“
Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.
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Heinrich von Kleist (Selected Prose)
“
I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.
But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.
Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.
[…]
I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown.
Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown.
You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete.
This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.
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Debbie Millman (Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design)
“
Intersectionality brings people face-to-face with their privilege. People, in general, do not like to recognize the ways in which they may be unfairly advantaged over other people. To embrace intersectionality is to also embrace the knowledge of those advantages and to acknowledge that your advantages may have kept you from first seeing the disadvantages others face.
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Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
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...modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.
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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
“
Theory does not solve issues—only action and solidarity can do that—but theory gives you language to fight, knowledge to stand on, and a humbling reality of what intersectional social justice is up against.
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Bettina L. Love (We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom)
“
Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.
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Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
“
In all of these areas, the human brain is asked to do and handle more than ever before. We are dealing with several fields of knowledge constantly intersecting with our own, and all of this chaos is exponentially increased by the information available through technology. What this means is that all of us must possess different forms of knowledge and an array of skills in different fields, and have minds that are capable of organizing large amounts of information. The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same. In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn. The Apprenticeship Phase is more relevant and important than ever, and those who discount this notion will almost certainly be left behind. Finally, we live in a culture that generally values intellect and reasoning with words. We tend to think of working with the hands, of building something physical, as degraded skills for those who are less intelligent. This is an extremely counterproductive cultural value. The human brain evolved in intimate conjunction with the hand. Many of our earliest survival skills depended on elaborate hand-eye coordination. To this day, a large portion of our brain is devoted to this relationship. When we work with our hands and build something, we learn how to sequence our actions and how to organize our thoughts. In taking anything apart in order to fix it, we learn problem-solving skills that have wider applications. Even if it is only as a side activity, you should find a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you. Many Masters
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Robert Greene (Mastery)
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Social theories expressed by women emerging from these diverse groups typically do not arise from the rarefied atmosphere of their imaginations. Instead, social theories reflect women's efforts to come to terms with lived experiences within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and religion.
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Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
“
Pedagogy should work in tandem with students’ own knowledge of their community and grassroots organizations to push forward new ideas for social change, not just be a tool to enhance test scores or grades. Pedagogy, regardless of its name, is useless without teachers dedicated to challenging systemic oppression with intersectional social justice.
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Bettina L. Love (We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom)
“
Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice. In contrast, the matrix of domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized. Regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression.
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Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
“
This makes us, however unintuitively, the most powerful people that have ever lived…Nothing has threatened our ecologies more than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the affluent consumer culture…But we have also been granted an astonishingly beautiful gift that has never before been given to humans: the chance to shepherd human and animal life into the coming centuries and millennia, when we know that much of it would otherwise disappear. That’s a power that should make us very humble and a privilege that can motivate us profoundly. In a way, our darkness- the knowledge that without our great effort, many or most of Earth’s creatures will vanish- is what reveals the light within, the seed of life and possibility that we share with all of Earth’s life, the one that we can carry forward. For better and for worse, we are the ones at the intersection of knowledge and agency.
LOVING A VANISHING WORLD by Emily N. Johnston
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
“
It is important to stress that no homogeneous Black woman's standpoint exists. There is no essential or archetypal Black woman whose experiences stand as normal, normative, and thereby authentic. an essentialist understanding of a Black woman's standpoint suppresses differences among Black women in search of an elusive group unity. Instead, it may be more accurate to say that a Black women's collective standpoint does exist, one characterized by the tensions that accrue to different responses to common challenges. Because it both recognizes and aims to incorporate heterogeneity in crafting Black women's oppositional knowledge, this Black women's standpoint eschews essentialism in favor of democracy. Since Black feminist thought both arises within and aims to articulate a Black women's group standpoint regarding experiences associated with intersecting oppressions, stressing this group standpoint's heterogeneous composition is significant.
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Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
“
Conditions in the wider political economy simultaneously shape Black women's subordination and foster activism. On some level, people who are oppressed usually know it. For African-American women, the knowledge gained at intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender provides the stimulus for crafting and passing on the subjugated knowledge of Black women's critical social theory.
As a historically oppressed group, U.S. Black women have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this thought diverge from standard academic theory - it can take the form of poetry, music, essays, and the like - but the purpose of Black women's collective thought is distinctly different. Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of U.S. Black women and other historically oppressed groups aim to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice. In the United States, for example, African-American social and political thought analyzes institutionalized racism, not to help it work more efficiently, but to resist it. Feminism advocates women's emancipation and empowerment, Marxist social thought aims for a more equitable society, while queer theory opposes heterosexism.
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Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment)
“
What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.
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Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
Our galaxy is surrounded by a cloud of about fifty nearby galaxies, known as our Local Group. Foremost among them is the Andromeda Galaxy, a beautiful spiral galaxy, and the only galaxy in our group larger than our own. Gravity is pulling the two toward each other, and in four billion years (before our Sun has died) they will collide and unite. With so much distance between the stars of each galaxy, this collision will do surprisingly little to upset the stars and their planets. Its main effect will be to disrupt the delicate spiral structures of the partners, probably merging into a more uniform elliptical galaxy about three times as large. Eventually (in hundreds of billions of years) all the other galaxies in our group will have merged in too, forming a single giant galaxy.28 Zooming further out, we see many more groups of galaxies, some with as many as a thousand members.29 Eventually these groups resolve into a larger structure: the cosmic web—long, thick threads of galaxies, called filaments. These filaments criss-cross space in a kind of three-dimensional network, as if someone took a random set of points in space and connected each to its nearest handful of neighbors. Where the filaments intersect, space is bright and rich with galaxies.30 Between such filaments are dark and empty expanses, known as cosmic voids. As far as we can tell, this cosmic web continues indefinitely. At the very least, it continues as far as we can see or go. It is these final limits on our knowledge and action that appear to set the ultimate scale in our universe. We have known for almost a century that our universe is expanding, pulling the groups of galaxies apart. And twenty years ago we discovered that this expansion is accelerating. Cosmologists believe this puts a hard limit on what we will ever be able to observe or affect.31 We can currently see a sphere around us extending out 46 billion light years in all directions, known as the observable universe. Light from galaxies beyond this sphere hasn’t yet had time to reach us.32 Next year we will see a little further. The observable universe will increase in radius by a single light year, and about 25 more galaxies will come into view. But on our leading cosmological theory, the rate at which new galaxies become visible will decline, and those currently more than 63 billion light years away will never become visible from the Earth. We could call the region within this distance the eventually observable universe.33 But much more importantly, accelerating expansion also puts a limit on what we can ever affect. If, today, you shine a ray of light out into space, it could reach any galaxy that is currently less than 16 billion light years away. But galaxies further than this are being pulled away so quickly that neither light, nor anything else we might send, could ever affect them.34
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Toby Ord (The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity)
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If I have endeavored to speculate on possible trajectories of the good life, the conditions of possibility for its realization rest on a politics relentless in its critique of violence and constituted by embodiments of egalitarian solidarity; resolutely critical of appeals to redemption and salvation; affirmatively engaged in articulating critical knowledges; and responsive to aesthetic practices that resonate with the deepest echoes of the uncanny, the sublime, and the beautiful.
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Omedi Ochieng (Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought))
“
It requires scientists everywhere to come out of their laboratories and talk about what they know in the public square, to adults, so the public understands not just that science is important, but why it’s important. It requires them to provide a constant reminder for all citizens of the process by which we build knowledge, why this process is important, how facts are different from belief and opinion, why citizens should care, and how science intersects with their lives. It requires a reengagement.
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Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
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cryptology is black magic in itself springs ultimately from a superficial resemblance between cryptology and divination. Extracting an intelligible message from ciphertext seemed to be exactly the same thing as obtaining knowledge by examining the flight of birds, the location of stars and planets, the length and intersections of lines in the hand, the entrails of sheep, the position of dregs in a teacup. In all of these, the wizardlike operator draws sense from grotesque, unfamiliar, and apparently meaningless signs. He makes known the unknown.
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David Kahn (The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet)
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My short time in Pretoria made me realize that it can best be described as that place where the brushstrokes of life blend the old with the new in a way that helps to create a story of a place that will forever be deeply tucked into the breathing spaces of my heart, as a place of fondness.
A reminder that even when the lessons doesn’t go according to plan, there are always chances to be like the statue of President Nelson Mandela, open arms – embracing the future and using the past, especially the most difficult chapters, to help to infuse new life through the wisdom gained by being like the middle part of the Union Buildings, a space of collaboration.
In the words of South African British poet William Polmer, “Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” And when the connection is made, that place is simply called Pretoria. And if one should look a little deeper at the connection, you’ll understand that Pretoria is simply a word with a Latin origin, Praetor, that means Leader, a perfect place to house the Union Buildings, the place where our difference becomes one, and that knowledge becomes the spectrum of where the old and the new intersect, and we call that…
Pretoria…Leader within.
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hlbalcomb
“
define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
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From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past three hundred years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of “social justice.” Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony, and not simply the haves, which was actually responsible for oppressing the have-nots. György Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system. The Frankfurt School developed critical theory to analyze oppression in cultural institutions. French postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics. Kimbery Williams Crenshaw developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories. Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to the redistribution of privilege, from the liberation of the lower classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society. No social organization remains unaffected. Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” is almost complete. The final stage is to capture the last stand for Western Civilization and conscious of the country—the American evangelical church.
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Jon Harris (Christianity and Social Justice: Religions in Conflict)
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Not everything disability produces is beautiful, but as a productive force, in the Foucauldian sense, disability produces specific sensibilities and discourses. I want to affirm the life that’s already here in the form of the knowledges of disabled and mad people, at the same time as calling to end violent debilitation and the conditions that make them viable. This book therefore understands disability as an (intersectional) optic that deconstructs the normative body/mind and uncovers the radical potential of living otherwise.
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Liat Ben-moshe (Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition)
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The safest route to building a business is to look for the 4-Way Business Intersection. What you know (ability to deliver; what you have knowledge, skills, or experience in); What people will buy (market need); What you can sell (products or services that can generate revenue); What you want (the purpose of the business).
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Candy Valentino (Wealth Habits: Six Ordinary Steps to Achieve Extraordinary Financial Freedom)
“
The cleaning lady is green
despite her blue eyes
we love her beauty to death. we sniff
unwashed since the beginning of the world
lusting to know. and from too much knowledge
we forgot that the intersection between giving and
receiving the spring mist an empty sack
gurgling not even French perfume
makes it go away. we’re more organic
exophthalmic eyes. muddy balloons.
if we don’t want
she chooses from what we have. what’s better more syrupy
we keep searching our memories perhaps there’s
a leftover slice of bread a good deed by mistake,
a sprig of onion wide as a rope. we search through
everything we have at least a sprinkle of
kind words. an offering
she wants us to stop for a moment
to change our meaning. to make us at least
leaves the kitchens of growing upward. what she puts us through what she doesn’t
put us through. all that’s left is a baby the size of a baguette.
who hopes and hopes.
we’ve started thinning out
and one who passed through the no. 9 mental hospital
he says he’s a national security agent
we that he’s a security guard. he isn’t sick
he’s always right.
a metal cup or maybe
a jar that expands threateningly
we don’t even curse him behind his back. not because of fear we think
more positively when he’s around. it took us too long to understand
that No, the nervous tic, with a question mark at the end of a sentence, is actually Yes.
emotions jumped out of him like strings.
he told us he wouldn’t have left that manelist diva.
should’ve seen how he compared her to the woman he
never had. he about smashed his phone.
it wasn’t our fault he was the only
man without a woman.
(in english by Diana Manole)
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Emil Iulian Sude (Paznic de noapte)
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As a Caribbean-born, I understand the self as a multi-geometric entropic process always connected with the communal self. I do not seek history as a way to find points of origin, but to articulate historical locations in a traveling interconnected knowledge system that provides solutions for my subjective migrant experience. In a deeper process, the encounter with these places of intersection, the crossroads, could become turning points to return, to depart, to convey, and to arrive to the present. African Aesthetics still nurtures contemporary artistic practices in the Caribbean, as well as in the African Americana Diaspora and the US Latino Diaspora.
Writing the Decolonial Mariposa Ancestral Memory
CARIBBEAN INTRANSIT ART JOURNAL
Vol. 1, Issue 4, Spring 2013.
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Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet
“
Knowledge without devotion is cold, dead orthodoxy. Devotion without knowledge is irrational instability. But true knowledge of God includes understanding everything from his perspective. Theology is learning to think God’s thoughts after him.
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Jonathan Morrow (Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture)
“
habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
She also observed a fascinating paradox at the intersection of the tutor effect and the curse of knowledge: you can learn by teaching, but once you’ve learned them well, it can become harder to teach them.
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Adam M. Grant (Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things)
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Another key scripture that I like to refer to when discussing matters of business and how it intersects with our faithful lives is Deuteronomy 8:18. It reads “But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.” He gives us the ability to produce wealth. How does He do this? Through ideas and knowledge that we have to apply, which is wisdom.
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Billy Sticker (The Blessed Entrepreneur: 5 Steps to Launch & Scale a Business with Impact)
“
It also seems true that centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention)
“
sensible phenomenon that had previously called forth the spoken utterance, to the shape of the utterance itself, now invoked directly by the written character. A direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured. The evocative phenomena—the entities imaged—are no longer a necessary part of the equation. Human utterances are now elicited, directly, by human-made signs; the larger, more-than-human life-world is no longer a part of the semiotic, no longer a necessary part of the system. Or is it? When we ponder the early Semitic aleph-beth, we readily recognize its pictographic inheritance. Aleph, the first letter, is written thus: Aleph is also the ancient Hebrew word for “ox.” The shape of the letter, we can see, was that of an ox’s head with horns; turned over, it became our own letter A.13 The name of the Semitic letter mem is also the Hebrew word for “water”; the letter, which later became our own letter M, was drawn as a series of waves: . The letter ayin, which also means “eye” in Hebrew, was drawn as a simple circle, the picture of an eye; it is this letter, made over into a vowel by the Greek scribes, that eventually became our letter O. The Hebrew letter qoph, which is also the Hebrew term for “monkey,” was drawn as a circle intersected by a long, dangling, tail . Our letter Q retains a sense of this simple picture.14 These are a few examples. By thus comparing the names of the letters with their various shapes, we discern that the letters of the early aleph-beth are still implicitly tied to the more-than-human field of phenomena. But these ties to other animals, to natural elements like water and waves, and even to the body itself, are far more tenuous than in the earlier, predominantly nonphonetic scripts. These traces of sensible nature linger in the new script only as vestigial holdovers from the old—they are no longer necessary participants in the transfer of linguistic knowledge. The other animals, the plants, and the natural elements—sun, moon, stars, waves—are beginning to lose their own voices. In the Hebrew
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David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
“
Of all the wretched, low-vibe bullshittery we endure, screens have got to be the most nefarious. Modern life has blurred the lines between work and home, of knowledge and power, and where most of these things intersect is on our screens. We have screens in our homes, screens in our hands, screens on our wrists, and screens in our cars. It’s madness!
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Mandi Em (Witchcraft Therapy: Your Guide to Banishing Bullsh*t and Invoking Your Inner Power)
“
Ideas emerge at the intersection of perspectives.
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Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
“
Philosophy is this destruction of idealizations, of idols; it is reborn, not as a return to a chimerical immediate that no one has ever seen, but to the indivision of Being and nothingness that we are, and which we know in some manner since we live it...And what is this field, what is the secret science that makes all knowledge, all experience appear at its tribunal?...No longer an order of absolute coincidence, an entirely immediate positive...but the passage through us, the encounter, the overlap, the intersection, the confrontation of these multiple references in us, because they are all on the horizon of our life.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Possibility of Philosophy: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1959–1961 (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
“
Finely tuned to the swells of my own and others' hearts, I sensed a deep we'll at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives... I would read or think or feel myself into a brimming state-- not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection, the raw matter from which each was made-- then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, thrilled and afraid that I might combust, might simply die of feeling too much.
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Melissa Febos (Girlhood)
“
As developed by trans activists, standpoint epistemology says there are special forms of standpoint-related knowledge about trans experience available only to trans people, not cis people. For instance, only trans people can properly understand the pernicious effects of ‘cis privilege’, and how it intersects with other forms of oppression to produce certain kinds of lived experience. As with some versions of feminism and critical race theory, when transmuted through popular culture this has quickly become the idea that only trans people can legitimately say anything about their own nature and interests including on philosophical matters of gender identity. Cis people, including feminists and lesbians, have nothing useful to contribute here. Their assumption that they do have something useful to contribute is a further manifestation of their unmerited privilege.
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Kathleen Stock (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism)
“
Fulcanelli explained that cosmic disasters happen in a predictable cycle, and that alchemy was never about creating gold from lead, but was a veiled allegory about properly restoring a golden age after the next cataclysm. Fulcanelli said that secret societies have been passing down knowledge of these cycles for thousands of years, and that the monument at Hendaye is just one of many monuments in stone that “pointed to a specific time period, the intersection point of several celestial cycles” regarding the galactic center. “The symbols and teachings encoded in the cross at Hendaye offer us a new understanding of the cosmos, especially with regard to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and its effect on us… ancient knowledge of the location of the center of our galaxy and from that knowledge a way to estimate the date of a celestial event of eschatological magnitude.”[227] He also warns that a “double catastrophe” for the world is due soon, “when the solstices cross the galactic axis – the time, according to Fulcanelli, of the cyclic catastrophe”[228] which Weidner and Bridges interpret as Judgment Day, due in the early 21st century.
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David Montaigne (Pole Shift: Evidence Will Not Be Silenced)
“
In early 2021 I formulated a concept that I dubbed "theoretical creativity." If "applied creativity" is the coin's obverse, then "theoretical creativity" is the reverse side of that same coin. Similar to the oppositional relationship between applied physics and theoretical physics, where the former is rooted in the basic concepts of physical sciences and the intersection of known principles of practical devices and systems (e.g., engineering, technology, etc.) and the latter, in stark contrast, employs hypothetical models and abstractions to predict natural phenomena and behavior rather than the study of extant knowledge and its application, applied creativity and theoretical creativity are diametric. Borrowing from the definition of theoretical physics, theoretical creativity must also employ hypothetical concepts and abstractions rather than any existing knowledge, understanding, or experience.
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Kevin Molesworth (The Utility of Deep Divergence in Applied Creativity)
“
I view the tapestry of human knowledge from a broader perspective than anyone ever has before; I can fill gaps in the design where scholars never even noticed a lack, and enrich the texture in places that they felt were complete. The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like “optics” or “thermodynamics” are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artifically generating spherically symmetric gravity fields.
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Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
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we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
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While poststructuralism has a cynical disdain for terms such as ‘Truth with a capital T’ and ‘Knowledge with a capital K’, the entire edifice depends upon a mysterious ‘Power with a capital P’ (...) A history that is the sum of individual responses to and refractions of Power is no more of a history of human existence than a relay of blinking lights is a history of light. Such a schema is not a history, but a situation, a meaningless existential crisis in which one is positioned arbitrarily.
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Holly Lewis (The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection)
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In 1975, a 17-year-old boy was killed while riding his Moped. He was killed exactly one year after his 17-year-old brother was killed while riding the same Moped in the same intersection by the same taxi with the same driver carrying the same passenger.
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Scott Matthews (3666 Interesting, Fun And Crazy Facts You Won't Believe Are True - The Knowledge Encyclopedia To Win Trivia (Amazing World Facts Book Book 4))
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We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity, and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways—the most benign projects have unforeseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media. It
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Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1))
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It would’ve been really easy to blow off the question. I could’ve said that the neurodiverse crowd simply hadn’t shown up. Or I could’ve cited my own limited knowledge of such disabilities as the reason for a lack of diversity, and that likely would’ve ended the conversation. It also would have ended my blog’s premise of being a resource devoted to offering a platform for the underrepresented. Instead, I took a different tack. I posted the reader’s question publicly and asked for help. Soon after I did this, I received messages from other readers who had more experience with, and knowledge of, disabilities than I had. Through this influx of new information, I was able to reach out to a polyamorous blogger with Asperger’s syndrome. I got some letter-writing assistance from a partner who has some familiarity with Asperger’s, and I communicated the needs of the blog, and let this blogger do their thing. What I received from this blogger, was one of the most personal and informative entries in the blog’s history. Not only was the profile amazing, the author immediately followed up its publishing with a second entry that drove even deeper into the intersection of autism and polyamory. Had the self-identities questions been available then, the follow-up might not have been needed. Instead, that follow-up became the signpost that such a question was necessary. It would be added to the submission form the very next week. So, what happened in this situation, is that I gave up control of my platform, and opened it up to ideas outside of my own. As far as representation goes, the goals of my blog are clear, but I understand that I don’t have the tools to manage them. Not completely and not by myself. Had I kept my hands on the steering wheel, this bit of magic would never have occurred. Furthermore, I’d have lost the idea that my platform was welcoming to neurodiverse people or people with disabilities. I didn’t want to be the kind of privileged person who tells oppressed people what their version of diversity should look like. It’s the reason why I readily accept nominations for blog contributors. Everyone can have a hand in the creative process, in as much as it pertains to them. So, instead of trying to control the narrative, the pen was passed to those with lived experience to express themselves in the way that felt most authentic to them. In response, Poly Role Models became a more honest and welcoming resource, especially with the newly inspired question.
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Kevin A. Patterson (Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities)
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For our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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This presence is like a passport to greater life. It is our connection to that Greater Being to which we belong, but which is often buried beneath mundane concerns, bodily desires, emotional disturbances, and mental distractions. Through knowledge, practice, and understanding, this presence can be awakened. Eventually, we will not be without it – whether in speaking or moving, whether in thinking or feeling. Awakening this presence is the most reliable and direct means of cultivating our essential human qualities, of activating everything that we need to meet the conditions of our lives. Presence is the point of intersection between the world of the senses and the world of the Spirit. May we never cease to discover its beauty and power.
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Kabir Helminski (Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self)
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As a result, Social Justice scholarship takes umbrage with anything that foregrounds reason and evidence as the way to know what is true and demands “epistemic justice” and “research justice” in their place. By this, it means that we should include the lived experiences, emotions, and cultural traditions of minority groups, consider them “knowledges,” and privilege them over reason and evidence-based knowledge, which is unfairly dominant. Research justice often involves deliberately avoiding citing white, male, and Western scholars in favor of those with some intersectionally marginalized status.
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Helen Pluckrose (Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody)
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...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)
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Martha A. Gimenez (Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays)
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Even with the onset of contemporary animal advocacy, and the unavoidability of at least some knowledge of what goes on in slaughterhouses and on factory farms, most of us choose to look away—even feminists. Collectively, feminists remain largely unaware of the well-documented links between the exploitation of women and girls, and the exploitation of cows, sows, and hens.
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Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
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Even with the onset of contemporary animal advocacy, and the unavoidability of at least some knowledge of what goes on in slaughterhouses and
on factory farms, most of us choose to look away—even feminists. Collectively, feminists remain largely unaware of the well-documented links between the exploitation of women and girls, and the exploitation of cows, sows, and hens.
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Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
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Not only do we harbor patriarchal indifference to uniquely female suffering, but additionally, most of us are ignorant of the horrible cruelty inherent in factory farming. It is easy to buy a bucket of chicken or a carton of vanilla yogurt without even knowing about the females whose sad lives lie behind these unnecessary products. It is easy to forget that mozzarella and cream come from a mother’s munificence—mothers who would have desperately preferred to tend their young, and to live out their lives with a measure of freedom and comfort—or not to be born at all. Most consumers are unaware of the ongoing, intense suffering and billions of premature deaths that lurk behind mayonnaise and cream, cold cuts and egg sandwiches.
Even with the onset of contemporary animal advocacy, and the unavoidability of at least some knowledge of what goes on in slaughterhouses and
on factory farms, most of us choose to look away—even feminists. Collectively, feminists remain largely unaware of the well-documented links between the exploitation of women and girls, and the exploitation of cows, sows, and hens.
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Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
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But activists must not work against one another in their single-minded dedication to one specific cause. Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We do well to specialize, we do not do so well if we specialize without knowledge of interlocking oppressions—or without the application of that
knowledge.
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Lisa Kemmerer (Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice)
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THROAT CHAKRA—VISHUDDHA How do you know the truth? Truth is the operative word in this section, whereas voice is its secondary focus. Most people are focusing on voice and expression at the Throat Chakra — that is, the capacity to express ideas and thoughts. What matters most is not how you talk at the Throat Chakra, but what you convey. The "what" is your truth, your most insightful wisdom; the "how" is your medium to express your truth. Both the "what" and "how" of truth are sitting here at the Throat Chakra, at the center of your physical throat (or the apple of your Adam). What do you mean by "truth?" Many claim the reality is a personal quest to discover the values and beliefs that drive choices and decisions about your life. Others suggest that a collective truth exists, a unified wisdom to which all can aspire and seek integration. Let the intersection of these two approaches inspire you to explore individual and collective truths to understand how to integrate what you see, learn and experience into your life. Throat Chakra Gemstones The gems of this chakra are believed to be the gems of Lemuria, an ancient civilization aligned with the realm of the dolphin, which reflect knowledge that had been preserved and held in crystals before the destruction of that community. One of the main Lemurian gemstones, AQUA Atmosphere QUARTZ is a powerful purifier of the atmosphere and also encourages power, tenacity and stability. • AMAZONITE is the primary stone of reality, and it enhances confidence for public speakers, allowing them to express with ease even the most difficult words and themes. • ANGELITE (in crystalline form, known as CELESTITE) invokes the angelic forces to evoke in your spaces the presence of angels, like archangels. Take this jewel with you or sleep by it to feel more connected to your own personal angels and guides. • Since centuries TURQUOISE has been valued by indigenous Americans who find it a powerful purifier and healer, as well as a tool that strengthens and defends warriors in combat. It was revered as a source of good fortune in antiquity Persia. Connect to your gemstones in the Throat Chakra in moments of anxiety or frustration. Here's how to do this: Lie down in a comfortable position and keep in your right hand, the receiving one, one or three of your beloved light blue Throat Chakra crystals, through which energy reaches your body. (Some people feel their left hand is their Receiving Hand; go with what they feel right for you.) Set the intention to receive the gifts of the Throat Chakra, peace, wisdom and truth. Then move the stones to your hand, or Projecting Side, so you can take the energy out into the universe as a gift for everyone. Imagine a bright blue ray of truth and light beaming out into the world for everyone to see, receive and enjoy.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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The power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the basic habits of effectiveness. Knowledge, skill, and desire are all within our control. We can work on any one to improve the balance of the three. As the area of intersection becomes larger, we more deeply internalize the principles upon which the habits are based and create the strength of character to move us in a balanced way toward increasing effectiveness in our lives.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
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In a way, our darkness—the knowledge that without our great effort, many or most of Earth’s creatures will vanish—is what reveals the light within, the seed of life and possibility that we share with all of Earth’s life, the one that we can carry forward. For better and for worse, we are the ones at the intersection of knowledge and agency.]
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
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RESISTANCE AND SELF-MEDICATION
Do you regularly ingest any substance, controlled or otherwise, whose aim is the alleviation of depression, anxiety, etc.? I offer the following experience: I once worked as a writer for a big New York ad agency. Our boss used to tell us: Invent a disease. Come up with the disease, he said, and we can sell the cure. Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren't diseases, they're marketing ploys. Doctors didn't discover them, copywriters did. Marketing departments did. Drug companies did. Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.
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Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
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HABITS” DEFINED For our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three. I may be ineffective in my interactions with my work associates, my spouse, or my children because I constantly tell them what I think, but I never really listen to them. Unless I search out correct principles of human interaction, I may not even know I need to listen. Even if I do know that in order to interact effectively with others I really need to listen to them, I may not have the skill. I may not know how to really listen deeply to another human being. But knowing I need to listen and knowing how to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire, it won’t be a habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions. The being/seeing change is an upward process—being changing seeing, which in turn changes being, and so forth, as we move in an upward spiral of growth. By working on knowledge, skill, and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)