Discursive Quotes

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.

Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness.

The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.

The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought. —Chogyam Trungpa

If the Devil says you cannot pray when you are angry, tell him it is none of his business, and pray until that species of insanity is dispelled and serenity is restored to the mind. (p. 175)

The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical - discursive - atomistic - or purely intuitive - dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come?

Iris was too languid and too used to Mrs. Drake’s discursive style to inquire why the mention of Dr. Gaskell should have reminded her aunt of the local grocer, though had she done so, she would have received the immediate response: “Because the grocer’s name is Cranford, my dear.” Aunt Lucilla’s reasoning was always crystal clear to herself.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

I believe that in the process of locating new avenues of creative thought, we will also arrive at an existential conservatism. It is worth asking repeatedly: Where are our deepest roots? We are, it seems, Old World, catarrhine primates, brilliant emergent animals, defined genetically by our unique origins, blessed by our newfound biological genius, and secure in our homeland if we wish to make it so. What does it all mean? This is what it all means: To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing.

Death is a cessation of the impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the strings that move the appetites, and of the discursive movements of the thoughts, and of the service to the flesh.

Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the longer they grow.

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.

There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they rush in where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out what devils intend to do.

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.

It might have been supposed that Freddy, whose intellect was not of the first order, would have found it impossible to grasp the gist of an extremely tangled and discursive story, but once more the possession of three volatile and excitable sisters stood him in good stead.

He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.

To be free one must be a slave to reason. But to be a slave to reason (the very condition of freedom) exposes one to both the revisionary power and the constructive compulsion of reason. This susceptibility is terminally amplified once the commitment to the autonomy of reason and autonomous engagement with discursive practices are sufficiently elaborated. That is to say, when the autonomy of reason is understood as the automation of reason and discursive practices—the philosophical rather than classically symbolic thesis regarding artificial general intelligence.

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts.

Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in the world…the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground—the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to “Die to self” and so make room, as it were, for God.

The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.

in the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.

The language of the Soul is right-brain, metaphorical, narrative, and paradoxical, very unlike the left-brain, logical, discursive, dualistic language of the Ego.

Beauty always represents an inward and inexhaustible equilibrium of forces; and this overwhelms our soul, since it can neither be calculated nor mechanically produced. A sense of beauty can therefore permit us the direct experience of relationships before we can perceive them, in a differentiated manner, with our discursive reason; in this, incidentally, there is a defence for our own physical and psychic well-being, something that we cannot neglect with impunity.

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory: often I feel this, I foresee this, at the very moment when these scenes are forming. —This theater of time is very contrary of the search of lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively: I remember in order to be unhappy/happy— not in order to understand. I do not write, I do not shut myself up in order to write the enormous novel of time recaptured.

We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself.

Discursive thinking is basically a set of memories that we are now recycling as “us.” That’s why it’s such a problem. It’s coming from the past. We’ve picked it up from here, there, and everywhere. The only thing that is truly ours is the life that’s in our body that wants to unfold. Everything that we think, all our plans and all our values, all our projects, our self-image, our sense of personal identity—all of that is beside the point of what needs to happen right now.

Symbolic thinking is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reasoning. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality—the deepest aspects—which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being..

We can move gradually from total confusion, dominated by hatred and other mental poisons, to an intermediate stage of serenity, altruistic joy, and self-mastery before finally arriving at enlightenment, which will give us a true vision of phenomena's ultimate nature. At that point, knowledge functions with an immediate certitude that transcends discursive thought.

Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in. Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts.

A form of consciousness beyond the veils of discursive thought, a space forever present for those who seek it, not in some far-off wilderness, but in our inner most hearts. When that realization dawns in the depths of one's being, the world effortlessly transforms into that which was sought.

During a period in which women and children’s testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned “ritual abuse” as the new frontier of disbelief. The term “ritual abuse” arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of “recovered memories”, “false allegations” and “moral panic”. Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.

But ma’am must have been briefed, surely?’ ‘Of course,’ said the Queen, ‘but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Without discursive thought it is just dharma practice. Hope together with aim obscures. One does not cut through pride by meditatively cultivating the desire for happiness. If there is hope, even the hope for buddhas, it is a negative force. If there is apprehension, even apprehension about hells, it is a negative force.

For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height.

Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky

The apparent effect of truth which operates in the sophism is in reality a quasi-juridical bond between a discursive event and a speaking subject. Hence the fact that we find two theses in the Sophists: Everything is true (as soon as you say something, that thing exists.). Nothing is true (whatever words you employ, they never express what exists).

The great human questions arose. What is the purpose of desire? What is a dream? A song? How do we know the depth of silence in another human being? What is the heart? What is it to be a true human being? What is the source of the universe and how do these individual awarenesses connect to that? They asked the Faustian question in many guises: What is it at bottom that holds the world together? How do we balance surrender and discipline? This high level of continuous question-and-answer permeated the poetry and music, the movement, and each activity of the community. They knew that answers might not come in discursive form, but rather in music, in image, in dream, and in the events of life as they occur.

subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection,

no matter how much I resist authority, I am everywhere implicated in this text.

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.

The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought.

Habitual identification with discursive thought is the source of human suffering

Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.

Critique Economy, a largely discursive and academic mini-industry that seems to have consumed too much of the left's energy of late, as its actual institutional power has declined.

The deep truths of a good story, especially fairy tales, cannot be revealed through discursive analysis—otherwise, why tell the story?

In other words, "sex" is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms.

The mind sees reality through the lens of māyā (that is, it sees things as fundamentally separate and differentiated) because its primary function is to produce discursive thought-forms, or vikalpas. Vikalpas are mental constructs or interpretive filters that divide up (vi-kḷp) the world into discrete chunks for analysis (e.g., “Dangerous to me or not?” “Source of food or not?” “Potential mate or not?”). This function of the mind was very useful and important in our evolution, but has led to a problematic situation in which our interpretive lenses are constantly interposed between awareness and the rest of reality, such that it’s very easy to mistake the lens for reality. (To be more precise, we take the modified image that appears in the lens or filter as being accurate, when in fact it’s distorted to an unknown degree, until you learn how to remove the lens, at least temporarily). This is one definition of the ‘unawake’ state or dreamstate.

Poetry is language that speaks to our hearts. And I’m using the biblical word heart. I think the closest equivalent to that in 21st-century language is our imaginations. The heart, in biblical physiology, is the center of our emotions, but also of our intellect. Those two things cannot be separated. And poetic language is precise. It is detailed, it’s realistic, but it is not the discursive language of mere fact.

Unrecognized thought is the daytime equivalent of falling asleep. Each discursive thought is a mini-daydream. Drifting off into mindless thinking is how we end up sleepwalking through life—and therefore death.

[on the internet] “wearing sweatpants and a tee shirt, I found it easy and intensely gratifying to relish the compliments and heterosexual advances of men I surely would have avoided had I encountered them in person.

Kahlo’s imaginative configurations of alternative selves and hybrid cosmologies transcend the genre of self-portraiture. They conjure up bold political, spiritual and ontological queries and open up radically new discursive realms.

Symbolic thinking is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfil a function, that of bringing to light the hidden modalities of being.

The other concept of truth in Lacan situates the truth, so to speak, in the midst of reality. Here, the discontinuities, ruptures, standstills, and crises of reality are places or points of its truth. The truth is not some impossible and lethal Beyond that can be reached only by transgressing the limits of the Symbolic and the Imaginary –Lacan comes to present it as something that speaks between the lines, detectable in changes of discursivity, in the disturbances, interruptions, and slips of the discourse...

Quelles sont les images régnantes de la femme dans le patrimoine culturel marocain? Il s'agit certes de lire, mais que cette lecture se transforme le plus possible en écoute. Les questions à se poser, après l'écoute, sont les suivantes: 1°) Le patrimoine culturel marocain renferme-t-il une seule et même image de la femme? Le passage du droit musulman classique, des traités (du mariage) savants à la tradition orale implique-t-il un changement dans la perception de la femme? 2°) Dans quelle mesure les oppositions "savant/populaire" et écrit/oral appartiennent-elles à la problématique de la société étudiée? 3°) Peut-on rechercher les points de rencontre entre le féminisme et les formations discursives traditionnelles sans retomber dans le salafisme et le folklorisme?

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild, amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's a different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

you will think about someone you care about, such as your parents, sibling, or beloved, and will let your mind be invaded by a feeling of altruistic love (wishing well-being) or of compassion (wishing freedom from suffering) toward them. After some training you will generate such feeling toward all beings and without thinking specifically about someone. While in the scanner, you will try to generate this state of loving-kindness and compassion until an unconditional feeling of loving-kindness and compassion pervades the whole mind as a way of being, with no other consideration or discursive thoughts.

For the same reason there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the graphics of differance. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility. The problematic of writing is opened by putting into question the value of the arkhe. What I will propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse, operating according to principles, postulates, axioms, or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. In the delineation of differance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is a not simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of differance, it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.

ASANA Now I shall instruct you regarding the nature of asana or seat. Although by 'asana' is generally meant the erect posture assumed in meditation, this is not its central or essential meaning. When I use the word 'asana' I do not mean the various forms of asana’s such as Padmasana, Vajrasana, Svastikasana, or Bhadrasana. By 'asana' I mean something else, and this is what I want to explain to you. First let me speak to you about breath; about the inhaling breath-apana, and the exhaling breath-prana. Breath is extremely important in meditation; particularly the central breath-madhyama-pranan, which is neither prana nor apana. It is the center of these two, the point existing between the inhaling and exhaling breaths. This center point cannot be held by any physical means, as a material object can be held by the hand. The center between the two breaths can be held only by knowledge-jnana – not discursive knowledge, but by knowledge which is awareness. When this central point is held by continuously refreshed awareness – which is knowledge and which is achieved through devotion to the Lord – that is, in the true sense settling into your asana. “On the pathway of your breath maintain continuously refreshed and full awareness on and in the center of breathing in and breathing out. This is internal asana." (Netra Tantra) Asana, therefore, is the gradual dawning in the spiritual aspirant of the awareness which shines in the central point found between inhaling and exhaling. This awareness is not gained by that person who is full of prejudice, avarice, or envy. Such a person, filled with all such negative qualities, cannot concentrate. The prerequisite of this glorious achievement is, therefore, the purification of your internal egoity. It must become pure, clean, and crystal clear. After you have purged your mind of all prejudice and have started settling with full awareness into that point between the two breaths, then you are settling into your asana. “When in breathing in and breathing out you continue to maintain your awareness in continuity on and in the center between the incoming and outgoing breath, your breath will spontaneously and progressively become more and more refined. At that point you are driven to another world. This is pranayama." (Netra Tantra) After settling in the asana of meditation arises the refined practice of pranayama. ‘Pranayama’ does not mean inhaling and exhaling vigorously like a bellow. Like asana, pranayama is internal and very subtle. There is a break less continuity in the traveling of your awareness from the point of asana into the practice of pranayama. When through your awareness you have settled in your asana, you automatically enter into the practice of pranayama. Our Masters have indicated that there are two principle forms of this practice of ‘asana-pranayama’, i.e. cakrodaya and ajapa-gayatri. In the practice of ajapa-gayatri you are to maintain continuously refreshed full awareness-(anusandhana) in the center of two breaths, while breathing in and out slowly and silently. Likewise in the practice of cakrodaya you must maintain awareness, which is continually fresh and new, filled with excitement and vigor, in the center of the two breaths – you are to breathe in and out slowly, but in this case with sound.

As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I'd guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedome promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

Spiritual reading, discursive meditation, and prayer prepare our hearts for contemplation. Contemplation is a state of realized oneness with God. When engaged in contemplation, we rest in God resting in us. We are at home in God at home in us. Our role in contemplation is essentially receptive, in that when we are engaged in contemplation we receive a gift of divine awareness. Contemplation, in its essentially receptive aspect, is sometimes referred to as mystical experience or mystical prayer. The word mystical, as used in the classical Christian texts, does not refer to having visions, hearing God’s voice, or experiencing any other similar, extraordinary events. Although these kinds of experiences can and do occur, they do not necessarily arise from God, and even when they do, they can become hindrances if we cling to them. The Christian mystics use the terms contemplation and mystical union with God to refer not to visions and other similar experiences, but rather to a life-transforming realization of oneness with God. In this mystical realization of oneness with God we are liberated from our tendencies to derive our security and identity from anything less than God. In specifically Christian terms, we enter the mind of Christ, who realized oneness with God to be the reality of himself and of everyone and everything around him.

You're a mountain searching for it's echo! Whenever you hurt, you say, Lord God! The answer lives in that which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this. They make you clear. When they're gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go. This is because you're uneven in your opening: sometimes closed and unreachable, sometimes, with your shirt torn with longing. Your discursive intellect dominates for a time; then the universal, beyond-time intelligence comes. Sell your questioning talents, my son; buy bewildering surrender. Live simply and helpfully in that. Don't worry about the University of Bukhara with its prestigious curriculum.

The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.

In derogating the notion of ‘victim’, neoliberalism promotes a conception of victimization as subjective rather than social, a state of mind rather than a worldly situation. As a result, victims of poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence are discursively constructed as the authors of their own suffering, or as genuine victims of incomprehensible crime.

regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought

In meditation which is a continuous flow of staying in the state at all times and in every circumstance there is neither suppression nor production of dwelling and proliferation; if there is dwelling, that is the dharmakaya’s own face and if there is proliferation, that is preserved as the self-liveliness of wisdom, so, “Then, whether there is proliferation or dwelling,” Whatever comes from mind’s liveliness as discursive thoughts, be it the truth of the source—afflictions of anger, attachment, and so on—or the truth of unsatisfactoriness—the flavours of experience which are the feelings of happiness, sadness, and so on—if the nature of the discursive thoughts is known as dharmata, they become the shifting events of the dharmakaya, so, “Anger, attachment, happiness, or sadness,” That does not finish it though; generally speaking if they are met with through the view but not finished with by bringing them to the state with meditation, they fall into ordinary wandering in confusion and if that happens, you are bound into cyclic existence by the discursive thoughts of your own mindstream and, dharma and your own mindstream having remained separate, you become an ordinary person who has nothing special about them. Not to be separated from a great non-meditated self-resting is what is needed . . . Additionally, whatever discursive thought or affliction arises, it is not something apart from dharmakaya wisdom, rather, the nature of those discursive thoughts is actual dharmakaya, the ground’s luminosity. If that, which is called ‘the mother luminosity resident in the ground’, is recognized, there is self-recognition of the view of self-knowing luminosity previously introduced by the guru and that is called ‘the luminosity of the practice path’. Abiding in one’s own face of the two luminosities of ground and path become inseparable is called ‘the meeting of mother and son luminosities’ so, “The previously-known mother luminosity joins with the son.

Lao-tzu advised, “As soon as you have a thought, laugh at it,” because reality is not what we think. We perceive the world through a window colored by beliefs, interpretations, and associations. We see things not as they are but as we are. The same brain that enables us to contemplate philosophy, solve math equations, and create poetry also generates a stream of static known as discursive thoughts, which seem to arise at random, bubbling up into our awareness. Such mental noise is a natural phenomenon, no more of a problem than the dreams that appear in the sleep state. Therefore, our schooling aims not to struggle with random thoughts but to transcend them in the present moment, where no thoughts exist, only awareness. Our mind’s liberation awaits not in some imagined future but here and now.

As chapters 5 and 6 will discuss in detail, the identification of liberal democracies with tolerance and of nonliberal regimes with fundamentalism discursively articulates the global moral superiority of the West and legitimates Western violence toward the non-West. That is, the exclusive identification of the West with tolerance, and of tolerance with civilization, makes the West into the broker of the civilized, delimiting what is “intolerable” and therefore legitimate for imperial conquest cloaked as liberation.

Gless's lexical shift from "sexiness" through "femininity" to a "real strong lady" is a discursive shift and therefore has sociopolitical dimension. "Sexiness" is from an explicitly patriarchal discourse, "femininity" is from a discourse that attempts to naturalize gender construction and difference in terms of the status quo and is therefore implicitly patriarchal, whereas "real strong lady" is from a discourse that consciously opposes and exposes both the explicit and implicit patriarchy of "sexiness" and "femininity".

It isn’t so terrible to think logically and to be analytical; if we are designing a bridge or balancing a checkbook, that’s the best way to think and the best way to be. But when we look carefully, we see that discursive, linear thinking is only useful for certain kinds of tasks; for others it is quite useless. Like the hammer or the toothbrush, discursive thought is a tool intended for certain kinds of jobs: If you use a hammer to brush your teeth, or a toothbrush to drive nails, you are not likely to meet with great success.

[I]n the present moment, when (your mind) remains in its own condition without constructing anything, Awareness at that moment in itself is quite ordinary. And when you look into yourself in this way nakedly (without any discursive thoughts), Since there is only this pure observing, there will be found a lucid clarity without anyone being there who is the observer; Only a naked manifest awareness is present. (This awareness) is empty and immaculately pure, not being created by anything whatsoever. It is authentic and unadulterated, without any duality of clarity and emptiness. It is not permanent and yet it is not created by anything. However, it is not a mere nothingness or something annihilated because it is lucid and present. It does not exist as a single entity because it is present and clear in terms of being many. (On the other hand) it is not created as a multiplicity of things because it is inseparable and of a single flavor. This inherent self-awareness does not derive from anything outside itself. This is the real introduction to the actual condition of things. —Padmasambhava13

It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author-function”, while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer_ it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor_ it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer_ but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.

THE SANSKRIT WORD for meditation is dhyana; the Tibetan term is samten. Both refer to the same thing: steady mind. Mind is steady in the sense that you don’t go up when a thought goes up, and you don’t go down when it goes down, but you just watch things going either up or down. Whether good or bad, exciting, miserable, or blissful thoughts arise—whatever occurs in your state of mind, you don’t support it by having an extra commentator. The sitting practice of meditation is simple, direct, and very businesslike. You just sit and watch your thoughts go up and down. There is a physical technique in the background, which is working with the breath as it goes out and in. That provides an occupation during sitting practice. It is partly designed to occupy you so that you don’t evaluate thoughts. You just let them happen. In that environment, you can develop renunciation: you renounce extreme reactions to your thoughts. Warriors on the battlefield don’t react to success or failure. Success or failure is just regarded as another breath coming in and going out, another discursive thought coming in and going out. So the warrior is very steady. Because of that, the warrior is victorious—because victory is not particularly the aim or the goal. But the warrior can just be—as he or she is.

Under these circumstances, if they meet with no one who understands the matter, these persons fall away, and abandon the right road; or become weak, or at least put hindrances in the way of their further advancement, because of the great efforts they make to proceed in their former way of meditation, fatiguing their natural powers beyond measure. They think that their state is the result of negligence or of sin. All their own efforts are now in vain, because God is leading them by another and a very different road, that of contemplation. Their first road was that of discursive reflection, but the second knows no imagination or reasoning. 4. It behooves those

Moreover, since (as chapters 3 and 5 will argue) tolerance requires that the tolerated refrain from demands or incursions on public or political life that issue from their “difference,” the subject of tolerance is tolerated only so long as it does not make a political claim, that is, so long as it lives and practices its “difference” in a depoliticized or private fashion. In addition to being at odds with the epistemological and political stance to which many politicized identities aspire, this requirement also results in the discursive suppression of the social powers that constitute “difference” as well as in the strengthening of the hegemony of unmarked cultures, ethnicities, races, or sexualities;

Suppose, by way of illustration, we isolate a relation between technological change and patterns of managerial organization in business firms. The expanding use of microchip technology, let us say, might be shown to be associated with a partial dissolution of more rigid forms of hierarchical authority. The ‘social force’ involved here is not like a force of nature. Causal generalizations in the social sciences always presume a typical ‘mix’ of intended and unintended consequence of action, on the basis of the rationalization of conduct, whether ‘carried’ on the level of discursive or of practical consciousness. Technological change is not something that occurs independently of the uses to which agents put technology, the characteristic modes of innovation, etc. It

Pushing upstream, the colonials are figured as traveling backward into anachronistic space: “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world…. We were wanderers on prehistoric earth…. We were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone.” Within the trope of anachronistic space, the boilerman’s mimetic failure is less a discursive dilemma than a familiar element of the colonial progress narrative. Inhabiting the cusp of prehistory and imperial modernity, the “improved specimen” is seen as the living measure of how far Africans must still travel to attain modernity. In other words, the slippage between difference and identity is rendered non-contradictory by being projected onto the axis of time as a natural function of imperial progress.

If ideas were viruses, then, like any virus, they would mutate rapidly and often arbitrarily, with only the fitter ideas spreading and continuing their lineage. We simply do not see this with any sort of knowledge. The only time knowledge might appear to mutate is when ideas are altered by the individuals holding them, but that does not prove the meme “hypothesis.” In fact, if the meme “hypothesis” were true, then the evolution of ideas would be quite strange indeed. For every time a good idea was received through memetic transmission, there would be mutations of that idea, rapid one's, most of which would be complete nonsense. Sure, the nonsense ideas would “die”, but they would appear at first and remain until they did. One might argue that this is made manifest in discursive thought, but one would be patently, at the base level, incorrect. This is, unfortunately, is one of the logical consequences of the meme “hypothesis” that, as a parasite, all information becomes discursive thought. Schizophrenics are typically the only people to experience discursive thoughts, and most people are not, in fact, schizophrenic.

On the one hand, any analysis which foregrounds one vector of power over another will doubtless become vulnerable to criticisms that it not only ignores or devalues the others, but that its own constructions depend on the exclusion of the others in order to proceed. On the other hand, any analysis which pretends to be able to encompass every vector of power runs the risk of a certain epistemological imperialism which consists in the presupposition that any given writer might fully stand for and explain the complexities of contemporary power. No author or text can offer such a reflection of the world, and those who claim to offer such pictures become suspect by virtue of that very claim.

Immediate experience requires that the concrete particulars themselves are the objects of knowledge. Such particulars are not mediated but are grasped immediately in the sense that the experience of them is simply had. The structures that permit the having of experience and that determine its significance are the cultivated habits that dispose one toward that experience. The language of taste and of appreciation is relevant. The notion of Being that implies a contrast between essence and existence privileges mediation and, therefore, conceptual, generic, and essential knowledge. An aesthetic perspective, as opposed to a rational or logical one, involves experiencing the world in a relatively unmediated fashion. Mediated experience requires one to grasp or comprehend the essence of a thing, while the unmediated aesthetic experience is simply had as lived experience. A comparison with the analytical epistemic language of “getting,” “grasping,” “comprehending” is important here. Rather than a language of mediation in which the essences of things are abstracted through concepts, the Chinese language tends to be dispositional in that it promotes the “having” of the unmediated experience through a correlating and focusing of the affairs of the day. The important contrast here is between a cognitive and discursive knowing that abstracts from experience and felt experience as the concrete content of knowledge.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

According to the [evolutionist explanation of the instinct of animals], instinct is the expression of the heredity of a species, of an accumulation of analogous experiences down the ages. This is how they explain, for example, the fact that a flock of sheep hastily gathers together around the lambs the moment it perceives the shadow of a bird of prey, or that a kitten while playing already employs all the tricks of a hunter, or that birds know how to build their nests. In fact, it is enough to watch animals to see that their instinct has nothing of an automatism about it. The formation of such a mechanism by a purely cumulative . . . process is highly improbable, to say the least. Instinct is a nonreflective modality of the intelligence; it is determined, not by a series of automatic reflexes, but by the “form”—the qualitative determination—of the species. This form is like a filter through which the universal intelligence is manifested. . . The same is also true for man: his intelligence too is determined by the subtle form of his species. This form, however, includes the reflective faculty, which allows of a singularization of the individual such as does not exist among the animals. Man alone is able to objectivize himself. He can say: “I am this or that.” He alone possesses this two-edged faculty. Man, by virtue of his own central position in the cosmos, is able to transcend his specific norm; he can also betray it, and sink lower; "The corruption of the best is corruption at its worst." A normal animal remains true to the form and genius of its species; if its intelligence is not reflective and objectifying, but in some sort existential, it is nonetheless spontaneous; it is assuredly a form of the universal intelligence even if it is not recognized as such by men who, from prejudice or ignorance, identify intelligence with discursive thought exclusively.

The earliest commentaries on Scripture had been of this discursive nature, being addresses by word of mouth to the people, which were taken down by secretaries, and so preserved. While the traditionary teaching of the Church still preserved the vigour and vividness of its Apostolical origin, and spoke with an exactness and cogency which impressed an adequate image of it upon the mind of the Christian Expositor, he was able to allow himself free range in handling the sacred text, and to admit into the comment his own particular character of mind, and his spontaneous and individual ideas, in the full security, that, however he might follow the leadings of his own thoughts in unfolding the words of Scripture, his own deeply fixed views of Catholic truth would bring him safe home, without overstepping the limits of truth and sobriety. Accordingly, while the early Fathers manifest a most remarkable agreement in the principles and the substance of their interpretation, they have at the same time a distinctive spirit and manner, by which each may be known from the rest. About the vith or viith century this originality disappears; the oral or traditionary teaching, which allowed scope to the individual teacher, became hardened into a written tradition, and henceforward there is a uniform invariable character as well as substance of Scripture interpretation. Perhaps we should not err in putting Gregory the Great as the last of the original Commentators; for though very numerous commentaries on every book of Scripture continued to be written by the most eminent doctors in their own names, probably not one interpretation of any importance would be found in them which could not be traced to some older source. So that all later comments are in fact Catenas or selections from the earlier Fathers, whether they present themselves expressly in the form of citations from their volumes, or are lections upon the Lesson or Gospel for the day, extempore indeed in form, but as to their materials drawn from the previous studies and stores of the expositor. The latter would be better adapted for the general reader, the former for the purposes of the theologian.

Agnostics and other relativists dispute the value of metaphysical certainty; in order to demonstrate the illusory character of the de jure certainty of truth, they set it in opposition to the de facto certitude of error, as if the psychological phenomenon of false certainties could prevent true certainties from being what they are and from having all their effectiveness, and as if the very existence of false certainties did not prove in its own way the existence of true ones. The fact that a lunatic feels certain he is something that he is not does not prevent us from being certain of what he is and what we ourselves are, and the fact that we are unable to prove to him that he is mistaken does not prevent us from being right; or again, the fact that an unbalanced person may possibly have misgivings about his condition does not oblige us to have them about our own, even if we find it impossible to prove to him that our certainty is well founded. It is absurd to demand absolute proofs of suprasensorial realities that one thinks one ought to question while refusing in the name of reason to consider metaphysical arguments that are sufficient in themselves; for outside of these arguments the only proof of hidden realities—as we have already said—is the realities themselves. One cannot ask the dawn to be the sun or a shadow to be the tree that casts it; the very existence of our intelligence proves the reality of the relationships of causality, relationships that allow us to acknowledge the Invisible and by the same token oblige us to do so; if the world did not prove God, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason. First and foremost—leaving aside any question of intellectual intuition—the very fact of our existence necessarily implies pure Being; instead of starting with the idea that “I think; therefore I am”, one should say, “I am; therefore Being is”: 'sum ergo est Esse' and not 'cogito ergo sum'. What counts in our eyes is most definitely not some more or less correct line of reasoning but intrinsic certainty itself; reasoning is able to convey this in its own way: it describes the certainty in order to show forth its self-evident nature on the plane of discursive thought, and in this way it provides a key that others might use in actualizing this same certainty.