Concept Of Attitude Quotes

Soft skin warm against his nose, her pulse beating strong against his cheek, suddenly clear thinking and being the voice of reason were concepts as foreign as a different language.

It is more important to go slow and gain the lessons you need along the journey then to rush the process and arrive at your destination empty.

Sometimes you must agree with someones opinion for the sake of being polite and modest, but within you, you know that you are not foolish and crazy.

Its all about perspective, that is how you look at things. Your own thoughts and outlook defines whether an experience, event, situation whatever is good or bad. And your definition determines your response.

Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.

You see, Islam is the only religion that gives both husband and wife a true understanding of what love is. The Western “love” concept, you take it apart, it really is lust. But love transcends just the physical. Love is disposition, behaviour, attitude, thoughts, likes, dislikes - these things make a beautiful woman, a beautiful wife. This is the beauty that never fades. You find in your Western civilisation that when a man’s wife’s physical beauty fails, she loses her attraction. But Islam teaches us to look into the woman, and teaches her to look into us.

Its all about perception, that is how you look at. Your own thoughts and outlook defines whether it is good or bad. And your definition determines your response.

On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent’s attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker.

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.

The darkest night in someone's life may be the brightest day in another person's life. Life rests on perceptions and conceptions or missed perceptions and misconceptions. You can choose to make good things out of every challenging circumstance. In contrast, you can also choose to see nothing in a creative opportunity.

My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me. At the age of twelve, before I had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

Concepts such as love, charity, obligation and tradition all helped to shape medieval attitudes to devotion, but perhaps the most powerful conditioning influence was fear;

The gospel, if it is really believed, removes neediness - the need to be constantly respected, appreciated, and well regarded; the need to have everything in your life go well; the need to have power over others. All of these great, deep needs continue to control you only because the concept of the glorious God delighting in you with all His being is just that - a concept and nothing more. Our hearts don't believe it, so they operate in default mode. Paul is saying that if you want to really change, you must let the gospel teach you - that is to train, discipline, coach you - over a period of time. You must let the gospel argue with you. You must let the gospel sink down deeply into your heart, until it changes your motivation and views and attitudes.

Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.

Most traders have absolutely no concept of what it means to be a risk-taker in the way a successful trader thinks about risk. The best traders not only take the risk, they have also learned to accept and embrace that risk. There is a huge psychological gap between assuming you are a risk-taker because you put on trades and fully accepting the risks inherent in each trade. When you fully accept the risks, it will have profound implications on your bottom-line performance.

This hostility to unnatural sex had a demographic consequence of high importance. Puritan moralists condemned as unnatural any attempt to prevent conception within marriage. This was not a common attitude in world history. Most primitive cultures have practiced some form of contraception, often with high success. Iroquois squaws made diaphragms of birchbark; African slaves used pessaries of elephant dung to prevent pregnancy. European women employed beeswax disks, cabbage leaves, spermicides of lead, whitewash and tar. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, coitus interruptus and the use of sheepgut condoms became widespread in Europe.14

Submission has nothing to do with equality. Men and women are equal, but we have been assigned different roles. Neither role is superior. The Trinity models this concept. The Persons in the Godhead are equal in power and in substance, but each as a different function. Submission is a position we willingly assume in obedience to Jesus and after His pattern. Submission is an attitude of humilty. Submission is being concerned about the interests of another rather than looking after our own interests. The world tells women that submission is foolish and renders us powerless. Scripture tells us that submission gives access to the power and protection of God.

The Christian is in the world, but not to be of it. This constitutes the basis of the perennial problem involved in the discussion of Christian culture. Because believers are not of the world, there have been many Christians who have taken a negative attitude toward culture.

It can be said with truth that certain aspects of reality conceal themselves from anyone who looks upon reality from a profane and materialistic point of view, and they become inaccessible to his observation: this is not a more or less ‘picturesque’ manner of speaking, as some people might be tempted to think, but is the simple and direct statement of a fact, just as it is a fact that animals flee spontaneously and instinctively from the presence of anyone who evinces a hostile attitude toward them. That is why there are some things that can never be grasped by men of learning who are materialists or positivists, and this naturally further confirms their belief in the validity of their conceptions by seeming to afford a sort of negative proof of them, whereas it is really neither more nor less than a direct effect of the conceptions themselves.

Previously, as I went through life, I was in full belief of the concept of "blending" (I was fully convinced that I as a person am completely capable of blending myself in the accordance of friendship, in order to give respect to the differences between people and in order for others to feel that I respect them). However, I have come to learn at this time in my life, that such an attitude is all good for a while, but then there does come a point where you must see and identify yourself; also see and identify others! You have to be able to identify yourself as someone who is made happy by this and as someone who doesn't like that; then when you meet people, discern if those same things are the things that make them happy and if those same things are the things that they don't like, because at a point in time it becomes beneficial to you, to not waste time on blending in behalf of virtue but rather it becomes beneficial to you, to see yourself and go into the direction that makes you happy, taking people with you that are already going in that same direction and who also do not like the things that you do not like. At the end of the day, there are those paths in life, and you have to take one of them, you can't walk down all of them.

You'll be demonized for no other reason than that your glow hurts their eyes. Everyone loves the concept of an angel until they have to stand in that light and their shadows start climbing out.

As a gentleman- assuming you still have some pretensions in that direction- of honor- again, perhaps presumptuous, but still supposing your passing acquaintance with the concept- it is your duty- I won't even trouble to speculate here, but remain naively hopeful- to protect those under your care.

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and — existing reality will collapse.

The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.

Emptiness and the not-“I” is the quality that arises when the therapist consciously moves out of his own way without hindering the therapeutic process through his own ideas, attitudes, expectations and concepts. He is present, available and responds with the truth in the moment.

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

A thrilling sense of having been chosen for something is the best and the only certain thing in one whose glance surveys the world for the first time. If he monitors his feelings, he finds nothing he can accept without reservation. He seeks a possible beloved but can't tell whether it's the right one; he is capable of killing without being sure that he will have to. The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end.

if a theorem is geometrically obvious why prove it? This was exactly the attitude taken in the eighteenth century. The result, in the nineteenth century, was chaos and confusion: for intuition, unsupported by logic, habitually assumes that everything is much nicer behaved than it really is.     Good

To preserve our absolute categories or ideals at the expense of human lives offends equally against the principles of science and of history; it is an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days, and is not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts.

Human freedom brings with it the burden of choice and of its consequences. As humankind is akin to claim for its own special privilege a certain unique destiny not afforded with equal measure to other organisms, so must it further—if paradoxically so—entertain the assumption that, in spite of this glorious determinism, there persists nonetheless a thread of free will—or, at the very least, some vague delusion thereof—woven seamlessly into the tapestry of collective experience. Of course, this conception that destiny is to be forged by one’s own hands more often engenders greater restriction than it does greater extension to the potential of human happiness.

The concept of an inactive church member is an oxymoron. Biblically, no such church member really exists.

Indifference to what words actually say; willingness to accept a vapid truism as a useful, even revelatory concept; carelessness about where a supposed quotation comes from—that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet. A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude—a lazy-mindedness that degrades both language and thought.

He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetish before which they fell down and worshipped.

There's a school of thought today that rejects patriotism. People are made nervous by that intense allegiance to a country. They think it can only lead to war and bloodshed and that fights can be avoided if we all just compromise and get along. And, of course, compromise and getting along are great things as long as you're not sacrificing essential values. But I believe there's a line in the sand, some things that you have to be willing to stand up for, even if it means trouble. Charlie's patriotism is not blind, flag-waving jingoism: it's an intense allegiance to the American concept of liberty. He's through and through. He can talk about it and explain it. And he's shown he's willing to give everything for it. I admire him for that.

Their sense of entitlement was about as big as their egos, and their egos were twice the size of their brains. Decency was a foreign concept to them; Hope ignored them all and walked into her room.

In every time of season change: it is #wise to slow down and examine what our ego, thought-habits, and spiritual-energy are communicating to others...our environments. Truth is these thoughts (attitudes that aren't situationally static) are producing real activity, outcomes that shape our existence. Consider the conception of our thoughts, and what they will give birth to beyond the physical...they have an incredible power, with or without our active will, to lift us, sink us or soar us. Consider how we as human beings can be subject to the law enforcement of living under our own thought legislation...Selah.

we begin to create separations and become judgmental of others. Contrary to what the world around us is trying to teach, having this type of obsessed competitive attitude will only set you up for much suffering down the road.

This attitude adds nothing to the explanation of the paradoxes, for it fails to recognize that the conception of motion at a point, which is the crux of the situation, is not a scientific notion but a mathematical abstraction.

Some books about the Holocaust are more difficult to read than others. Some books about the Holocaust are nearly impossible to read. Not because one does not understand the language and concepts in the books, not because they are gory or graphic, but because such books are confrontational. They compel us to “think again,” or to think for the first time, about issues and questions we might rather avoid. Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust is one book I found difficult, almost impossible to read. Why? Because I had to confront the terrible underside of Christian theology, an underside that contributed in no small part to the beliefs and attitudes too many Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – had imbibed throughout centuries of anti-Jewish preaching and teaching that “paved the road to the Holocaust.” I cannot say that I “liked” Gabriel Wilensky’s book, Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust. I didn’t, but I can say it was instructive and forced me to think again about that Jew from Nazareth, Jesus, and about his message of universal love and service – “What you do for the least of my brothers [and sisters], you do for me” (Matthew 25: 40). As Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, the Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust began with words. And too many of those hate-filled words had their origin in the Christian Scriptures and were uttered by Christian preachers and teachers, by Christians generally, for nearly two millennia. Is it any wonder so many Christians stood by, even participated in, the destruction of the European Jews during the Nazi era and World War II? I recommend Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Antisemitism Paved the Road to the Holocaust because all of us Christians – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – must think again, or think for the first time, about how to teach and preach the Christian Scriptures – the “New Testament” writings – in such a way that the words we utter, the attitudes we encourage, do not demean, disrespect, or disregard our Jewish brothers and sisters, that our words do not demean, disrespect, or disregard Judaism. I hope the challenge is not an impossible one.

We are focus-points of consciousness, [...] enormously creative. When we enter the self-constructed hologrammetric arena we call spacetime, we begin at once to generate creativity particles, imajons, in violent continuous pyrotechnic deluge. Imajons have no charge of their own but are strongly polarized through our attitudes and by the force of our choice and desire into clouds of conceptons, a family of very-high-energy particles which may be positive, negative or neutral. [...] Some common positive conceptions are exhilarons, excytons, rhapsodons, jovions. Common negative conceptions include gloomons, tormentons, tribulons, agonons, miserons. "Indefinite numbers of conceptions are created in nonstop eruption, a thundering cascade of creativity pouring from every center of personal consciousness. They mushroom into conception clouds, which can be neutral or strongly charged - buoyant, weightless or leaden, depending on the nature of their dominant particles. "Every nanosecond an indefinite number of conception clouds build to critical mass, then transform in quantum bursts to high-energy probability waves radiating at tachyon speeds through an eternal reservoir of supersaturated alternate events. Depending on their charge and nature, the probability waves crystallize certain of these potential events to match the mental polarity of their creating consciousness into holographic appearance. [...] "The materialized events become that mind's experience, freighted with all the aspects of physical structure necessary to make them real and learningful to the creating consciousness. This autonomic process is the fountain from which springs every object and event in the theater of spacetime. "The persuasion of the imajon hypothesis lies in its capacity for personal verification. The hypothesis predicts that as we focus our conscious intention on the positive and life-affirming, as we fasten our thought on these values, we polarize masses of positive conceptions, realize beneficial probability-waves, bring useful alternate events to us that otherwise would not have appeared to exist. "The reverse is true in the production of negative events, as is the mediocre in-between. Through default or intention, unaware or by design, we not only choose but create the visible outer conditions that are most resonant to our inner state of being [...]

I’m saying that if you want to be happy, eradicate your attachment; cut your concrete concepts. The way to cut them is not troublesome—just change your attitude; switch your attitude, that’s all. It’s not really a big deal! It’s really skillful, reasonable. The way Buddhism explains this is reasonable. It’s not something in which you have to super-believe. I’m not saying you have to try to be a superwoman or superman. It’s reasonable and logical. Simply changing your attitude eliminates your concrete concepts.

When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude toward life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honor, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honorable vs. dishonorable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth, replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on. However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature in my opinion is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism.

Recall Clifford Geertz definition of culture: "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about the attitudes toward life.

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

Rogers believed that we have within ourselves enormous potential for self-understanding and for altering our self-concept and for our behaviour. He believed that this potential can be tapped if a climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided, which person-centred therapy aims to do

I seek to use the tools of the mind to overcome a narcissistic self and attain self-mastery. I aspire to engage in self-cultivation by making practical usage of the process of enduring privations, overcoming challenges, and rejecting illicit temptations in order to gain fortitude, courage, and wisdom. I shall reflect upon grievous personal mistakes and embrace the concept of repentance as a lifelong growth process through which humankind conscientiously learns to make better choices by forsaking vice, immorality, and wickedness. I must also unreservedly embrace fate by perceiving everything that happens in life including suffering and loss as good, and affirm a life filled with indignity, sorrow, and tragedy. I can only discover happiness – a meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value of existence – by living with dignity in the face of absurdity. When we affirm all aspects of being, we enjoy a tranquil existence.

Sin for Salvation applies to everything. It’s a mindset. It’s about not buying into the laws and attitudes of those who would control you. It’s about having an open mind about what “sin” actually is. It’s about not automatically subscribing to someone else’s conception of sin. There are many sins in this world – such as the infinite greed of Wall Street bankers and their ilk – that are held up as virtues and qualities to be emulated. Always be on the lookout for sins that masquerade as the good. Always be on the lookout for healthy activities (like joyous sex outside the institution of marriage) that are condemned as sinful.

This is why you are told “Let the weak man say, ‘I am strong’.” (Joel 3:10), for by his assumption, the cause-substance — ‘I AM’ — is rearranged and must, therefore, manifest that which its rearrangement affirms. This principle governs every aspect of your life, be it social, financial, intellectual, or spiritual. ‘I AM’ is that reality to which, whatever happens, we must turn for an explanation of the phenomena of life. It is I AM’s concept of itself that determines the form and scenery of its existence. Everything depends upon its attitude towards itself; that which it will not affirm as true of itself cannot awaken in its world.

Personal Power and a Positive attitude after praying, you should also completely men-tally, emotionally and physically “act as if it is already accomplished!” In truth, it already has been accomplished in GOD, and that is the only true “permanent’ reality of life! Taking this one step further, you should even experience this truth with all five senses. See it being real, hear it, touch it, smell it and taste it! As far as you are concerned, for all intents and purposes, the prayer has already been completely answered and you should live your life on every level of your being as if this was the case! If ever you start to slip from this “immaculate conception” in your own mind, you should immediately do an affirmation and positive creative visualization to reaffirm the “Truth of GOD” back into your reality. The other way to reaffirm this truth back into your being is to repeat the prayer! Just the Act of doing the Prayer is an affirmation in and of itself!

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden, the national sport is suicide), the Danes’ relaxed attitude to life is not so much refreshing as astonishing.

To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all. The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations.

The immortality of Thomas Jefferson does not lie in any one of his achievements, or in the series of his achievements, but in his attitude towards mankind and the conception which he sought to realize in action of the service owed by America to the rest of the world...Thomas Jefferson was a great leader of men because he understood and interpreted the spirits of men.

I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. When people read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

Christian Fundamentalism. Because the holy texts of nearly all religions hold the seed of violence, fundamentalists of every stripe tend to become increasingly violent, in their attitudes if not in their actions. William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted that if our concept of God is wrong, the more religious we get, the more dangerous we are to ourselves and others.

Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings—it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn’t know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn’t even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there’s a need to say: “This is what it is, and it’s not changing; we’re taking a picture of it to hold it still.” It’s like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct—eyes, nose, mouth—and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it’s going to dissolve completely. It’s a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we’re constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita . . .” What other immortality will anyone share?

The egoist, turning against the demands and concepts of the present, executes pitilessly the most measureless — desecration. Nothing is holy to him! It would be foolish to assert there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of — every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it out friend and be humble toward it.

The maker of an advertised article knows the manufacturing side and probably the dealers side. But this very knowledge often leads him astray in respect to customers. His interests are not in their interests. The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else. This book will contain no more important chapter than this one on salesmanship. The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship. Ads are planned and written with some utterly wrong conception. They are written to please the seller. The interest of the buyer are forgotten. One can never sell goods profitably, in person or in print, when that attitude exists.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

Now come on, we’re off.” He marched out of the room. They heard the front door open, but Dudley did not move and after a few faltering steps Aunt Petunia stopped too. “What now?” barked Uncle Vernon, reappearing in the doorway. It seemed that Dudley was struggling with concepts too difficult to put into words. After several moments of apparently painful internal struggle he said, “But where’s he going to go?” Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon looked at each other. It was clear that Dudley was frightening them. Hestia Jones broke the silence. “But…surely you know where your nephew is going?” she asked, looking bewildered. “Certainly we know,” said Vernon Dursley. “He’s off with some of your lot, isn’t he? Right, Dudley, let’s get in the car, you heard the man, we’re in a hurry.” Again, Vernon Dursley marched as far as the front door, but Dudley did not follow. “Off with some of our lot?” Hestia looked outraged. Harry had met this attitude before: Witches and wizards seemed stunned that his closest living relatives took so little interest in the famous Harry Potter. “It’s fine,” Harry assured her. “It doesn’t matter, honestly.” “Doesn’t matter?” repeated Hestia, her voice rising ominously. “Don’t these people realize what you’ve been through? What danger you are in? The unique position you hold in the hearts of the anti-Voldemort movement?” “Er--no, they don’t,” said Harry. “They think I’m a waste of space, actually, but I’m used to--” “I don’t think you’re a waste of space.” If Harry had not seen Dudley’s lips move, he might not have believed it. As it was, he stared at Dudley for several seconds before accepting that it must have been his cousin who had spoken; for one thing, Dudley had turned red. Harry was embarrassed and astonished himself. “Well…er…thanks, Dudley.” Again, Dudley appeared to grapple with thoughts too unwieldy for expression before mumbling, “You saved my life.” “Not really,” said Harry. “It was your soul the dementor would have taken…” He looked curiously at his cousin. They had had virtually no contact during this summer or last, as Harry had come back to Privet Drive so briefly and kept to his room so much. It now dawned on Harry, however, that the cup of cold tea on which he had trodden that morning might not have been a booby trap at all. Although rather touched, he was nevertheless quite relieved that Dudley appeared to have exhausted his ability to express his feelings. After opening his mouth once or twice more, Dudley subsided into scarlet-faced silence. Aunt Petunia burst into tears. Hestia Jones gave her an approving look that changed to outrage as Aunt Petunia ran forward and embraced Dudley rather than Harry. “S-so sweet, Dudders…” she sobbed into his massive chest. “S-such a lovely b-boy…s-saying thank you…” “But he hasn’t said thank you at all!” said Hestia indignantly. “He only said he didn’t think Harry was a waste of space!” “Yeah, but coming from Dudley that’s like ‘I love you,’” said Harry, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh as Aunt Petunia continued to clutch at Dudley as if he had just saved Harry from a burning building.

He talks about how he grew up believing women served men because he watched his grandmother and his female cousins all make the food and bring the food and clean up the food, and the boys sat watching the ball game. What were they all being taught? And now he’s a grown man and he knows, because he had to learn, how to feed himself, how to make his own damn omelet. “I had no concept of appreciation,” he says of his past girlfriends, of Kelly. “I never had a bad partner. I had a bad attitude.

The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11 What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage. Fortunately,

This psychological attitude is, as we know, an essential condition for obtaining the kingdom of heaven, and this in its turn—all rational interpretations notwithstanding—is the central, irrational symbol whence the redeeming effect comes. The Christian symbol merely has a more social character than the related conceptions of the East. These are directly connected with age-old dynamistic ideas of a magical power emanating from people and things or—at a higher level of development—from gods or a divine principle.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and lay it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men’s souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

There's really no reason to come to satsang at all, unless you have an open heart! If you came to satsang with an open heart, Reality will be yours. Not my reality or your reality, but Reality, the Reality, what people call the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God. You are already That, but you have so many concepts you cover it up. You have so many feelings and dogmas and attitudes that you cover up the Godliness. So you have to open your heart and let your reality shine through. How do you do this? By keeping silent, by not being judgmental, by leaving the world alone. There will always be something in this world to correct, either in yourself or in your family or in the world or people. You have learned from experience that you cannot do this. The correction is always made within yourself. It is yourself with a small "s" that sees the problem. But if you try to resolve the problem outside of you, it will never be resolved. It's resolving yourself, knowing the Truth, understanding who you are, that brings you peace and realization. (p. 3-4)

It seems never to have occurred to the Pilgrims that this was just the kind of intolerant attitude that had forced them to leave England. For them, it was not a question of liberty and freedom—those concepts, so near and dear to their descendants in the following century, were completely alien to their worldview—but rather a question of right and wrong. As far as they were concerned, King James and his bishops were wrong, and they were right, and as long as they had the ability to live as the Bible dictated, they would do so.

Many Christians have a simplistic concept of temptation that goes something like this: Satan, at a particular moment, flits to our side and whispers “Do it,” and we either do or do not, depending upon our spiritual strength at that moment. We might be more consistently victorious in not “doing it” if we realized that there is much more to temptation than the overt, momentary solicitation to evil and that our strength or weakness at that moment is based upon attitudes that have been forming for weeks, months, even years prior.

you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.

Human history is the ancient story of the umbilical conflict between a lone individual versus a cabalistic society. A love-hate relationship defines our personal history with society, where the suppression of individuality for the sake of the collective good battles the notion that the purpose of society is to enable each person to flourish. A conspicuous feature of cultural development involves societies teaching children the sublimation of unacceptable impulses or idealizations, consciously to transform their inappropriate instinctual impulses into socially acceptable actions or behavior. The paradox rest in the concept that in order for any person to flourish they must preserve the spiritual texture of themselves, a process that requires the individual to resist societal restraint, push off against the community, and reject the walls of traditionalism that seek to pen us in. The climatic defining event in a person’s life represents the liberation of the self from crippling conformism, staunchly rebuffing capitulating to the whimsy of the super ego of society.

As spouses, we play a big role in the development of each other's self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. An entire personality can be destroyed and a marriage ripped apart over the course of just months. It's important that husbands and wives take this subject seriously and learn to build each other up through the simple concepts of dating. It's critical that the older we get, the younger we feel. As the years pass, our attitudes towards each other and our relationships should become more positive and our lives more meaningful.

necessary mudsill’ on which one constructed the edifice of a higher kind of society.” “What a distressing concept,” said Catherine. “Although I’m not sure it’s an order of magnitude worse than the upper-class attitude to the lower classes. I mean, not everything has to be about race, does it?” “Perhaps not, when you’re White.” “Oh, well, I didn’t mean to downplay . . .” Theo shifted in his seat. He imagined she would file the exchange away as an example of how easy it was to offend a Black person. He felt irritated and suddenly exhausted.

It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist." It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies.

Transcendental generosity is generally misunderstood in the study of the Buddhist scriptures as meaning being kind to someone who is lower than you.  Someone has this pain and suffering and you are in a superior position and can save them—which is a very simple-minded way of looking down on someone.  But in the case of the bodhisattva, generosity is not so callous.  It is something very strong and powerful; it is communication.   Communication must transcend irritation, otherwise it will be like trying to make a comfortable bed in a briar patch.  The penetrating qualities of external color, energy, and light will come toward us, penetrating our attempts to communicate like a thorn pricking our skin.  We will wish to subdue this intense irritation and our communication will be blocked.   Communication must be radiation and receiving and exchange.  Whenever irritation is involved, then we are not able to see properly and fully and clearly the spacious quality of that which is coming toward us, that which is presenting itself as communication.  The external world is immediately rejected by our irritation which says, “no, no, this irritates me, go away.”  Such an attitude is the complete opposite of transcendental generosity.   So the bodhisattva must experience the complete communication of generosity, transcending irritation and self-defensiveness.  Otherwise, when thorns threaten to prick us, we feel that we are being attacked, that we must defend ourselves.  We run away from the tremendous opportunity for communication that has been given to us, and we have not been brave enough even to look to the other shore of the river.  We are looking back and trying to run away.   Generosity is a willingness to give, to open without philosophical or pious or religious motives, just simply doing what is required at any moment in any situation, not being afraid to receive anything.  Opening could take place in the middle of a highway.  We are not afraid that smog and dust or people’s hatreds and passions will overwhelm us; we simply open, completely surrender, give.  This means that we do not judge, do not evaluate.  If we attempt to judge or evaluate our experience, if we try to decide to what extent we should open, to what extent we should remain closed, the openness will have no meaning at all and the idea of paramita, of transcendental generosity, will be in vain.  Our action will not transcend anything, will cease to be the act of a bodhisattva.   The whole implication of the idea of transcendence is that we see through the limited notions, the limited conceptions, the warfare mentality of this as opposed to that. Generally, when we look at an object, we do not allow ourselves to see it properly.  Automatically we see our version of the object instead of actually seeing the object as it is.  Then we are quite satisfied, because we have manufactured or own version of the thing within ourselves.   Then we comment on it, we judge, we take or reject; but there is on real communication going on at all.   Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, p.167, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche

I have given a brief explanation of the various meanings of dharma according to the Abhidharma, but what I want to say next is much more important. In Mahayana Buddhism, and especially in Dōgen Zenji's teachings, the meaning of dharma has more depth. According to the concepts we accept, we think that everything exists as objects outside the self. For example, we usually think that all phenomenal things that appear before our eyes, or this twentieth-century human society, have existence outside our individual self. We believe that when we are born we appear on this world's stage, and when we die we leave that stage. All of us think this way. But the truth is that this common-sense concept is questionable. Mahayana Buddhism began from a reexamination of this common-sense attitude. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I am looking at this cup now. You are also looking at the same cup. We think that we are looking at the very same cup, but this is not true. I am looking at it from my angle, with my eyesight, in the lighting that occurs where I am sitting, and with my own feelings or emotions. Furthermore, the angle, my feeling, and everything else is changing from moment to moment. This cup I am looking at now is not the same one that I will be looking at in the next moment. Each of you is also looking at it from your own angle, with your eyesight, with your own feelings, and these also are constantly changing. This is the way actual life experience is. However, if we use our common-sense way of thinking, we think we are looking at the very same cup. This is an abstraction and not the reality of life. Abstract concepts and living reality are entirely different. The Buddhist view is completely different from our ordinary thinking. Western philosophy's way of thinking is also based on abstractions. It assumes that all of us are seeing the same cup. Greek philosophers went further and further in their abstractions until they came up with the concept of the idea that cannot be seen or felt. One example is Venus, the goddess of beauty. In the real world, no woman is as well-proportioned as Venus, or embodies perfect beauty as she does. Yet the Greeks idealized beauty and created a statue of Venus, just as they had thought of the "idea" of a circle that is abstracted from something round. In other words, the Greek way of thinking is abstraction to the highest degree. Buddhism is different. Buddhism puts emphasis on life, the actual life experience of the reality of the self.

The rote nature of education in contemporary Muslim societies can be traced to attitudes inherited from traditional education, wherein knowledge is something to be acquired rather than discovered. and in which the attitude of mind is passive and receptive rather than creative and inquisitive. The social conditioning of an authoritarian traditional environment has. as an inescapable consequence. That all knowledge comes to be viewed as unchangeable and all books tend to be memorized or venerated to some degree. The concept of secular knowledge as a problem-solving tool which evolves over time is alien to traditional thought.

The concept "God" was invented as the opposite of the concept life — everything detrimental, poisonous, and slanderous, and all deadly hostility to life, wad bound together in one horrible unit in Him. The concepts "beyond" and "true world" were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists — in order that no goal or aim, no sense or task, might be left to earthly reality. The concepts "soul," "spirit," and last of all the concept "immortal soul," were invented in order to throw contempt on the body, in order to make it sick and "holy," in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling levity towards all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously, i.e. the questions of nutrition and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather. Instead of health, we find the "salvation of the soul" — that is to say, a folie circulate fluctuating between convulsions and penitence and the hysteria of redemption. The concept "sin," together with the torture instrument appertaining to it, which is the concept "free will," was invented in order to confuse and muddle our instincts, and to render the mistrust of them man's second nature! In the concepts "disinterestedness" and "self-denial," the actual signs of decadence are to be found. The allurement of that which is detrimental, the inability to discover one's own advantage and self-destruction, are made into absolute qualities, into the "duty," the "holiness," and the "divinity" of man. Finally — to keep the worst to the last — by the notion of the good man, all that is favoured which is weak, ill, botched, and sick-in-itself, which ought to be wiped out. The law of selection is thwarted, an ideal is made out of opposition to the proud, well-constituted man, to him who says yea to life, to him who is certain of the future, and who guarantees the future — this man is henceforth called the evil one.

Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13', where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere's disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can't rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned. But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you, but can't be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting ‘as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centres on control rather than care. I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an ‘attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’ An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’. This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning. It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some people choose to believe in materialism; they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. An answer to the question whether God exists could only come from my acting ‘as if’ God is, and in this way being true to God, and experiencing God (or not, as the case might be) as true to me. If I am a believer, I have to believe in God, and God, if he exists, has to believe in me. Rather like Escher's hands, the belief must arise reciprocally, not by a linear process of reasoning. This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true. Truth and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected. It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.

The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden the national sport is suicide), the Danes’ relaxed attitude to life is not so much refreshing as astonishing. Do you know how long World War II lasted for Denmark? It was over in a day – actually less than a day. Hitler’s tanks crossed the border under cover of darkness and had taken control of the country by dawn. As a politician of the time remarked, ‘We were captured by telegram.’ By evening they were all back in the bars and restaurants.

We see that it is not the alleged profligacy of the male world that necessarily causes immorality and delinquency in boys and girls. Women are not oppressed and morally led astray because of males, but by their own distorted conception of masculinity, a condition originally caused by their malignant mother's attitudes. In today's world many women prefer raising children without a male influence being present. This is because the "male" is rejected in a similar way as the woman (or mother) is rejected. Neither the father nor the mother have contributed to the creation of a positive superego or ego-ideal (Self-image). Consequently, both parents are demoted in the eyes of a malignant daughter.

It was now clear that no matter how it was done in England, Plymouth played by its own, God-ordained rules, and everyone—Separatist or Anglican—was expected to conform. It seems never to have occurred to the Pilgrims that this was just the kind of intolerant attitude that had forced them to leave England. For them, it was not a question of liberty and freedom—those concepts, so near and dear to their descendants in the following century, were completely alien to their worldview—but rather a question of right and wrong. As far as they were concerned, King James and his bishops were wrong, and they were right, and as long as they had the ability to live as the Bible dictated, they would do so.

When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.

Nintendo’s standards were exacting. “In terms of game testing they revolutionised the concept,” said Milgrom. “They said zero defects – we will not allow you to release a game that has any bugs in it whatsoever. Now zero defects was an unheard of concept in any other software or on any other gaming platform. Nintendo knew if they were going to sell it in the supermarkets and sell it to mums and dads it had to work off the shelf and had to be flawless. They didn’t want returns. We had to change our programming attitude and the way we developed games, which was brilliant. It was really hard work. If you had a bug in your final version you could miss Christmas because it would take a month for them to go through the testing of the title.

research shows that the experiences of patients, and the attitudes of health professionals, is mixed; nonetheless, we conclude that testimonial injustice – the deflation of CFS/ME patients’ testimony on the ground of unjustified negative stereotyping – appears to be a continued problem within mainstream healthcare across a range of settings and countries. Furthermore, it would seem that the testimonial injustice is sustained and also accompanied by hermeneutical injustice because the dominant group (health professionals) may routinely fail to provide adequate training about CFS/ME, leading to prejudiced deflations of patient credibility, and/or an unfair lack of shared concepts with which to make mutual sense of the experience of the patient.

Before drawing any affirmative conclusions let us first note the absence of the concept of imitation as a general pastoral or moral guideline. There is in the New Testament no Franciscan glorification of barefoot itinerancy. Even when Paul argues the case for celibacy, it does not occur to him to appeal to the example of Jesus. Even when Paul explains his own predilection for self-support there is no appeal to Jesus' years of village artisan. Even when the Apostle argues strongly the case for his teaching authority, there is no appeal to the rabbinic ministry of Jesus. Jesus' trade as a carpenter, his association with fishermen, and his choice of illustrations from the life of the sower and the shepherd have through Christian history given momentum to the romantic glorification of the handcrafts and the rural life; but there is none of this in the New Testament, which testifies throughout to the life and mission of a church going intentionally into the cities in full knowledge of the conflicts which awaited here there. That the concept of imitation is not applied by the New Testament at some of those points where Franciscan and romantic devotion has tried most piously to apply it, is all the more demonstration of how fundamental the thought of participation in the suffering of Christ is when the New Testament church sees it as guiding and explaining her attitude to the powers of the world. Only at one point, only on one subject - but then consistently, universally - is Jesus our example: in his cross.

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.

The existence of two mutually antagonistic tendencies, both striving to drag man into extreme attitudes and entangle him in the world, whether on the material or spiritual level, sets him at variance with himself and accordingly demands the existence of a counterweight. This is the “irrational third,” tao. Hence the sage’s anxious endeavour to live in harmony with tao, lest he fall into the conflict of opposites. Since tao is irrational, it is not something that can be got by the will, as Lao-tzu repeatedly emphasizes. This lends particular significance to another specifically Chinese concept, wu-wei. Wu-wei means “not-doing” (which is not to be confused with “doing nothing”). Our rationalistic “doing,” which is the greatness as well as the evil of our time, does not lead to tao.

While paying attention to the messages in its public spaces, Christianity also wisely recognizes the extent to which our concepts of good and bad are shaped by the people we spend time with. It knows that we are dangerously permeable with regard to our social circle, all too apt to internalize and mimic others’ attitudes and behaviour. Simultaneously, it accepts that the particular company we keep is largely a result of haphazard forces, a peculiar cast of characters drawn from our childhood, schooling, community and work. Among the few hundred people we regularly encounter, not very many are likely to be the sorts of exceptional individuals who exhaust our imagination with their good qualities, who strengthen our soul and whose voices we want consciously to adopt to bolster our best impulses.

Your beliefs, your fixed attitudes of mind, constantly modify your consciousness as it is reflected on the mirror of your mind. Your consciousness, modified by your beliefs, objectifies itself in the conditions of your world. To change the world, you must first change your conception of it. To change a man, you must change your conception of him. You must believe him to be the man you want him to be and mentally talk to him as though he were. All men are sufficiently sensitive to reproduce your beliefs of them. Therefore, if your word is not reproduced visibly in him toward whom it is sent, the cause is to be found in you, not in the subject. As soon as you believe in the truth of the state affirmed, results follow. Everyone can be transformed; every thought can be transmitted; every thought can be visibly embodied.

The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the Leitmotiv of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, man is nothing, the powers are everything. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.

There is no difference in the objective compatibility between those couples who are unhappy and those who are happy.' Hudson found that couple who feel 'content and warmth in their relationship' don't believe having compatible personalities is the issue. On the contrary, they believe it was their attitude that made the relationship work. The strength of the relationship does not depend on how alike they are, more their willingness to adapt and build a bank of warmth and affection that helps buffer the annoyance of their differences. This supports the concept of the development of compatibility, having a growth mindset('I believe I can change') rather than a fixed mindset ('This is how I am'). Having an attitude of growth means going through difficulties and seeing them as an opportunity to know each other better and bolster the relationship through the resolution of the conflict.

It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.

I believe this quasi-religious attitude explains the repeated misunderstandings and deficiencies of revolutionary Marxism in the face of all the major events that have accompanied decolonization—such as the secessions of Katanga and Rhodesia, the Biafra war, and even the Algerian war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Marxists seem to circle round and round these problems without knowing from which angle to tackle them. Innumerable ‘mini-theories’ are produced that contradict one another; words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group, even within the great ‘left-wing’ parties themselves on those occasions when reflection is encouraged, allowed or simply tolerated. This confusion becomes unbearable when the inadequacy of the old concepts is recognized and people try to save them with a multitude of deductive developments instead of firmly replacing them by new ones.

Most geniuses responsible for the major mutations in the history of thought seem to have certain features in common; on the one hand scepticism, often carried to the point of icon-oclasm, in their attitude towards traditional ideas, axioms and dogmas, towards everything that is taken for granted; on the other hand, an open-mindedness that verges on na- ïve credulity towards new concepts which seem to hold out some promise to their instinctive gropings. Out of this combination results that crucial capacity of perceiving a familiar object, situation, problem, or collection of data, in a sudden new light or new context: of seeing a branch not as part of a tree, but as a potential weapon or tool; of associating the fall of an apple not with its ripeness, but with the motion of the moon. The discoverer perceives relational patterns or functional analogies where nobody saw them before, as the poet perceives the image of a camel in a drifting cloud.

HAPPINESS: "Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming...Flourishing is rooted in action..."happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence"...a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence...Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in...Flourishing is not a virtue, but a condition; not a character trait, but a result. We need virtue to flourish, but virtue isn't enough. To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can flourish...Resilience is a virtue required for flourishing, bur being resilient will not guarantee that we will flourish. Unfairness, injustice, and bad fortune will snuff our promising lives. Unasked-for pain will still come our way...We can build resilience and shape the world we live in. We can't rebuild the world...three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and happiness of excellence...people who are flourishing usually have all three kinds of happiness in their lives...Aristotle understood: pushing ourselves to grow, to get better, to dive deeper is at the heart of happiness...This is the happiness that goes hand in hand with excellence, with pursuing worthy goals, with growing mastery...It is about the exercise of powers. The most common mistake people make in thinking about the happiness of excellence is to focus on moments of achievement. They imagine the mountain climber on the summit. That's part of the happiness of excellence, and a very real part. What counts more, though, is not the happiness of being there, but the happiness of getting there. A mountain climber heads for the summit, and joy meets her along the way. You head for the bottom of the ocean, and joy meets you on the way down...you create joy along the way...the concept of flow, the kind of happiness that comes when we lose ourselves through complete absorption in a rewarding task...the idea of flow..."Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."...Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim...A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness. The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary...the pull of purpose, the desire to feel "needed in this world" - however we fulfill that desire - is a very powerful force in a human life...recognize that the drive to live well and purposefully isn't some grim, ugly, teeth-gritting duty. On the contrary: "it's a very good feeling." It is really is happiness...Pleasures can never make up for an absence of purposeful work and meaningful relationships. Pleasures will never make you whole...Real happiness comes from working together, hurting together, fighting together, surviving together, mourning together. It is the essence of the happiness of excellence...The happiness of pleasure can't provide purpose; it can't substitute for the happiness of excellence. The challenge for the veteran - and for anyone suddenly deprived of purpose - is not simple to overcome trauma, but to rebuild meaning. The only way out is through suffering to strength. Through hardship to healing. And the longer we wait, the less life we have to live...We are meant to have worthy work to do. If we aren't allowed to struggle for something worthwhile, we'll never grow in resilience, and we'll never experience complete happiness.

If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned we shall find the case the same. It is the same, for instance, in the deep matter of the Trinity. Unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude. But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king. The HEART of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For

Thus, once you have adopted such an attitude of infinite interconnectedness, you naturally want to liberate not just yourself but all beings from suffering. The Buddha calls this „the conception of the Spirit of Enlightenment“ it is the soul of the Bodhisattva, the person who dedicates him- or herself to helping all beings achieve total happiness. When you open to the inevitability of your infinite interconnection with other sensitive beings, you develop compassion. You learn to feel empathy for them, to love them, to want their happiness. You want to keep them from suffering, and you do so just as if they were a part of you. You don‘t think your behavior makes you special. You don‘t congratulate yourself for helping others, just as you wouldn't congratulate yourself for healing your own legs when you hurt it. It is natural for you to love your leg because it is one with you, and so it is natural for you to love others. You would certainly never harm another being. As the great Buddhist adept Shantideva (eighth-century Indian sage) wrote, „How wonderful will it be when all beings experience each other as limbs on the one body of life! (p. 27)

Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it's still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the 'porn star' aesthetic and young girls' behavior on social media, observing that pornography is not about liberation but about control. The more pornography, the more control. 'Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV,' the director of a youth-counseling service for teens told Sales. 'They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.' The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic, combined with the under-representation of more multidimensional female characters, affects the attitudes, behavior, and ideas about gender roles in both girls and boys, but it's especially insidious for girls' self-concept; as they constantly absorb the message that the choice comes down to either duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts, or abject invisibility.

How necessary it is to keep realizing that idealism does not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but that in truth it has been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture, yes, that it alone created the concept of 'man' It is to this inner attitude that the Aryan owes his position in this world, and to it the world owes man; for it alone formed from pure spirit the creative force which, by a unique pairing of the brutal fist and the intellectual genius, created the monuments of human culture. Without his idealistic attitude all, even the most dazzling faculties of the intellect, would remain mere intellect as such outward appearance without inner value, and never creative force. But, since true idealism is nothing but the subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the community, and this in turn is the precondition for the creation of organizational forms of all kinds, it corresponds in its innermost depths to the ultimate will of Nature. It alone leads men to voluntary recognition of the privilege of force and strength, and thus makes them into a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the whole universe. The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

These characteristics are individual peculiarities which we must not import into our conception of the introverted or extraverted attitude. In a man whose attitude is predominantly reflective, the Apollinian perception of inner images produces an elaboration of the perceived material in accordance with the nature of intellectual thinking. In other words, it produces ideas. In a man whose attitude is predominated by feeling a similar process results: a “feeling through” of the images and the production of a feeling-toned idea, which may coincide in essentials with an idea produced by thinking. Ideas, therefore, are just as much feelings as thoughts, examples being the idea of the fatherland, freedom, God, immortality, etc. In both elaborations the principle is a rational and logical one. But there is also a quite different standpoint, from which the rational and logical elaboration is not valid. This is the aesthetic standpoint. In introversion it dwells on the perception of ideas, it develops intuition, the inner vision; in extraversion it dwells on sensation and develops the senses, instinct, affectivity. From this standpoint, thinking is not the principle of an inner perception of ideas, and feeling just as little; instead, thinking and feeling are mere derivatives of inner perception and outer sensation.

The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique. The collective attitude hinders the recognition and evaluation of a psychology different from the subject’s, because the mind that is collectively oriented is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection. What we understand by the concept “individual” is a relatively recent acquisition in the history of the human mind and human culture. It is no wonder, therefore, that the earlier all-powerful collective attitude prevented almost completely an objective psychological evaluation of individual differences, or any scientific objectification of individual psychological processes. It was owing to this very lack of psychological thinking that knowledge became “psychologized,” i.e., filled with projected psychology. We find striking examples of this in man’s first attempts at a philosophical explanation of the cosmos. The development of individuality, with the consequent psychological differentiation of man, goes hand in hand with the de-psychologizing work of objective science.

The general intelligence which is the faculty of arranging concepts “reasonably” and handling words suitably, must therefore aid in the social life just as intelligence in the narrower sense of the word, which is the mathematical function of the mind, presides over the knowledge of matter. It is the first of these we have in mind when we say of a man that he is intelligent. By that we mean that he has the ability and the facility for combining the ordinary concepts and for drawing probable conclusions from them. One can hardly take issue with him on that account, as long as he confines himself to things of every-day life, for which the concepts were made. But one would hardly admit of a man who was merely intelligent undertaking to speak with authority on scientific questions seeing that the intellect, made precise in science, becomes a mathematical, physical and biological attitude of mind, and substitutes for words more appropriate signs. All the more should one forbid him to meddle in philosophy when the questions raised are no longer in the domain of the intelligence alone. But no, it is agreed that the intelligent man is on this point a competent man. Against this I protest most vigorously. I hold the intelligence in high esteem, but I have a very mediocre opinion of the “intelligent man,” whose cleverness consists in talking about all things with a show of truth.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and lay it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and lay it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men’s souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

The very concept of fathers as protectors is so politically incorrect that researchers must hedge their findings with politically acceptable weasel words: “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.” In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule. While men are assumed more likely to commit sexual than physical abuse,333 sexual abuse is much less common than severe physical abuse and is almost entirely perpetrated by boyfriends and stepfathers (who are falsely classified as “fathers” in most statistical studies). Yet feminists would have us believe that father-daughter incest is rampant, and feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy, rationalizing the forced removal of fathers and creating the very problem they claim to be solving. “An anti-male attitude is often found in documents, statements, and in the writings of those claiming to be experts in cases of child sexual abuse.” These scholars document techniques by social service agencies to systematically teach children to hate their fathers, including inculcating in the children a message that the father has sexually molested them. “The professionals use techniques that teach children a negative and critical view of men in general and fathers in particular,” they write. “The child is repeatedly reinforced for fantasizing throwing Daddy in jail and is trained to hate and fear him.” From the father’s perspective, the real child abusers have thrown him out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.

The definition of morality; Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents, actuated by a desire to avenge themselves with success upon life. I attach great value to this definition. 8 [Pg 141] Have you understood me? I have not uttered a single word which I had not already said five years ago through my mouthpiece Zarathustra. The unmasking of Christian morality is an event which unequalled in history, it is a real catastrophe. The man who throws light upon it is a force majeure, a fatality; he breaks the history of man into two. Time is reckoned up before him and after him. The lightning flash of truth struck precisely that which theretofore had stood highest: he who understands what was destroyed by that flash should look to see whether he still holds anything in his hands. Everything which until then was called truth, has been revealed as the most detrimental, most spiteful, and most subterranean form of life; the holy pretext, which was the "improvement" of man, has been recognised as a ruse for draining life of its energy and of its blood. Morality conceived as Vampirism.... The man who unmasks morality has also unmasked the worthlessness of the values in which men either believe or have believed; he no longer sees anything to be revered in the most venerable man—even in the types of men that have been pronounced holy; all he can see in them is the most fatal kind of abortions, fatal, because they fascinate. The concept "God" was invented as the opposite of the concept life—everything detrimental, poisonous, and slanderous, and all deadly hostility to life, wad bound together in one horrible unit in Him. The concepts "beyond" and "true world" were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists—in order that no goal or aim, no sense or task, might be left to earthly reality. The concepts "soul," "spirit," and last of all the concept "immortal soul," were invented in order to throw contempt on the body, in order to make it sick and "holy," in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling levity towards all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously, i.e. the questions of nutrition and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather. Instead of health, we find the "salvation of the soul"—that is to say, a folie circulate fluctuating between convulsions and penitence and the hysteria of redemption. The concept "sin," together with the torture instrument appertaining to it, which is the concept "free will," was invented in order to confuse and muddle our instincts, and to render the mistrust of them man's second nature! In the concepts "disinterestedness" and "self-denial," the actual signs of decadence are to be found. The allurement of that which is [Pg 142] [Pg 143] The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ecce Homo, by Friedrich Nietzsche. detrimental, the inability to discover one's own advantage and self-destruction, are made into absolute qualities, into the "duty," the "holiness," and the "divinity" of man. Finally—to keep the worst to the last—by the notion of the good man, all that is favoured which is weak, ill, botched, and sick-in-itself, which ought to be wiped out. The law of selection is thwarted, an ideal is made out of opposition to the proud, well-constituted man, to him who says yea to life, to him who is certain of the future, and who guarantees the future—this man is henceforth called the evil one. And all this was believed in as morality!

Byron’s diabolism, if indeed it deserves the name, was of a mixed type. He shared, to some extent, Shelley’s Promethean attitude, and the Romantic passion for Liberty; and this passion, which inspired his more political outbursts, combined with the image of himself as a man of action to bring about the Greek adventure. And his Promethean attitude merges into a Satanic (Miltonic) attitude. The romantic conception of Milton’s Satan is semi-Promethean, and also contemplates Pride as a virtue. It would be difficult to say whether Byron was a proud man, or a man who liked to pose as a proud man – the possibility of the two attitudes being combined in the same person does not make them any less dissimilar in the abstract. Byron was certainly a vain man, in quite simple ways: I can’t complain, whose ancestors are there, Erneis, Radulphus – eight-and-forty manors (If that my memory doth not greatly err) Were their reward for following Billy’s banners. His sense of damnation was also mitigated by a touch of unreality: to a man so occupied with himself and with the figure he was cutting nothing outside could be altogether real. It is therefore impossible to make out of his diabolism anything coherent or rational. He was able to have it both ways, it seems; and to think of himself both as an individual isolated and superior to other men because of his own crimes, and as a naturally good and generous nature distorted by the crimes committed against it by others. It is this inconsistent creature that turns up as the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred and Cain; only as Don Juan does he get nearer to the truth about himself. But in this strange composition of attitudes and beliefs the element that seems to me most real and deep is that of a perversion of the Calvinist faith of his mother’s ancestors.

A Presidential speech by a real President on Peace in the World John Kennedy 10th June 1963 “We need to examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But this is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that War is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man made and they therefore can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable. I am not here referring to the absolute and universal concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the values of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical more attainable goal—based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution of human institutions in a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single simple key to his peace—no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic not static, changing to meet the needs of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems. So let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct our attention to our common interests and the means by which these differences can be resolved, and if we now can not end our differences at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our childrens futures and we are all mortal.

He drew quick breaths at every few words and shot quick glances at my face, as though in his anguish he were watchful of the effect. He was not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence — another possessor of his soul. These were issues beyond the competency of a court of inquiry: it was a subtle and momentous quarrel as to the true essence of life, and did not want a judge. He wanted an ally, a helper, an accomplice. I felt the risk I ran of being circumvented, blinded, decoyed, bullied, perhaps, into taking a definite part in a dispute impossible of decision if one had to be fair to all the phantoms in possession — to the reputable that had its claims and to the disreputable that had its exigencies. I can’t explain to you who haven’t seen him and who hear his words only at second hand the mixed nature of my feelings. It seemed to me I was being made to comprehend the Inconceivable — and I know of nothing to compare with the discomfort of such a sensation. I was made to look at the convention that lurks in all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood. He appealed to all sides at once — to the side turned perpetually to the light of day, and to that side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon, exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light falling at times on the edge. He swayed me. I own to it, I own up. The occasion was obscure, insignificant — what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million — but then he was one of us; an incident as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Intelligence finds itself determined: this is its apparent aspect from which in its immediacy it starts. But as knowledge, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity has to do with the empty form – the pretense of finding reason: and its aim is to realise its concept or to be reason actual, along with which the content is realised as rational. This activity is cognition. The nominal knowledge, which is only certitude, elevates itself, as reason is concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge. The course of this elevation is itself rational, and consists in a necessary passage (governed by the concept) of one grade or term of intelligent activity (a so-called faculty of mind) into another. The refutation which such cognition gives of the semblance that the rational is found, starts from the certitude or the faith of intelligence in its capability of rational knowledge, and in the possibility of being able to appropriate the reason, which it and the content virtually is. The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called cognition (knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence inter alia knows – besides which it also intuits, conceives, remembers, imagines, etc. To take up such a position is in the first instance, part and parcel of that isolating of mental activity just censured; but it is also in addition connected with the great question of modern times, as to whether true knowledge or the knowledge of truth is possible – which, if answered in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort. The numerous aspects and reasons and modes of phrase with which external reflection swells the bulk of this question are cleared up in their place: the more external the attitude of understanding in the question, the more diffuse it makes its simple object. At the present place the simple concept of cognition is what confronts the quite general assumption taken up by the question, viz. the assumption that the possibility of true knowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecute or to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence. It follows from this that it is absurd to speak of intelligence and yet at the same time of the possibility or choice of knowing or not. But cognition is genuine, just so far as it realises itself, or makes the concept its own. This nominal description has its concrete meaning exactly where cognition has it. The stages of its realising activity are intuition, conception, memory, etc.: these activities have no other immanent meaning: their aim is solely the concept of cognition (§ 445 note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that they are useful for something else than cognition, or that they severally procure a cognitive satisfaction of their own; and that leads to a glorification of the delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It is true that even as isolated (i.e. as non-intelligent), intuition, imagination, etc. can afford a certain satisfaction: what physical nature succeeds in doing by its fundamental quality – its out-of-selfness – exhibiting the elements or factors of immanent reason external to each other – that the intelligence can do by voluntary act, but the same result may happen where the intelligence is itself only natural and untrained. But the true satisfaction, it is admitted, is only afforded by an intuition permeated by intellect and mind, by rational conception, by products of imagination which are permeated by reason and exhibit ideas – in a word, by cognitive intuition, cognitive conception, etc. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that intuition, conception, etc. are not isolated, and exist only as ‘moments’ in the totality of cognition itself.

If, in the case of Amfortas and the union of spear and Grail, only the sexual problem is discerned, we get entangled in an insoluble contradiction, since the thing that harms is also the thing that heals. Such a paradox is true and permissible only when one sees the opposites as united on a higher plane, when one understands that it is not a question of sexuality, either in this form or in that, but purely a question of the attitude by which every activity, including the sexual, is regulated. Once again I must emphasize that the practical problem in analytical psychology lies deeper than sexuality and its repression. The latter point of view is no doubt very valuable in explaining the infantile and therefore morbid part of the psyche, but as an explanatory principle for the whole of the psyche it is quite inadequate. What lies behind sexuality or the power instinct is the attitude to sexuality or to power. In so far as an attitude is not merely an intuitive (i.e., unconscious and spontaneous) phenomenon but also a conscious function, it is, in the main, a view of life. Our conception of all problematical things is enormously influenced, sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously, by certain collective ideas that condition our mentality. These collective ideas are intimately bound up with the view of life and the world of the past centuries or epochs. Whether or not we are conscious of this dependence has nothing to do with it, since we are influenced by these ideas through the very air we breathe. Collective ideas always have a religious character, and a philosophical idea becomes collective only when it expresses a primordial image. Their religious character derives from the fact that they express the realities of the collective unconscious and are thus able to release its latent energies. The great problems of life, including of course sex, are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are balancing or compensating factors that correspond to the problems which life confronts us with in reality.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin. It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed - in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

I’ve been discussing elite attitudes toward democracy. I sketched a line from the first democratic revolution, with its fear and contempt for the rascal multitude who were asking for ridiculous things like universal education, health care, and democratization of law, wanting to be ruled by countrymen like themselves who know the people’s sores, not by knights and gentlemen who just oppress them. From there to the second major democratic revolution establishing the US Constitution, which was, as discussed last time, a Framers’ Coup, the title of the main scholarly work, a coup by elites that the author describes as a conservative counterrevolution against excessive democracy. On to the twentieth century and such leading progressive theorists of democracy as Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and their conception that the public has to be put in its place. They’re spectators, not participants. The responsible men, the elite, have to be protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd, who have to be kept in line with necessary illusions, emotionally potent oversimplifications, and, in general, engineering of consent, which has become a gigantic industry devoted to some aspects of the task, while responsible intellectuals take care of others. The men of best quality through the ages have to be self-indoctrinated, as Orwell discussed. They must internalize the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. It must be so fully internalized that it becomes as routine as taking a breath. What else could anyone possibly believe? As long as all of this is in place, the system functions properly, with no crises. This picture, I think, captures crucial features of thought control in the more free societies, but it is misleading in essential ways. Most importantly, it largely omitted the constant popular struggles to extend the range of democracy, with many successes. Even in the last generation, there have been quite substantial successes. Such successes typically lead to a reaction. Those with power and privilege don’t relinquish it easily. The neoliberal period that we’re now enduring, long in planning, is such a reaction.

The risibility of our altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people. Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation. To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.

From Life, Volume III, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey: I am constantly startled and often amused by the diverse attitudes toward wealth to be found among the peoples of the Oikumene. Some societies equate affluence with criminal skill; for others wealth represents the gratitude of society for the performance of valuable services. My own concepts in this regard are easy and clear, and I am sure that the word ‘simplistic’ will be used by my critics. These folk are callow and turgid of intellect; I am reassured by their howls and yelps. For present purposes I exclude criminal wealth, the garnering of which needs no elaboration, and a gambler’s wealth which is tinsel. In regard, then, to wealth: Luxury and privilege are the perquisites of wealth. This would appear a notably bland remark, but is much larger than it seems. If one listens closely, he hears deep and far below the mournful chime of inevitability. To achieve wealth, one generally must thoroughly exploit at least three of the following five attributes: Luck. Toil, persistence, courage. Self-denial. Short-range intelligence: cunning, improvisational ability. Long-range intelligence: planning, the perception of trends. These attributes are common; anyone desiring privilege and luxury can gain the precursory wealth by making proper use of his native competence. In some societies poverty is considered a pathetic misfortune, or noble abnegation, hurriedly to be remedied by use of public funds. Other more stalwart societies think of poverty as a measure of the man himself. The critics respond: What an unutterable ass is this fellow Unspiek! I am reduced to making furious scratches and crotchets with my pen! — Lionel Wistofer, in The Monstrator I am poor; I admit it! Am I then a churl or a noddy? I deny it with all the vehemence of my soul! I take my bite of seed-cake and my sip of tea with the same relish as any paunchy plutocrat with bulging eyes and grease running from his mouth as he engulfs ortolans in brandy, Krokinole oysters, filet of Darango Five-Horn! My wealth is my shelf of books! My privileges are my dreams! — Sistie Fael, in The Outlook … He moves me to tooth-chattering wrath; he has inflicted upon me, personally, a barrage of sheer piffle, and maundering insult which cries out to the Heavens for atonement. I will thrust my fist down his loquacious maw; better, I will horsewhip him on the steps of his club. If he has no club, I hereby invite him to the broad and convenient steps of the Senior Quill-drivers, although I must say that the Inksters maintain a superior bar, and this shall be my choice since, after trouncing the old fool, I will undoubtedly ask him in for a drink. — McFarquhar Kenshaw, in The Gaean

Kshemaraja says: Let people of great intelligence closely understand the Goddess Consciousness who is simultaneously of the nature of both revelation (unmesha) and concealment (nimesha). The best attitude is to regard everything that happens in the group as the play of Chiti. Revelation is Shiva and confusion is also Shiva. However, there is always recourse to A-Statements, statements of present feeling. An A-Statement (I feel mad, sad, bad, scared or glad), is already at a higher level than a statement in which the A-Statement is not acknowledged or expressed. A person might be angry and not know it. That anger will colour all his opinions and attitudes and distort them. The simple statement, ‘I am angry’, is much closer to the truth and also much less destructive. Making A-Statements keeps thought closely tied to feeling. If thought wanders away from feeling, that is, if it is unconscious of the feeling underlying it, it can and does create universes of delusion. When thought is tied to feeling, it becomes much more trustworthy. If I were to look for a scriptural justification of the concept of the A-Statement, I would point to the remarkable verse (I.4) from Spanda Karikas: I am happy, I am miserable, I am attached—these and other cognitions have their being evidently in another in which the states of happiness, misery, etc., are strung together. Notice the A-Statements (I am happy, etc.). Of course, the point that Vasugupta is making has to do with the old debate with the Buddhists. He is saying that these cognitions or A-Statements must exist within an underlying context, the Self. The Buddhist logicians denied the existence of a continuous Self, saying that each mind moment was essentially unrelated to every other one. Leaving that debate aside, the verse suggests the close connection of the A-Statement with the Self. The participant in Shiva Process work makes an A-Statement, understanding that with it he comes to the doorway of the Self, which underlies it. I think of the A-Statement as a kind of Shaivite devotional ritual. The Shaiva yogi sacramentalises every movement and gesture of life and by making a perfect articulation of present feeling, he performs his sacrament to the presence of divinity in that moment. Once the A-Statements are found, expansion takes place via B-Statements, any statements that uplift, and G-Statements, those B-Statements that are scriptural or come from higher Consciousness. Without G-Statements the inquiry might be merely psychological, or rooted in the mundane. Without A-Statements we are building an edifice on shaky foundations. Balance is needed. Mandala of the Hierarchy of Statements. Self-inquiry leads to more subtle and profound understanding. A-Statements set the foundation of present feeling, B-Statements draw on inner wisdom and G-Statements lift the inquiry to higher Consciousness.

Should a child be allowed to “decide for himself” on matters related to God? Aren’t we forcing our religion down children’s throats when we tell them what to believe? Let me answer with an illustration from nature. A little gosling (baby goose) has a peculiar characteristic that is relevant at this point. Shortly after it hatches from its shell it becomes attached, or “imprinted,” to the first thing seen moving nearby. From that time forward, the gosling follows that particular object when it moves in the vicinity. Ordinarily, it becomes imprinted to the mother goose which hatched the new generation. If she is removed, however, the gosling settles for any mobile substitute, whether alive or not. In fact, a gosling becomes imprinted most easily to a blue football bladder, dragged by on a string. A week later, the baby falls in line behind the bladder as it scoots by. Time is the critical factor in this process. The gosling is vulnerable to imprinting for only a few seconds after hatching from the shell. If that opportunity is lost, it cannot be regained. In other words, there is a critical, brief period in the gosling’s life when this instinctual learning is possible. There is also a critical period when certain kinds of instruction are easier in the life of children. Although humans have no instincts (only drives, reflexes, urges, etc.), there is a brief period during childhood when youngsters are vulnerable to religious training. Their concepts of right and wrong are formulated during this time, and their view of God begins to solidify. As in the case of the gosling, the opportunity of that period must be seized when it is available. Leaders of the Catholic Church have been widely quoted as saying, “Give us the child until he is seven years old and we’ll have him for life.” They are usually correct, because permanent attitudes can be instilled during these seven vulnerable years. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is also true. The absence or misapplication of instruction through that prime-time period may place a severe limitation on the depth of a child’s later devotion to God. When parents withhold indoctrination from their small children, allowing them to “decide for themselves,” the adults are almost guaranteeing that their youngsters will “decide” in the negative. If parents want their children to have a meaningful faith, they must give up any misguided attempts at objectivity. Children listen closely to discover just how much their parents believe what they preach. Any indecision or ethical confusion from the parent is likely to be magnified in the child. After the middle adolescent age (ending at about fifteen years), children resent being told exactly what to believe. They don’t want religion “forced down their throats,” and should be given more autonomy in what they believe. If the early exposure has been properly conducted, children will have an inner mainstay to steady them. Their early indoctrination, then, is the key to the spiritual attitudes they carry into adulthood.

But I had no need to suppose anything of the sort, she might well have disdained the use of her eyes to ascertain what her instinct must have adequately enough detected, for, throughout her service with me and my parents, fear, prudence, alertness and cunning had finally taught her that instinctive and almost divinatory knowledge of us that the sailor has of the sea, the quarry of the hunter, and if not the doctor then often the patient of the disease. All the knowledge she was in the habit of acquiring would have astounded anyone for as good a reason as the advanced state of certain areas of knowledge among the ancients, given the almost negligible means of information at their disposal (hers were no less so: a handful of chance remarks forming barely a twentieth part of our conversation at dinner, gleaned in passing by the butler and inaccurately transmitted to the staff quarters). Even her mistakes resulted, like theirs, like the fables in which Plato believed, from a false conception of the world and from preconceived ideas rather than from an inadequacy of material resources... But if the drawbacks of her position as a servant had not prevented her from acquiring the learning indispensable to the art which was its ultimate goal – the art of confounding us by communicating the results of her discoveries – the constraints on her time had been even more effective; here hindrance had not merely been content not to paralyse her enthusiasm, it had powerfully fired it. And of course Françoise neglected no auxiliary stimulant, like diction and attitude for instance. While she never believed anything we said to her when we wanted her to believe it, and since she accepted beyond a shadow of doubt the absurdest things anyone of her own status told her which might at the same time offend our views, in the same way that her manner of listening to our assertions pointed to her incredulity, so the tone she used to report (indirection enabling her to fling the most offensive insults at us with impunity) a cook’s account of threatening her employers and forcing any number of concessions out of them by treating them like dirt in public, indicated that she treated the story as gospel truth. Françoise even went so far as to add: ‘If I’d been the mistress, I’d have been very put out, I can tell you.’ However much, despite our initial dislike of the lady on the fourth floor, we might shrug our shoulders at this unedifying tale as if it were an unlikely fable, its teller knew just how to invest her tone with all the trenchant punch of the most unshakeable and infuriating confidence in what she was saying. But above all, just as writers, when their hands are tied by the tyranny of a monarch or of poetic convention, by the strict rules of prosody or state religion, often achieve a power of concentration they would not have done under a system of political freedom or literary anarchy, so Françoise, by not being free to respond to us in an explicit manner, spoke like Tiresias and would have written like Tacitus.5 She knew how to contain everything she could not express directly in a sentence we could not denounce without casting aspersions on ourselves, in less than a sentence in fact, in a silence, in the way she placed an object.

The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity. We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.

Democracy, the apple of the eye of modern western society, flies the flag of equality, tolerance, and the right of its weaker members to defense and protection. The flag bearers for children's rights adhere to these same values. But should democracy bring about the invalidation of parental authority? Does democracy mean total freedom for children? Is it possible that in the name of democracy, parents are no longer allowed to say no to their children or to punish them? The belief that punishment is harmful to children has long been a part of our culture. It affects each and every one of us and penetrates our awareness via the movies we see and the books we read. It is a concept that has become a kingpin of modern society and helps form the media's attitudes toward parenting, as well as influencing legislation and courtroom decisions. In recent years, the children's rights movement has enjoyed enormous momentum and among the current generation, this movement has become pivotal and is stronger than ever before. Educational systems are embracing psychological concepts in which stern approaches and firm discipline during childhood are said to create emotional problems in adulthood, and liberal concepts have become the order of the day. To prevent parents from abusing their children, the public is constantly being bombarded by messages of clemency and boundless consideration; effectively, children should be forgiven, parents should be understanding, and punishment should be avoided. Out of a desire to protect children from all hardship and unpleasantness, parental authority has become enfeebled and boundaries have been blurred. Nonetheless, at the same time society has seen a worrying rise in violence, from domestic violence to violence at school and on the streets. Sweden, a pioneer in enacting legislation that limits parental authority, is now experiencing a dramatic rise in child and youth violence. The country's lawyers and academics, who have established a committee for human rights, are now protesting that while Swedish children are protected against light physical punishment from their parents (e.g., being spanked on the bottom), they are exposed to much more serious violence from their peers. The committee's position is supported by statistics that indicate a dramatic rise in attacks on children and youths by their peers over the years since the law went into effect (9-1). Is it conceivable, therefore, that a connection exists between legislation that forbids across-the-board physical punishment and a rise in youth violence? We believe so! In Israel, where physical punishment has been forbidden since 2000 (9-2), there has also been a steady and sharp rise in youth violence, which bears an obvious connection to reduced parental authority. Children and adults are subjected to vicious beatings and even murder at the hands of violent youths, while parents, who should by nature be responsible for setting boundaries for their children, are denied the right to do so properly, as they are weakened by the authority of the law. Parents are constantly under suspicion, and the fear that they may act in a punitive manner toward their wayward children has paralyzed them and led to the almost complete transfer of their power into the hands of law-enforcement authorities. Is this what we had hoped for? Are the indifferent and hesitant law-enforcement authorities a suitable substitute for concerned and caring parents? We are well aware of the fact that law-enforcement authorities are not always able to effectively do their jobs, which, in turn, leads to the crumbling of society.

Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide. Triumphant repression of selfcritical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the phenomena of conversive thinking (twisted thinking), or paralogistics (twisted logic), paramoralisms (twisted morality), and the use of reversion blockades (Big Lies). They stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology emerges from this conviction, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior. However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is nothing other than a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting selfcritical associations into the subconscious. The ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs. The spellbinder believes that he will always find converts to his ideology, and most often, they are right. However, they feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to only a limited minority, while most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed. The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the ef ectiveness of his activities. The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible. Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority, since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average. Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically. However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls. It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom. In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy. Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union. On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results. In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.

I fell deeply in love with the books of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. They parented me, and gave me a sense of what it was to be a decent person, without any of the usual hypocritical rhetoric. They fired my imagination and opened me up; I read them all one after the other, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, on and on they go, they gave me the soul nutrients I needed. He was bitterly funny and awakened in me a morality that lay dormant and unarticulated. He taught me that it was fun and beautiful to be humble, and that human beings are no more important than rutabagas. That we’ve got to love with all we are, not for some reward down the line, but purely for the sake of being a loving person, and that creativity was the highest part of ourselves to engage. He pointed out the frivolous and insensitive attitudes that birthed the absurd cruelty of war. His humorous detachment from the world’s insane and egotistical violence—“So it goes”—my first hint of a spiritual concept. To this day, his books inform my political and social views, my sense of humor, and touch me deeply. KVJ changed my life, he never gets old.

Kindness is not a concept we throw around ourselves to decorate ourselves with, like robes we wear and then take off when we come home. But kindness is a presence, a phantom in our lives, a ghost, that we must choose to invite into our very present moments.

That is the ultimate alternative: is the opposition between Loveand Law to be reduced to its “truth,” the opposition, internal to theLaw itself, between the determinate positive Law and the excessivesuperego injunction, the Law beyond every measure—that is to say,is the excess of Love with regard to the Law the form of appearanceof a superego Law, of a Law beyond any determinate law; or is theexcessive superego Law the way the dimension beyond the Law ap-pears withinthe domain of the Law, so that the crucial step to be ac-complished is the step (comparable to Nietzsche’s “High Noon”)from the excessive Law to Love, from the way Love appears withinthe domain of the Law to Love beyond the Law? Lacan himselfstruggled continuously with this same deeply Pauline problem: isthere love beyond Law? Paradoxically (in view of the fact that thenotion as unsurpassable Law is usually perceived as Jewish), in thevery last page of Four Fundamental Concepts,he identifies this stance oflove beyond Law as that of Spinoza, opposing it to the Kantian no-tion of moral Law as the ultimate horizon of our experience. InEthics of Psychoanalysis,Lacan deals extensively with the Pauline di-alectic of the Law and its transgression13—perhaps what we shoulddo, therefore, is read this Pauline dialectic together with its corol-lary, Saint Paul’s other paradigmatic passage, the one on love from 1Corinthians 13. Crucial here is the clearly paradoxical place of Love with regard to All(to the completed series of knowledge or prophecies): first, SaintPaul claims that love is here even if we possess all of knowledge—then, in the second quoted paragraph, he claims that love is hereonly for incomplete beings, that is, beings who possess incompleteknowledge.When I “know fully . . . as I have been fully known,” willthere still be love? Although, in contrast to knowledge, “love neverends,” it is clearly only “now” (while I am still incomplete) that“faith, hope, and love abide.” The only way out of this deadlock isto read the two inconsistent claims according to Lacan’s feminineformulas of sexuation:14even when it is “all” (complete, with no ex-ception), the field of knowledge remains, in a way, non-all, incom-plete—love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but preciselythat “nothing” which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge. In other words, the point of the claim that, evenif I were to possess all knowledge, without love, I would be nothing,is not simply that withlove, I am “something”—in love, I am also noth-ing,but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing par-adoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimatemystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higherthan completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking beingloves: we love because we do notknow all. On the other hand, evenif we were to know everything, love would, inexplicably, still behigher than completed knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement ofChristian is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place ofGod, that is, of ultimate perfection. That is the kernel of the Chris-tian experience. In the previous pagan attitude, imperfect earthlyphenomena can serve as signs of the unattainable divine perfection.In Christianity, on the contrary, it is physical (or mental) perfectionitself that is the sign of the imperfection (finitude, vulnerability, un-certainty) of you as the absolute person. becomes a sign of this spiritual dimension—not the sign of your“higher” spiritual perfection, but the sign of youas a finite, vulner-able person. Only in this way do we really break out of idolatry. Forthis reason, the properly Christian relationship between sex and loveis not the one between body and soul, but almost the opposite...

The wise man must become a friend of the truth, not a fanatic of the concepts that are believed by many to be true only.

We end up with the concept of, humans are to God as the robots are to Man.

Dreams are conceived yet require hard work.Hard work implies labor from conception—but Success is birthed from labor!

With the experience of our soul supporting us we will be psychologically primed to re-interpret our past in a way that justifies a more empowered attitude. One exercise that can help us in this regard is to write out a brief life narrative which frames the events of our past in such a way that at the end of the narrative we are firmly planted on the path of our living option. This exercise, in other words, uses our desired future to re-shape our conception of the past in the recognition that “…what an individual seeks to become determines what he remembers of his has been. In this sense the future determines the past.” Rollo May, Existence

gratitude and expectant. First, I’m grateful for the opportunity to live on this beautiful and astonishing planet Earth. In the morning, I wake up with a sense of gratitude. Second, I expect the best; I expect to reach the goals I establish for myself (we’ll talk a good deal more about this concept later in the book). I find the idea of fulfilling those goals agreeable; hence, the attitude of expectancy. I know the world will give me back what I put out in the way of attitude, so it’s up to me. I’m responsible.

Success much like failure, it is an illusion. Those things are relative; it is your perception that determines failure or success. It is a concept that you must define for yourself.

The concept, "all men are equal before God" does an extraordinary amount of harm; actions and attitudes of mind were forbidden which belonged to the prerogative of the strong alone, just as if they were in themselves unworthy of man. All the tendencies of strong men were brought into disrepute by the fact that the defensive weapons of the most weak (even of those who were weakest towards themselves) were established as a standard of valuation. The confusion went so far that precisely the great virtuosos of life (whose self-control presents the sharpest contrast to the vicious and the unbridled) were branded with the most opprobrious names. Even to this day people feel themselves compelled to disparage a Cesare Borgia: it is simply ludicrous. The Church has anathematised German Kaisers owing to their vices: as if a monk or a priest had the right to say a word as to what a Frederick II. should allow himself. Don Juan is sent to hell: this is very naïf. Has anybody ever noticed that all interesting men are lacking in heaven? ... This is only a hint to the girls, as to where they may best find salvation. If one think at all logically, and also have a profound insight into that which makes a great man, there, can be no doubt at all that the Church has dispatched all "great men" to Hades — its fight is against all "greatness in man".

S’il n’y a pas de principe déterminé ou de recette du bonheur, on peut néanmoins le viser en questionnant sans relâche nos propres actes et nos inclinations. Plutôt que l’atteinte d’un objectif déterminé, il constitue la récompense d’une attitude intérieure sur le long terme.

Lacan proposes a new conception of complexes. We must understand the notion of 'complex' not in the sense of an unhealthy formation, but, rather, as the key to all normal formation (there is no 'man without complexes'). A complex is a stereotypical attitude regarding certain situations. In some way, the complex is the most stable element of behavior, being a collection of behavioral traits which are always reproduced in analogous situations...In this sense, we can say that the base of the family is not the instinct, but the complex.

The concept of predestination takes away the true meaning of the day of judgment.

The interval between the first and second wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003) has seen a remarkable shift from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu in the discourse about contemporary warfare. Clausewitz enjoyed an undreamed of renaissance in the USA after the Vietnam War and seemed to have attained the status of master thinker. On War enabled many theorists to recognize the causes of America’s traumatic defeat in Southeast Asia, as well as the conditions for gaining victory in the future. More recently, however, he has very nearly been outlawed. The reason for this change can be found in two separate developments. Firstly, there has been an unleashing of war and violence in the ongoing civil wars and massacres, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in the secessionist wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in the persistence of inter-communal violence along the fringes of Europe’s former empires. These developments seemed to indicate a departure from interstate wars, for which Clausewitz’s theory appeared to be designed, and the advent of a new era of civil wars, non-state wars, and social anarchy. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War seemed to offer a better understanding of these kinds of war, because he lived in an era of never-ending civil wars. Secondly, the reason for the change from Clausewitz to Sun Tzu is connected with the ‘revolution in military affairs’. The concepts of Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) and fourth generation warfare have made wide use of Sun Tzu’s thought to explain and illustrate their position. The ‘real father’ of ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraq War of 2003 was Sun Tzu, argued one commentator in the Asia Times. Some pundits even claimed triumphantly that Sun Tzu had defeated Clausewitz in this war, because the US Army conducted the campaign in accordance with the principles of Sun Tzu, whereas the Russian advisers of the Iraqi army had relied on Clausewitz and the Russian defence against Napoleon’s army in 1812. The triumphant attitude has long been abandoned.

Long before the Gorgon Medusa constellated within the archaic Greek world and was demonized as ugly and ultimately monstrous—with her tongue lolling between sharp fangs, with writhing serpents for hair and glaring eyes—the roots of her multi-layered iconography extended deep into pre-Greek cultures. The earliest agrarian societies of Southeastern Europe, from the 7th-4th millennia BCE, were intimately bonded with the seasonal realities of the living Earth. These egalitarian farmers who developed long-lived, sustainable societies understood that life feeds on life. Death and decomposition are inevitable consequences of being alive, and the nutrients released from previously living matter are essential for life's renewal. Within this context, concepts of the sacred are analogous to the cyclic continuity of all existence. In mythic terms, the Great Goddess, as the Sacred Source of all life, is a metaphor for life giving birth to itself and absorbing itself in death. Therefore, the Goddess of Life is also the Goddess of Death who is responsible for regeneration. Goddesses in various guises who represent this eternal cycle are found in ancient traditions throughout the world. The nature of every society is shaped by prevailing attitudes—honoring and respectful, or fearful.

theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being as an experience which surpasses all understanding. ‘It is a great thing to speak of God, but still better to purify oneself for God,’ says St. Gregory Nazianzen.[47] Apophaticism is not necessarily a theology of ecstasy. It is, above all, an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God. Such an attitude utterly excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mysteries of the wisdom of God to human ways of thoughts. It is an existential attitude which involves the whole man: there is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man. To know God one must draw near to Him. No one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian. The way of the knowledge of God is necessarily the way of deification.

External circumstances are not what draw us into suffering. Suffering is caused and permitted by an untamed mind. The appearance of self-defeating emotions in our minds leads us to faulty actions. The naturally pure mind is covered over by these emotions and troubling conceptions. The force of their deceit pushes us into faulty actions, which leads inevitably to suffering. We need, with great awareness and care, to extinguish these problematic attitudes, the way gathering clouds dissolve back into the sphere of the sky. When our self-defeating attitudes, emotions, and conceptions cease, so will the harmful actions arising from them. —His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Success much like failure, it is an illusion. Those things are relative; it is your perception that determines failure or success. It is a concept that you must define for yourself?

This is not all. Together with the absurdity proper to democratizing the marriage rite and imposing it on all, there is an inconsistency in Catholic doctrine when it claims that the rite, as well as being indissoluble, renders natural unions “sacred”—which represents one incongruence associating with another. Through precise, dogmatic premises, the “sacred” is here reduced to a mere manner of speech. It is well known that Christian and Catholic attitudes are characterized by the antithesis between “flesh” and spirit, by a theological hatred for sex, due to the illegitimate extension to ordinary life of a principle valid at best for a certain type of ascetic life. With sex being presented as something sinful, marriage has been conceived as a lesser evil, a concession to human weakness for those who cannot choose chastity as a way of life, and renounce sex. Not being able to ban sexuality altogether, Catholicism has tried to reduce it to a mere biological fact, allowing its use in marriage only for procreation. Unlike certain ancient traditions, Catholicism has recognized no higher value, not even a potential one, in the sexual experience taken in itself. There is lacking any basis for its transformation in the interests of a more intense life, to integrate and elevate the inner tension of two beings of different sexes, whereas it is in exactly these terms that one should conceive of a concrete “sacralization” of the union and the effect of a higher influence involved in the rite. On the other hand, since the marriage rite has been democratized, the situation could not be otherwise even if the premises were different; otherwise, it would be necessary to suppose an almost magical power in the rite to automatically elevate the sexual experiences of any couple to the level of a higher tension, of a transforming intoxication that alone could lift it beyond the “natural” plane. The sexual act would constitute the primary element, whereas procreation would appear absolutely secondary and belonging to the naturalistic plane. As a whole, whether through its conception of sexuality, or through its profanation of the marriage rite as something put in everyone’s reach and even rendered obligatory for any Catholic couple, religious marriage itself is reduced to the mere religious sanction of a profane, unbreakable contract. Thus the Catholic precepts about the relations between the sexes reduce everything to the plane of a restrained, bourgeois mediocrity: tamed, procreative animality within conformist limits that have not been fundamentally changed by certain hesitant, fringe concessions made for the sake of “updating” at the Second Vatican Council.

Tainter essentially denies concepts such as the metaphysical, human spirit, social zeitgeists, governing philosophies, attitudes about the relationship between humans and their environment, ideologies, because they cannot be measured by the tools of science.

This is why some of the pre-molecular-biological discoveries of the twenties and thirties were so startling and certainly significant for the whole change of attitude that ensued,” Monod said. “I’m thinking now first of all of the crystallization of urease by Sumner in 1926.” Urease is the enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of urea into ammonia and carbon dioxide. Starting with an extract of jack beans, James Sumner had prepared a solution that demonstrated this catalytic activity very strongly; when he let the solution stand overnight in the cold, he found that crystals formed. The crystals were protein. They proved to be pure urease. This was the first pure enzyme ever prepared. It provided the first demonstration that a protein could act catalytically, and confuted the prevalent view, following Richard Willstätter’s experiments, that enzymes were not proteins. “Sumner’s discovery that one could crystallize an enzyme shocked biologists at the time,” Monod said. “In fact the discovery was denied for a long time. And the second discovery—this was of great psychological rather than actual scientific importance—was the crystallization of tobacco-mosaic virus by Wendell Stanley in 1935. Right away there was a lot of stupid discussion about ‘Can you crystallize life?’ and that sort of thing, which of course is meaningless. But if you could crystallize these biologically active and specific substances, then they had regular structures. With that began the replacement of the colloidal conception of the organization of life by the structural conception.

It seems certain that Drahomanov analyzed correctly the practical possibilities open to the Ukrainian movement of his time. His analysis was validated by the fact that it was only after 1905-after the introduction of a certain, though very limited, degree of constitutionalism – that the momentum of the Ukrainian national movement increased. Drahomanov's attitude toward the question of independent statehood for the Ukraine was thoroughly compatible with his attitude toward the socialist maximal program. In both cases he was sceptical of utopias; he preferred to seek a strategic plan which would point the way forward from the status quo. But there was another element, besides this pragmatic one, which figured in his rejection of separatism. As we have seen, Drahomanov had a very individualist conception of freedom. His ideal was freedom from the State rather than freedom through the State. He considered concentration of power and power politics bad in themselves. But the foundation of a new State, even of a thoroughly democratic one, is impossible without power and power, politics, without the creation of authority and of a hierarchy. It is easy to understand that Drahomanov instinctively shrank from seeing the Ukrainian movement go in this direction. He hoped that the political freedom of the Ukrainian people could come from a gradual decentralist and federalist transformation of the existing power aggregates, Russia and Austria-Hungary. We should like to say here that, at a time when there was neither a Ukrainian State, nor even a modest practical basis for a Ukrainian separatist policy, a man like Drahomanov, whose nature it was to think in terms other than those of States, was particularly fitted to render service to the Ukrainian cause.

The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times . . . The will to use, as a matter of principle, only concepts, symbols, and attitudes which are established by the praxis of the priest, the instinctive repudiation of every other praxis, of every other mode of perspective with regard to value and utility—that is not only tradition, it is inheritance:

There is a perhaps understandable reluctance to come to grips scientifically with the problem of race differences in intelligence—to come to grips with it, that is to say, in the same way the scientists would approach the investigation of any other phenomenon. This reluctance is manifested in a variety of ‘symptoms’ found in most writings and discussions of the psychology of race differences. These symptoms include a tendency to remain on the remotest fringes of the subject, to sidestep central questions, and to blur the issues and tolerate a degree of vagueness in definitions, concepts and inferences that would be unseemly in any other realm of scientific discourse. Many writers express an unwarranted degree of skepticism about reasonably well-established quantitative methods and measurements. They deny or belittle facts already generally accepted—accepted, that is, when brought to bear on inferences outside the realm of race differences—and they demand practically impossible criteria of certainty before even seriously proposing or investigating genetic hypotheses, as contrasted with with extremely uncritical attitudes towards purely environmental hypotheses. There is often a failure to distinguish clearly between scientifically answerable aspects of the question and the moral, political and social policy issues; there is tendency to beat dead horses and set up straw men on what is represented, or misrepresented I should say, as the genetic side of the argument. We see appeals to the notion that the topic is either too unimportant to be worthy of scientific curiosity, or is too complex, or too difficult, or that it will be forever impossible for any kind of research to be feasible, or that answers to key questions are fundamentally ‘unknowable’ in any scientifically accepted sense. Finally, we often see complete denial of intelligence and race as realities, or as quantifiable attributes, or as variables capable of being related to one another. In short, there is an altogether ostrich-like dismissal of the subject.

Unpacking certain words or concepts, may reveal, [attributes] which may not always hold true to intended use. If the majority (or the influencial source) is lazy, the language adopts a lazy attitude - bundling in [other] which were observed throughout time, disregarding exceptions. Which again, may almost certainly be due to past hardships, when survival is a prefered priority. Impatience. Patience. Then. Now. However, good things usually take time.

By the New Inquisition I mean to designate certain habits of repression and intimidation that are becoming increasingly commonplace in the scientific community today. By New Idol I mean to designate the rigid beliefs that form the ideological superstructure of the New Inquisition. By the New Agnosticism I mean to designate an attitude of mind which has elsewhere been called "model agnosticism" and which applies the agnostic principle not just to the "God" concept but to ideas of all sorts in all areas of thoughts and ideology.

Le Zen sous-entend que l'on suive e mouvement de la vie, sans valoir ni l'arrêter ni interrompre son cours. C'est la raison pour laquelle on le définit quelquefois comme « un chemin sans détours », ou un « le fait d'aller droit devant soi ». Une telle attitude suppose une compréhension immédiate des choses en tant que vie et mouvement et non simplement en tant que sensations et concepts, lesquels ne sont que les symboles morts d'une réalité vivante. POur cette raison, Takuan commente l'arte de l'escrime (kendo) -- un art profondément imprégné des principes zen -- en ces termes: « Cette qualité, qu'on peut désigner par l'attitude mentale de ''non-ingérence'', constitue l'élément le plus vital tant dans l'art de l'escrime, que dans le Zen. Si deux actions sont distantes, même de l'épaisseur d'un cheveu, il y a interruption. » Lorsqu'on tape dans ses mains, le son se dégage immédiatement. Le son n'attend, ni ne pense avant de sortir. Il n'y a aucun état intermédiaireL un mouvement succède à un autre, sans l'intervention du mental conscient. Si vous êtes indécis et si vous réfléchissez à ce qu'il convient de faire, au moment où votre adversaire est prêt à vous abattre, vous lui laissez la place, c'est-à-dire la possibiliité de vous porter un coup fatal. Que votre défense suive l'attaque, sans intervalle, et il n'y aura pas deux mouvements séparés appelés attaque et défense.

How does harmful behavior become the norm?…Doing harm to a good person or passively witnessing it is inconsistent with a feeling of responsibility for the welfare of others and the belief in a just world. Inconsistency troubles us. We minimize it by reducing our concern for the welfare of those we harm or allow to suffer. We devalue them, justify their suffering by their evil nature or by higher ideals. A changed view of the victims, changed attitude toward that suffering, and changed self-concept result.

The question arises: What is God? God is man's consciousness, his awareness, his I AMness. The drama of life is a psychological one in which we bring circumstances to pass by our attitudes rather than by our acts. The corner-stone on which all things are based is mans concept of himself. He acts as he does, and has the experiences that he does, because his concept of himself is what it is, and for no other reason. Had he a different concept of himself, he would act differently and have different experiences.

In retrospect, The General Theory would set the intellectual agenda for Friedman’s entire career, but when it appeared, he barely noticed. As Keynes’s ideas were making landfall in American universities, Friedman offered a course through the Columbia University extension school that was a throwback to the early 1930s. Focused on individual demand curves, individual marginal utility, and individual economic decision-making, Friedman’s course, Structure of Neo-classical Economics, made no mention of business cycles, national income, or current economic conditions. Drawing on the approach pioneered by Knight and Simons, it placed the question of “how free enterprise system solves economic problem” front and center.45 At the same time, Friedman did offer an implicit critique of the fiscal revolution, particularly Hansen’s concept of secular stagnation. Picking up a theme from Knight, Friedman told his class, “Once wants are satisfied, new wants are going to be formed; the process of want formation is part of the basic drive.”46 There were two critical implications. First was that perpetual wanting would keep economies always in motion: “Impossibility of completely satisfying all wants. If the greatest want is the desire for new wants … the notion of satiety is silly.” It was more than a philosophical point. Not only was it impossible for the economy to stagnate, but it would be impossible to design a government program that would adequately satisfy wants, which tended to continually increase. Friedman drew out the second implication in another comment. “Attitude toward all policies will be affected by our ideas concerning wants,” he argued.47 In a letter to Arthur Burns, he was more direct. Reflecting on a road trip to visit Rose’s family, he wrote, “The whole West, particularly California, and more particularly Southern California, gives you the feeling that the frontier is not yet gone and makes you feel like telling the stagnationites to come out and take a look.”48 Although he worked for the New Deal, Friedman was not a New Dealer. Nor was he a Keynesian. He thoroughly rejected the ideas that would most profoundly shape economics in the years ahead.

Finally, we may understand misanthropy as a kind of viewpoint that includes the judgment that humanity is bad. There are various senses of “bad” one might use here, but I focus on moral badness, a concept that I shall explicate below. This viewpoint is distinct from the other types of misanthropy just noted, although it may be compatible with some of them. Someone who sincerely judges that humans are bad, and views them accordingly, need not dislike, hate, or despise humanity. Like misanthropy as contempt, this type essentially involves a belief rather than a non-cognitive attitude, such as disliking or hatred. However, unlike contempt, misanthropy as the judgment that humans are bad does not essentially involve the judgment that others are inferior to oneself. Although it seems possible for one to judge that humans are bad and to hold the rest of humanity in contempt, this requires only that we acknowledge that one might be two types of misanthrope at once. Solely in virtue of judging humanity to be bad, one will not thereby be contemptuous toward others. This opens an important possibility for our final type of misanthropy, namely that one can include oneself among those judged to be bad. Contempt seems unavoidably elitist, as it involves looking down upon other persons. This distinguishes misanthropy as contempt from misanthropy as the judgment that humanity is bad and in a striking way.

Patience is My Power *** I stand open To every person I live far from pretentious I escape from such plays What I feel and imagine I write that The exact thought Since I honor the truth I speak the truth Whereas I am also strong To bear All the bitter and critical Conducts and attitudes Of the people I avoid the quarrel I face all awkward faces With only my glory And gifted power The patience That breaks my anger That enlightens my vision That heals, The wounds of my soul That inspires the calm That washes with the tears My heart and mind To display a smile Upon my lips I always win By holding the patience The cost less Fragrance and waves Of my entity and conception.

I refer to a fundamental difference in the religious attitude between the East (China and India) and the West; this difference can be expressed in terms of logical concepts. Since Aristotle, the Western world has followed the logical principles of Aristotelian philosophy. This logic is based on the law of identity which states that A is A, the law of contradiction (A is not non-A) and the law of the excluded middle (A cannot be A and non-A, neither A nor non-A). Aristotle explains his position very clearly in the following sentence: 'It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same respect; and whatever other distinctions we might add to meet dialectical objections, let them be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles...' This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be 'natural' and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.) In opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assumes that A and non-A do not exclude each other as predicates of X. Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx. The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly described by Lao-tse. 'Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical.' And by Chuang-tzu: 'That which is one is one. That which. is not-one, is also one.' These formulations of paradoxical logic are positive: it is and it is not. Another formulation is negative: it is neither this nor that. The former expression of thought we find in Taoistic thought, in Heraclitus and again in Hegelian dialectics; the latter formulation is frequent in Indian philosophy. Although it would transcend the scope of this book to give a more detailed description of the difference between Aristotelian and paradoxical logic, I shall mention a few illustrations in order to make the principle more understandable. Paradoxical logic in Western thought has its earliest philosophical expression in Heraclitus philosophy. He assumes the conflict between opposites is the basis of all existence. 'They do not understand', he says, 'that the all-One, conflicting in itself, is identical with itself: conflicting harmony as in the bow and in the lyre.' Or still more clearly: 'We go into the same river, and yet not in the same; it is we and it is not we.' Or 'One and the same manifests itself in things as living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old.

The mother's and the father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs. The infant needs mother's unconditional love and care physiologically as well as psychically. The child, after six, begins to need father's love, his authority and guidance. Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him. In the ideal case, mother's love does not try to prevent the child from growing up, does not try to put a premium on helplessness. Mother should have faith in life, hence not be overanxious, and thus not infect the child with her anxiety. Part of her life should be the wish that the child become independent and eventually separate from her. Father's love should be guided by principles and expectations; it should be patient and tolerant, rather than threatening and authoritarian. It should give the growing child an increasing sense of competence and eventually permit him to become his own authority and to dispense with that of father. Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience. Motherly conscience says: 'There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.' Fatherly conscience says: 'You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all you must change your ways if i am to like you.' The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside. In contrast to Freud's concept of the super-ego, however, he has built them inside not by incorporating mother and father, but by building a motherly conscience on his own capacity for love, and a fatherly conscience on his reason and judgment. Furthermore, the mature person loves with both the motherly and the fatherly conscience, in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other. If he would only retain his fatherly conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt to lose judgment and to hinder himself and others in their development. In this development from mother-centered to father-centered attachment, and their eventual synthesis, lies the basis for mental health and the achievement of maturity. In the failure of this development lies the basic cause for neurosis.

Consider this: when you’re trying to change someone’s feelings or attitudes, your words account for just 7 percent of your overall message. Seven percent. That’s it. In contrast, your tone of voice accounts for 38 percent of it, and your body language accounts for a colossal 55 percent. This is the famous 7-38-55 rule, or concept, which Albert Mehrabian, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, came up with in 1971 in his book Silent Messages.

The man who throws light upon it is a force majeure, a fatality; he breaks the history of man into two. Time is reckoned up before him and after him. The lightning flash of truth struck precisely that which theretofore had stood highest: he who understands what was destroyed by that flash should look to see whether he still holds anything in his hands. Everything which until then was called truth, has been revealed as the most detrimental, most spiteful, and most subterranean form of life; the holy pretext, which was the "improvement" of man, has been recognised as a ruse for draining life of its energy and of its blood. Morality conceived as Vampirism.... The man who unmasks morality has also unmasked the worthlessness of the values in which men either believe or have believed; he no longer sees anything to be revered in the most venerable man—even in the types of men that have been pronounced holy; all he can see in them is the most fatal kind of abortions, fatal, because they fascinate. The concept "God" was invented as the opposite of the concept life—everything detrimental, poisonous, and slanderous, and all deadly hostility to life, was bound together in one horrible unit in Him. The concepts "beyond" and "true world" were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists—in order that no goal or aim, no sense or task, might be left to earthly reality. The concepts "soul," "spirit," and last of all the concept "immortal soul," were invented in order to throw contempt on the body, in order to make it sick and "holy," in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling levity towards all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously, i.e. the questions of nutrition and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather. Instead of health, we find the "salvation of the soul"—that is to say, a folie circulate fluctuating between convulsions and penitence and the hysteria of redemption. The concept "sin," together with the torture instrument appertaining to it, which is the concept "free will," was invented in order to confuse and muddle our instincts, and to render the mistrust of them man's second nature! In the concepts "disinterestedness" and "self-denial," the actual signs of decadence are to be found. The allurement of that which is detrimental, the inability to discover one's own advantage and self-destruction, are made into absolute qualities, into the "duty," the "holiness," and the "divinity" of man. Finally—to keep the worst to the last—by the notion of the good man, all that is favoured which is weak, ill, botched, and sick-in-itself, which ought to be wiped out. The law of selection is thwarted, an ideal is made out of opposition to the proud, well-constituted man, to him who says yea to life, to him who is certain of the future, and who guarantees the future—this man is henceforth called the evil one. And all this was believed in as morality!—Ecrasez l'infâme! Have you understood me? Dionysus versus Christ.

Knowledge is only the first step. It is the foundation of further learning processes.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 102 “Students engage in learning when two conditions are fulfilled. The goals, standards, or objectives must be of value for them. But it is not sufficient that they attribute personal value to the goal: They must be convinced that they can reach it.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 108 “The expertise of a teacher does not consist only of his ability to plan a lesson or a comprehensive teaching unit and put it into practice; at least as important as these basic tools of the teaching profession are knowledge and flexibility regarding how to surmount unexpected difficulties.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 119 “When planning a teaching intervention, the most important question often remains unasked: In what ways does the chosen learning content or skill refer to the needs and interests of the students?” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 122 “Teaching is more effective and learning more successful when students participate in planning and starting the lesson.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 136 “What is a good explanation? Explanations should be clear and well-structured. They should take students’ age and their prior knowledge into account. They are supposed to correspond to the interests of the learners.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 144 “There is an unjustified differentiation between tasks for learning and tasks for testing. • First, all tasks should be meaningful and motivating, not only those destined for classroom practice. … • Second, all tasks have to contribute to an improvement of learning.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 159 “Deepening the learning processes during independent practice should at least prepare the transfer of new concepts or schemata to other situations than those in which the new content first occurred.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 172 “Cooperative learning and problem-/project-based approaches aim at further deepening the new learning content. They offer the learners multiple and motivating opportunities to lead to automaticity of knowledge and skills, and to promote the desired attitudes.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 176 “During the lesson, feedback should have three directions: from teachers to students, among the learners, and from students to teachers.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 199 “During work in small groups, teachers cannot eliminate peer feedback. It occurs as such because feedback is frequent in the life contexts of children, adolescents and adults. Therefore adequate training is of utmost importance not only for classroom learning but also with regard to future professional and private requirements.” – Inez De Florio, Effective Teaching and Successful Learning, p. 210

Il est convenu qu’on ne peut parler du diable sans provoquer, de la part de tous ceux qui se piquent d’être plus ou moins « modernes », c’est-à-dire de l’immense majorité de nos contemporains, des sourires dédaigneux ou des haussements d’épaules plus méprisants encore ; et il est des gens qui, tout en ayant certaines convictions religieuses, ne sont pas les derniers à prendre une semblable attitude, peut-être par simple crainte de passer pour « arriérés », peut-être aussi d’une façon plus sincère. Ceux-là, en effet, sont bien obligés d’admettre en principe l’existence du démon, mais ils seraient fort embarrassés d’avoir à constater son action effective ; cela dérangerait par trop le cercle restreint d’idées toutes faites dans lequel ils ont coutume de se mouvoir. C’est là un exemple de ce « positivisme pratique » auquel nous avons fait allusion précédemment : les conceptions religieuses sont une chose, la « vie ordinaire » en est une autre, et, entre les deux, on a bien soin d’établir une cloison aussi étanche que possible ; autant dire qu’on se comportera en fait comme un véritable incroyant, avec la logique en moins ; mais quel moyen de faire autrement, dans une société aussi « éclairée » et aussi « tolérante » que la nôtre, sans se faire traiter à tout le moins d’« halluciné » ? Sans doute, une certaine prudence est souvent nécessaire, mais prudence ne veut pas dire négation « a priori » et sans discernement ;

The next few weeks were a real struggle. Mental turmoil was a new emotion for me, and not a fun one. I felt I had let myself down, and that I had wasted four months of my life to hard, cold misery, and all for nothing. I was depressed and I felt useless. And that was on a good day. The only silver lining was that my squadron training team had invited me back to try once more--if I wanted to. It would involve going all the way back to the start. Day one. It was a truly horrendous concept. But they didn’t invite people back who they didn’t feel potentially had the right attitude or abilities to pass. That was some small glimmer of hope, at least. At this point, my greatest enemy was myself. Self-doubt can be crushing, and sometimes it is hard to see outside the black bubble. I tried to look at the situation objectively--I’d failed Selection only a third of the way through the course--what chance did I really have of passing if I tried again? My family said that maybe it wasn’t meant to be and that I had gained an invaluable experience from it. This just made me feel worse. Yet through it all, a little part of me, deep down, believed that I could do this--that I was capable of passing. It wasn’t a big part of me, but it was an ember. Sometimes an ember is all we need.

Zen is more so an attitude than simply a belief. Zen is feeling at peace and becoming one with an entity other than yourself. Zen is being truly aware of your oneness with the world around you and everything in it. Zen is living in the present and to experience it to the fullest. Zen is being free from all distractions and materialistic things of the world. Zen is being one with the whole universe and all life that exists within it. Zen is truly appreciating the incredible miracle of life itself.

As I read it I was thinking of the phenomenon of endgame. Although the concept can apply to many games, it is most common in chess, which is where I study the subject exhaustively. As the middle game draws to a close and the endgame approaches, a fundamental change occurs in the players’ attitudes, and, I swear, a macabre eeriness descends over the board. The surviving pieces take on different roles and importance. For instance, pawns become vital; not only can they move to the opponent’s first line and become queens but they provide important defensive barriers that limit the other player’s moves. Similarly the king spends most of the game in hiding, protected by his minions. But in endgame, he often must go on the offensive himself. Each

Paul also reminds the Roman believers that “we have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). Foerster helpfully writes, “The basic feature of the Greek concept of ‘eirene’ is that the word does not primarily denote a relationship between several people, or an attitude, but a state, i.e., ‘time of peace’ or ‘state of peace’ originally conceived of purely as an interlude in the everlasting state of war.

The obvious alternative to blaming the parent is to conclude that there is something amiss or lacking in the child. If we are not given to doubt our parenting, we assume the source of our trouble must be the child. We take refuge in the child-blaming thought that we have not failed, but our children have failed to live up to the expected standards. Our attitude is expressed in questions or demands such as Why don't you pay attention? Stop being so difficult! Or, Why can't you do as you're told? Difficulty in parenting often leads to a hunt to find out what is wrong with the child. We may witness today a frantic search for labels to explain our children's problems. Parents seek the formal diagnoses of a professional or grasp at informal labels — there are, for examples, books on raising the “difficult” or the “spirited” child. The more frustrating parenting becomes, the more likely children will be perceived as difficult and the more labels will be sought for verification. It is no coincidence that the preoccupation with diagnoses has paralleled the rise in peer orientation in our society. Increasingly, children's behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place. Medical explanations help by removing guilt but they hinder by reducing the issues to oversimplified concepts. They assume that the complex behavior problems of many children can be explained by genetics or by miswired brain circuits. They ignore scientific evidence that the human brain is shaped by the environment from birth throughout the lifetime and that attachment relationships are the most important aspect of the child's environment. They also dictate narrow solutions, such as medications, without regard to the child's relationships with peers and with the adult world. In practice, they serve to further disempower parents.

Qu'est-ce que le genre ? En tan que concept, il correspond à peu près à « sexe social ». La recherche a prouvé que la plupart des différences entre les sexes, les différences de statu social, de richesse et de pouvoir, mais aussi les différences dites « psychologiques », d'aptitudes et d'attitudes entre femmes et hommes, ne sont causées ni par le sexe anatomique, ni par les différences de fonction dans la procréation que ce sexe anatomique induit. En fait, le sexe anatomique n'induit que cela : des différences de fonction entre femelles et mâles dans la procréation. Le reste, couramment appelé différence de sexe, et couramment aussi rapporté à cette différence anatomique, est donc une construction sociale. La raison de cette construction sociale se trouve, selon certaines, dans les différences de fonction dans la procréation. Pour d'autres, dont je suis, la différence anatomique ne sert que de marqueur, de signe de repérage qui rend plus facile l'identification des personnes à exploiter. C'est une position considérée aujourd'hui comme osée, mais qui sera un jour, j'en suis sûre, tenue pour une évidence. (p. 57-58)

Study Guide for Chapter 1 The Way to Freedom Overview Everything around us operates on the principle of submission, and to the extent that submission is heeded, to the same extent that way is prospered. Submission is a choice toward life. Adam chose death, and we are born into this curse. Submission to God includes submission to delegated authority.* It is out of God’s love for us that He asks us to submit. Authority is and flows from God Himself, and the principle of submission to authority is eternal, sacred and foundational.* Where is your heart? Are you fighting, or are you surrendered? Adam’s curse is broken as we surrender and choose the way of the cross as Christ did.* Just as Christ manifests absolute submission and surrender, Satan manifests absolute rebellion.* God created us to depend on Him, and only what is done in His Spirit will last. Through the mystery of submission to authority, God is restoring creation back to innocence. When we submit, we become part of that work.* * These topics are developed more fully in later chapters. Reflection and Action 1. Reflect on your day. Write down some of the many different ways you saw the principle of submission to authority at work in nature, in society and in your personal life. How might your day have been different if the response in each of those cases was defying submission? What was the result of submission in each of those cases? 2. Note each time that the words “choice” or “choose” were used in this chapter. What are we choosing between? And what is the outcome of the choices made? In the Garden of Eden, what did the two trees represent? What was God’s purpose in allowing Adam and Eve to choose between them? Can you recall an incident recently in which you were faced with the same kind of choice? How did you respond? 3. Prayerfully review all of the Scripture passages related to submission within the Trinity itself. How does this glimpse into the very heart of God change the way you think about submission? Meditate on Isaiah 43:10–11. How would you explain to someone else the concept of God and authority? Why is this principle so important and holy? 4. It can be painful to admit, even to ourselves, that we may imitate Lucifer, rather than Christ, in our attitude toward authority. However, by allowing God to reveal truth to us, we are taking our first steps toward godliness. With that perspective, review these questions from the text and ask the Lord to speak to you through them in any way He chooses. 5. What are the reasons why we find it difficult to submit to authority? And how is it possible for us to remain in rebellion for years after having received Jesus as our Savior? Write down specific times you can look back and see how you remained in rebellion. How would you want to handle those times now? 6. The author writes: “Nothing will remain in eternity that is not of the Spirit.” Explain what this means to you and how it applies to your own ministry. 7. What does God want to accomplish through giving us the freedom to choose submission? Write down any changes in your thoughts and attitude toward submission as you’ve studied this chapter. Close your time by thanking God for His kindness to open your eyes to the things He showed you through this chapter.

In fact, the post independence Indian political and bureaucratic rulers had succeeded in enshrining the cult of violence as a semi-statutory means of grievance redressal. They allowed the genuine aspirations of the people to be trampled and ignored and subsequently handling the violent venting of the accumulated frustration as a law and order problem. The state governments and the Union ministry of internal affairs had perfected the battle order of deputing police and paramilitary forces to fighting the violent segment of the people, who were, at the first instance, were allowed to choose violent means to express their genuine and perceived grievances over peaceful constitutional means. Somewhere some vested interests in the political and bureaucratic edifices of the country worked assiduously to bury the concepts of constitutional grievance redressing mechanics and promoted the cult of violence. They blindly followed the British attitude in dealing with the post-independent Indians who had assumedly given themselves an elaborate constitution and several layers of legal guarantees. The politicians and bureaucrats simply looted the public exchequer in the name of maintaining law and order. They were neither interested nor capable of addressing the grievances of the people.

In essence, Ficino’s philosophy elevated the liberal arts, pure scientific research, and the centrality of the individual and his or her immortal soul’s redemption through beauty and love. It taught that there are absolute concepts that exist outside of human variations and distortions, among them the concepts of Absolute Good, Absolute Love, and Absolute Beauty. This is almost certainly what Michelangelo had in mind when in later life he explained, “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and in action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”5 For Michelangelo, imbued with this Platonic mind-set, art was not creating as much as it was uncovering hidden preexistent absolute beauty. “I saw the angel in the marble,” he said, “and I carved until I set him free.”6

Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.

The things you are certain of at age twenty-five lose a lot of luster by age forty, and even more by age fifty. As you follow God and hear from him and watch him work—and also watch him choose not to speak and act—the greater the chances that your early conception of him will be hidden in shadow. Over time, as you continue to follow God, you gain a humbler attitude about what you say about God. You also gain a desire for clarity and simplicity when you speak about God.

As a Chinese American growing up in a largely white world during the 1920s and 1930s, a sense of social marginalization marked her formative years. “Asian Americans were so few and far between,” she recalled, “that from an early age we were raised to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, in part because so many of us had relatives or knew people who were illegal immigrants.” 3 Indeed, she came of age during the era of exclusion, as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (extended in 1904) remained in force well into her adulthood. It was repealed during World War II as she approached the age of thirty, marking her as a member of the last generation whose childhood and young adulthood unfolded before the Chinese in America saw significant opportunities “to move out from the shadows of exclusion and become fuller participants in American life.” 4 She did not have available during her formative years the concept of “Asian Americans” or of a pan-Asian ethnic identity, which did not emerge until the 1960s. Furthermore, her parents transmitted conflicting attitudes toward Chinese identity. While her father proudly embraced his Chinese heritage and sought to instill an appreciation of it in his children, her mother increasingly identified with the United States and derived fulfillment from seeing herself as more American than Chinese.

Mais il est vain de penser qu'on puisse s'en tenir à une attitude qui affirmerait : retirons-nous du capitalisme ; ne cherchons pas à le détruire, mais seulement à construire, à côté de lui, le monde qui nous convient. Car nos espaces libérés sont des espaces de combat : ils ont dû être gagnés contre la pression permanente de la synthèse capitaliste et ils doivent constamment être défendus. Ils ne peuvent se maintenir et croître sans s'affronter aux contraintes qui les entourent et leur destin a partie liée avec les luttes menées ailleurs pour contrer les avancées de la déprédation marchande. L'option consistante à construire dès maintenant, sans attendre le grand Moment révolutionnaire, change la donne et constitue une rupture significative avec les conceptions longtemps dominantes de l'émancipation. Mais elle ne nous libère pas de la question de la conflictualité. On peut configurer diversement les trois pointes du triangle - résister, lutter contre, construire - mais on ne peut pas les dissocier. (p. 167)

In heterosexual society, many women dread growing old because of the belief systems we have created around the glory of youth. It is not so difficult for the men, for they become distinguished with a bit of gray hair. The older man often gets respect, and people may even look up to him. Not so for most gay men, for they have created a culture that places tremendous emphasis on youth and beauty. While everyone is young to start with, only a few fit the standard of beauty. So much emphasis has been placed on the physical appearance of the body that the feelings inside have been totally disregarded. If you are not young and beautiful, it’s almost as though you don’t count. The person does not count; only the body counts. This way of thinking is a disgrace to the whole culture. It’s another way of saying, “Gay is not good enough.” Because of the ways gay people often treat other gays, for many gay men the experience of getting old is something to dread. It is almost better to die than to get old. And aids is a dis-ease that often kills. Too often gay men feel that when they get older, they will be useless and unwanted. It is almost better to destroy themselves first, and many have created a destructive lifestyle. Some of the concepts and attitudes that are so a part of the gay lifestyle — the meat rack, the constant judging, the refusal to get close to another, and so on—are monstrous. And aids is a monstrous dis-ease.

Failure is a dreaded concept for most business people. But failure can actually be a huge engine of innovation. The trick lies in approaching it with the right attitude and harnessing it as a blessing, not a curse.

For Guardiola, tactical concepts are taken in if the players have the right attitude and understand what they are doing.

In seeing the thinkers in this tradition as embodying a certain fundamental viewpoint, I am far from denying that there is disagreement between them. Indeed, I try to show how Fichte’s concept of absolute freedom differs subtly from Kant’s, as well as how Fichte develops the theme of intersubjectivity in a new and creative direction. I also try to show how Kant and Herder differ concerning the correct way of understanding human nature, cultural difference and history; and also how Hegel’s theory of imputation differs from Kant’s, and deepens it. And, of course, I emphasize the radical difference between Marx’s treatment of themes having to do with right and the way these themes were treated by the thinkers earlier in the tradition. At the same time, in treating the German philosophers of this period whose thought interests me, I always tend to emphasize continuities and agreements rather than squabbles and the differences. I think it is both shortsighted and wrongheaded to treat these thinkers as though the fundamental issue is whether we should choose Hegel over Kant, or defend Kant against Hegel, or even champion Marx over against the entire later German idealist tradition, trying to show that he has rendered the entire classical German philosophical tradition obsolete (a dogmatic sectarian attitude that is not as fashionable now as it once was). Instead, I think that despite the controversies within this tradition, there is something unified and important in it, when it comes to themes of freedom, right, ethics, humanity, community, and history, which sets the classical German tradition apart from other strands in modern philosophy.

With the imposition of chastity, women become unchaste under the pressure of their sexual demands; the sexual brutality on the part of the male, and the corresponding conception on the part of the female that for her the sexual act is something disgraceful, takes the place of natural orgastic sensuousness. Extramarital sexual intercourse, to be sure, is not done away with anywhere. With the shifting of the valuation and the abolition of the institutions that previously protected and sanctioned it in a matriarchal society, it becomes involved in a conflict with official morality and is forced to lead a clandestine existence. The change in the social attitude toward sexual intercourse also effects a change in the inner experience of sexuality. The conflict that is now created between the natural and "sublime morality" disturbs the individual's ability to gratify his needs. The feeling of guilt now associated with sexuality cleaves the natural, orgastic course of sexual coalescence and produces a damming up of sexual energy, which later breaks out in various ways. Neuroses, sexual aberrations, and antisocial sexuality become permanent social phenomena. Childhood and adolescent sexuality, which were given a positive value in the original matriarchal work-democracy, fall prey to systematic suppression, which differs only in form. As time goes on, this sexuality, which is distorted, disturbed, brutalized, and prostituted, advocates the very ideology to which it owes its origin. Those who negate sexuality can now justifiably point to it as something brutal and dirty. That this dirty sexuality is not natural sexuality but merely patriarchal sexuality is simply overlooked. And the sexology of latter-day capitalistic patriarchy is no less affected by this evaluation than the vulgar views. This condemns it to complete sterility.

His action was inexcusable, but it was forgivable.

On peut dire véritablement que certains aspects de la réalité se cachent à quiconque l’envisage en profane et en matérialiste, et se rendent inaccessibles à son observation ; ce n’est pas là une simple façon de parler plus ou moins « imagée », comme certains pourraient être tentés de le croire, mais bien l’expression pure et simple d’un fait, de même que c’est un fait que les animaux fuient spontanément et instinctivement devant quelqu’un qui leur témoigne une attitude hostile. C’est pourquoi il est des choses qui ne pourront jamais être constatées par des « savants » matérialistes ou positivistes, ce qui, naturellement, les confirme encore dans leur croyance à la validité de leurs conceptions, en paraissant leur en donner comme une sorte de preuve négative, alors que ce n’est pourtant rien de plus ni d’autre qu’un simple effet de ces conceptions elles-mêmes

For van Fraassen, when a theory passes a lot of tests and becomes well established, the right attitude to have toward the theory is to "accept" it, in a special sense. To accept a theory is to (z) believe (provisionally) that the theory is empirically adequate, and to (z) use the concepts the theory provides when thinking about further problems and when trying to extend and refine the theory.

Angry tears stung her eyes. Tension built and boiled inside her. Her cheeks grew hot with suppressed anger, her movements became jerky and abrupt. She shoved an errant strand of hair out of her face, stormed to the washstand — And collided with her husband. He had been coming toward her with a piece of wet linen and a bowl half-filled with water. As he and Juliet bounced off each other, some of the water spilled onto the carpet, the rest down the front of his waistcoat. Ignoring it, Gareth held out the damp rag like a truce offering. "Here." "What's that for?" "She needs washing, doesn't she?" "What do you know about babies?" "Come now, Juliet. I am not entirely lacking in common sense." "I wonder," she muttered, spitefully. He summoned a polite though confused smile — and that only stoked Juliet's temper all the more. She did not want him to be such a gentleman, damn it!  She wanted a good, out-and-out row with him. She wanted to tell him just what she thought of him, of his reckless spending, of his carefree attitude toward serious matters. Oh, why hadn't she married someone like Charles — someone capable, competent, and mature? "What is wrong, Juliet?" "Everything!" she fumed. She plunged the linen in the bowl of water and began swabbing Charlotte's bottom. "I think Perry was right. We should go straight back to your brother, the duke." "You should not listen to Perry." "Why not? He's got more sense than you and the rest of your friends combined. We haven't even been married a day, and already it's obvious that you're hopelessly out of your element. You have no idea what to do with a wife and daughter. You have no idea where to go, how to support us — nothing. Yet you had to come charging after us, the noble rescuer who just had to save the day. I'll bet you didn't give any thought at all to what to do with us afterward, did you? Oh!  Do you always act before thinking? Do you?" He looked at her for a moment, brows raised, stunned by the force of her attack. Then he said dryly, "My dear, if you'll recall, that particular character defect saved your life. Not to mention the lives of the other people on that stagecoach." "So it did, but it's not going to feed us or find us a place to live!"  She lifted Charlotte's bottom, pinned a clean napkin around the baby's hips, and soaped and rinsed her hands. "I still cannot believe how much money you tossed away on a marriage license, no, a bribe, this morning, nor how annoyed you still seem to be that we didn't waste God-knows-how-much on a hotel tonight. You seem to have no concept of money's value, and at the rate you're going, we're going to have to throw ourselves on the mercy of the local parish or go begging in the street just to put food in our bellies!" "Don't be ridiculous. That would never happen." "Why wouldn't it?" "Juliet, my brother is the Duke of Blackheath. My family is one of the oldest and richest in all of England. We are not going to starve, I can assure you." "What do you plan to do, then, work for a living? Get those pampered, lily-white hands of yours dirty and calloused?

Our thoughts are so powerful! Be careful what you think! If people only realized how powerful this concept is, they would never allow a negative thought to take space inside their minds.

But it was not just Freemasonry in itself — not just the rites, rituals, traditions, opportunities and benefits of Freemasonry. It was also an ambience, a mentality, a hierarchy of attitudes and values for which Freemasonry provided a particularly effacious conduit. The Freemasonry of the age was a repository for an imaginatively stirring and potent idealism, which it was able, in a fashion uniquely its own, to disseminate. Most colonists did not actually read Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau, any more than most British soldiers did. Through the lodges, however, the currents of thought associated with such philosophies became universally accessible. It was largely through the lodges that 'ordinary' colonists learned of that lofty premise called 'the rights of man'. It was through the lodges that they learned the concept of the perfectibility of society. And the New World seemed to offer a species of blank slate, a species of laboratory in which social experiment was possible and the principles enshrined by Freemasonry could be applied in practice.

Scientists are fascinated by Escher's work because they recognize in it not only a concept of the world with which they are familiar but also a similar attitude toward that world. For them as for him, the plurality of the world signifies neither absurdity nor chaos but a challenge to look for new logical relationships between phenomena.

The conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus

[The] passive assertion of superstitious men waiting for Destiny to fell them . . . is an attitude that most sensible men and women can easily reject. But rejection means assuming responsibility. And in our elites there is no desire to initiate changes which would insert the concept of responsibility into that of power. Only a persistent public commitment by the citizenry could bring such a thing about.

Most folks greet confusion with surrender. Most people, when they don’t know what to do, do nothing. The average person meets an obstacle and tells himself, "This is not for me," or "I am not the kind of person who does things like this." Average people respond to confusion in an average way. They stop. But people who achieve extraordinary results think differently. They understand something very significant about confusion. Confusion precedes learning. The anxious thoughts that seem so puzzling or discouraging are actually your very gateway to understanding. Only by persistently doing battle with the things you cannot yet do or that which you do not yet understand can you ever hope to achieve what average people never accomplish. A sign of a person’s maturity is his ability to live with — even in — confusion. The average person meets the edge of confusion and turns away. He runs from confusion at its beginning, at its first appearance. He will not live with or even near confusion and seeks an easier path. The mature person—the high achiever — will understand that life’s grand prizes are guarded by confusion. The mature person senses the victory that exists beyond confusion and says, "I cannot do this... yet. I am not good at this yet, but I will work and learn and become better until I am competent, then excellent, then great! I will struggle and persist through confusion until I break through to the understanding or greater skill required for victory." It's a thought process. It opens up new possibilities for almost everything. The whole concept of "confusion before learning" means that confusion guards the answers we seek. You've got to be willing to enter into and do battle with the confusion in order to reach the victory on the other side... to take your life in a new and incredible direction.

your self-concept is composed by all beliefs and attitudes you have about your-self, it determines what you think you are, what you can do and what you can become

The Lean-Agile mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking and apply it in their daily lives.

The statement that the essence of the human being consists in being-inthe-world likewise contains no decision aboutwhether the human being in a theologico-metaphysical sense is merely a this-worldly or an other-worldly Creature. 115th the existential determination of the essence of the human being, therefore, nothing is decided about the "existence of God" or his "nonbeing," no more than about the possibility or impossibility of gods. Thus it is not only rash hut also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of the human being from the relation of his essence to the mth of being is atheism. And what is more, this arbitrary classification betrays a lack of careful reading. No one bothers to notice that in my essay "On the Essence of Ground" (1929) the following appears (,,, 2~, note I): "Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as beingin-the-world no decision, whether positive or neptive, is made concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumi- .,tion of transcendence we first achieve nn adeqrcnte concept of Dnsein, with respect to which it can now he asked how the relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered." If we think about this remark too quickly, as is usually the case, we will declare that such a philosophy does not decide either for or against the existence of God. It remains stalled in indifference. ~hus it is unconcerned with the religious question. Such indifferentism falls prey to nihilism. Rut does the foregoing observation teach indifferentism? Why then are particular words in the note italicized - and not just random ones? For no other reason than to indicate that the thinking that thinks from the question concerning the uuth of being questions more primordially than metaphysics can. Only from the truthofbeing can the essence of the holy he thought. [I~z] Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to he thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word "God" is to signify. Or should we not first be able to hear and understand all these words carefully if we are to be permirted as human beings, that is, as eksistent creatures, to experience a relation of God to human beings? How can the human being at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of being is not cleared and in its clearing is near to humans. Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension of the hale [des Heilen]. Perhaps that is the sole malignancy [Unheil]. But with this reference the thinking that points toward the truth of I)eing as what is to be thought has in no way decided in favor of theism. It can he theistic as little as atheistic. Not, however, because of an indifferent attitude, hutoutofrespect forthe boundaries that have heen set forthinking as such, indeed set by what gives itself to thinking as what is to be thought, 1)). the truth of being. Insofar as thinking limits itself to its task it tlirects the human being at the present moment of the world's destiny into the primordial dimension of his historical abode.

Attitude is everything. If you have the right attitude, anything is possible. The concept is indispensable for success, but it is metaphor and not literal fact. Attitude is not really everything. Training, ability, specific knowledge, and clear direction all count for something. In the minds of Histrionics, however, metaphors are always preferable to boring details. These vampires truly believe that being motivated enough to put on a good show can exempt them from having to pay attention to tedious day-to-day technicalities. It is a simple, comforting alternate reality, very easy to buy into, especially if your job involves the difficult and confusing task of managing other people. It’s much easier to tell subordinates what they’re supposed to feel than what they’re supposed to do and how to do it.

Some regulations promulgated by administrators restrict freedom of speech, often with highly subjective definitions of key concepts. These rules contribute to an attitude on campus that chills speech, in part by suggesting that freedom of speech can or should be restricted because of some students' emotional discomfort. This teaches catastrophizing and mind reading (among other cognitive distortions) and promotes the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning.

As a man in recovery I must remain in serenity, clean and serene; I’ve spent enough time jazzed, wired, buzzing, and gouching. Serenity is the first thing people with addiction issues are instructed to request: God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. Junkies and alkies and bulimics and gamblers and sex addicts and love addicts and people who can’t stop shopping, smoking, loving, fighting—whatever it is, there’s someone out there who’s doing too much of it—and for those people there’s a solution and sanctuary, and in those places of sanctuary, this prayer is recited. The first thing is serenity. The agitation has to end. The itchy irritability, the restlessness, the wanting. So do the lows, the self-loathing, wretched, heavy-hearted, lead-gutted, teary-eyed, dry-mouthed misery. The pain. So do the highs. The wide-eyed, bilious highs, the cheek-chewing, trouble-brewing highs, the never-stopping-till-I-touch-the-sky highs, the up-at-dawn hitting-the-pipe highs, chasing, defacing, heart-racing highs, gagging, shagging, blagging highs. All the things we do to change the way we feel, the way the world looks and tastes: It’s all got to go. So courage is necessary. Courage to change yourself, the one thing you can change. Your attitude and actions. Neither the serenity nor the courage are available to you on your own; if they were, you would’ve found them by now—you’ve been pretty fastidious in your research. God, however you conceptualize him, will have to grant them to you. And whatever you conceptualize God as, with your human mind, your individual brain, made up of instinctive responses, training, and memories, however you conceptualize a power that’s beyond you and the decisions you’ve made so far, your conception will be extremely limited. Likely as limited as my cat’s conception of the Internet. The invisible network of interconnected portals that communicate data are beyond my cat’s comprehension. My cat’s inability to comprehend does not impede the Internet. The World Wide Web (which is incidentally quicker to say than “double-you, double-you, double-you-dot”) will continue to exist, regardless of my cat’s awareness. Pray, then, for wisdom, wisdom to know the difference between things we can change and things we can’t. Likely this will be a lifetime’s work, undertaken one day at a time. Which, for humans, is the way time happens

To Those Who Mean Well (Sonnet From A God) Dear vermin of the greedy gutters of earth, I permit you to live as your whims may dawn. I just wish, expired cigarette buts wouldn't show the moronic audacity to advise the sun. I don't hate you for your life of greed and filth, But the most you are gonna get from me is pity. Apes who are alien to the concept of accountability, Are no more significant than a termite community. With all your googling expertise, how about you spend some data researching the term "ambition". Know your place, my dear armchair intellectuals, Chimps should speak only when spoken to by a human. To you who mean well, your death is the end of your story. My death is the beginning of a legend.

greater attention to the problem area tends to increase negative public attitudes toward the status quo, which can then produce lasting institutional and agenda changes that break up policy monopolies.

The acronym FEAST is composed of Friends, Energy, Attitude, Self-esteem, and Tenacity. Each of us has these five components in our lives, to one degree or another. Some are weak, some are strong, or all may, in some cases, need adjusting. You’re reading this book because you’re looking for answers. I propose FEASTing as an answer. As you proceed, you’ll be introduced to guidelines and principles related to each component. As you apply these principles, you’ll start building a better you. If you’ll feast upon these concepts, you’ll feed yourself with much-needed nutrients. These are nutrients for the mind and for the soul. And there will be a few suggestions for the body as well.

Idolatry is right in so far as the worshipper is aware that the object of his worship is a manifested form of God and that, therefore, by worshipping the idol he is worshipping God. Once, however, he forgets this fundamental fact, he is liable to be deceived by his own imagination and ascribe real divinity to the idol (a piece of wood, or a stone, for example) and begin to worship it as a god existing independently of, and side by side with, God. If he reaches this point, his attitude is a pure tashbih which completely excludes tanzih.

Alienated from official Russia by their politics, and from peasant Russia by their education, Russia’s artists took it upon themselves to create a national community of values and ideas through literature and art. What did it mean to be a Russian? What was Russia’s place and mission in the world? And where was the true Russia? In Europe or in Asia? St Petersburg or Moscow? The Tsar’s empire or the muddy one-street village where Natasha’s ‘Uncle’ lived? These were the ‘accursed questions’ that occupied the mind of every serious writer, literary critic and historian, painter and composer, theologian and philosopher in the golden age of Russian culture from Pushkin to Pasternak. They are the questions that lie beneath the surface of the art within this book. The works discussed here represent a history of ideas and attitudes – concepts of the nation through which Russia tried to understand itself. If we look carefully, they may become a window on to a nation’s inner life.

Escape was always possible; in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one's self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious. The colonial mimicry is a special mimicry of an old country without a native aristocracy for a thousand years who has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English. The Indian lavatory and the Indian kitchen are the visitor's nightmare. The attitude of the foreigner who does not understand the function of the beggar in India and is judging India by the standards of Europe. Physical effort is to be avoided as a degradation. Every man is an island; each man to his function, his private contract with God. This is the realization of the Gita's selfless action. An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship. India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste. India, it was said, brought our concealed elements of the personality. It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written. Respect for the past is new in Europe and it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism. It is still through European eyes that India looks at her ruins and her art. The virtues of R.K. Narayan are Indian failing magically transmuted. Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life, yet it permitted a unique human development to so many.

I AM is that reality to which, whatever happens, we must turn for an explanation of the phenomena of life. It is I AM's concept of itself that determines the form and scenery of its existence. Everything depends upon its attitude towards itself; that which it will not affirm as true of itself cannot awaken in its world. That is, your concept of yourself, such as "I am strong", "I am secure", "I am loved," determines the world in which you live.