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The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn….
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John Mark Comer (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World)
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As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself plunged into the depths of the non-ego; I feel happy only when setting foot—on the Avenue de la Gare, on the Port, or on the Place de l'Eglise—in one of those provincial hotels with cold, long corridors where the wind from outside contends successfully with the efforts of the heating system, where the detailed geographic map of the district is still the sole ornament on the walls, where each noise helps only to make the silence appear by displacing it, where the rooms keep a musty perfume which the open air comes to wash, but does not eliminate, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to bring it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which has it pose like a model to try to recreate it with all the thoughts and remembrances that it contains...
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Marcel Proust
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There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived…. This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.2
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John Mark Comer (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World)
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Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty, or grace, or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc.
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David Foster Wallace (On Tennis: Five Essays)
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The most powerful way of being able to listen to your own intuition is by being silent. Find a quiet space, slow down and calm your mind. Your goal is to eliminate all that noise going through your head – all those thoughts that appear from nowhere.
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Nigel Cumberland (100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living)
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we try to quell the mental chatter by self-medicating with too much food, alcohol, drugs, work, sex, or exercise. But these are temporary solutions to muffle the noise and ease the pain. Soon enough, our thoughts are back at it again, and the cycle continues.
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S.J. Scott (Declutter Your Mind: How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking)
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When solitude has been my safe haven, the world and all its noise seem cautionary. My foot is half stepping forward with the back one standing still, eager to move through my life in a brave manner whilst eliminating the fears. Growth takes time, be gentle on yourself.
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Nikki Rowe
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Those who do contemplative retreats in hermitages are far from doing nothing, since they are constantly engaged in training their minds, but there is no ‘noise,’ no ‘waste’ to eliminate, no stress to cure, no chaos to reorganize. This means that there is less to repair during sleep and the sleep quality of meditators is deeper.
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Arianna Huffington (The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time)
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On the other hand, it has a number of other advantages for power. For one thing, it diverts people, it atomizes people. When you're sitting in front of your tube, you're alone. I mean, there's something about human beings that just makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back―that's very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations. Well, that's obviously a good result from the point of view of people with power―because it's extremely important to drive human sentiments out of people if you just want them to be passive and obedient and under control. So if you can eliminate things like face-to-face contact and direct interaction, and just turn people into what's caricatured as kind of an M.I.T. nerd―you know, somebody who's got antennae coming out of his head, and is wired into his computer all the time―that's a real advantage, because then you've made them more inhuman, and therefore more controllable.
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Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
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If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voicedness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course, crete an artistic work that compositionally and thematically will be similar to a novel, will be “made” exactly as a novel is made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-confident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that such an author finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity, emerges in most cases as a “closet drama,” with detailed, fully developed and “artistically worked out” stage directions (it is, of course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diversity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays [327].
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Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays)
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The second big emotional impact of quitting social media was that it made me miss my friends. I know the easy knock on social media is that it’s just people telling you what they had for dinner, but it could be so much more than that. Long before, I had eliminated much of the noise on my feeds, so the friends I “saw” each day were those who made me laugh and learn and think. That was not something I was prepared to lose forever, so it forced me into an interesting position. The only way to get those people back into my life was to actually get them back into my life.
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Billy Baker (We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends)
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In simplest terms, you won’t be able to unlock your creative potential, achieve sustainable success, or even be fundamentally happy unless you align your internal and external worlds—unless you’re true to yourself. Therefore, to begin the journey of discovering your purpose, you must focus on what matters to you internally, not externally. And the first step in this process is to eliminate obstacles that prevent you from hearing the signal above the noise. These obstacles include things such as commercial concerns, financial motivations, comparing yourself to someone else, and other manifestations of ego.
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Alan Philips (The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s."
- from "Federer Both Flesh and Not
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David Foster Wallace (Both Flesh and Not: Essays)
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In all ages, the technique of the Black Magician has been essentially the same. In all spells the words are deprived of their meanings and reduced to syllables or verbal noises. This may be done literally, as when magicians used to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or by reiterating a word over and over again as loudly as possible until it has become a mere sound. For millions of people today, words like communism, capitalism, imperialism, peace, freedom, democracy, have ceased to be words, the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee-reflex.
It makes no difference if the magic is being employed simply for the aggrandizement of the magician himself or if, as is more usual, he claims to be serving some good cause. Indeed, the better the cause he claims to be serving, the more evil he does…. Propaganda, like the sword, attempts to eliminate consent or dissent and, in our age, magical language has to a great extent replaced the sword.
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W.H. Auden (Secondary worlds: The T. S. Eliot memorial lectures delivered at Eliot College in the University of Kent at Canterbury, October 1967,)
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There are several important remarks which can be made about this 'absolute emptiness' and 'absolute nothingness'. First of all, we now know, theoretically and empirically, that such a thing does not exist. There may be more or less of something, but never an unlimited 'perfect vacuum'. In the second place, our nervous make-up, being in accord with experience, is such that 'absolute emptiness' requires 'outside walls'. The question at once arises, is the world 'finite' or 'infinite'? If we say 'finite', it has to have outside walls, and then the question arises: What is 'behind the walls'? If we say it is 'infinite', the problem of the psychological 'walls' is not eliminated. and we still have the semantic need for walls, and then ask what is beyond the walls. So we see the such a world suspended in some sort of an 'absolute void' represents a nature against human nature, and so we had to invent something supernatural to account for such assumed nature against human nature. In the third place, and this remark is the most fundamental of all, because a symbol must stand for something to be a symbol at all, 'absolute nothingness' cannot be objective and cannot be symbolized at all. This ends the argument, as all we may say about it is neither true nor false, but non-sense. We can make noises, but say nothing about the external world. It is easy to see that 'absolute nothingness' is a label for a semantic disturbance, for verbal objectification, for a pathological state inside our skin, for a fancy, but not a symbol, for a something which has objective existence outside our skin.
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Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics)
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1. Individual choice: We can choose how to spend our energy and time. Without choice, there is no point in talking about trade-offs. 2. The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. This is the justification for taking time to figure out what is most important. Because some things are so much more important, the effort in finding those things is worth it. 3. The reality of trade-offs: We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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Peace is not something that happens by accident. Peace is like silence; it is always there. The lack of harmony in our lives is like noise superimposed on the silence. The issue is not how to create peace, but how to live in a way that eliminates the noise.
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Gabriel Cousens (Creating Peace by Being Peace: The Essene Sevenfold Path)
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Open your eyes. Block all escape routes. Eliminate all noise. The common will capture your attention as long as it’s allowed in the room. Whatever you are used to, whether cigarettes, shopping, or Twitter, must be eliminated in the quest to get into the ring. You must make a sacrifice on the altar of greatness and perform acts that others will not. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice your comfort, you don’t have what it takes.
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Julien Smith (The Flinch)
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and attention is the necessary and sufficient condition for long-term memory storage to occur.’ The rest is noise. Indeed, from a cognitivist perspective, teaching might well be defined as the ‘management of attention for pedagogical purposes’. Managing attention means both drawing attention to the subject at hand, and drawing attention away from whatever might be a distraction. In the case of the latter, this might mean eliminating competing stimuli by shutting down peripheral channels. In other words, by unplugging the classroom.
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Scott Thornbury (Big Questions in ELT)
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He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't--a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.
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Stewart O'Nan (West of Sunset)
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Eliminate the noise inside you with the silence outside, and later, when you encounter noise outside, this time you can neutralize it with the silence inside you!
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Mehmet Murat ildan
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You’re on your own. And you know what you know. You have come a long way, spilling the light of consciousness into the unconscious' dark corridors and boarded-up walls, all in the name of knowing your birthright: your true self. You have gained useful tools and knowledge throughout this journey to help you stay connected with this self and return as we all wander from time to time. Such habits and values are designed to help you achieve wholeness and joy in the middle of the messiness of everyday life, and, as you have found, you don't have to go up to a mountain top to find them. And even the term "seeking" is inaccurate— this wholeness, this joy has never really been lost, obscured by egoic noise. In any moment, regardless of where you are, what you are doing, or with whom you are, you can choose to remember who you really are: you are a holy luminous light residing in a beautiful physical body. Embrace all facets of your nature— physical and spiritual— because they empower you with amazing abilities that can't be achieved in isolation. The way you learn to live as a special being both real and spiritual is the calling of your soul articulated through your work, partnerships, fitness, hobbies— through every aspect of your life. Nobody else is going to express that duality as you do, and the world needs your special contribution. It's time now. Reclaim the throne inside. The seat cannot be occupied by anyone else; it is reserved for you. Rule with compassion: seek out your hidden aspects, your rejected aspects, and by accepting them at home. Trust that all the pieces, not just the sparkling and glamorous ones, are deserving of this recognition. The more you can embrace your own complexity and inner contradiction, the less you will try to eliminate disparities between people and the world around you. You will know that your True Self is large enough to contain all the paradoxes, and you can walk away from the relentless ego war that no one can win to a beautiful, soul-led life.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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Restfulness Relentlessness Margin Busyness Slowness Hurry Quiet Noise Deep relationships Isolation Time alone Crowds Delight Distraction Enjoyment Envy Clarity Confusion Gratitude Greed Contentment Discontentment Trust Worry Love Anger, angst Joy Melancholy, sadness Peace Anxiety Working from love Working for love Work as contribution Work as accumulation and accomplishment
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John Mark Comer (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World)
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Therefore I recommend using 15-minute charts. This time frame is small enough for you to capture the nice intraday moves, but it's big enough to eliminate the noise in the market and correctly displays the "true trends.
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Markus Heitkoetter (THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO DAY TRADING)
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Powered by a bearingless engine, the Blue Edge main rotor has five double-swept blades, each with three Blue Pulse flaps in its trailing edge that are automatically activated as many as forty times per second. This all but eliminates blade-vortex interaction that produces the thwop-thwop-thwop noise when a rotor blade impacts the wake vortex created by the blade in front of it.
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Dean Koontz (The Forest of Lost Souls)