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Is there another word for synonym?
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George Carlin
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The protagonist, Amanda, discusses her sex relationship with her husband, John Paul --
As long as it's done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn't mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy. What has marriage got to do with it? Marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen is not going to wash our love away.
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Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)
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A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.
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Criss Jami (Healology)
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Love is full of peace and rage. It's another synonym of freedom - sacrifice is necessary.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo
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Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34
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Philip K. Howard (The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America)
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Fantasy Is just another synonym for "having-your-own-crazy-world-bcause-the-real-one-is-too-cynical-to-handle-your-craziness".
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Aleena farrukh
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Blessing: just another synonym for her existence
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Ismaaciil C. Ubax
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I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.
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Alberto Manguel
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Stupidity isn't synonymous with insanity. Stupidity is the action of making no attempt to comprehend another's calculations and considerations about life and in turn making the representation that such a person is stupid.
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Ryan Fletcher
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Q: Isn't the employment of thought in the psychological sense synonymous with corruption? Bohm: Why do you say that? Q: Are there not only two states: corruption and innocence? Bohm: Are you saying that thought by itself is incapable of innocence? Q: In the psychological sense it seems so. Bohm: It may seem so. But the question is whether it is actually so. That's the question we're trying to explore. We'll admit the fact that it seems so; it has that appearance. Now the question is: what is actually the case? We have to explore this, and it will take some digging into. We can't simply take the way things seem and just work on that, because that would be another kind of mistake thought makes—taking the surface and calling it the reality.
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David Bohm (Thought as a System: Second edition (Key Ideas Book 4))
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another way, Papa Homonym and Mama Synonym had bought a bottle of Boone’s Farm, some whip cream, and silk blindfolds to bump uglies like uglies had never been bumped before—to pervert Schoolhouse Rock into a late-night Cinemax special—in hopes of conceiving a phonetic paradox.
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Shayne Silvers (Godless (Feathers and Fire, #7))
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It is important in thinking about this lens to separate two ideas that are too often synonymous in the mind of the public: the practice of science and the scientific worldview that it feeds. Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry. The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than-human world. Trying to understand the life of another being or another system so unlike our own is often humbling and, for many scientists, is a deeply spiritual pursuit.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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The average grunt when not out in “the shit” the boonie thought about all the “Ball Games”, the battles, he had fought, all the narrow escapes from death, of buddies who had fallen one by one and wondered just how long his luck would hold. It came from knowing that a grunt could not fight in many “Ball Games” before he became a casualty. The general thinking was that if a grunt fought in say six without being hit he would not last another six, for there was a feeling that, sooner or later, death caught up with you but it was not what actually happened. There was a near-truism that if a grunt remained in the shit for a long time without a break he was almost certain to become a casualty, but casualty and death are not synonymous. A more realistic calculation was between three to six people wounded for one “kool aid”, killed in action. Nevertheless, it sure was unsettling to think that the best to hope for was receiving a wound.
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Sergeant Walker
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Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous. “All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law,” he goes on, “is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another.
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Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
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STRANGE LAND
Love is the strangest land
It's that promised land of happiness
That everyone keep talking about
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Love means both beautiful and ugly
It does not discriminate against anyone
In front of a lover's heart
Who cares so much for a person who was
Formerly considered as a stranger
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Love is the bridge that all friends must walk on
This love can easily turn you into a martyr
It can force deaf people to wish they could hear
And the mute to wish he could speak and pour out his heart
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Love is like that stream of calm water
But every time it decides to flood
There will be no one to hold on
Since many people are mostly unprepared for the storm
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Love is full of peace and rage
It's another synonym of freedom - sacrifice is necessary
Another way to fully live your potential
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In the end, love kills, and love saves lives
Love brings peace and causes endless wars
It can either build or destroy everything in its path
Our innocent hearts have been colonised by it.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo
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Honest question: If I am a good Christian, and have faith and stuff, will God protect my children? Honest answer: He might. Or He might not. Honest follow-up question: So what good is He? I think the answer is that He’s still good. But our safety, and the safety of our kids, isn’t part of the deal. This is incredibly hard to accept on the American evangelical church scene, because we love families, and we love loving families, and we nearly associate godliness itself with cherishing family beyond any other earthly thing. That someone would challenge this bond, the primacy of the family bond, is offensive. And yet . . . Jesus did it. And it was even more offensive, then, in a culture that wasn’t nearly so individualistic as ours. Everything was based on family: your reputation, your status—everything. And yet He challenges the idea that our attachment to family is so important, so noble, that it is synonymous with our love for Him. Which leads to some other spare thoughts, like this: we can make idols out of our families. Again, in a “Focus on the Family” subculture, it’s hard to imagine how this could be. Families are good. But idols aren’t made of bad things. They used to be fashioned out of trees or stone, and those aren’t bad, either. Idols aren’t bad things; they’re good things, made Ultimate. We make things Ultimate when we see the true God as a route to these things, or a guarantor of them. It sounds like heresy, but it’s not: the very safety of our family can become an idol. God wants us to want Him for Him, not merely for what He can provide. Here’s another thought: As wonderful as “mother love” is, we have to make sure it doesn’t become twisted. And it can. It can become a be-all, end-all, and the very focus of a woman’s existence. C. S. Lewis writes that it’s especially dangerous because it seems so very, very righteous. Who can possibly challenge a mother’s love? God can, and does, when it becomes an Ultimate. And it’s more likely to become a disordered Ultimate than many other things, simply because it does seem so very righteous. Lewis says this happens with patriotism too.
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Brant Hansen (Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better)
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Advaita, being the non-dual reality, necessarily points to the essential truth in all religions. Paula Marvelly points out that: 'All religions and faiths contain an esoteric heart, a mystical belief that I AM is in fact synonymous with God.' (Ref. 353) As Gandhi said: 'If the same divinity constitutes the core of all individuals, they cannot but be equal. Further, divinity in one person cannot in any way be unjust to the same divinity in another person.' (Ref. 215) Sayings from the bible such as those of God to Moses ('I am that I am' ) or of Christ ('The kingdom of heaven is within you') express the fundamental truth of Advaita, the non-dual reality of Brahman.
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Dennis Waite (Back to the Truth: 5000 Years of Advaita)
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The average grunt when not out in “the shit”, the boonie, thought about all the “Ball Games”, the battles, he had fought, all the narrow escapes from death, of buddies who had fallen one by one and wondered just how long his luck would hold. It came from knowing that a grunt could not fight in many “Ball Games” before he became a casualty. The general thinking was that if a grunt fought in say six without being hit he would not last another six, for there was a feeling that, sooner or later, death caught up with you but it was not what actually happened. There was a near-truism that if a grunt remained in the shit for a long time without a break he was almost certain to become a casualty, but casualty and death are not synonymous. A more realistic calculation was between three to six people wounded for one “kool aid”, killed in action. Nevertheless, it sure was unsettling to think that the best to hope for was receiving a wound.
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Robin Blair-Crawford
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The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEO's, talk of "business plans" and "return on investment," as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate either to education or to research.
But this is not possible. No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be made true, according to a standard that is not economic.
To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to "property" and education to training for the "job market."
If, on the contrary, [Sir Albert] Howard was right in his belief that health is the "one great subject," then a unifying aim and a common critical standard are clearly implied. Health is at once quantitative and qualitative; it requires both sufficiency and goodness. It is comprehensive (it is synonymous with "wholeness"), for it must leave nothing out. And it is uncompromisingly local and particular; it has to do with the sustenance of particular places, creatures, human bodies, and human minds.
If a university began to assume responsibility for the health of its place and its local constituents, then all of its departments would have a common aim, and they would have to judge their place and themselves and one another by a common standard. They would need one another's knowledge. They would have to communicate with one another; the diversity of specialists would have to speak to one another in a common language. And here again Howard is exemplary, for he wrote, and presumably spoke, a plain, vigorous, forthright English-- no jargon, no condescension, no ostentation, no fooling around.
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Wendell Berry
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Kircher’s system shows certain affinities with our series of quaternios. Thus the Second Monad is a duality consisting of opposites, corresponding to the angelic world that was split by Lucifer’s fall. Another significant analogy is that Kircher conceives his schema as a cycle set in motion by God as the prime cause, and unfolding out of itself, but brought back to God again through the activity of human understanding, so that the end returns once more to the beginning. This, too, is an analogy of our formula. The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process. Just as the central idea of the lapis Philosophorum plainly signifies the self, so the opus with its countless symbols illustrates the process of individuation, the step-by-step development of the self from an unconscious state to a conscious one. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.113 According to Michael Maier, the gold, another synonym for the self, comes from the opus circulatorium of the sun. This circle is “the line that runs back upon itself (like the serpent that with its head bites its own tail), wherein that eternal painter and potter, God, may be discerned.”114 In this circle, Nature “has related the four qualities to one another and drawn, as it were, an equilateral square, since contraries are bound together by contraries, and enemies by enemies, with the same everlasting bonds.” Maier compares this squaring of the circle to the “homo quadratus,” the four-square man, who “remains himself” come weal come woe.115 He calls it the “golden house, the twicebisected circle, the four-cornered phalanx, the rampart, the city wall, the four-sided line of battle.”116 This circle is a magic circle consisting of the union of opposites, “immune to all injury.
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C.G. Jung (Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works, Vol 9ii))
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Fearing death - neurotically manifested as a fear of “failure” or being needy in American culture - we slavishly pursue “success” as it is defined by the surrounding culture. Even more troubling, we become hostile toward out-group members who call our hero system into question.
The great problem in all this - a problem we need to face before concluding - is how God and religion undergird and support the cultural hero system. Cultural hero systems and religion are deeply interconnected - in fact, they are generally synonymous - with our “God” or “gods” providing the warrant for our way of life. Recall that in order for hero systems to confer immunity in the face of death, they must be experienced as immortal and eternal. And there is no better way to create that sense of immortality than to baptize and sacralize the hero system, to fuse our way of life with the way of God.
What this means is that “God” and religious institutions can become as enslaved to the fear of death as everything else in the culture. The church can become as much a principality and power as any other cultural institution. And if this is so, service to “God” and “the church” can produce satanic outcomes as much as, if not more so, any other form of service to the power of death in our world.
In biblical terms, this is idolatry - when “God” and religion become another form of our slavery to the fear of death, another fallen principality and power demanding slavish service and loyalty. Idolatry is when our allegiances to the faith-based principalities and powers, and the cultural institutions they are wedded to (e.g., the nation-state), keep us enslaved to death, bound to the fear-driven cycle of sin as we become paranoid and hostile toward out-group members. It’s not news that much of the hostility and violence in the world has been rooted in religious conflict.
Idolatry, then, is the slavery of God where “God” and “the church” become another manifestation of our slavery to death, another form of “the devil’s work” in our lives.
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Richard Beck (The Slavery of Death)
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(AIR)
THE BOOK OF LUCIFER
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Roman god, Lucifer, was the bearer for light, the spirit of the air, the personification of enlightenment. In Christian mythology he became synonymous with evil, which was only to have been expected from a religion whose very existence is perpetuated by clouded definitions and bogus values! It is time to set the record straight. False moralisms and occult inaccuracies must be corrected. Entertaining as they might be, most stories and plays about Devil worship must be recognized as the obsolete absurdities they are. It has been said "the truth will make men free". The truth alone has never set anyone free. It is only with DOUBT which will bring mental emancipation. Without the wonderful element of doubt, the doorway through which truth passes would be tightly shut, impervious to the most strenuous poundings of a thousand Lucifers. How understandable that Holy Scripture should refer to the Infernal monarch as the "father of lies" - a magnificent example of character inversion. If one is to believe this theological accusation that the Devil represents falsehood, then it surely must be concurred that it was HE, NOT GOD, THAT ESTABLISHED ALL SPIRITUAL RELIGIONS AND WHO WROTE ALL OF THE HOLY BIBLES! When one doubt is followed by another, the bubble, grown large from long accumulated fallacies, threatens to burst. For those who already doubt supposed truths, this book is revelation. Then Lucifer will have risen. Now is the time for doubt! The bubble of falsehood is bursting and its sound is the roar of the world!
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Anton Szandor LaVey (The Satanic Bible)
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Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.
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Alexander R. Galloway
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What is the vril?” I asked. Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:— “I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest, have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent that they are convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call ‘atmospheric magnetism,’ they can influence the variations of temperature—in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril.
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Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Coming Race)
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It is interesting to note that Marx also defines freedom in terms of a successful relationship to others: Only in community [with others does each] individual [have] the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.’ From this perspective, being free means nothing other than self-realization with others. Freedom is synonymous with a working community (i.e., a successful one). For Marx, individual freedom represents a ruse - a trick of capital. ‘Free competition’, which is based on the idea of individual freedom, simply amounts to the ‘relation of capital to itself as another capital, i.e., the real
conduct of capital as capital’. Capital reproduces by entering into relations with itself as another form of Capital: through free competition. It copulates with the Other of itself by way of individual freedom. Capital grows inasmuch as people engage in free competition. Hereby, individual freedom amounts to servitude inasmuch as Capital lays hold of it and uses it for its own propagation. That is, Capital exploits individual freedom in order to breed: ‘It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.’ The freedom of Capital achieves self-realization byway of individual freedom. In the process, individuals degrade
into the genital organs of Capital. Individual freedom lends it an ‘automatic’ subjectivity of its own, which spurs it to reproduce actively. In this way. Capital continuously‘ brings forth living offspring’. Today, individual freedom is taking on excessive forms; ultimately, this amounts to nothing other than the excess of Capital itself.
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Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power)
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..reincarnation is a truth, because in existence nothing dies. Even the physicist will say, about the objective world, that nothing dies. You can destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki but you cannot destroy a single drop of water.
You cannot destroy. Physicists have become aware of this impossibility. Whatever you do, only the form changes.
But nothing can be destroyed in the objective world.
The same is true about the world of consciousness, of life. There is no death. Death is only a change from one form into another form, and ultimately from form to formlessness.
Only Gautam Buddha has given the right word for this experience. In English it is difficult to translate it, because languages develop only after experience. It is just arbitrarily that I am calling it "enlightenment." But it is very arbitrary; it does not really give you the sense that Buddha's word gives. He calls it nirvana.
Nirvana means ceasing to be. Strange... ceasing to be.
Not to be is nirvana. That does not mean that you are no more; it simply means you are no longer an entity, embodied.
The dewdrop drops into the ocean.
Now it is the whole ocean.
Existence is alive at every stage. Nothing is dead. Even a stone - which you think seems to be completely dead - is not dead. So many living electrons are running so fast inside it that you cannot see them, but they are all living beings. Their bodies are so small that nobody has seen them; we don't even have any scientific instrument to see the electron, it is only guesswork. We can see the effect; hence we think there must be a cause. The cause has not been seen, only the effect has been seen. But the electron is as alive as you are.
The whole existence is synonymous with life.
Here nothing dies. Death is an impossibility.
Yes, things change from one form to another form till they become mature enough that they need not go to school again. Then they move into a formless life, then they become one with the ocean itself.
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Osho (From the false to the truth: Answers to the seekers of the path)
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When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so. Malcolm’s statement is not answered by references to the triumphs of the N.A.A.C.P., the more particularly since very few liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evidence that one can carry into court, or how long such court battles take. Neither is it answered by references to the student sit-in-movement, if only because not all Negroes are students and not all of them live in the South. I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm’s statements simply because I disagree with his conclusions, or in order to pacify the liberal conscience. Things are as bad as the Muslims say they are—in fact, they are worse, and the Muslims do not help matters—but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. At the end of a television program on which Malcolm X and I both appeared, Malcolm was stopped by a white member of the audience who said, “I have a thousand dollars and an acre of land. What’s going to happen to me?” I admired the directness of the man’s question, but I didn’t hear Malcolm’s reply, because I was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today cannot very usefully be compared.
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James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
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Scripture and Tradition Scriptural exegesis was no mere school exercise. The New Testament text became the battleground for the fierce debates over the nature of Jesus, God and man, that were waged in the fifth century and exegesis was the weapon that all the combatants wielded with both skill and conviction.23 The scriptural witness, often couched in familiar, popular, and even homely language, had to be converted into the abstract and learned currency of theology, the language of choice of the Church’s intelligentsia. Scripture, as it turned out, was merely the starting point. The steering mechanism was exegesis, and behind the exegesis, the helmsman at the rudder, stood another elemental principle: tradition.24 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each possessed a Scripture that was, by universal consent, a closed Book. But God’s silence was a relative thing, and his providential direction of the community could be detected and “read” in other ways. Early within the development of Christianity, for example, one is aware of a subtle balance operating between appeals to Scripture and tradition. It was not a novel enterprise. By Jesus’ time the notion of an oral tradition separate from but obviously connected to the written Scriptures was already familiar, if not universally accepted, in Jewish circles. Jesus and the Pharisees debated the authority of the oral tradition more than once, and though he does not appear to have denied the premise, Jesus, his contemporaries remarked, “taught on his own authority,” not on that of some other sage. He substituted his authority for the tradition of the Fathers. Thus Jesus was proposing himself as the source of a new tradition handed on to his followers and confirmed by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The Christian view that there was a tradition distinct from the Scriptures may have begun with the early understanding of Scripture as synonymous with the Bible—serious exegetical attention did not begin to be paid to the Gospels until the end of the second century—whereas the “tradition” was constituted of the teachings and redemptive death of Jesus, both of which Jesus himself had placed in their true “scriptural” context.25 Thus, even when parts of Jesus’ teachings and actions had been committed to writing in the Gospels, and so began to constitute a new, specifically Christian Scripture, the distinction between Scripture in the biblical sense and tradition in the Christian sense continued to be felt in the Christian community.26
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F.E. Peters (The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam - New Edition (Princeton Classic Editions))
“
Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’…
As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers.
[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]
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Louis Yako
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Let us now assume that under truly extraordinary circumstances, the daimon nevertheless breaks through in the individual, so to speak, and is this able to let its destructive transcendence be felt: then one would have a kind of active experience of death. Thereupon the second connection becomes clear: why the figure of the daimon or doppelgänger in the ancient myths could be melded with the deity of death. In the Nordic tradition the warrior sees his Valkyrie precisely at the moment of death or mortal danger.
In religious asceticism, mortification, self-renunciation, and the impulse of devotion to God are the preferred methods of provoking and successfully overcoming the crisis I have just mentioned. Everyone knows the expressions which refer to these states, such as the 'mystical death' or 'dark night of the soul', etc. In contrast to this, within the framework of a heroic tradition, the path to the same goal is the active rapture, the Dionysian unleashing of the active element. At its lower levels, we find phenomenons such as the use of dance as a sacred technique for achieving an ecstasy of the soul that summons and uses profound energies. While the individual’s life is surrendered to Dionysian rhythm, another life sinks into it, as if it where his abyssal roots surfacing. The 'wild host' Furies, Erinyes, and suchlike spiritual natures are symbolic picturings of this energy, thus corresponding to a manifestation of the daimon in its terrifying and active transcendence. At a higher level we find sacred war-games; higher still, war itself. And this brings us back to the ancient Aryan concept of battle and the warrior ascetic.
At the climax of danger and heroic battle, the possibility for such an extraordinary experience was recognized. The Lating ludere, meaning both 'to play' and 'to fight', seems to contain the idea of release. This is one of the many allusions to the inherent ability of battle to release deeply-buried powers from individual limitations and let them freely emerge. Hence the third comparison: the daimon, the Lar, the individualizing I, etc., are not only identical with the Furies, Erinyes, and other unleashed Dionysian natures, which themselves have many traits similar to the goddess of death — they are also synonymous with the storm maidens of battle, the Valkyries and Fravartis. In the texts, for example, the Fravartis are called 'the terrible, the all-powerful', 'those who attack in storm and bestow victory upon those who conjure them', or, more precisely, those who conjure them up in themselves.
From there to the final comparison is only a short step. In the Aryan tradition the same martial beings eventually take on the form of victory-goddesses, a transformation which denotes the happy completion of the inner experience in question. Just as the daimon or doppelgänger signifies a deep, supra-individual power in its latent condition as compared to ordinary consciousness; just as the Furies and Erinyes reflect a particular manifestation of daimonic rages and eruptions (and the goddesses of death, Valkyries, Fravartis, etc., refer to the same conditions, as long as these are facilitated by battle and heroism) — in the same way the goddess of victory is the expression of the triumph of the I over this power. She signifies the victorious ascent to a state unendangered by ecstasies and sub-personal forms of disintegration, a danger that always lurks behind the frenetic moment of Dionysian and even heroic action. The ascent to a spiritual, truly supra-personal condition that makes one free, immortal, and internally indestructible, when the 'Two becomes One', expresses itself in this image of mythical consciousness.
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Julius Evola (Metaphysics of War)
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contextualization is inevitable. As soon as you choose a language to speak in and particular words to use within that language, the culture-laden nature of words comes into play. We often think that translating words from one language to another is simple — it’s just a matter of locating the synonym in the other language. But there are few true synonyms. The word God is translated into German as Gott— simple enough. But the cultural history of German speakers is such that the word Gott strikes German ears differently than the English word God strikes the ears of English speakers. It means something different to them. You may need to do more explanation if you are to give German speakers the same biblical concept of God that the word conveys to English speakers.
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Timothy J. Keller (Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City)
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Bakushan had only been open for a couple of months, but expectations were already sky-high. Still, few people had mentioned the food. Instead, everyone was writing about the up-and-coming chef, Pascal Fox. According to nearly every article, he'd dropped out of college and worked at top French restaurants around the world. Then, at twenty-five and on every "30 under 30" list in existence, he had received an offer to take over L'Escalier, a cathedral-ceilinged white-tablecloth institution in Midtown. But just as New York was ready to inaugurate him into a realm of Immortal Chefs synonymous with a certain level of luxurious precision, Pascal had said he would open a place on his own. He didn't have a location or a concept- or so he'd said in his interviews- just a conviction that he didn't want to fall into the trap of being yet another French chef at another fancy restaurant.
So there we were, in front of his brand-new place. It was hard to label it. I had read neo-modernist and Asian-American eclectic. The food was hard to pin down, but the inside was just cool, at least from my sidewalk vantage point. It was 5:45 and already there was a forty-five-minute wait for a spot at one of the communal, no-reservation tables.
I looked at the crowd while we waited and saw a couple of girls dressed in tight, short dresses. One of them held a food magazine with Pascal Fox's face on the cover against a blurred kitchen background. I stole a peek at the photo. His eyes were a deep black-brown with a streak of gold. His hair was charmingly messed up, longish bits going every which way, casting shadows on his sculpted cheekbones.
That was the other thing. Pascal was exceedingly good-looking. I hadn't paid attention to the hype around his looks, but seeing these girls swoon over his photo made his handsomeness hard to ignore. And... the pictures. I'm only human.
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Jessica Tom (Food Whore)
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Ontologies are not just another type of controlled vocabulary. Although they are similar to thesauri in that they address relationships among concepts, there are significant differences. The most notable is that the purpose of an ontology is farther reaching than that of a controlled vocabulary. A thesaurus, most often, is focused on addressing synonyms, homographs, hierarchy, and so on. Although an ontology is a formalized vocabulary of terms, an ontology’s emphasis is not solely lexical; it is also an attempt to represent the reality or essence of a situation, knowledge domain, or conceptual framework through formal definitions and specific relationships (i.e., those going beyond simple hierarchy and synonymy).
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Arlene G. Taylor (The Organization of Information)
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At its core, town government is the closest government to the people and, accordingly, you truly get a flavor for the residents of the town by watching their best-and-brightest elected leaders reviewing rezoning applications peacefully during one meeting and cussing one another out at the next. Oftentimes, members conduct themselves just as professionally mundane as in any other form of government, but when they do flare up, it’s the sort of rocket launch that occasionally gets the cops and/or the courts involved, as I covered multiple times in Haymarket. (My favorite, of course, involved a town council member being found guilty of “using abusive language” following a dispute about what synonym for testicle he told the mayor to suck during a parade.) After all, nothing exemplifies former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous observation that “All politics is local” like town government, especially with the more modern take that “All politics is personal.
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Danica Roem (Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change)
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Giants in Jeans Sonnet 9
Thread by thread fabric is made.
Heart by heart community is made.
Star by star the sky is made.
Shoulder to shoulder the world is made.
The power of one is the power of all,
Wilderness is another name for divisionism.
When we are together we are civilized,
Civilization is synonym for nonsectarianism.
But the tragedy of the world is,
Each thread thinks they are all important.
And the problems faced by others,
Are all considered insignificant.
A world where callousness is assumed cool,
Is but a billion-dollar grave of the fool.
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Abhijit Naskar (Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth)
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The power of one is the power of all, wilderness is another name for divisionism. When we are together we are civilized, civilization is synonym for nonsectarianism.
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Abhijit Naskar (Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth)
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Saying you believe and living your belief aren’t necessarily synonymous. For one person Christianity can be simply a religion they identify with. It is a common perspective that lacks conviction (and the power to save). For another it is a “oneness” with Jesus that is so much a part of their life that it is at times difficult to determine where they end and He begins. This is the very same intertwined oneness that Jesus enjoyed with our heavenly Father and prayed for His followers to have (John 17:20-26).
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Clinton Bezan
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However this may be, the preceding explanation has at least made it clear that the Way has two opposite aspects, one positive and the other negative. The negative side is comparable with the metaphysical Darkness of Ibn Arabi. In the world-view of the latter too, the Absolute (haqq) in itself, i.e., in its absoluteness, is absolutely invisible, inaudible and ungraspable as any 'form' whatsoever. it is an absolute Transcendent, and as such it is 'Nothing' in relation to human cognition. But, as we remember, the Absolute in the metaphysical intuition of the Arab sage is 'Nothing', not because it is 'nothing' in the purely negative sense, but rather because it is too fully existent-rather, it is Existence itself. Likewise, it is Darkness not because it is deprived of light, but rather because it is too full of light, too luminous-rather, it is the Light itself.
Exactly the same holds true of the Way as Lao-tzu intuits it. The Way is not dark, but it seems dark because it is too luminous and bright. He says:
A 'way' which is (too) bright seems dark.
The Way in itself, that is, from the point of view of the Way itself, is bright. But since 'it is too profound to be known by man' it is, from the point of view of man, dark. The Way is 'Nothing' in this sense.
This negative aspect, however, does not exhaust the reality of the Absolute. If it did, there would be no world, no creatures. In the thought of Ibn Arabi, the Absolute by its own unfathomable Will comes down from the stage of abysmal Darkness or 'nothingness' to that of self-manifestation. The Absolute, although it is in itself a Mystery having nothing to do with any other thing, and a completely self-sufficient Reality-has another, positive aspect in which it is turned toward the world. And in this positive aspect, the Absolute contains all things in the form of Names and Attributes. In the same way, the Way of Lao-Tzu too, although it is in itself Something 'nameless', a Darkness which transcends all things, is the 'Named' and the 'Mother of the ten thousand things'. Far from being Non-Being, it is, in this respect, Being in the fullest sense.
The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The Named is the Mother of ten thousand things.
This passage can be translated as follows:
The term 'Non-Being' could be applied to the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The term 'Being' could be applied to the Mother of ten thousand things.
Whichever translation we may choose, the result comes to exactly the same thing. For in the metaphysical system of Lao-Tzu, the 'Nameless' is, as we have already seen, synonymous with 'Non-Being', while the 'Named' is the same as 'Being'.
What is more important to notice is that metaphysically the Nameless or Non-Being represents a higher - or more fundamental - stage than the Named or Being within the structure of the Absolute itself. Just as in Ibn 'Arabi' even the highest 'self-manifestation' (tajalli) is a stage lower than the absolute Essence (dhat) of the Absolute, so in Lao-Tzu Being represents a secondary metaphysical stage with regard to the absoluteness of the Absolute.
The ten thousand things under Heaven are born out of Being (yu), and Being is born out of Non-Being (wu).
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Toshihiko Izutsu (Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts)
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she found that two organizational “perks”—dinner and a free ride home—were central to the long hours synonymous with banking culture. If workers stayed at the office until seven p.m., they could order dinner on the company dime. “With no time to shop for groceries or cook, they soon become dependent on this service and even on the occasional day when they can leave before seven p.m., they stay in order to have dinner,” she writes in Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Then, if bankers reached the nine p.m. milestone, the company paid for their ride home. While complimentary dinners and rides home might keep bankers working late, another device, the BlackBerry, kept them “chained to the office while at home or ‘on vacation,’ ” according to Ho.
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Simone Stolzoff (The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work)
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the physical abuse that came to be almost synonymous with privatized incarceration always was eventually unacceptable in an era when virtually every convict was white. The punishment of slaves for misdeeds rested with
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Douglas A. Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II)
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What exactly was grunge? That’s a question any person who’s thought about early ‘90s rock music has asked themselves at one point or another. Was it a scene or a musical style? A fashion category? A marketing ploy? A political bent? An ethos? Is the word synonymous with “alternative,” the other descriptor regularly applied to early ‘90s rock?
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Kevin Craft (Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey (Kindle Single))
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There was Customer Service, a chirpy brunette with a permanent smile behind the desk. And there was someone waiting there, someone dressed in jeans and a sweater, devilishly normal in the twenty-first-century crowd. He saw her, and he straightened, his eyes hopeful. Apparently, Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s barrister hadn’t been in his office to assure her that being a magazine writer doesn’t nullify a confidentially agreement.
“Jane.”
“Martin. You whistled?” She laid the rancor on thick. No need to tap dance around.
“Jane, I’m sorry. I was going to tell you today. Or tonight. The point is, I was going to tell you, and then we could still see if you and I--”
“You’re an actor,” Jane said as though “actor” and “bastard” were synonymous.
“Yes, but, but…” He looked around as though for cue cards.
“But you’re desperately in love with me,” she prompted him. “I’m unbelievably beautiful, and I make you feel like yourself. Oh, and I remind you of your sister.”
The chirpy brunette behind the counter furiously refused to look up from her monitor.
“Jane, please.”
“And the suddenly passionate feelings that sent you running after me at the airport have nothing to do with Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s fear that I’ll write a negative review of Pembrook Park.”
“No! Listen, I know I was a cad, and I lied and was misleading, and I’ve never actually been an NBA fan--go United--but romances have bloomed on stonier ground.”
“Romances…stonier ground…Did Mrs. Wattlesbrook write that line?”
Martin exhaled in exasperation.
Thinking of Molly’s dead end on the background check, she asked, “Your name’s not really Martin Jasper, is it?”
“Well,” he looked at the brunette as though for help. “Well, it is Martin.”
The brunette smiled encouragement.
Then, impossibly, another figure ran toward her. The sideburns and stiff-collared jacket looked ridiculous out of the context of Pembrook Park, though he’d stuck on a baseball cap and trench coat, trying to blend. His face was flushed from running, and when he saw Jane, he sighed with relief.
Jane dropped her jaw. Literally. She had never, even in her most ridiculous daydreaming, imagined that Mr. Nobley would come after her.
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Shannon Hale (Austenland (Austenland, #1))
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Our big mistake in modern intellectualism is first and foremost its lack of nuance. We have made science synonymous with atheism - a presupposed conception and yet, another means to non sequiturs - and therefore, to a number of enthusiasts determined to go the further, anti-theism. Hereby let us observe that science has long served best and should be, if none other, the one discipline, if at all possible, free of potential ideology, pro-religious or anti-religious, and/or biased presupposition in order to maintain the true authenticity and the full reliability of its nature.
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Criss Jami (Healology)
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A superficial reading of Schmitt, focusing on his subtitle, might take the concept of the jus publicum Europaeum (hereafter JPE) to be synonymous with the notion of international law (Völkerrecht), but for Schmitt the two notions are completely different, indeed opposed to one another. Schmitt objects to the notion of international law for two, interconnected, reasons. First, international law lacks the spatial aspect which is central to the JPE; it purports to offer a universal account of international order, blurring the crucial distinction between the European and the non-European worlds. But second, and more important, international law is, for Schmitt, a progressive, liberal project which is subject to the same critique as he delivers against liberalism in general, namely that it undermines the political and acts as a cover for special interests.
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Louiza Odysseos (The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory Book 24))
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In Paul’s day, writing to Corinthians about God’s love was the equivalent of writing a letter on family values to Hollywood today. “Corinthian” was synonymous with immorality. To “play the Corinthian” meant to give oneself to sexual pleasure. A “Corinthian girl” was another word for a prostitute. How could Paul hope to convey an understanding of God’s pure love to a city steeped in perversion?
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Joshua Harris
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Practice: Explore Connotations Pick a word from your thesaurus and write down some of its synonyms, looking them up in a dictionary if you need to. Pick one synonym that has positive connotations (such as svelte) and one that has negative connotations (such as stringy) and write a sentence using each one. Do this exercise again with a different word. Read your sentences out loud, noticing the different effects of the words you’ve chosen. Do the particular connotations of your chosen word influence how you write the rest of the sentence? Practice: Explore Connotations Read your favorite writer, keeping an ear open for words chosen for positive or negative connotations. Collect these words in your notebook and experiment with making your own sentences with them. Practice: Explore Connotations Read over a passage from your own work, keeping your ear tuned to the connotations of your words. Are there any places where you might choose a different word, exploiting its connotations to enhance the effect of your sentence? Practice: Explore Connotations Some words have both positive and negative connotations. We can work with the connotations of this kind of word in another way as well—by placing it in a context that highlights one particular connotation. Take the word fire (as a noun) for instance; its most familiar denotations are “things that are burning” and “flames produced by things that are burning.” But the noun fire also has connotations. Take a few minutes now, if you like, to bring the denotations of the noun fire to your mind, and then listen for the words or phrases, the ideas or things, that this word suggests to you; write them all down. You may find yourself collecting synonyms for the word. If this happens, try to let your mind move beyond close synonyms and see what other ideas or things the word brings to your mind. You have now collected some of the word’s connotations. Now look through these connotations. What do you notice? One thing you might notice is
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Barbara Baig (Spellbinding Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Achieving Excellence and Captivating Readers)
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I believe that anytime someone messes with the mind, they mess with the soul. Historically they go hand-in-hand, for a long time ago, the word "mind" was another word for "soul". Contextually, people might not see the relationship between the mind and such events from the past and present, but there is a connection. They all involved tampering of the value of the mind.
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Lauren Lola (An Absolute Mind)
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my mentality is, and always will be: things will always work out; if not tomorrow then another day.
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synonymous
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And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are relate–but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal–a world humane.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
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with the semantics from general context, it can be seen that “helper” is not synonymous to “slave.” If a person were to state that he/she “helped” a friend with his/her homework, would that mean that the helper is insignificant? Of course not. When a person helps another person with homework, he/she is actually the one who consolidates the understanding of the person who receives their help, which does oppose the claim that “helpers” are inferiors. In fact, in Psalms 54:4 and John 14:26, God and the Holy Spirit are referred to as “helpers,” which was the same word Eve was referred to:
“See, God is my helper. The Lord is the one who keeps my soul alive.” (Psalms 54:4)
“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” (John 14:26)
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Lucy Carter (Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics)
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Heidegger next turns to humans specifically, and to our own particular kind of being. What does it mean for a human being to be? (I realize this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when. We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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Honor He Wrote Sonnet 79
When we end up together,
That's not an end, but the beginning.
It's division that ends all journey,
End division, ‘n life will have true beginning.
Century after century went on with division,
Yet unity is forever, division is nonexistence.
To breathe, eat, mate and sleep, ain't existence,
To help, heal, lift and light, that's existence.
We've got intellect, we've got sentiment,
All are useless if they don't help erase division.
Human is another name for undivision,
Not another synonym for discrimination.
To have 'n to hold, mustn't be a vow between just two.
Make it one among all, and soon unity will be true.
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Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
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Human is another name for undivision, not another synonym for discrimination.
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Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
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Humanity and failure are synonymous with one another – the human race has a destiny to fail, because we have a destiny to grow.
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Jay D'Cee
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For "guilt" is just another synonym for "death" - a crueller, more agonizing death
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Romy Hausmann (Sleepless)
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In the same way that black and white were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicates them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform. Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.
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Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
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As long as power is equated with violence, then you will feel it necessary to regulate normal aggression in your behavior; and considering power as violent, you will be afraid to act to some extent. You will then consider goodness and powerlessness to be somewhat synonymous, and equate power with evil. Not wanting to face such “evil” in yourself, you may then direct it outward and transfer it to another area. As a society you may project it upon the criminal, as a nation upon a foreign country. As an individual you may place this power upon an employer, a labor union, or any other segment of society. In whatever area you choose, though, you will feel relatively weak in comparison with the strength that you have projected outward. You meet your own denied power, you see, whenever you find yourself in a situation where you feel weak in comparison to another person or situation that frightens you.
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Jane Roberts (The Nature of Personal Reality: Specific, Practical Techniques for Solving Everyday Problems and Enriching the Life You Know)
“
Atticus: I've been working there four fucking weeks! I'm going to be eating ramen noodles for the rest of my life.
Asher: Never tried them.
Atticus: Dude, fucking disgusting. Trust me.
Asher: Matilda's making roast au jus for dinner tonight with those homemade Yorkshire puddings you like.
Atticus: I hate you. Loathe. Despise. Basically every synonym for hate there is.
Asher: Call me?
My phone rang a minute later, and I whined long and loud into the receiver in place of saying hello. I'd been accused of being overly dramatic in the past. There might be some truth behind it.
Asher chuckled. "You're pathetic."
"Why have you not run away with me? We've been separated. I can't stand it. It's like the individual cells in my body are trying to divide again and make another you. It hurts. I can't do it twice." I whimpered again for emphasis. "Ash, I'm screwed, and not in the bend me over the hood of the Jag and pound my ass type of way. The bad way. The painful way. The oh-crap-my-bank-account-is-in-the-negative way. I'm fast running out of ideas, and you're over there living the high life and eating roast au jus with my goddamn Yorkshire puddings."
"I get the sense you're trying to tell me something, but whatever it is, it's getting lost in translation. You're rambling. What's going on? Speak-a the English. What's the problem?"
"What isn't the problem? I'm poor and miserable. I was not ready for adulthood this soon. Tell Mom and Dad it was all lies. It was a phase. I'm over it. Ha, good joke, right?"
"Riiight, and how do you propose I magically make the burned image of your mouth around Ryan Vector's cock disappear from Matilda's mind?"
"Fuck. You know what? We don't need a housekeeper. Fire her ass! Tell Mom and Dad she's a big fat liar who lies and hates me. Tell them she's stealing from them. She's an illegal immigrant! No, tell them, she's a housekeeper by day and a hooker by night. I saw her walking the streets of Fifth Avenue after sundown in a mini skirt and fishnet stockings."
I paused, envisioning our sixty-year-old housekeeper/used-to-be-nanny in that kind of attire. Asher and I both audibly ewwed at the exact same time.
"Dude, that's fucking gross as shit, and you know it. I just threw up in my mouth. Why would you put that image in my head?"
"I regret many of my life decisions. Add it to the list. Ash, I'm serious. Just make something up. Get rid of her. We don't need a housekeeper, and we're long past requiring a nanny. Especially one who walks into rooms without knocking. What was she thinking?"
"The door wasn't closed."
"Not the time, Ash!"
"Okay, so let's pretend for five minutes Matilda dies in a horrible car crash."
"We could make that happen.
”
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Nicky James (End Scene)
“
And remember the mind is very cunning, it can always find ways to befool you; it has learned very many tricks to befool. The mind can just use another word and you may not even see the difference. The difference may be so subtle that it is almost synonymous – and the mind has played a trick.
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Osho (The Tantra Experience: Evolution through Love)
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What exactly does it mean then for two terms to be synonymous? How related must they be? We might propose 'interchangeability in all contexts without change of truth value' as a way of handling synonymy. Obviously this has to be qualified to focus solely on the meaning of the expressions (and not, for example, the number of letters or sounds of the words). But, as Quine demonstrates, it is impossible to give an account of such cognitive synonymy that does not end up presupposing analyticity, and thus reasoning in a circle. Besides, many expressions may be interchangeable without altering the truth value of the statement, but may not be synonymous. For example, there is extensional agreement between the statements 'All creatures with a heart' and 'All creatures with kidneys' even though they are far from being synonymous. Another common example would be the phrases 'morning star' and 'evening star'. The interchangeability is based on accidental factors, not synonymy. Thus, it is more difficult than it might appear at first glance to determine when two expressions have the same meaning.
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Rich Lusk
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Medieval Armed Combat as Universal Metaphor and All-Purpose Protocol Interface Schema (MACUMAPPIS). Since Medieval Armed Combat was the oxygen they breathed, even mentioning it seemed gratuitous, so this got shortened to UMAPPIS and then, since the “metaphor” thing made some of the businesspeople itchy, it became APPIS, which they liked enough to trademark. And since APPIS was one letter away from APIS, which was the Latin word for bee, they then went on to create and trademark some bee- and hive-related logo art. As Corvallis patiently told Richard, it was all a kind of high-tech in-joke. In that world, API stood for “application programming interface,” which meant the software control panels that tech geeks slapped onto their technologies in order to make it possible for other tech geeks to write programs that made use of them. All of which was one or two layers of abstraction beyond the point where Richard could give a shit. “All I am trying to say with this memo,” he told Corvallis, “is that anyone who feels like it ought to be able to grab hold of our game by the technological short hairs and make it solve problems for them.” And Corvallis assured him that this was precisely synonymous with having an API and that everything else was just marketing. The problems Richard had in mind were not game- or even entertainment-related ones. Corporation 9592 had already covered as many of those bases as their most imaginative people could think of, and then they had paid lawyers to pore over the stuff that they’d thought of and extrapolate whole abstract categories of things that might be thought of later. And wherever they went, they found that the competition had been there five years earlier and patented everything that was patentable and, in one sense or another, pissed on everything that wasn’t. Which explained a lot about Phase 3.
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Neal Stephenson (Reamde)
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As the modern era came into being, the avarice of the usurer was supplanted by interest in the broader and more abstract sense of a share or stake. This new concept of interest was ethically wide-ranging: it ‘came to cover virtually the entire range of human actions, from the narrowly self-centered to the sacrificially altruistic, and from the prudently calculated to the passionately compulsive’.49 The seventeenth-century English statesman and philosopher Lord Shaftesbury summed up the new thinking with his comment that ‘Interest governs the World.’50 In his Fable of the Bees (1714), Bernard Mandeville exposed the paradox at the heart of the modern world, namely that private vices brought public benefits. Adam Smith incorporated Mandeville’s wicked insights into his political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes the individual as one who ‘By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.’51 A similar thought is expressed in another famous line, in which Smith writes that ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ The spirit of capitalism was transmitted across networks of credit that connected lenders and borrowers through bonds of mutual self-interest.52 Daniel Defoe described credit as a ‘stock’, synonymous with capital, while the French in Defoe’s day referred to capital as ‘interest’, in the sense of taking a stake.fn6 From a technical viewpoint, capital consists of a stream of future income discounted to its present value. Without interest, there can be no capital. Without capital, no capitalism. Turgot, a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, understood this very well: ‘the capitalist lender of money,’ he wrote, ‘ought to be considered as a dealer in a commodity which is absolutely necessary for the production of wealth, and which cannot be at too low a price.’53 (Turgot exaggerated. As we shall see, interest at ‘too low a price’ is the source of many evils.)
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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This ability to access the overall concept of the word we’re blanking on is what sometimes causes us to come out with ludicrously long-winded synonyms, out of sheer desperation. Case in point, I once blanked on the word pen, and called it an ‘ink pencil’. Case in another point, a friend of mine once referred to Starbucks as ‘the coffee pub’.
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Paul Anthony Jones (Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask)
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What does it mean for a human being to be? (I realise this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when. We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It)
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Another respondent said, "I used to believe self-care and coddling were synonymous, that the best way of curing depression was to stay as far inside my comfort zone as possible. Stay in, watch my favorite movies over and over, binge on desserts, don't put any effort into anything that might 'exhaust' me. Then I realized I had already committed suicide, by refusing to live. Now, I get out of depression by doing new things with new people, taking risks, putting in effort on big and small things. Long story short, huddling inside a blanket eating ice cream may be comforting enough for one day, but it's not the way your whole life should be led.
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J.S. Park (How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression)
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Φύσις is used, e.g., at Rep. 620c, as a synonym for that which elsewhere in Er’s account is more often termed βίος, a life or way of life, namely that structure which, through the choice of a paradigm, the individual brings forth. This structure expresses the different result that follows from one individual choosing a particular paradigm rather than another individual choosing the same one: same paradigm, different life.
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Edward P. Butler (Essays on Plato)
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To be “the best Christian one can be” will appear synonymous with being the perfect US citizen. Fear will lead families to betray one another:
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Thomas Horn (Blood on the Altar: The Coming War Between Christian vs. Christian)
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Life is not the shit and complications and obligations that make up our day. That's just the stuff we pile on top of Life to obscure it. Our existence itself is the miraculous thing we're talking about here. Life is, essentially, another workable synonym for 'God.
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Carrie Triffet (The Fricken Map is Upside Down: Notes from a spiritual journey (1))
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Yes, we have solved The Drake Equation, The Fermi Paradox and whether or not Humans are alone. We just need to accept there is no division. Division does NOT exist in the Kingdom of God. God is One without a second. There is NO division in God. The answer to the question - is Human alone in the Universe? - is Yes. The Universe is Human. Human is One. One is alone but desires not to feel alone. Aloneness is the cause and Companionship is the purpose. There where otherness is perceived is One desiring to experience togetherness. Togetherness can only be experienced through the perception of otherness. There is in truth no otherness. There is only One. One perceives itself as Two not to be alone. That which is Two verily is One perceiving itself as Two not to be alone, for Companionship, To Love and Be Loved in return. There is no division. Division does not exist. All there is is One perceiving itself as diverse. Diversity exists for Companionship. Companionship being synonymous with Love. Love is all that matters, all that matters is Love. Finally, it must be understand that One is not external. One is Self. Self is One. Oneself Is. It is a high realization and not easy to accept but it is necessary for Humankind to go forward. As such the following is conclusive. Life is Self experiencing itself as itself. Self perceives itself as variegated not to be alone. The purpose of Self is Companionship. There where otherness is perceived is Self perceiving itself as otherness in the current for the very purpose to negate is own alOneness. So it is. One is alone but desires not to feel alone. Hence the purpose of Life. Hence the purpose of Human. The purpose of Human is Love. Love one another, there is no other, truth is Self desiring not to be alone, truth is Self desiring Companionship, truth is Self desiring Love. Human should not fight for it is One. Human should embrace itself for it perceives itself as variegated for the very purpose not to be alone, for Companionship, for Love. Love is the primordial motivation. Always return to Love when in doubt. Do not get swayed by the illusion of divisiveness and remember that there is in reality no division; there is only the perception of diversity which exists for the purpose not to feel alone, to experience Companionship, to Love and Be Loved in return. Bless you all, all of you are Blessed.
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Wald Wassermann
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Opportunities for enhanced recycling remain great even in the case of paper and aluminum cans, the two materials whose recycling rates are the highest in all affluent countries (Japan's paper recycling may be the exception as it is already about as complete as is practical). Perhaps most notably, until 2008 paper was still the largest discarded material going into US landfills (almost 21% of the total mass, compared to nearly 17% for plastics), and although by 2010 it had fallen to just below plastic's share (16.2 vs 17.3%) the total mass of buried paper was still nearly 27 Mt/year (USEPA, 2011a): that is more than the annual production of all paper and paperboard in the same year in Germany (FAO, 2013). And while the mass of paper landfilled in the USA in 2010 was half of the total in 1990 (26.7 vs 52.5 Mt), during the same two decades the mass of discarded plastics rose by 70% and the total of buried polymers, 28.5 Mt, was greater than the combined annual production in Germany and France (Plastics Europe, 2012). Or another comparison: a destitute waste collector may spend a day collecting a mass of 1 kg of plastic shopping bags when rummaging the open garbage tips of Asia's megacities, while the USA buries nearly 80 000 t of plastic in its landfills every day. While in the USA only about 8% of discarded plastics were recovered in 2010 (with the rate ranging from 23% for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles to less than1% for PP (polypropylene) waste), the EU's goal for 2020 is full diversion of plastic waste from landfills (EPRO, 2011). This would require a 50% increase of the 2010 recovery rate of 66%, roughly split between recycling and incineration for energy recovery. And, of course, waste recovery is not synonymous with recycling as significant shares of collected materials are not reused but landfilled (after volume reduction by shredding or compression).
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Vaclav Smil (Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization)
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I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related—but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal—a world more humane.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
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And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related—but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal—a world more humane.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
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When I run, whether or not it is among other people, my pulse beats faster, and my breath flows deeper. Heat rises, pores open, and sweat pours. Breath steadies as each foot falls into the grasp of gravity for an instant, another instant, and another. Moments between footstrikes, moments between heartbeats, and moments between breaths, no matter how brief, merge and become
one stillness. Consciousness surges through thousands of miles of synapses, both toward the sky and down to the dirt. Absence and
presence are synonymous as they are stillness within movement, where distance doesn’t matter, because distance is infinite.
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Keith Catalano Wilson
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I can tell you what love means, dictionary-wise, all the synonyms and so forth. And I can tell you all about endorphins and synapses and muscle memory. But ardour’s resonance in the heart is a mystery to me. I’m a computer, Arthur."
Arthur hid his disappointment with the traditional brisk rubbing of hands and stiffening of upper lip.
"Of course. No problem."
"I am made to live for ever but you are made to live.
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Eoin Colfer (And Another Thing... (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #6))
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Sorry, I needed another word for "crisis," and when I entered the word "crisis" into Thesaurus.com, it suggested "hot potato" as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know but Thesaurus.com lists "hot potato" as a synonym for "crisis." "Hey, did you hear about what's happening with Israel and Palestine? It's becoming a real hot potato.
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Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance)
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Lack of groundedness due to spiritual “highs.” When you work through and into the depths of your rebirth, you may occasionally find yourself "strong" emotionally, and you will be much less rooted in your earthen body whenever this occurs. This "danger," as mentioned in the introduction paragraph to this section, is more like a symptom. Most people will experience that groundlessness through the kundalini awakening excitement. Your higher chakras will be wide open, and you'll have the ability to be overwhelmed by what you can now experience. Whenever you feel like this–dreamy, disturbed, floaty, almost cloud-like–start a deep breath. Make one hand into your navel's fist and imagine you could drop a cord straight down into the earth from this spot in your body. Felt grounded and affirmed with your human body as this cord drops and connects with nature. This simulation will relieve these "high" symptoms as they occur. • Jerkiness & muscle spasms As with the argument just above, jerkiness and muscle spasms are signs of kundalini awakening that will undergo much (if not all) of their systems. It is only coded as a "risk" or "danger" because the individual may not think that these actions are linked to his or her awakening and are scared of his or her own well-being. If you ever have occasional spasms or unwanted jerks, take a deep breath and try to feel at ease. These are normal and will pass, "growing pains" synonymous with awakening. Ultimately, you will no longer have them at all, but for now, breathe deeply, and accept them. They're, believe it or not, a good sign. • Finding yourself alone in the “dark night of the soul.” Another symptom of awakening is the "dark night of the soul" experience. This period of time will come to pass for anyone involved in kundalini awakening, and it's not necessarily a fun time, which is why it's coded as a "danger" or "risk." Essentially, the "dark night of the soul" is when you feel like you've hit the lowest low. It's the time you confront all the defects within yourself and know that you can only step upwards, which is an overwhelming task. You may lose someone near you, like a mentor, a friend, or someone you love. You may feel directionless or doubt everything you thought you knew was true, real and nice. If you feel these things, you have not failed to wake up; know that to your core's depths. You didn't fail; you are on the right track. Keep close tabs on that person for those who know someone very emotionally sensitive that is trying to awaken kundalini. The emotionally vulnerable among us are at great risk because, alone, they go through these times. If they're too dejected and directionless, it can mean their lives, but we can always guard against it. Together we are stronger as a community, and each of us with that backing force will make it through this dark night.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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These high-level political figures are playing a peculiar game. No one in the group believes for a moment that Duke Humphrey must be murdered in order to protect the king or save the state. Every word they speak is a lie, and each of the plotters is merely projecting his or her own predominant vice onto the intended victim. Since they are not in public, why don’t they simply say what they mean? There are several possible answers. First, they are all politicians and, therefore, congenitally dishonest; the word “politician,” for Shakespeare, was virtually synonymous with hypocrite. (“Get thee glass eyes,” rages Lear. “And, like a scurvy politician,/Seem to see the things thou dost not” [King Lear 4.6.164–66]). Second, they distrust one another and do not know what may be reported outside the room in which they are speaking. Third, each harbors a secret hope that their lie and theirs alone will deceive the others. Fourth, pretending that they are virtuous, even when they know that they are not, makes them feel better about themselves. And fifth, they are all warily watching to see if anyone among them expresses even a slight reservation about the conspiracy, anything that would lead it to unravel. They want everyone to be on board.
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Stephen Greenblatt (Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics)
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Although it can and at times almost certainly should be, compassion need not be synonymous with what might generally be considered agreeableness, rather the compassion being referred to here more suggests a sympathetic understanding of others’ lack of agreeableness. An awareness serving to help calibrate our easily incited impatience or anger or finger-pointing or disdain towards others over mostly nothing, or things that we can’t really know or understand. There is a suffering and confusion a part of existence that we all know and feel yet seem to so often struggle to grant others. To not see the so obviously unobvious thing behind everything. To hate. To seek vengeance. To frequently act on anger. To declare certainty in almost anything. All contradict the very struggle and confusion of life that we feel such a pain over in the first place. How often do we turn minor inconveniences into major ones over this lack of consideration? Or worse yet, turn tragedies of random circumstance into tragedies of hatred? It’s not that if one is annoyed by or disagrees with another person or group, they shouldn’t. Nor should they not try to work for what they believe in or against what they disagree with. But it is perhaps worth approaching all instances as often as we can. With the awareness that the ignorance and annoyance and sometimes cruelty we find in others is sometimes found by others in us. Sometimes at the same time and with equally valid reasons. Who is right in such cases? Perhaps in some of them, no one is. And perhaps not even the person who thinks they’ve trumped such an occurrence by realizing it’s happening and determining that they are superior to both parties by realizing how foolish both are. Even here, if one acts in such a way, one is exhibiting a conceit and smugness over others by thinking that they have superiorly realized the foolishness of being conceited and smug. Everyone is absurd in their attempt to trump their own absurd relationship with everything. And everyone is more the more so when they do not realize that they, even here, are also a part of everyone.
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Robert Pantano
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gut feeling is an unexplainable sensation that tells you to do (or not do) something. Another synonym for this phrase is the word intuition – also known as the voice of your Soul. Whenever you feel drawn towards something or someone (without a fearful motive), you can be sure that this is your Soul trying to guide you. This is why listening to, and sharpening, your intuition is a powerful way of maintaining contact with your Soul.
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Aletheia Luna (The Spiritual Awakening Process)
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#Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.
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Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
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In my work with clients, I like to use a term I call the growth-structure quotient. It’s a synonym for the right dosage, which is the number that’s not working plus one. For instance, if I have decided to meet with my writing mentor every two weeks but I’m not getting my homework done right, I add another meeting or interaction to the formula. Instead of meeting every two weeks, now we’ll meet every week. If that still doesn’t work, then we need to meet even more frequently. It needs to be often enough to help positive patterns form but not so often that the walls of the new internal structure don’t have enough time to solidify. I have to have some time to work on it in between.
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Henry Cloud (The Power of the Other: The startling effect other people have on you, from the boardroom to the bedroom and beyond-and what to do about it)