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a
meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as
fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. … The
way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way
in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the
most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may
remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for
self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an
animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the
opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may
afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. …
Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with
fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering. … Woe to
him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no
point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man
rejected all encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any
more.” What sort of answer can one give to that? … What was really needed was a
fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and,
furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really
matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of
ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our
answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in
right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the
right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets
for each individual.
Love is
the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his
personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human
being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential
traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is
potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.
Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to
actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of
what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a
target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness,
cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended
side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the
by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must
happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring
about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and
go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see
that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you
precisely because you had forgotten to think of it. (Viktor
Frankl – Man’s Search For Meaning)
All
is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis. (Henry Miller)
Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two
contradictions. This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world
— this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall
pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one
flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and
continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? (Virginia
Woolf’s last entry in her diary)
Maps
and memories are bound together, a little as songs and love affairs are. The
artifact envelops the emotion, and then the emotion stores away in the
artifact: We hear 'All the Things You Are' or 'Hey There Delilah' just by
chance while we're in love, and then the love is forever after stored in the
song. … This attachment requires no particular creative energy. It just
happens. … Maps, especially schematic ones, are the places where memories go not
to die, or be pinned, but to live forever. … Cognitive science now insists that
our minds make maps before they take snapshots, storing in schematic form the
information we need to navigate and make sense of the world. Maps are our first
mental language, not our latest. The photographic sketch, with its optical
hesitations, is a thing we force from history; the map, with its neat
certainties and foggy edges, looks like the way we think. … A remembered
relation of spaces, a hole, a circle, a shaded area – and a whole life comes
alive. The real appeal of the map, perhaps, is not so much that it stores our
past as that it forces our emotions to be pressed into their most parsimonious
essence – and, as every poet knows, it is emotion under the force of limits,
emotion pressed down and held down to strict formal constraints, that makes for
the purest expression. These maps are street haiku, whose emotions, whether
made by the well known or the anonymous, are more moving for being so stylized.
… Each diagrams the one thing we most want a map to show us, and that is a way
home. (Adam
Gopnik)
The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. (Seneca)
Read
not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find
talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
(Francis Bacon)
The important thing is not to stop questioning… Never lose holy curiosity. (Albert Einstein)
For
the Greeks, curiosity was not even a clearly articulated concept.
To the extent that it was acknowledged at all, it stands in contrast to its
mercurial sibling, wonder. Aristotle believed that all humans
naturally desire knowledge, but he felt that curiosity (periergia) had
little role to play in philosophy. It was a kind of aimless, witless tendency
to pry into things that didn’t concern us. Wonder (thauma) was far more
significant, the true root of enquiry: ‘It is owing to their wonder,’ he
wrote, ‘that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.’ … Until
the seventeenth century, wonder was esteemed while curiosity was reviled. …
That some knowledge was forbidden to humankind is of course central to the
Christian Creation myth: this is the basis of the Fall. ‘When you eat of it
your eyes will be opened and you will be like God’, the serpent tells Eve of
the fruit on the tree of knowledge. The transgressive aspect of curiosity is an
insistent theme in Christian theology. Time and again the student of the Bible
is warned to respect the limits of enquiry and to be wary of too much learning.
‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God’, proclaims Deuteronomy.
Solomon (if it was he who wrote Ecclesiastes) cautions that ‘with much wisdom comes
much sorrow; the more grief’ Or, as the King
James version has it ‘Be not curious in unnecessary matters: For more things are
shewed unto thee than men understand’. St Paul
was considered to have echoed this sentiment in the admonition ‘Seek not to
know high things.’ The fact that he did not actually write this at all
speaks volumes in itself, suggesting that the mistranslation fitted with
prevailing prejudice. … ‘Do not take pride in the arts or sciences,’ wrote
Thomas à Kempis in the fifteenth century, ‘rather, fear what has been told to
you.’
[Wonder,
on the other hand, had an element of unquestioning submission that resonated
with the religious tradition]
The
central problem with curiosity was that it was thought to be motivated by
excessive pride. The accumulation of pointless learning ran the risk not that
one would become another Lucifer but that one would primp and preen rather than
bow one’s head before the Lord. ‘O curiosity! O vanity!’, cried the late
twelfth-century theologian Alexander Neckam. ‘O vain curiosity! O curious vanity!'
… The imperative of pious humility was what commended wonder to Augustine at
the same time as it indicted curiosity. There was nothing frivolous or
hedonistic about wonder. It instilled awe, reminding us of our powerlessness
and insignificance before the glory of God. That is why wonder in the face of
nature’s splendor was seen as the educated response, and a willingness to
believe in marvels and prodigies was not only praiseworthy but virtually a
religious duty. Curiosity, like scepticism, was a sign that you lacked devotion
and faith.
(Philip Ball - Curiosity: How Science Became
Interested in Everything)
The
essence of ‘nowness’ runs like fire along the fuse of time. (George Santayana - Realms of
Being)
According
to conventional wisdom, highly successful people have three things in common:
motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a
combination of hard work, talent, and luck. But there is a fourth ingredient,
one that’s critical but often neglected: success depends heavily on how we
approach our interactions with other people. Every time we interact with
another person at work, we have a choice to make: do we try to claim as much
value as we can, or contribute value without worrying about what we receive in
return? … Takers have a distinctive signature: they like
to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favor, putting
their own interests ahead of others’ needs. Takers believe that the world is a
competitive, dog-eat-dog place. They feel that to succeed, they need to be
better than others. To prove their competence, they self-promote and make sure
they get plenty of credit for their efforts. Garden-variety takers aren’t cruel
or cutthroat; they’re just cautious and self-protective.
…
In the workplace, givers are a relatively rare breed. They
tilt reciprocity in the other direction, preferring to give more than they get.
Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer
them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need
from them. These preferences aren’t about money: givers and takers aren’t
distinguished by how much they donate to charity or the compensation that they
command from their employers. Rather, givers and takers differ in their
attitudes and actions toward other people.
If
you’re a taker, you help others strategically, when the benefits to you
outweigh the personal costs. If you’re a giver, you might use a different
cost-benefit analysis: you help whenever the benefits to others exceed the
personal costs. Alternatively, you might not think about the personal costs at
all, helping others without expecting anything in return. If you’re a giver at
work, you simply strive to be generous in sharing your time, energy, knowledge,
skills, ideas, and connections with other people who can benefit from them. …
Outside the workplace, most of us are givers in close relationships like
marriages and friendships, contributing without preoccupation with keeping
score.
In
the workplace, however, few of us are purely givers or takers – rather, what
dominates is a third style: We become matchers, striving
to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting. Matchers operate on the
principle of fairness: when they help others, they protect themselves by
seeking reciprocity. If you’re a matcher, you believe in tit for tat, and your
relationships are governed by even exchanges of favors. … Giving, taking, and
matching are three fundamental styles of social interaction, but the lines
between them aren’t hard and fast. You might find that you shift from one
reciprocity style to another as you travel across different work roles and
relationships. It wouldn’t be surprising if you act like a taker when
negotiating your salary, a giver when mentoring someone with less experience
than you, and a matcher when sharing expertise with a colleague.
Evidence
shows that at work, the vast majority of people develop a primary reciprocity
style, which captures how they approach most of the people most of the time.
And this primary style can play as much of a role in our success as hard work,
talent, and luck.
So
who, then, is at the bottom of the success ladder? … The worst performers and
the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in
the middle. … Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success
ladder. Across occupations, if you examine the link between reciprocity styles
and success, the givers are more likely to become champs – not only chumps. …
The answer is less about raw talent or aptitude, and more about the strategies
givers use and the choices they make. … We all have goals for our own
individual achievements, and it turns out that successful givers are every bit
as ambitious as takers and matchers. They simply have a different way of
pursuing their goals.
Givers,
takers, and matchers all can – and do – achieve success. But there’s something
distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades. When
takers win, there’s usually someone else who loses. Research shows that people
tend to envy successful takers and look for ways to knock them down a notch. In
contrast, when givers win, people are rooting for them and supporting them,
rather than gunning for them. Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple
effect, enhancing the success of people around them. You’ll see that the
difference lies in how giver success creates value, instead of just claiming
it.
(Adam Grant - Give and Take: A Revolutionary
Approach to Success)
We may want to believe that we are still concerned,
as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA
scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But
the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring. (Kathleen
Norris)
What
the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that
their prior conclusions remain intact.
(Warren Buffett)
If
there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of
life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of
this life. (Camus)
The
idea of the ‘passage of time’ captures our sense of the loss of the past and of
the implacability of change that propels us from birth to death, in respect of which
we seem like logs on a river surging towards a cataract. Ridding ourselves of
spatialised time, and quasi-spatial notions requires constant vigilance against
long-established habits. (Raymond
Tallis – UK naturalist philosopher)
Given that I was born a few months after
Auschwitz was liberated, it is hardly surprising that I have a strong sense of
the evil that humans – individually and collectively – do. My position is that
of cautious and chastened optimism, a belief that, if we are ourselves well-treated
by others, we will usually treat others reasonably well. (Raymond
Tallis)
A man is always a teller of stories, he lives
surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything
that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as
if he were recounting it. (Sartre)
There are things so horrible and tragic, that
nothing that subsequently happens can diminish the tragedy or the horror … the
attempt to put an otherworldly frame around such things, so they seem not to be
the tragedies or the horrors that they manifestly are, borders on the childish
and the obscene. These tragic defects are overcome, rather, by salvation:
Salvation is not making it all better; it is the grace of finding a way to live
that keeps faith with the importance of goodness and love even in the face of
everything that can happen to you … Salvation, understood as the goal of
religious or spiritual life, is a new orientation that authentically addresses
the large-scale defects of human life, and thereby provides a reservoir of
energy otherwise dissipated in denial of, and resistance to, necessary
suffering. (Princeton
Professor Mark Johnston)
It is necessary that we face up to the
‘large-scale structural defects in human life’, for instance arbitrary and
meaningless suffering, the decay of ageing, untimely death, our profound
ignorance of our condition, the destructiveness produced by our tendency to
demand premium treatment for ourselves, and the vulnerability of everything we
cherish to chance and to the massed power of states and other institutions. A
truly religious or redeemed life is one in which these large-scale defects are
somehow finally healed or addressed or overcome or rendered irrelevant.
Theodicy is an unsurpassably disgusting practice which seeks to show that
everything is ultimately for the best. Genuine belief in an omniscient, wholly
benevolent and omnipotent God is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the
reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering. (Galen Strawson - British Analytic philosopher and
literary critic)
The duty to seek God's face survives
his non-existence. To follow it is to seek God's face because "the beauty
of being" (as Spinoza observed) is the correct name for "God". …
An artist may be driven by ambition, by a violent desire for fame, self-glory,
unalloyed self-expression. But if the gift is there, the self burns away in the act of art. There's really
nothing one can do about it. The self dissolves in the beauty of being. (Galen
Strawson)
When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls
and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half
out of water utters
the cantillations he sang
in his first spring,
and the snake lowers
himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the
stones, one sees
they all live to mate with
their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of
solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind,
toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside
one's own singing
is to come back, if one
can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the
exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long
time alone.
Galway
Kinnell
As to the question of loneliness, I already know that only
the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing
modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition.
… You put together two people who have
not been put together before – Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this
reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater
than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it
is emotionally possible. … We live on the flat, on the level, and yet – and so
– we aspire . . . Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But
when we soar, we can also crash . . . Every love story is a potential grief
story. … Anger at the reactions of others is noted: Since the griefstruck
rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and
offence-taking are common. Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of
death; they avoid you as if they fear infection. Some, without knowing it, half
expect you to do their mourning for them. (Julian
Barnes - Levels of Life)
To
trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing,
gratifying, and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet,
anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these
distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than
none…. The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling
of fear…. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning. (Dostoevsky)
Specialization
may be all well very well if you happen to have skills particularly suited to
these jobs, or if you are passionate a niche area of work, and of course there
is also the benefit of feeling pride in being considered an expert. But there
is equally the danger of becoming dissatisfied by the repetition inherent in
many specialist professions. … Moreover, our culture of specialization conflicts
with something most of us intuitively recognize, but which career advisers are
only beginning to understand: we each have multiple selves. … We have
complex, multi-faceted experiences, interests, values and talents, which might
mean that we could also find fulfillment as a web designer, or a community
police officer, or running an organic cafe.
This
is a potentially liberating idea with radical implications. It raises the
possibility that we might discover career fulfillment by escaping the confines
of specialization and cultivating ourselves as wide achievers … allowing the
various petals of our identity to fully unfold. (Roman
Krznaric)
What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. (Victor Frankl)
A
master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his
play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his
recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of
excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether
he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. (François-René
de Chateaubriand)
Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. (Albert Camus)
[in commenting on the science vs religion debate] There can be
alternatives that are not always religious. That's an interesting false
dichotomy that's often set up: If it's not this, it must be religious. No: If
it's not this, it could be other stuff you haven't thought of yet. You can't
assert an answer just because it's not something else. That's a false argument
that's been made throughout time, and the better scientists that move forward
never assume anything just because one thing is wrong. (physicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson)
Without Contraries is no progression.
Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy,
Love and Hate,
are necessary to Human existence.
(William Blake - The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell)
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