Form Over Substance Quotes

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.

In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being “in love” while discounting the importance of loving.

I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur.

To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn't have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke's, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.

let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

How deaf and stupid have I been!" he thought, walking swiftly along. "When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated be-fore I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have in-deed awakened and have not been born before this very day.

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.

There is a theory that when a planet, like our earth for example, has manifested every form of life, when it has fulfilled itself to the point of exhaustion, it crumbles to bits and is dispersed like star dust throughout the universe. It does not roll on like a dead moon, but explodes, and in the space of a few minutes, there is not a trace of it visible in the heavens. In marine life we have a similar effect. it is called implosion. When an amphibian accustomed to the black depths rises above a certain level, when the pressure to which it adapts itself is lifted, the body bursts inwardly. Are we not familiar with this spectacle in the human being also? The norsemen who went berserk, the malay who runs amuck—are these not examples of implosion and explosion? When the cup is full it runs over. but when the cup and that which it contains are one substance, what then? There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such overbrimming splendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the madonnas the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the face becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out—and received. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the life of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon. Rarer still are the anomalous ones who, having come to the full, are so terrified by the wonder of it that they spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to stifle that which gave them birth and being. The war of the mind is the story of the soul-split. When the moon was at full there were those who could not accept the dim death of diminution; they tried to hang full-blown in the zenith of their own heaven. They tried to arrest the action of the law which was manifesting itself through them, through their own birth and death, in fulfillment and transfiguration. Caught between the tides they were sundered; the soul departed the body, leaving the simulacrum of a divided self to fight it out in the mind. Blasted by their own radiance they live forever the futile quest of beauty, truth and harmony. Depossessed of their own effulgence they seek to possess the soul and spirit of those to whom they are attracted. They catch every beam of light; they reflect with every facet of their hungry being. instantly illumined, When the light is directed towards them, they are also speedily extinguished. The more intense the light which is cast upon them the more dazzling—and blinding—they appear. Especially dangerous are they to the radiant ones; it is always towards these bright and inexhaustible luminaries that they are most passionately drawn…

And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe, I continued, and then I broke off for Walter's sake.

And they talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading and kneading them, continually rolling between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had extracted from their lives (what they called “life,” their domain), kneading it, pulling it, rolling it until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little gray pellet.

I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself. I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation. In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event. Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way. Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.

If Elvis ..is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz...It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music...if Dylan...becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition...The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally "good" singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style...

Let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: It solidifies into something else. Not grief, like you’d expect, or even regret. No, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn’t until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tongue that you realize this is anger in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measured and spread.

To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn’t have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke’s, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.

Over the years, certain stories in the history of family take hold. They're passes from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely form the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

Nothingness is the fragrance of the beyond. It is the opening of the heart to the transcendental. It is the unfoldment of the one-thousand-petalled lotus. It is man's destiny. Man is complete only when he has come to this fragrance, when he has come to this absolute nothingness inside his being, when this nothingness has spread all over him, when he is just a pure sky, unclouded. This nothingness is what Buddha calls nirvana. First we have to understand what this nothingness actually is, because it is not just empty; it is full, it is overflowing. Never for a single moment think that nothingness is a negative state, an absence, no. Nothingness is simply no-thingness. Things disappear, only the ultimate substance remains. The identity of "yes" and "no" is the secret of nothingness. Nothingness is not identical with "no", nothingness is the identity of "yes" and "no", where polarities are no more polarities, where opposites are no more opposites. When you make love to a woman or to a man, the point of orgasm is the point of nothingness. At that moment the woman is no more a woman and the man is no more a man. Those forms have disappeared. That polarity between man and woman is no more there; it is utterly relaxed. They have both melted into each other. They have unformed themselves, they have gone into a state which cannot be defined. The identity of yes and no is the secret of emptiness, nothingness, nirvana. Emptiness is not just empty; it is a presence, it is the ultimate peak of consciousness.a very solid presence. If you want to know it you will have to go into life, into some situation where yes and no meet, then you will know it. Where the body and the soul meet, when the world and God meet, where opposites are no longer opposites only then will you have a taste of it. The taste of it is the taste of Tao, of Zen, of Hassidism, of Yoga.

I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture" had everything to do with why music has always exerted such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.

From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God—books written by the Mormon prophets or the Founding Fathers—were not to be studied so much as cherished, like a thing perfect in itself. I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself. Books that were not of God were banished; they were a danger, powerful and irresistible in their cunning. To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn’t have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke’s, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.

We live on a spinning rock suspended in darkness, which evolves around a dying star. Our spinning rock was once ruled and owned by gigantic reptiles, all over! In sea, land, and air, gigantic reptiles roamed! Then a smaller rock fell from the sky and made a hole in the ground, so big that all the giant reptiles died! We live on a spinning rock we got from dragons flying through the air, and on this rock we kill each other over things like religion and money! And on this rock we make friends, we fall in love, we work hard to earn papers so we can buy things. On this rock we have dreams at night that remind us of beautiful places we have never been to, beautiful wonders we have never imagined before... we write stories and we make books, we try to travel to other rocks around us, we wonder if anyone else is out there. Our planet, and our existence as a human species, is bizarre! Our reality is bizarre! What we think is normal, when spelled out, is not normal at all. It's only normal because we are familiar with it. We are residents of a universe that is expanding at a rate of more than 5 billion meters per every few seconds, forming new realities and new substances with each expansion! We will never become familiar with even the very tip of what actually is! So why are any of us afraid of the possibilities of what could be? Why does this frighten us, why does this scare us? When we actually never know anything at all!

Every infirmity originates in the devil’s territory, and for that reason is spiritual. Now, if we understand the origin of infirmity and what gives it substance, we will be able to deal with it with the spiritual weapons God has given us. Science regards this approach as insanity or religious fanaticism, but it is God who created us and not science. Darkness, in all its forms, operates over the soul and it is what produces and gives form to infirmity. Darkness, by definition are all the sins, feelings and negative forms of thought that oppose God. But what is darkness? Darkness is essentially the absence of light. Light has substance and power, darkness has no substance. Putting it in simple terms: When I turn on the lights at home, I do

Entirely my own opinion,” said Ivanov. “I am glad that we have reached the heart of the matter soon. In other words: you are convinced that “we” – that is to say, the Party, the State and the masses behind it – no longer represent the interests of the Revolution.” “I should leave the masses out of it,” said Rubashov. […] “Leave the masses out of it, “ he repeated. “You understand nothing about them. Nor, probably, do I any more. Once, when the great “we” still existed, we understood them as no one had ever understood them before. We had penetrated into their depths, we worked in the amorphous raw material of history itself…” […] “At that time,” Rubashov went on, “we were called the Party of the Plebs. What did the others know of history? Passing ripples, little eddies and breaking waves. They wondered at the changing forms of the surface and could not explain them. But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia, of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions. That was the greatness of our doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists; we were empirics. We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever men have known about mankind; that is why our revolution succeeded. And now you have buried it all again….” […] “Well,” said Rubashov, “one more makes no difference. Everything is buried: the men, their wisdom and their hopes. You killed the “We”; you destroyed it. Do you really maintain that the masses are still behind you? Other usurpers in Europe pretend the same thing with as much right as you….” […] “Forgive my pompousness,” he went on, “but do you really believe the people are still behind you? It bears you, dumb and resigned, as it bears others in other countries, but there is no response in their depths. The masses have become deaf and dumb again, the great silent x of history, indifferent as the sea carrying the ships. Every passing light is reflected on its surface, but underneath is darkness and silence. A long time ago we stirred up the depths, but that is over. In other words” – he paused and put on his pince-nez – “in those days we made history; now you make politics. That’s the whole difference.” […] "A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out x, but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize x for what it stands for in the equation." "Pretty," said Ivanov. "But unfortunately rather abstract. To return to more tangible things: you mean, therefore, that "We" - namely, Party and State - no longer represent the interests of the Revolution, of the masses or, if you like, the progress of humanity." "This time you have grasped it," said Rubashov smiling. Ivanov did not answer his smile.

The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything. “How deaf and stupid have I been!” he thought, walking swiftly along. “When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened and have not been born before this very day.

The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything. "How deaf and stupid have I been!" he thought, walking swiftly along. "When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened and have not been born before this very day.

...imagine that you hold in one hand an oddly shaped stone. You keep this hand closed into a fist, but still you can feel the stone’s curvature and the pointed edges, the roughness—of course, you know the relative size and weight and might even have a mental image of the color of this stone, even if you have not yet laid eyes upon it. Imagine that stone in your hand. Imagine what it is like to know everything about the way it feels, but nothing of how it looks. Hold that in mind for a moment. Now, imagine that there is a person standing next to you who tells you that she also holds a stone in her hand. You look down and see the clenched fist and she sees yours and you confess the same. Neither of you, it seems, has yet opened the hand and seen the stone. Still, you can only trust each other’s proclamations. Standing together with your stones in hand, the two of you theorize about whether or not your respective stones are similar to one another. You discuss mundane details about your stones (not the special ones—you hesitate to make mention of the sharp point in the northern hemisphere or the flat area on the bottom). Your neighbor finally notes similarities between her stone and yours and you nod with relief and acknowledge that your stones indeed share reasonable commonalities. Over the course of your discussion, you and your neighbor finally conclude, without bothering to open your hands, that the stones you hold must indeed be quite similar. Are they? It is only suitable to say that they are. At the same time, and in spite of your desire not to offend, there is no doubt in your mind that the stone you hold bespeaks a greater prominence than that of your neighbor. You are not sure how you know this to be true, but it must be so! And I do not mean that this stone simply holds a greater subjective prominence. It has something of the universal, for it is, indeed, an auspicious stone! Silently, you hypothesize in what ways it must be special. It is possibly different in shape, color, weight, size and texture from the other, but you cannot confirm this. Perhaps, it is special by substance? Still, you are unsure. The very fact of your uncertainty begins to bother you and unleashes within you a deep insecurity. What if you are wrong and your stone is actually inferior to the other…or inferior even to some third stone not yet encountered? Meanwhile, your neighbor is silently suffering in the same agony. Both of you tacitly understand that, without comparing the two visually, it is absurd to proclaim the two stones similar. Yet, your fist remains clenched, as does your neighbor’s and so you find yourselves unable to hold out the stones before you and compare them side-by-side. Of course, this is possible, but the mutual curiosity is outstripped by an inveterate pride, and so you both become afraid of showing (and even seeing) what you have, for fear that your respective stones will be different in appearance from the model that you have each conceptualized in mind. Meekly your eyes meet and you smile to one another at your new comradeship, but, all the while, remain paralyzed by a simultaneous shame and vanity.

Phaeton said, "No civilization can exist without money. Even one in which energy is as cheap and free as air on Earth, would still have some needs and desires which some people can fulfill better than others. An entertainment industry, if nothing else. Whatever efforts -- if any -- these productive people make, above and beyond that which their own idle pastimes incline them to make, will be motivated by gifts or barter bestowed by others eager for their services. Whatever barter keeps its value best over time, stays in demand, and is portable, recognizable, divisible, will become their money, No matter what they call it, no matter what form it takes, whether cowry shells or gold or grams of antimatter, it will be money. Even Sophotechs use standardized computer seconds to prioritize distribution of system resources among themselves. As long as men value each other, admire each other, need each other, there will be money." Diomedes said, "And if all men live in isolation? Surrounded by nothing but computer-generated dreams, pleasant fictions, and flatteries? And their every desire is satisfied by electronic illusions which create in their brains the sensations of satisfaction without the substance? What need have men to value other men then?" "Men who value their own lives would not live that way.

People used to consider change, alteration, and becoming in general as proof that appearances were illusory, as a sign that something must be misleading us. These days, on the other hand, we see ourselves mired in error, drawn necessarily into error, precisely to the extent that the prejudice of reason forces us to make use of unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being. We have checked this through rigorously and are sure that this is where the error lies. This is no different than the movement of the sun, where our eye is a constant advocate for error, here it is language. Language began at a time when psychology was in its most rudimentary form: we enter into a crudely fetishistic mindset when we call into consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language - in the vernacular: the presuppositions of reason. It sees doers and deeds all over: it believes that will has causal efficacy: it believes in the 'I', in the I as being, in the I as substance, and it projects this belief in the I-substance onto all things - this is how it creates the concept of 'thing' in the first place. Being is imagined into everything - pushed under everything - as a cause; the concept of 'being' is only derived from the concept of 'I' . . . In the beginning there was the great disaster of an error, the belief that the will is a thing with causal efficacy, - that will is a faculty . . . These days we know that it is just a word.

Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires. Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time—and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are. From this complacence, the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and have so far succeeded, that they are now become the masters, and have the assurance to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them. The critic, rightly considered, is no more than the clerk, whose office it is to transcribe the rules and laws laid down by those great judges whose vast strength of genius hath placed them in the light of legislators, in the several sciences over which they presided. This office was all which the critics of old aspired to; nor did they ever dare to advance a sentence, without supporting it by the authority of the judge from whence it was borrowed. But in process of time, and in ages of ignorance, the clerk began to invade the power and assume the dignity of his master. The laws of writing were no longer founded on the practice of the author, but on the dictates of the critic. The clerk became the legislator, and those very peremptorily gave laws whose business it was, at first, only to transcribe them. Hence arose an obvious, and perhaps an unavoidable error; for these critics being men of shallow capacities, very easily mistook mere form for substance. They acted as a judge would, who should adhere to the lifeless letter of law, and reject the spirit. Little circumstances, which were perhaps accidental in a great author, were by these critics considered to constitute his chief merit, and transmitted as essentials to be observed by all his successors. To these encroachments, time and ignorance, the two great supporters of imposture, gave authority; and thus many rules for good writing have been established, which have not the least foundation in truth or nature; and which commonly serve for no other purpose than to curb and restrain genius, in the same manner as it would have restrained the dancing-master, had the many excellent treatises on that art laid it down as an essential rule that every man must dance in chains. To

What, then, is addiction? In the words of a consensus statement by addiction experts in 2001, addiction is a “chronic neurobiological disease… characterized by behaviors that include one or more of the following: impaired control over drug use, compulsive use, continued use despite harm, and craving.” The key features of substance addiction are the use of drugs or alcohol despite negative consequences, and relapse. I’ve heard some people shrug off their addictive tendencies by saying, for example, “I can’t be an alcoholic. I don’t drink that much…” or “I only drink at certain times.” The issue is not the quantity or even the frequency, but the impact. “An addict continues to use a drug when evidence strongly demonstrates the drug is doing significant harm…. If users show the pattern of preoccupation and compulsive use repeatedly over time with relapse, addiction can be identified.” Helpful as such definitions are, we have to take a broader view to understand addiction fully. There is a fundamental addiction process that can express itself in many ways, through many different habits. The use of substances like heroin, cocaine, nicotine and alcohol are only the most obvious examples, the most laden with the risk of physiological and medical consequences. Many behavioural, nonsubstance addictions can also be highly destructive to physical health, psychological balance, and personal and social relationships. Addiction is any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves: 1. compulsive engagement with the behaviour, a preoccupation with it; 2. impaired control over the behaviour; 3. persistence or relapse, despite evidence of harm; and 4. dissatisfaction, irritability or intense craving when the object — be it a drug, activity or other goal — is not immediately available. Compulsion, impaired control, persistence, irritability, relapse and craving — these are the hallmarks of addiction — any addiction. Not all harmful compulsions are addictions, though: an obsessive-compulsive, for example, also has impaired control and persists in a ritualized and psychologically debilitating behaviour such as, say, repeated hand washing. The difference is that he has no craving for it and, unlike the addict, he gets no kick out of his compulsion. How does the addict know she has impaired control? Because she doesn’t stop the behaviour in spite of its ill effects. She makes promises to herself or others to quit, but despite pain, peril and promises, she keeps relapsing. There are exceptions, of course. Some addicts never recognize the harm their behaviours cause and never form resolutions to end them. They stay in denial and rationalization. Others openly accept the risk, resolving to live and die “my way.

Burbank's power of love, reported Hall, "greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly. Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection." Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out­ look for the Blind: "He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees." Her observation was particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay "Training of the Human Plant," later published as a book, he an­ticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authori­tarian parents by saying, "It is more important for a child to have a good nervous system than to try to 'force' it along the line of book knowledge at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really useful in later life come to the children through play and through association with nature." Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for everything around him. He told one of his biographers: 'Tm almost seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick the chandelier. That's because my body is no older than my mind-and my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will." It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders. Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell "all" during a lecture entitled "How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers," who sat agape as they heard him say: In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world. Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

While iron oxide makes up over 6% of the Earth’s crust, it took a long time for mankind to figure out how to convert dirt into something as useful as steel. The first smelting of iron from ore was probably accidental when some iron-bearing ore was mixed in with the copper ore during the smelting of copper. Iron ore is composed mostly of various iron oxides which need to be reduced – have oxygen removed – to form metallic iron. The iron ore was mixed with charcoal, which is mostly carbon, and fired. The carbon dioxide produced by burning charcoal combines with the hot carbon in the charcoal, forming carbon monoxide. The hot carbon monoxide turns again to carbon dioxide by stealing oxygen from – reducing – the iron oxides, leaving metallic iron behind. But the heat needed for melting copper isn’t nearly sufficient to melt the iron that may be present in the copper ore. The reaction from ore to iron occurs while in a solid state when the iron forms into a solid, ugly mass of spongy metal called a bloom. The bloom’s cavities were full of slag (molten impurities from the smelting) that needed to be removed. Someone must have recognized the spongy mass as a metallic substance, probably by using appropriate scientific methodology such as hitting it with a rock. Eventually, the bloom was processed by heating it to the slag’s melting point and hammering on it until all of the slag had squirted out. This would be hard, dangerous and resource-intensive work as the iron was reheated and beaten over and over to produce wrought iron. This process was the way iron was made from late B.C. to early A.D.

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

When we struggle with overwhelming energy bouncing around us, or vibrating like a truck inside of us, the subtle energy field needs attention. The energy we are experiencing has two functions: the first is to clear away what is not needed and the second is to bring in new potentials. There are some common blockages that need to be cleared and then transformed as we awaken. They include: Toxic events and experiences Toxic people who may, or may not, still be in our life Enduring grief over losses Attachment to anything that we fear losing, but would be better off letting go Toxic substances, such as drugs, cigarettes, or unhealthy food Ways we learned to constrict our body rigidly in childhood as forms of defense

Human bodies are extremely complicated and over the years I learned three important things about them, none of which I had been taught by lecturers or professors at my medical school. First, I learned that no two bodies are identical and there are an infinite number of variations. Not even twins are truly identical. When I first started to study medicine I used to think how much easier it would be for us all (doctors and patients) if bodies came with an owner's manual, but the more I learned about medicine the more I realised that such a manual would have to contain so many variations, footnotes and appendices that it wouldn't fit into the British Museum let alone sit comfortably on the average bookshelf. Even if manuals were individually prepared they would still be too vast for practical use. However much we may think we know about illness and health there will always be exceptions; there will always be times when our prognoses and predictions are proved wrong. Second, I learned that the human body has enormous, hidden strengths, and far greater power than most of us ever realise. We tend to think of ourselves as being delicate and vulnerable. But, in practice, our bodies are tougher than we imagine, far more capable of coping with physical and mental stresses than most of us realise. Very few of us know just how strong and capable we can be. Only if we are pushed to our limits do we find out precisely what we can do. Third, I learned that our bodies are far better equipped for selfdefence than most of us imagine, and are surprisingly well-equipped with a wide variety of protective mechanisms and self-healing systems which are designed to keep us alive and to protect us when we find ourselves in adverse circumstances. The human body is designed for survival and contains far more automatic defence mechanisms, designed to protect its occupant when it is threatened, than any motor car. To give the simplest of examples, consider what happens when you cut yourself. First, blood will flow out of your body for a few seconds to wash away any dirt. Then special proteins will quickly form a protective net to catch blood cells and form a clot to seal the wound. The damaged cells will release special substances into the tissues to make the area red, swollen and hot. The heat kills any infection, the swelling acts as a natural splint - protecting the injured area. White cells are brought to the injury site to swallow up any bacteria. And, finally, scar tissue builds up over the wounded site. The scar tissue will be stronger than the original, damaged area of skin. Those were the three medical truths I discovered for myself. Over the years I have seen many examples of these three truths. But one patient always comes into my mind when I think about the way the human body can defy medical science, prove doctors wrong and exhibit its extraordinary in-built healing power.

This hypothesis is inevitably controversial, but it is testable by experiment, and there is already considerable circumstantial evidence in its favor. For example, when a newly synthesized organic chemical is crystallized for the first time (say a new drug), there will be no morphic resonance from previous crystals of this type. A new morphic field has to come into existence; of the many energetically possible ways the substance could crystallize, one actually happens. The next time the substance is crystallized anywhere in the world, morphic resonance from the first crystals will make this same pattern of crystallization more probable, and so on. A cumulative memory will build up as the pattern becomes more and more habitual. As a consequence, the crystals should tend to form more readily all over the world. Such a tendency is in fact well known; new compounds are generally difficult to crystallize, sometimes taking weeks or even months to form from supersaturated solutions. As time goes on, they tend to appear more readily all over the world.

How, then, shall he be a God, who has not as yet been made a man? Or how can he be perfect who was but lately created? How, again, can he be immortal, who in his mortal nature did not obey his Maker? For it must be that thou, at the outset, shouldest hold the rank of a man, and then afterwards partake of the glory of God. For thou dost not make God, but God thee. If, then, thou art God’s workmanship, await the hand of thy Maker which creates everything in due time; in due time as far as thou art concerned, whose creation is being carried out. Offer to Him thy heart in a soft and tractable state, and preserve the form in which the Creator has fashioned thee, having moisture in thyself, lest, by becoming hardened, thou lose the impressions of His fingers. But by preserving the framework thou shalt ascend to that which is perfect, for the moist clay which is in thee is hidden [there] by the workmanship of God. His hand fashioned thy substance; He will cover thee over [too] within and without with pure gold and silver, and He will adorn thee to such a degree, that even “the King Himself shall have pleasure in thy beauty.” But if thou, being obstinately hardened, dost reject the operation of His skill, and show thyself ungrateful towards Him, because thou wert created a [mere] man, by becoming thus ungrateful to God, thou hast at once lost both His workmanship and life. For creation is an attribute of the goodness of God but to be created is that of human nature. If then, thou shalt deliver up to Him what is thine, that is, faith towards Him and subjection, thou shalt receive His handiwork, and shall be a perfect work of God.

Maybe I have merely undergone a great, slow disintegration. And my struggle against that disintegration is just that: is just trying to give it a form. A form gives contours to chaos, gives a construct to amorphous substance… the vision of an infinite flesh is a madman's vision, but if I cut that flesh into pieces and spread those pieces over days and famines… then it will no longer be perdition and madness: it will be humanized life again.

It is so easy to get caught up in the externals and believe that their destruction would be the worst thing that could happen. When someone comes forward and exposes sin sometimes the first response is to silence the truth-teller and to be concerned about how the truth will damage the marriage, the church, or the institution. The governing force becomes protecting the form at all costs, even if its substance is rotten. Yet our God responded to the Israelites when they were continuously disobedient to him by destroying the forms so the substance could be exposed and cleansed and eventually transformed. He hates evil and nothing is valuable enough to protect it over and above dealing with that evil.

Worthiness is what gives meaning and fulfillment. Success without fulfillment is empty. That’s like good looks without goodness. In life we need substance over form, not form over substance.

Regardless of the different stages in our human development, unless we learn how to create loving and fulfilling relationships (with ourselves and others), addiction will follow – not necessarily as a manifestation of substance misuse but in the form of codependence, compulsive thinking, unhealthy relationships, sex and love addictions, overeating, insidious incarnations of self-harm and so on.

Since then I have learned many things, and above all the way in which dinosaurs conquer. First I had believed that disappearing had been, for my brothers, the magnanimous acceptance of a defeat; now I knew that the more the dinosaurs disappear, the more they extend their dominion, and over forests far more vast than those that cover the continents: in the labyrinth of the survivor's thoughts. From the semidarkness of fears and doubts of now ignorant generations, the Dinosaurs continued to extend their necks, to raise their taloned hoofs, and when the last shadow of their image had been erased, their name went on, superimposed on all meanings, perpetuating their presence in relations among living beings. Now, when the name too had been erased, they would become one thing with the mute and anonymous molds of thought, through which thoughts take on form and substance: by the New Ones, and by those who would come after the New Ones, and those who would come even after them.

Another aspect of our multidimensional selves and communication is with the Earth and Earth energies. We each have a unique relationship with the Earth Mother whose planet we live on. We each communicate multidimensionally with nature. We communicate subtly and sometimes not so subtly with nature spirits, the Devas or Angels of plants, with tree spirits and the elementals. The elementals I speak of here are the Gnomes, Sylphs, Salamanders, and Undines. We also have the ability to communicate directly with the four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. This is how high level initiates and Masters have been able to control the weather. Every aspect of nature, in truth, contains a spiritual essence or being that embodies that particular form. We also have the ability to multidimensionally communicate with crystals and gemstones, and the elemental beings that create the form and physical substance itself. We also each can communicate multidimensionally with animals. There are many on this plane that can talk to animals and they will telepathically talk back in words and images. Many of us have multidimensional communication with pets that have passed over to the other side and are functioning as spirit guides and helpers. There are also spirit animals such as the eagle, jaguar, owl, bear, lion, and tiger, which come as guides and helpers as well on a physical and/or etheric level.

As the sky is clear with an azure apparition of substance that effectively conceals the immensity of its depth—thereby protecting the over-wrought sensibilities of linear humans from the cosmic horrors of the void. The same indifference to existence, including his own, formed the basis of the emotional composition and character of Burning Hot Coals.

According to Scientific American, people watching TV “reported feeling relaxed and passive. The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading. . . . Habit-forming drugs work in similar ways.” In short, scientists conclude that “TV does seem to meet the criteria for substance dependence.”1

Whitewash, a solution of lime and chalk mixed with other additives, was brushed on interior and exterior walls like paint. It took several days to set, forming a white surface that could be coloured with other substances; in some areas animal blood or vegetable dye was added to give exterior walls a pink colour. Whitewash was a cheap way of decorating rooms. More expensive options included textile hangings, wallpaper, painting and wainscoting. In 1817 William Holland was decorating parts of the vicarage at Over Stowey. His daughter’s bedroom had wallpaper, but he hired a painter for some of the woodwork, inside and out:

Can growth be sustained into the indefinite future? We first briefly address the general worry that since the world’s resources are finite, growth must be unsustainable in the very long term. If all resources were non-renewable, all economic activity, whether growing or static in magnitude, might eventually become unsustainable. But even this is not quite certain since a finite stock of non-renewable resources can last infinitely if the usage declines asymptotically over time—a not impossible achievement in a technologically dynamic society with a constant population. Fortunately, many resources are not of the non-renewable type. Furthermore, the law of conservation of mass energy shows that one does not destroy mass energy but merely transforms it into other forms. Also, the world is not a closed system, receiving a continuous flow of new energy from the sun. So there seems little substance in the general worry that over many centuries all forms of growth are unsustainable because of ultimate resource limitations.

Pletho, a neo-pagan, had an ulterior motive in pitting Plato against Aristotle. As an opponent of the proposed union between the Latins and the Greeks, he hoped to demolish the intellectual edifice of the Roman Catholic Church, which he quite rightly recognized had been raised, thanks to Aquinas and others, on Aristotelian foundations. Upending the traditional philosophical hierarchy, he depicted Aristotle as an atheist while stressing Plato’s piety. He pointed out that for Aristotle the Prime Mover—the primary cause of all motion in the universe—existed in only one celestial sphere, which undermined the Christian idea of a god who dwells in all things. He rebutted Aristotle’s attack on Forms by saying it was tantamount to denying the existence of eternal substances. Finally, Aristotle may have paid lip service to various divinities, but, Pletho claimed, he was ultimately an atheist. Plato, on the other hand, understood God as “the universal sovereign existing over all things … the originator of originators, the creator of creators.

I cannot respect your preference of the forms of courtesy over every substance of virtue.

What is a Sufi?” Sufis are Muslims who emphasize essence over form and substance over appearance in their spiritual practices

Tiller’s research has led him to state the following about subtle energies: •​They are manifested by people, as revealed in experiments that show subtle energies can increase electron sizes and numbers. •​A person can direct the flow of this energy through intention. •​This mind-electron interaction is effective even over great distances. Subtle energies follow a different set of laws than do physical energies, and radiate their energy with unique characteristics. There is not just one type of subtle energy, however. Tiller postulates several subtle substances, each of which occupies a different time-space domain. These domains are different levels of reality. Subtle energy flows downward from the highest, which Tiller calls “the Divine.” Each level provides a template for the level below. As the subtle energy enters the next domain, it adapts—but also instructs. The laws differ on each of these levels because the energy gets denser. Tiller’s levels of subtle reality range from the most to the least dense: •​Physical •​Etheric (also called bioplasmic, prephysical, or energy body) •​Astral •​Three levels of the mind: ​Instinctive ​Intellectual ​Spiritual •​Spirit •​The Divine The etheric level is just above the physical level. According to Tiller, etheric subtle energy penetrates all levels of material existence, and through the polarity principle forms atoms and molecules that make matter. Our mind interacts with the etheric energy (and above) to create patterns in the physical dimension. These patterns act like a force field that links us to the adjacent energy level. Tiller’s explanation of the physical level versus the etheric is similar to that proposed by the experts featured in “The Structure of the Subtle Anatomy”. He suggests that the physical realm occupies a positive time-space frame that is mainly electrical, in which opposites attract; over time, potential decreases, and entropy (chaos) increases. The etheric realm, conversely, is a negative time-space domain that is highly magnetic: like attracts like. As time passes in this realm, potential increases and entropy decreases; therefore, more order is established. We might suggest that communication in the physical realm is accomplished through the five senses; to reach into the etheric level (and above), we must use our intuition—the sixth sense. Within Tiller’s model, the meridians and chakras operate like antennae that detect and send signals from the physical into the upper domains. These subtle structures interact between the physical body and the etheric (and other) realms, illuminating higher orders so that we can perceive them from the physical plane.

The body, which is 70 percent water, has been compared to a crystal. Water itself has been analyzed at a crystal level through interaction with magnetism, and the results suggest that form is determined by thoughts and intention. A water molecule has north and south poles, just as the earth does. These poles are separated by a dipole length, as in a magnet. This means that water has “memory”: it can store information, as can a crystal.108 Working from these fundamental principles, Japanese physicist Dr. Masura Emoto used a magnetic resonance analyzer (MRA) to photograph water samples from different sources. He then exposed these samples to prayer, sound, and words, taking before-and-after pictures. One of the photos in his book The Messages from Water depicts water taken from the Fujiwara Dam in Japan. The just-sampled water molecules were dark and amorphous. Then Reverend Kato Hiki, chief priest of the Jyuhouin Temple, prayed over the dam for one hour, after which new samples were taken and photographed. The formless blobs had transformed into bright white hexagonal crystals-within-crystals. Through his work, Emoto discovered that all substances have their own special magnetic resonance field. No two types of water look alike, in terms of their crystalline structures. But when exposed to a substance, the crystals in water change shape, eventually mirroring the substance. (For instance, water crystals might start to look like rock crystals when around a rock; algae when near algae.) Water crystals will also morph to duplicate thoughts and intentions, appearing beautiful if the thoughts are beautiful and ugly if the thoughts are ugly.109 He calls the principle behind this revelation Hado, or the source of energy behind everything. Hado represents the specific vibrating wave generated by electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. Wherever there is Hado, there is a field of magnetic resonance. Thus Hado—the source of all—is the magnetic resonance field itself.110

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Volume 3. Pg 215-216 "...the Old Testament is also to be viewed as one in essence and substance wth the New Testament. For though God communicates his revelation successively and historically and makes it progressively richer and fuller, and humankind therefore advances in the knowledge, possession, and enjoyment of revelation, God is and remains the same. The sun only gradually illumines the earth, but itself remains the same, morning and evening, during the day and at night. Although Christ completed his work on earth only in the midst of history and although the Holy Spirit was not poured out till the day of Pentecost, God nevertheless was able, already in the days of the Old Testament, to full distribute the benefits to be acquired and applied by the Son and the Spirit. Old Testament believers were saved in no other way than we. There is one faith, one Mediator, one way of salvation, and one covenant of grace." Page 221-222 "The benefits granted to Israel by God in this covenant (Sinai) are the same as those granted to Abraham, but more detailed and specialized. Genesis 3:15 already contains the entire covenant in a nutshell and all the benefits of grace. God breaks the covenant made by the first humans with Satan, puts enmity between them, brings the first humans over to his side, and promises them victory over the power of the enemy. The one great promise to Abraham is "I will be your God, and you and your descendants will be my people" *Gen 17:8 paraphrase). And this is the principle content of God's covenant with Israel as well. God is Israel's God, and Israel is his people (Exod 19:6; 29:46; etc.). Israel, accordingly, receives a wide assortment of blessings, not only temporal blessings, such as the land of Canaan, fruitfulness in marriage, a long life, prosperity, plus victory over its enemies, but also spiritual and eternal blessings, such as God's dwelling among them (Exod. 29:45; Lev. 26:12), the forgiveness of sins (Exod. 20:6, 34:7; Num. 14:18; Deut. 4:31; Pss. 32; 103; etc.), sonship (Exod. 4:22; 19:5-6, 20:2; Deut. 14:1; Isa 63:16; Amos 3:1-2; etc.), sanctification (Exod. 19:6, Lev. 11:44, 19:2), and so on. All these blessings, however, are not as plainly and clearly pictured in the Old Testament as in the New Testament. At that time they would not have been grasped and understood in their spiritual import. The natural is first, then the spiritual. All spiritual and eternal benefits are therefore clothed, in Israel, in sensory forms. The forgiveness of sins is bound to animal sacrifices. God's dwelling in Israel is symbolized in the temple built on Zion. Israel's sonship is primarily a theocratic one, and the expression "people of God" has not only a religious but also a national meaning. Sanctification in an ethical sense is symbolized in Levitical ceremonial purity. Eternal life, to the Israelite consciousness, is concealed in the form of a long life on earth. It would be foolish to think that the benefits of forgiveness and sanctification, of regeneration and eternal life, were therefore objectively nonexistent in the days of the Old Testament. They were definitely granted then as well by Christ, who is eternally the same....The spiritual an eternal clothed itself in the form of the natural and temporal. God himself, Elohim, Creator of heaven and earth, as Yahweh, the God of the covenant, came down to the level of the creature, entered into history, assumed human language, emotions, and forms, in order to communicate himself with all his spiritual blessings to humans and so to prepare for his incarnation, his permanent and eternal indwelling in humanity. We would not even have at our disposal words with which to name the spiritual had not the spiritual first revealed itself in the form of the natural.

The CV is a particular sub-genre of post-Fordist autobiography, a copy-and-paste cosmetic narrative which accentuates the positives and papers over any cracks; ironically, at a time when continuity in work is at its weakest, one's life history must be made to seem as smooth and characterless as a shampoo advertisement. This again is a form of emotional labour, a micromanagement of feeling. Can I force myself into a state of enthusiasm as I string together various unwanted and unfulfilling jobs and inflate their personal significance, while reducing my identity to a series of bullet points? If I can, then once again, this is a triumph of style over substance.

Buddhism with all its developments was only a restatement, although from a new standpoint and with fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning, of one side of its experience and it carried it thus changed in form but hardly in substance over all Asia and westward towards Europe. The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West,

Despite Noetic Science’s use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science—the untapped potential of the human mind. The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities. Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no “spoon-bending” parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm. Mind over matter. In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order from chaos. The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a “cosmic consciousness”—a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body . . . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study—theintentionexperiment.com—aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherine’s interest. From this foundation, Katherine Solomon’s research had vaulted forward, proving that “focused thought” could affect literally anything—the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in one’s own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by one’s mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms. Human thought can literally transform the physical world.

Self-destructive behavior: When someone has been in a controlling relationship long enough, they carry on with the feelings of shame and fault even after the relationship has ended. This can flow over into forms of self-harm and substance abuse to continue with what the abuser did to them. ●     Overly obliging: Being forced to make the needs and wants of another person a number one priority from wake up until bedtime can result in extending the people-pleasing into other areas of your life. ●     Trust issues: Being mentally abused to the point where a person doubts themselves, or doesn’t even trust themselves or others, it can create severe trust issues. This can even lead to more severe concerns such as social anxiety. It instills mistrust of what others say, what they really mean and their sincerity. ●     Emotionally disconnected: It’s not uncommon to not understand how to emotionally respond to situations or people, or even express emotions at all. ●     Cognitive issues: This can be the result of the ill-treatment itself or the physical symptoms impairing health. Lack of sleep can result in many of the symptoms listed earlier as can digestive issues. Additional concerns also include memory loss, inability to concentrate, losing focus performing basic tasks or “spacing out”. ●     Inability to forgive the self: Feelings of unworthiness, shame and blame dissipate over time they never completely go away. Similar to PTSD, one small trigger can be all it takes to relive the trauma. Another aspect of this is a damaged self-worth that causes us to not make an effort to reach goals or dreams, or we self-sabotage because we’re convinced we don’t deserve happiness or success.

Each fragment of the world—and in particular the sea, sometimes riddled with eddies and ripples and plumed with spray, sometimes massive and immobile in itself—contains all sorts of shapes of being and, by the way it has of joining the encounter with one's glance, evokes a series of possible variants and teaches, over and beyond itself, a general way of expressing being. Renoir can paint women bathing and a fresh water brook while he is by the sea at Cassis because he only asks the sea—which alone can teach what he asks—for its way of interpreting the liquid substance, of exhibiting it, and of arranging it. In short, because he only asks for a typical form of manifestations of water.

If those who study the Tao do not awake to this mind substance, they will create a mind over and above mind, seek the Buddha outside themselves and remain attached to forms, practices and performances–all of which is harmful and not the way to supreme knowledge. (3)

To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. Because Burke had defended the British monarchy, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny. He wouldn't have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke's, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.” ― Tara Westover, Educated 2 likes Like “The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads.” ― Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir 2 likes Like “But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilisation; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstitution, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food. During long intervals it has been utterly arrested, when nations were being rescued from barbarism and from the grasp of strangers, and when the perpetual struggle for existence, depriving men of all interest and understanding in politics, has made them eager to sell their birthright for a pottage, and ignorant of the treasure they resigned. At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

The liberation struggle does not restore to national culture its former values and configurations. This struggle, which aims at a fundamental redistribution of relations between men, cannot leave intact either the form or substance of the people’s culture. After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonization, but also the demise of the colonized. This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism. This new humanism is written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.

to wrest oneself from moist, gastric intimacy and fly out over there, beyond oneself, to what is not oneself. To fly over there, to the tree, and yet outside the tree, because it eludes and repels me and I can no more lose myself in it than it can dissolve itself into me: outside it, outside myself … And, in this same process, consciousness is purified and becomes clear as a great gust of wind. There is nothing in it any more, except an impulse to flee itself, a sliding outside itself. If, impossibly, you were to ‘enter’ a consciousness, you would be picked up by a whirlwind and thrown back outside to where the tree is and all the dust, for consciousness has no ‘inside’. It is merely the exterior of itself and it is this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance, that constitute it as a consciousness. Imagine now a linked series of bursts that wrest us from ourselves, that do not even leave an ‘ourself’ the time to form behind them, but rather hurl us out beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the rough earth, among things. Imagine we are thrown out in this way, abandoned by our very natures in an indifferent, hostile, resistant world. If you do so, you will have grasped the profound meaning of the discovery Husserl expresses in this famous phrase: ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something.

Do you feel well in yourself currently?’. He answered ‘No’. ‘Are you using any substances regularly. If so, what?’. ‘Yes’ was written, though it looked shaky. She could imagine him sitting there in front of Mary, reaching that question, and then looking up, afraid to admit it. She’d seen it before. Too many times. The word ‘Heroin’ was written quickly, as if admitting it was hard and he needed to get it over with. ‘Do you want to receive support with the aim to become a non-user?’  The word ‘Yes’ was written there. Jamie looked over the questions again. Non-permanent residence. Non-user. Those were terms that people who knew how to deal with the homeless used so that they didn’t embarrass them. It was giving the answers without saying I’ve been homeless for this long, or yes, I want help getting clean. Mary knew what she was doing.  At the bottom of the page, there was one final question. ‘Would you like to have a free health check-up by a qualified medical practitioner at this shelter?’  He had written ‘Yes’, and then signed the declaration underneath that said he understood that if he was carrying drugs or under the influence when he arrived that he would be turned away, and that if he appeared to be a danger to himself or others the proper authorities would be called and this information could be provided to them with his permission.  She wondered if he’d read that before he signed. No one ever read the terms and conditions. Jamie sat back and tried to picture Oliver sitting there, and the circumstances that led him to the shelter. She opened Grace’s file quickly and scanned down the same form to her answers for diseases and sexual partners. She’s written the same answers as Oliver.

Poetry and Genre The hallmark of rhetoric in ancient Near Eastern literature is repetition; in poetry, this takes the form of what scholars call “parallelism.” Frequently, the first line of a verse is echoed in some way by the second line. The second line might repeat the substance of the first line with slightly different emphasis, or perhaps the second line amplifies the first line in some fashion, such as drawing a logical conclusion, illustrating or intensifying the thought. At times the point of the first line is reinforced by a contrast in the second line. Occasionally, more than two lines are parallel. Each of these features, frequently observed in Biblical psalms, is represented in songs from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ugarit. Unlike English poetry, which often depends on rhyme for its effect, these ancient cultures attained impact on listeners and readers with creative repetition. Psalms come in several standard subgenres, each with standard formal elements. Praise psalms can be either individual or corporate. Over a third of the psalms in the Psalter are praise psalms. Corporate psalms typically begin with an imperative call to praise (e.g., “Shout for joy to the LORD” [Ps 100:1]) and describe all the good things the Lord has done. Individual praise often begins with a proclamation of intent to praise (e.g., “I will praise you, LORD” [Ps 138:1]) and declare what God has done in a particular situation in the psalmist’s life. Mesopotamian and Egyptian hymns generally focus on descriptive praise, often moving from praise to petition. Examples of the proclamation format can be seen in the Mesopotamian wisdom composition, Ludlul bel nemeqi. The title is the first line of the piece, which is translated “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” As in the individual praise psalms, this Mesopotamian worshiper of Marduk reports about a problem that he had and reports how his god brought him deliverance. Lament psalms may be personal statements of despair (e.g., Ps 22:1–21, dirges following the death of an important person (cf. David’s elegy for Saul in 2Sa 1:17–27) or communal cries in times of crisis (e.g., Ps 137). The most famous lament form from ancient Mesopotamia is the “Lament Over the Destruction of Ur,” which commemorates the capture of the city in 2004 BC by the Elamite king Kindattu. For more information on this latter category, see the article “Neo-Sumerian Laments.” In the book of Psalms, more than a third of the psalms are laments, mostly by an individual. The most common complaints concern sickness and oppression by enemies. The lament literature of Mesopotamia is comprised of a number of different subgenres described by various technical terms. Some of these subgenres overlap with Biblical categories, but most of the Mesopotamian pieces are associated with incantations (magical rites being performed to try to rid the person of the problem). Nevertheless, the petitions that accompany lament in the Bible are very similar to those found in prayers from the ancient Near East. They include requests for guidance, protection, favor, attention from the deity, deliverance from crisis, intervention, reconciliation, healing and long life. Prayers to deities preserved

Many of us have opportunities for healthy rewards: lots of positive human interactions through work, worship, or volunteering that are consistent with our values and beliefs, for example (A). But a lack of strong relationships and connection can make an individual more vulnerable to overuse of other, less healthy forms of reward (B). A healthy combination of rewards (e.g., lots of positive human interactions, doing work consistent with your values, integrating healthy rhythm and sexuality into your day, staying regulated in healthy ways) can help decrease the pull toward any single, unhealthy form of reward such as substance use or overeating.