Growth And Expansion Quotes

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential.

We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.

Every event has a purpose and every setback its lesson. I have realized that failure, whether of the personal, professional or even spiritual kind, is essential to personal expansion. It brings inner growth and a whole host of psychic rewards. Never regret your past. Rather, embrace it as the teacher that it is.

My Father and my God, I thank You for Your discipline and correction that is pushing me to reach my full potential. I open myself to receive the success and victory Your chastisement brings. I speak competence and excellence to my spirit. I call forth discipline into my life that I may be able to sustain high levels of success and accomplishment for the kingdom of God. I decree and declare growth and expansion to be released into my life, in the name of Jesus!

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.

Do not rely on the outer world as your measuring stick for your own spiritual growth. Rely on your response to the outer world to determine how much you have grown.

Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer.

Your Ego tells you that you were wronged and it validates your separation. Your Higher Self tells you that you were blessed and it validates your expansion.

On the road to success there is absolutely no room for criticism of self or others. Insecurity and fear masquerade as jealousy and judgment. Finding faults in others wastes time as we attempt to remove the bricks from other people’s foundations – time that could be better spent building our own. And worrying about what other people think about us also wastes the time that could be better spent expanding upon what we have built.

Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of “grow or die,” is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame technology as such or population growth as such for environmental problems. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of “progress” with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative.

In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Every output is upcycled into new inputs of equal or greater value. This creates a cycle of productive utility, continuous growth and continuous expansion. I like to invest in companies that follow nature’s example.

But one theme comes up repeatedly: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or a lost) identity. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and is more often described as an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.

What do you do if you've got everything? There's only one thing you can do. More.

under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation

My mind is a center of Divine operation. The Divine operation is always for expansion and fuller expression, and this means the production of something beyond what has gone before, something entirely new, not included in the past experience, though proceeding out of it by an orderly sequence of growth. Therefore, since the Divine cannot change its inherent nature, it must operate in the same manner with me; consequently, in my own special world, of which I am the center, it will move forward to produce new conditions, always in advance of any that have gone before.

Eventually, it boils down to two choices – do I wish to experience this physical reality primarily through joy or do I want to experience it through suffering? That’s all there is to it. And since each person eventually works their way toward the realization that conscious expansion can happen through joy rather than suffering – enlightenment is a natural byproduct.

Every event has a purpose and every setback a lesson. Failure is essential to personal expansion. It brings inner growth and a whole host of psychic rewards. Never regret your past. Rather embrace it as the teacher it is.

The greatest book is one written by your pen, but not exactly from your mind.

Every challenge of the human self expands the divinity of the higher self.

What do these forests make you feel? Their weight and density, their crowded orderliness. There is scarcely room for another tree and yet there is space around each. They are profoundly solemn yet upliftingly joyous; like the Bible, you can find strength in them that you look for. How absolutely full of truth they are, how full of reality. The juice and essence of life are in them; they teem with life, growth and expansion. They are a refuge for myriads of living things. As the breezes blow among them, they quiver, yet how still they stand developing with the universe. God is among them. He has breathed with them the breath of life, might and patience. They stand developing, springing from tiny seeds, pushing close to Mother Earth. Fluffy baby things first, sheltering beneath their parents, mounting higher, spreading brave braches, pushing with mighty strength not to be denied skywards. Tossing in the breezes, glowing in the sunshine, bathing in the showers, bending below the snow piled on their branches, drinking the dew, rejoicing in creation, bracing each other, sheltering the birds and beasts, the myriad insects.

I understand that there are different expressions of Christianity in different cultures. Contextualization is essential for the growth and expansion of the church. But there is a difference between contextualization and compromise. Using goat's milk for communion in a culture that has never heard of wine or grapes is contextualization; sacrificing the goat is compromise. Having a Saturday night service because we have run out of room in all four Sunday services is contextualization; having a Saturday night service to accommodate and/or appease people who are “too busy” on Sunday is compromise.

Real success sometimes involves saying no to growth, expansion and gain.

By destroying the non-capitalist milieu on which its expansion is based, capitalism undermines the conditions of its own growth.

You have to create space; you have to remove something; you have to break something down in your life, in order to bring in the new.

Flower by flower a garden grows.

The wilderness journey is about transformation. For you, it could be a personal, spiritual, or professional drought. A desert season of confusion, frustration, and unproductivity. It's an in between stage. Something significant has ended or begun. Yet it provides opportunity for expansion, wisdom, and joy.

AN ARTIST’S PRAYER O Great Creator, We are gathered together in your name That we may be of greater service to you And to our fellows. We offer ourselves to you as instruments. We open ourselves to your creativity in our lives. We surrender to you our old ideas. We welcome your new and more expansive ideas. We trust that you will lead us. We trust that it is safe to follow you. We know you created us and that creativity Is your nature and our own. We ask you to unfold our lives According to your plan, not our low self-worth. Help us to believe that it is not too late And that we are not too small or too flawed To be healed— By you and through each other—and made whole. Help us to love one another, To nurture each other’s unfolding, To encourage each other’s growth, And understand each other’s fears. Help us to know that we are not alone, That we are loved and lovable. Help us to create as an act of worship to you.

There’s a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating that focused attention leads to the reshaping of the brain. In animals rewarded for noticing sound (to hunt or to avoid being hunted, for example), we find much larger auditory centers in the brain. In animals rewarded for sharp eyesight, the visual areas are larger. Brain scans of violinists provide more evidence, showing dramatic growth and expansion in regions of the cortex that represent the left hand, which has to finger the strings precisely, often at very high speed. Other studies have shown that the hippocampus, which is vital for spatial memory, is enlarged in taxi drivers. The point is that the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.

Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.

Indeed they realise their 'enemy' is self. Therefore they stand strong from a place of honour and integrity with forgiveness, love and gratitude in their hearts. Not gratitude for nefarious acts done to them, but gratitude for the game and the chance to experience the free will and polarity that has led to their growth and expansion.

Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection; from imbalance to balance; from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode; and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom, and love.

Beware the crazy traveller! Mind expansion can be contagious...

The place of expansion is always on the border, on the edge... If we're going to become whole, we have to go to the edge.

Growth and expansion are one of the main characteristics of life.

Durga is the strength and protective power in nature, Lakshmi is its beauty. As Kali is the darkness of night and the great dissolve into nirvana, Lakshmi is the brightness of day and the expansiveness of teeming life. She can be found in rich soil and flowing waters, in streams and lakes that teem with fish. She is one of those goddesses whose signature energy is most accessible through the senses. You can detect her in the fragrance of flowers or of healthy soil. You can see her in the leafed-out trees of June and hear her voice in morning birdsong. If Durga is military band music and Kali heavy metal, Lakshmi is Mozart. She’s chocolate mousse, satiny sheets, the soft feeling of water slipping through your fingers. Lakshmi is growth, renewal, sweetness.

Every event has a purpose and every setback its lesson. I have realized that failure, whether of personal, professional or even spiritual kind, is essential to personal expansion. It brings inner growth and a whole host of psychic rewards. Never regret your past. Rather, embrace it as the teacher that it is.

You are born with a spiritual life plan consisting of two primary goals. Your soul purpose, the growth and expansion you hope to take away with you; and your life purpose, the legacy you hope to leave behind.

Corporate loans can be used for various purposes like expansion, working capital, or equipment purchases. Sometimes these loans fuel the next level of growth, and sometimes it help keep afloat a company that might otherwise die.

Preparation" is a treacherous idea. In a certain sense every experience should do something to prepare a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality. That is the very meaning of growth, continuity, reconstruction of experience. But it is a mistake to suppose that the mere acquisition of a certain amount of arithmetic, geography, history, etc., which is taught and studied because it may be useful at some time in the future, has this effect, and it is a mistake to suppose that acquisition of skills in reading and figuring will automatically constitute preparation for their right and effective use under conditions very unlike those in which they were acquired.

Give yourself permission to see and feel the extraordinary events in your own life. In internalizing them, you also will find your perspective about life and its meaning will change, resulting in growth and expansion of your soul.

Perception of the miraculous requires no faith or assumptions. It is simply a matter of paying full and close attention to the givens of life, i.e., to what is so ever-present that it is usually taken for granted. The true wonder of the world is available everywhere, in the minutest parts of our bodies, in the vast expanses of the cosmos, and in the intimate interconnectedness of these and all things. . . . We are part of a finely balanced ecosystem in which interdependency goes hand-in-hand with individuation. We are all individuals, but we are also parts of a greater whole, united in something vast and beautiful beyond description.

Notwithstanding the damage which western imperialism did to many of the societies in other parts of the world, the exports and general economic growth of these societies do appear to have benefited most when the industrialized nations were in a period of expansion. Less-developed

In 1970, the prison system in this country was perhaps one-tenth the size of what it is today. Many people attribute this immense growth to the war on drugs. But even more than that, the expansion of the prison system reflects a war being waged against people of color, against Black-Brown-Indigenous bodies—the very same colonial war brought to us by Columbus and the conquistadores. These European “civilizers” treated Black and Brown people as if their lives were worth nothing. In many parts of the country, the designated value of our lives continues to be zero.

growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: ‘It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring’ (Observer); ‘… with the economy moving into a negative growth phase’ (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn’t the word for it.

Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what’s now called ‘Extra-Linear Dynamics.’ And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to a pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n² responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.

There is no growth strategy with networking and expansion.

The whole point of the physical experience is the expansion beyond that Which Is.

I felt like a Porsche that had learned it wasn't a bicycle anymore but was still taking part in bicycle races.

All growth is essentially an expansion of awareness.

Your sensual growth and evolution isn’t a mental journey, it’s an embodiment journey that leads into expansive energetics or new levels of ecstasy.

Unselfishness or selflessness is not the absence of the self, it is the absence of an exclusive self, and the presence of an inclusive self - the presence of an expansive self.

Spirituality is the drive for the ultimate expansion of the heart and removing all the fears, doubts, and hatred from the mind.

If you're not passionate about an activity, it means that activity isn't providing you with growth, satisfaction, joy and expansion. John Hagelin

Growth stationery from “X. Drew Butler,” advising the mayor of Airway Heights to prepare for major expansion

Keep your eyes and heart open. Do the work to create conditions where the magic can unfold. Your growth is about belief, choice, and action.

Wilson argued further, as he had to, that the federal courts are not bound to the Constitution. “The weightiest import of the matter is seen only when it is remembered that the courts are the instruments of the nation’s growth, and that the way in which they serve that use will have much to do with the integrity of every national process. If they determine what powers are to be exercised under the Constitution, they by the same token determine also the adequacy of the Constitution in respect of the needs and interests of the nation; our conscience in matters of law and our opportunity in matters of politics are in their hands.”10 Moreover, the only legitimate opinions the federal courts can render are those that endorse and promote the expansion of federal power. “[T]hat if they had interpreted the Constitution in its strict letter, as some proposed, and not in its spirit, like the charter of a business corporation and not like the charter of a living government, the vehicle of a nation

When we are in touch with our creativity, through passion and excitement, we always put ourselves in the most expansive state of consciousness. Fear slows down our development, while love supports a rapid growth.

Contrast is not ‘bad’ since the contrast we experience still causes us to learn and grow. Expansion never ceases, and that is a beautiful thing. Contrast allows us to see what is not in alignment with our Authentic Selves, and then presents us with opportunity after opportunity to respond from a place of compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, love, joy, gratitude, etc. Thus, when we break the karmic loop we swing back into alignment with Spirit.

From the pool of awakenings which includes creativity, strength, generosity, loving-kindness and transformation, I selected seven awakenings to immerse myself in each day: consciousness, compassion, forgiveness, expansion, abundance, healing, and balance. I believe that if we can live a life toward mastery of any seven principles in the pool of awakenings, then our lives will flourish and those we hold dear in our lives will experience greater fulfillment. Which seven do you choose?

In grief, we find a new view—a fresh perspective, which organically generates fresh expansion: personal revolution. Because in the wake of devastation, growth becomes the only survival option. In this way, loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.

Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so that revolution would not damage its own hardwon security and growing prosperity. Eighteenth-century writing is full of pride in England as the land of liberty (far ahead of France, the great rival, in political maturity), and saw a corresponding growth in national self-confidence accompanying the expansion of empire.

The assumption that economic expansion is driven by consumer demand—more consumers equals more growth—is a fundamental part of the economic theories that underlie the model. In other words, their conclusions are predetermined by their assumptions. What the model actually tries to do is to use neoclassical economic theory to predict how much economic growth will result from various levels of population growth, and then to estimate the emissions growth that would result. Unfortunately, as Yves Smith says about financial economics, any computer model based on mainstream economic theory “rests on a seemingly rigorous foundation and elaborate math, much like astrology.” In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.

We need to cease allowing the past to define us. We are evolving as a human race, and just because war and aggressive competition has always been a part of our heritage, that doesn’t mean we are forever destined to war and engage in aggressive competition. We are moving forward to a time when the heart will guide us. We once had to fight to survive, and some still do. Yet now it is time to lay down our weapons and open our hearts to the expansive potential of human compassion and creativity. Where our attention goes, energy flows. Do we continue to focus on opposition and give it our energy? Or do we begin to focus our energy on our own authentic freedom to shine and help to illuminate the world? The choice is ours. There are no mistakes – you are exactly where you need to be, and you were born with the precise gifts needed to transform a dying world into a thriving planet.

Contrary to popular belief, twin flames do not complete each other– this is because the soul itself is already complete. Instead, such relationships exist to catalyze spiritual maturing and conscious expansion. In other words, twin flame connections exist to aid the collective growth of our planet towards compassion, tranquility, and love.

It is possible to think of fragrance existing before a flower was created to contain it, and so it is that God created the world to reveal Himself, to reveal Mercy. Once or twice a year, perhaps three times, a woman visits the garden, her face ancient, the eyes calm but not passive as she approaches the rosewood tree and begins to pick and examine each fallen leaf. Whether she is in possession of her full mental faculties, no one is sure. Perhaps she is sane and just pretending madness for self-protection. Many decades ago - long before the house was built, when this place was just an expanse of wild growth - she had discovered the name of God on a rosewood leaf, the green veins curving into sacred calligraphy. She picks each small leaf now, hoping for a repetition of the miracle, holding it in her palms in a gesture identical to prayer. The life of the house continues around her and occasionally she watches them, following the most ordinary human acts with an attention reserved by others for much greater events. If it is autumn, she has to remain in the garden for hours, following the surge and pull of the wind as it takes the dropped foliage to all corners. Afterwards, as the dusk begins to darken the air, they sit together, she and the tree, until only the tree remains. What need her search fulfils in her is not known. Perhaps healing had existed before wounds and bodies were created to be its recipient.

Thus, in truth, a sojourn in Rome means an expansion of view that is beyond words. Whereas up to that time I had been accustomed to image Christianity to myself as a delicate flower, divine because of its supernatural fragility, now I saw that it was a tree in whose branches the fowls of the air, once the enemies of its tender growth, can lodge in security—divine since the wideness of its reach and the strength of its mighty roots can be accounted for by nothing else. Before I had thought of it as of a fine, sweet aroma, to be appreciated apart; now I saw that it was the leaven, hid in the heavy measures of the world, expressing itself in terms incalculably coarser than itself, until the whole is leavened.

If an economy has a stagnant labor force operating at a constant level of productivity, it will have constant output but no growth. The main drivers of labor force expansion are demographics and education, while the main drivers of productivity are capital and technology. Without those factor inputs, an economy cannot expand. But when those factor inputs are available in abundance, rapid growth is well within reach.

That the development of the human being is but the passing from one state of consciousness to another. It is a succession of expansions, a growth of that faculty of awareness that constitutes the predominant characteristic of the indwelling Thinker. It is the progressing from consciousness polarised in the personality, lower self, or body, to that polarised in the higher self, ego, or soul, thence to a polarisation in the Monad, or Spirit, till the consciousness eventually is Divine. As the human being develops, the faculty of awareness extends first of all beyond the circumscribing walls that confine it within the lower kingdoms of nature (the mineral, vegetable and animal) to the three worlds of the evolving personality, to the planet whereon he plays his part, to the system wherein that planet revolves, until it finally escapes from the solar system itself and becomes universal.

It’s ironic perhaps – but no one wants to lend money to someone or something that has no money or no monetary worth. You wouldn’t plant a seed on barren ground – you plant a seed where there’s already a wealth of resources sufficient to cultivate the seed. It could be a tiny bit of soil in a pot, or the expanse of your front yard. But you’re going to make sure the seed has enough soil to put down roots and a quality of soil that facilitates growth.

A cycle is the basic unit of life: birth, growth, transformation, decline and death, followed once again by birth. It is a circular, repeating journey. A process of expansion and contraction, which is echoed in the pulsations of the womb, the beating of our hearts, the in and out of our breath. Cycles can be observed in every life form on the planet, in the seasons and the phases of the moon. Our menstrual cycles connect our female bodies directly to nature.

More generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything, a point that may not merit a book—except when it is the specialist who is the fool of all fools. Disturbingly, science has only recently been able to handle randomness (the growth in available information has been exceeded only by the expansion of noise). Probability theory is a young arrival in mathematics; probability applied to practice is almost nonexistent as a discipline. In addition we seem to have evidence that what is called “courage” comes from an underestimation of the share of randomness in things rather than the more noble ability to stick one’s neck out for a given belief. In my experience (and in the scientific literature), economic “risk takers” are rather the victims of delusions (leading to overoptimism and overconfidence with their underestimation of possible adverse outcomes) than the opposite. Their “risk taking” is frequently randomness foolishness.

Every human being has "divinity" that is the same essence as the source of the cosmos. Our bodies act as temporary bodies for the journey of our souls. We came to Earth in order to go forward and complete the journey of our soul. Although our physical bodies have their limitations they also contain the necessary tools to propel our souls toward completion of the journey. The difficulties and trials that come with the human body are actually blessings, propelling our soul's expansive growth.

Yet history tells us that a deep financial and economic crisis has never occurred without a prior agrarian crisis, which tends to last even after the financial crisis abates. Consider the great depression of the inter-war period: it started not in 1929 as the conventional dating would have it, but years earlier from 1924–25 when global primary product prices started steadily falling. The reasons for this, in turn, were tied up with the dislocation of production in the belligerent countries during the war of inter-imperialist rivalry, the First World War of 1914–18. With the sharp decline in agricultural output in war-torn Europe there was expansion in agricultural output elsewhere which, with European recovery after the war, meant over-production relative to the lagging growth of mass incomes and of demand in the countries concerned. The downward pressure on global agricultural prices was so severe and prolonged that it led to the trade balances of major producing countries going into the red.

locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian 35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. ‘You

I don’t know the answer, but I know that the fiscal cliff is real. It can’t be discounted like Y2K fears. In 2008, for the first time in my career, my clients were really scared. We are three years from the bottom of the market, and they’re still scared. “New home construction in our area is picking up, and my client in the business wants to hire more people to handle the demand. But what if the economy falters? He would have to let them go. At 70, he doesn’t have the heart to face that, so he makes do with less. “A New York client in the vending business wants to hire young adults to help him expand his business. If he pays them fifty thousand dollars, it will cost him close to ninety thousand after taxes and mandatory health benefits. It’s just not worth it. “My clients are suffocating under the blanket of excessive regulations, taxes, and the biggest impediment to growth and expansion, uncertainty.” Mac’s voice softened. “My biggest fear is that I don’t have the answer and I don’t know how to help them.

To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural. It’s the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when—and where—it matters. That’s what music is telling you, too, when you’re listening—even more, perhaps, when you’re dancing—when its harmonious layered patterns of predictability and unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your Being.

The American Revolution and its aftermath coincided with two great transformations in the late eighteenth century. In the political sphere, there had been a repudiation of royal rule, fired by a new respect for individual freedom, majority rule, and limited government. If Hamilton made distinguished contributions in this sphere, so did Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. In contrast, when it came to the parallel economic upheavals of the period—the industrial revolution, the expansion of global trade, the growth of banks and stock exchanges—Hamilton was an American prophet without peer. No other founding father straddled both of these revolutions—only Franklin even came close—and therein lay Hamilton’s novelty and greatness. He was the clear-eyed apostle of America's economic future, setting forth a vision that many found enthralling, others unsettling, but that would ultimately prevail. He stood squarely on the modern side of a historical divide that seemed to separate him from other founders. Small wonder he aroused such fear and confusion.

On the cosmological level, the primary polarity is between the expansive impulse that underlies the growth of the universe and the contractive field of gravitation that holds everything together. If the centrifigual force is predominant, the universe will expand indefinitely; if the centripetal, the universe will sooner or later stop growing and begin to contract until everything is annihilated in the Big Crunch. No one knows what will happen. But in the meantime, the interplay between these expansive and contractive principles underlies the processes of cosmic evolution.

There is a common myth that people resist change. The reality is that most people are willing to embrace change when they are in charge of the change or when they believe the change offers expansion and growth. People get married, have children, buy new homes, move across the country, and start businesses. They pay off debt, lose weight, give up addictions, and run marathons, even though the changes are difficult mentally, physically, or spiritually. The kind of change people resist is change that is imposed upon them against their wishes, change that is unwanted, unexpected, or forced.

The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.

The expansion of the public sphere, from the 18th century onward, has led to a growth of democratically elected political institutions, independent courts, and bills of rights. But Habermas believes that many of these brakes on the arbitrary use of power are now under threat. Newspapers, for example, can offer opportunities for reasoned dialogue between private individuals, but if the press is controlled by large corporations, such opportunities may diminish. Informed debate on issues of substance is replaced with celebrity gossip, and we are transformed from critical, rational agents into mindless consumers.

What is the actual link between material consumption and objective and subjective quality of life once the basic needs for food, clothes, shelter, and mobility are well satisfied? Going from material misery to modest material comfort will make many things in life better but, obviously, the link is not an endless escalator. But if so, where is the saturation point? Can such a level actually be quantified in a meaningful way? These questions must be asked even if there are no easy answers, mainly because of the situation that is the very opposite of the material poverty outlined at the beginning of this section: too many people live in the condition of material excess and this does not endow them with a higher physical quality of life than that enjoyed by moderate consumers and it does not make them exceptionally happy. At the most fundamental level, the question is about the very nature of modern economies. All but a tiny minority of economists (those of ecological persuasion) see the constant expansion of output as the fundamental goal. And not just any expansion: economies should preferably grow at annual rates in excess of 2%, better yet 3%. This is the only model, the only paradigm, and the only precept, as the economists in command of modern societies cannot envisage a system that would deliberately grow at a minimum rate, even less so one that would experience zero growth, and the idea of a carefully managed decline appears to them to be outright unimaginable. The pursuit of endless growth is, obviously, an unsustainable strategy (Binswanger, 2009), and the post-2008 experience has shown how dysfunctional modern economies become as soon as the growth becomes negligible, ceases temporarily or when there is even a slight decline: rising unemployment, falling labor participation, growing income inequality, and soaring budget deficits.

The habit of thinking about progress as "development" has meant that many aspects of the environment were simply neglected. With the stereotype of "progress" before their eyes, Americans have in the mass seen little that did not accord with that progress. They saw the expansion of cities, but not the accretion of slums; they cheered the census statistics, but refused to consider overcrowding; they pointed with pride to their growth, bu would not see the drift from the land, or the unassimilated immigration. They expanded industry furiously at reckless cost to their natural resources; they built up gigantic corporations without arranging for industrial relations. They grew to be one of the most powerful nations on earth without preparing their institutions or their minds for the ending of their isolation... There comes a time, therefore, when the blind spots come from the edge of vision into the center. Then unless there are critics who have the courage to sound an alarm, and leaders capable of understanding the change, and a people tolerant by habit, the stereotype, instead of economizing effort, and focussing energy as it did in 1917 and 1918, may frustrate effort and waste men's energy by blinding them, as it did for those people who cried for a Carthaginian peace in 1919 and deplored the Treaty of Versailles in 1921.

Giants in Jeans Sonnet 97 Age doesn’t make you wise, curiosity does. Intellect doesn't make you curious, growth does. Experience doesn't make you grow, expansion does. Travel doesn't make you expand, self-correction does. Cynicism doesn't help correction, awareness does. Books don't make you aware, accountability does. Law cannot make you accountable, humanity does. Appearance doesn't make you human, acceptance does. Wokeness doesn't make you accepting, character does. Clothes don't make character, conduct does. Etiquettes don't define conduct, goodness does. Tradition doesn't make you good, oneness does. Oneness is the mother of all civilized behavior. Without oneness we're ever headed for disaster.

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives—carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers’ learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems.

Wishing only to preserve oneself is the expression of distress, or of a restriction on the proper, fundamental impulse of life which aims at the extension of power, and with this intention often enough calls into question and sacrifices self-preservation. We regard it as symptomatic when an individual philosopher, as, for example, the consumptive Spinoza, sees and has to see the decisive factor precisely in the so-called impulse towards self-preservation – they were merely men in distress. The fact that our modern natural sciences have entangled themselves to such an extent in Spinoza’s dogma (most recently and in the crudest manner in Darwinism, with its incredibly one-sided doctrine of the ‘struggle for existence’), is probably due to the origin of most naturalists: they belong in this respect to the ‘people’, their ancestors were poor and humble folk who were intimately acquainted with the difficulty of making ends meet. The whole of English Darwinism is reminiscent of the stifling air of English overpopulation, like the vulgar smell of hardship and overcrowding. But as a naturalist, one should emerge from one’s human corner; and in nature distress does not hold sway, but rather abundance, even an absurd extravagance. The struggle for existence is but an exception, a temporary restriction on the life-will; the struggle whether great or small everywhere turns on predominance, on growth and expansion, on power, in accordance with the will to power, which is precisely the will of life.

Why is this? What is the mechanism that drives this overproduction, this carry-on-regardless approach to resource use? The degrowthists will tell you that it is capitalism’s requirement for growth. But this is far too crude a description of what occurs. What is fundamental is not growth per se, but capital’s need for self-valorisation, or put another way, for self-expansion. A firm cannot receive back in value precisely what it has put in, otherwise it would go bankrupt. It must receive more value than it put in. Like a bicycle wheel, capital must keep on keepin’ on or it will fall over. Superficially, this appears to be the same thing as growth, but it is not. And the distinction is not a philosophical trick, but a difference of profound significance.

The most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish and German laborers who came in a flood after European crop failures of the 1840s. These new immigrants provided cheap labour power for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for railroad expansion and coalfields. They were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise. Partly rooted in economic rivalries in the labour market, the Yankee-versus-immigrant polarization in the working class also reflected a profound cultural antagonism that would hinder the efforts at labor unity for more than a century.

The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which de- develops,–these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another.

The conflict between horse and snake or bull and snake represents a conflict within the libido itself, a striving forwards and backwards at one and the same time.86 It is as if the libido were not only a ceaseless forward movement, an unending will for life, evolution, creation, such as Schopenhauer envisaged in his cosmic Will, where death is a mishap or fatality coming from outside; like the sun, the libido also wills its own descent, its own involution. During the first half of life it strives for growth; during the second half, softly at first and then ever more perceptibly, it points towards an altered goal. And just as in youth the urge for limitless expansion often lies hidden under veiling layers of resistance to life, so that “other urge” often hides behind an obstinate and purposeless cleaving to life in its old form. This apparent contradiction in the nature of the libido is illustrated by a statue of Priapus in the archaeological museum at Verona: Priapus, with a sidelong smile, points with his finger to a snake biting his phallus (pl. LXIb).

system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building’s water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash. . . . The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.

It is then simplest to think of the problem as follows: the purpose of commodity production is to convert the surplus value extracted from living labour into capital. But accumulation – the reproduction and expansion of capital – does not happen unless a sufficient magnitude of surplus value is produced. If the surplus value generated is insufficient then it only reproduces the part of capital that it is equal in value to – the rest becomes surplus capital. Capital is only fully “valorised” if it is reproduced and expanded. Grossman therefore says overaccumulation is produced by “imperfect valorisation”. This abstraction can be applied to ‘individual capital’, the capital owned by each individual capitalist, and total capital. Imperfect valorisation therefore explains cyclical crises. The total investment in production tends to grow faster relative to the growth of profits returned, because constant capital has to grow relative to variable capital. The mass of capital has continued to rise but at a declining rate. This is expressed as a falling rate of profit. There is a lack of surplus value relative to total capital  – an underproduction of surplus value is at once an overaccumulation of capital.

And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, 2n possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian 35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.

There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.

There is a sense that people of the Middle Ages did not feel space in the same way we do, as an empty expanse through which we move, or as a box in which we are contained. In Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield suggested that medieval man did not feel he was within space as if it were a container. Rather, for Barfield, medieval man wore the world like a garment. Medieval man, Barfield suggests, saw the world quite differently than we do. For him the air was “filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood from a living heart.” The night sky was not a “homogenous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional qualitative sky . . . from which . . . the great zodiacal belt . . . the planets and the moon . . . are raying down their complex influences on the earth.”16 Barfield says that although he may not have heard it, medieval man believed in the music of the spheres and he took for granted the correspondences between things on Earth and those above: the moon’s correspondence with growth, the sun’s with gold, Venus’s with copper, that of Mars with iron, and Saturn with lead. For Barfield, this meant that our medieval ancestors lived in a much more “participatory” relationship to the world than we do. They were “in” the world in a way that we are not, much more like figures in a painting than objects in a box. There was, we can say, a felt continuity between themselves and the world around them.

Economics are as simple as they are not obscured. And as confused as they are made to serve a selfish purpose. Any child can understand—and practice—the basic principles of economics. But grown men, huge with the stature of Government or Chain Banks, find it very useful to obscure the subject beyond all comprehension. The things that are done in the name of 'economic necessity' would shame Satan. For they are done by the selfish few to deny the many. Economics easily evolve into the science of making people miserable. Nine-tenths of life are economic. The remaining one-tenth is social-political. If there is this fruitful source of suppression loose upon the world and if it makes people unhappy, then it is a legitimate field for comment in Scientology as it must form a large 'misunderstood' in our daily lives. Let us see how involved it can be made. If Mankind increases in number and if property and goods increase, then money must also increase unless we are to arrive at a point where none can buy. Yet money is pegged to a metal of which there is just so much and no more—gold. So if Man's expansion is to be checked, it will be checked simply by running out of this metal. And aside from art uses and superstition, the metal, gold, has almost no practical value. Iron is far more useful, but as it is one of the most common elements about, it would not serve the purpose of suppression of Man's growth. MONEY IS SIMPLY A SYMBOL THAT PEOPLE ARE CONFIDENT CAN BE CONVERTED INTO GOODS.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.

This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago. And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017). These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.

There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” ... There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. ... all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. ... This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. ... This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.