Lack Of Unity Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Lack Of Unity. Here they are! All 100 of them:

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sticking to one person for a lifetime is not a waste of time or lack of better ones, it means you've found your place of eternity.
Michael Bassey Johnson
Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.
Alan W. Watts
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche. That is true, but no artist can get along without reality. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is. Rebellion can be observed here in its pure state and in its original complexities. Thus art should give us a final perspective on the content of rebellion.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
I haven’t written you a poem in years it seems. How can it be my fault when the words to describe you have not yet been created? When the alphabet lacks the very letters? How can it be my fault when your loveliness only grows by the time I reach for pen and paper? Tell me how I am at fault when I am only a beginner in poems and you are exquisite poetry? To write you in words is to put a veil upon you. Why must I write when I can kiss you instead?
Kamand Kojouri
What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?
Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
The inevitable fate of large groups is to perish because of lack of unity.
Napoléon Bonaparte (Aphorisms and Thoughts)
A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’ It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would ‘do anything’ for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into his presence. It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it. In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. Yet it is the presence of God which is the death of the marriage as something only ‘natural.’ It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end. But ‘by the cross, joy entered the whole world.’ Its presence is thus the real joy of marriage. It is the joyful certitude that the marriage vow, in the perspective of the eternal Kingdom, is not taken ‘until death parts,’ but until death unites us completely.
Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy)
Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Woman's fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse - or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood. Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics. Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness. Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth. However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics. The basic phenomenon - that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases - is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, absolutely lack to the extent women have it. To experience herself as so fundamentally different from the dominant patriarchal values understandably fills the woman with fear until she arrives at that point in her own development where, through experience and love that binds the opposites, she can clearly see the totality of humanity as a unity of masculine and feminine aspects of the Self.
Erich Neumann (The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology)
...the opposite of every truth is just as true! That is to say, any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought with the mind and said with words is one-sided, it's all just the half of it, lacking completeness, roundness, or unity.
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Wilderness holds an original presence giving expression to that which we lack, the losses we long to recover, the absences we seek to fill. Wilderness revives the memory of unity. Through its protection we can find faith in our humanity.
Terry Tempest Williams
16 But cynicism is always the indication of a mental chaos, or at least a mental disjunction and lack of unity.
T.S. Eliot (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry)
She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present.
Virginia Woolf (Night and Day)
Gratitude is a divine shift in your perspective from one of separation and lack to one of unity and right mindedness. It is a choice not made from guilt but rather from a higher level of consciousness.
Janet Rebhan (Learn To Be Still: Select Essays on the Spiritual Life)
How then should I love God?’ You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental images. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. As long as she has images, she will possess intermediaries, and as long as she has intermediaries, she will not have unity or simplicity. As long as she lacks simplicity, she does not truly love God, for true love depends upon simplicity . . . Indeed, you must love him as he is One, pure, simple and transparent, far from all duality. And we should eternally sink into this One, thus passing from something into nothing. So help us God. Amen.
Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings)
To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. This situation makes the "current-events man" a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more striking, more distressing, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants. Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a certain attitude. But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.
Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes)
For Lewis, Christian unity begins with the recognition that we have all, like Eustace, through our pride and selfishness, made ourselves into dragons. We must then understand that we cannot undragon ourselves—we lack the strength—and after that we must accept that God is ready and willing to undragon us, if we will but allow Him do to so. For Lewis, only those who share this picture of the human predicament and its cure can join together in true unity—can really, and not just nominally, become members of one another in a single Body.
Alan Jacobs (The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis)
She committed her energies to the Labour Party in 1944 but expressed disappointment with its leaders, complaining to David Hicks in May of ‘the usual lack of unity and intelligent leadership on the left’. To her surprise and delight, however, the Labour Party swept to victory in July 1945.
Iris Murdoch (Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995)
Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nonetheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity.
Ernst Cassirer (An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture)
Dalin must have whiffed the anarch in me, a man with no ties to state or society. Still, he was unable to sense an autonomy that puts up with these forces as objective facts but without recognizing them. What he lacked was a grounding in history. Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity. The anarch, in contrast, not only recognizes society a priori as imperfect, he actually acknowledges it with that limitation. He is more or less repulsed by state and society, yet there are times and places in which the invisible harmony shimmers through the visible harmony. This is obviously chiefly in the work of art. In that case, one serves joyfully. But the anarchic nihilist thinks the exact opposite. The Temple of Artemis, to cite an example, would inspire him to commit arson. The anarch, however, would have no qualms about entering the temple in order to meditate and to participate with an offering. This is possible in any temple worthy of the name.
Ernst Jünger (Eumeswil)
An ancient statement declares that “God is no respecter of persons.” What this means at the mystical level is that Spirit/The Universe doesn’t know or see separate “people” any more than the sun sees separate sunbeams, the ocean recognizes separate waves, or a tree views the branches as separate from each other. All of Life is a unity, expressing fully at every point in the universe. Nowhere is it more or less. Nowhere is it withholding anything. In other words, the only thing blocking your good is your lack of acceptance.
Derek Rydall (Emergence: The End of Self Improvement)
What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content.
R.F. Kuang (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution)
To Have Thousands Transformed In The Society Is To Lack Unity
Sunday Adelaja
The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines.
Jane Hamilton (The Excellent Lombards)
in every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
We have become disconnected from our true selves, and naturally, this has produced a deep sense of lack in our lives, causing us to endlessly search for happiness in objects, experiences, and people to fill the emptiness and make us feel whole again. We crave pleasure, material riches, and stimulating experiences—anything that will distract us from this inherent lack of connection. But no matter how hard we try to escape it, eventually the sensation returns. And that is because we are looking for the answer to our freedom in all the wrong places. We are looking for freedom in the world, when the answer to ending our suffering lies within us. Until we heal the root cause of our suffering, and awaken to our true nature, our inherent confusion will continue to manifest itself in the world around us.
Joseph P. Kauffman (The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom)
It will hardly be wise to adopt the suggestion… that we must stop treating the little sins as though they were big sins. That suggestion means apparently, that we must not worry too much about the little sins, but must let them remain unmolested. With regard to such an expedient, it may be suggested that in the moral battle: we are fighting against a very resourceful enemy, who does not reveal the position of his guns by desultory (lacking purpose) artillery actions when he plans a great attack. In the moral battle, as in the Great European War, the quiet sectors are usually the most dangerous. It’s through the “little sins” that Satan gains an entrance into our lives. Probably, therefore, it will be prudent to watch all sectors of the front and lose no time about introducing the unity of command.
J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism)
In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.
Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue)
It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth. ‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some think it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some think French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.
R.F. Kuang (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution)
With the progressive perishing of its ideal the race loses more and more the qualities that lent it its cohesion, its unity, and its strength. The personality and intelligence of the individual may increase, but at the same time this collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the individual, accompanied by a weakening of character and a lessening of the capacity for action. What constituted a people, a unity, a whole, becomes in the end an agglomeration of individualities lacking cohesion, and artificially held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. It is at this stage that men, divided by their interests and aspirations, and incapable any longer of self-government, require directing in their pettiest acts, and that the State exerts an absorbing influence. With the definite loss of its old ideal the genius of the race entirely disappears; it is a mere swarm of isolated individuals and returns to its original state—that of a crowd.
Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd; study of the popular mind)
While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand--"the power of love"--is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person. Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some way and diminished in others, this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her a feeling that a mighty power resides within her being. The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for the good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.
Sandra Lee Bartky (Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (Thinking Gender))
When I think about it, I have to say that by 1919 even the Hitler Youth had almost been formed. For example, in our school class we had started a club called the Rennbund Altpreussen (Old Prussia Athletics Club), and took as its motto “Anti-Spartacus, for Sport and Politics.” The politics consisted in occasionally beating up a few unfortunates, who were in favor of the revolution, on the way to school. Sports were the main occupation. We organized athletics championships in the school grounds or public stadia. These gave us the pleasurable sensation of being decidedly anti-Spartacist. We felt very important and patriotic, and ran races for the fatherland. What was that, if not an embryonic Hitler Youth? In truth, certain characteristics later added by Hitler’s personal idiosyncrasies were lacking, anti-Semitism for one. Our Jewish schoolmates ran with the same anti-Spartacist and patriotic zeal as everyone else. Indeed, our best runner was Jewish. I can testify that they did nothing to undermine national unity. During
Sebastian Haffner (Defying Hitler: A Memoir)
Our lack of praise may actually be the biggest cause of our divisions. Once we stop worshipping, all hope for unity is lost. This is what unites us: we can’t stop talking about the treasure we have in Jesus. It’s hard to start an argument with someone who is on her knees shouting praises to Jesus, especially when you’re busy blessing the Lord as well. Many of our problems could be reconciled if we discussed our concerns on our knees before a Holy God. We can’t allow the Enemy or our enemies to interrupt our praise. Worship is our path to unity.
Francis Chan (Until Unity)
My hope is that the white and the black will be united in perfect love and fellowship, with complete unity and brotherhood. Associate with each other, think of each other, and be like a rose garden. Anyone who goes into a rose garden will see various roses, white, pink, yellow, red, all growing together and replete with adornment. Each one accentuates the beauty of the other. Were all of one color, the garden would be monotonous to the eye. If they were all white or yellow or red, the garden would lack variety and attractiveness; but when the colors are varied, white, pink, yellow, red, there will be the greatest beauty.
Abdu'l-Bahá
In my view, posthuman ethics urges us to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth structures of our subjectivity by acknowledging the ties that bind us to the multiple ‘others’ in a vital web of complex interrelations. This ethical principle breaks up the fantasy of unity, totality and one-ness, but also the master narratives of primordial loss, incommensurable lack and irreparable separation. What I want to emphasize instead, in a more affirmative vein, is the priority of the relation and the awareness that one is the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.
Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman)
In every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Sansara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
The essence of being in the first beginning reveals itself, i.e., at the same time, essentially occurs inceptually, in emerging, advancing. Only if the basic traits of the inceptuality come to be recollected constantly, above all in their inceptual unity, can the first beginning be surmised. Being is the beginning. The beginning is disconcealment toward unconcealedness (АΛНΘΕІА). Disconcealment is the emerging that goes back into itself, because disconcealment possesses the concealment out of which it emerges. Emergence is φύσις. Emergence is presence (οὐσία). To presence pertain: the nearness—παρά the view—visibility ἰδέα the disburdening—against μὴ ὄν the magic—καλóν. Presence consists in constancy and is then permanence (ἀεί). Presence is then the essential occurrence in the work and as work, wherein is gathered the presentness of rest and motion: ἐνέργεια; ἐντελέχεια. Co-position: ἐνέχεια τò τέλος. Every emerged determination of being can in a certain way stand for the beginning, and all of them can be especially attributed to the beginning. And yet they do not exhaust it, because it itself, as the first beginning, must take over the advancement. Nevertheless, the beginning remains embedded in concealment, but one which itself remains concealed and thus is completely lacking in presence and so must be replaced by “truth” as ὁμοίωσις and as disfigurement of the cognizing human being.
Martin Heidegger (The Event (Studies in Continental Thought))
Are there American variations of Solomon Slepak, those rendered so rigid by ideas that all reason fails them? Prudence, a cautious awareness of nuances, of complexities, of consequences, a perception of the unity of the American experience, and a saving sense of irony and humor—pervasive in the Founding Fathers and lacking in contemporary ideologues. Can we learn something from these chronicles about iron righteousness and rigid doctrine, about the stony heart, the sealed mind, the capricious use of law, and the tragedies that often result when theories are not adjusted to realities? Do the chronicles seem to reveal a glaring and almost obvious truth: the larger the nation, the more tumultuous its demise? Are we approaching the finale now to the bright possibilities once inherent in this land? Is that old America forever gone? Indeed, did it ever exist? Were we seduced as schoolchildren into a vision of a land green and golden from sea to shining sea, a land as illusory for many Americans as the Motherland of Solomon Slepak was for Volodya and Masha? Perhaps the more sensible question is not about what we once were but about what we intend ourselves to be one day. Things are happening to us today that we don’t seem able to explain. Can we enter the uncertain future without the corrosive cynicism, the clutching greed, the divisive self-interests—the beasts that destroyed the world of Solomon Slepak and rendered it uninhabitable to his family?
Chaim Potok (The Gates of November)
The invention of the devil. If we are possessed by the devil, it cannot be by one, for then we should live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction, without reflection, always sure of the man behind us. His face would not frighten us, for as diabolical beings we would, if somewhat sensitive to the sight, be clever enough to prefer to sacrifice a hand in order to keep his face covered with it. If we were possessed by only a single devil, one who had a calm, untroubled view of our whole nature, and freedom to dispose of us at any moment, then that devil would also have enough power to hold us for the length of a human life high above the spirit of God in us, and even to swing us to and fro, so that we should never get to see a glimmer of it and therefore should not be troubled from that quarter. Only a crowd of devils could account for our earthly misfortunes. Why don’t they exterminate one another until only a single one is left, or why don’t they subordinate themselves to one great devil? Either way would be in accord with the diabolical principle of deceiving us as completely as possible. With unity lacking, of what use is the scrupulous attention all the devils pay us? It simply goes without saying that the falling of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not. But we still do not arrive at any state of well-being so long as the many devils are within us.
Franz Kafka (Diaries, 1910-1923)
Here we immediately face the danger of slipping into another but equally untenable romanticism, namely a call for humans to be humble and come to terms with or appreciate their finitude. The acknowledgement of the inherent lack of unity in the metabolism of humans and the rest of nature should not lead us to conceive of humans as fragile, vulnerable and ontologically homeless creatures destined to remain caught in opaque mediations. Such a way of thinking amounts to a secularisation of the religious demand for humans to display their submissiveness and obedience to God. One finds examples of this in existentialist philosophies of the Heideggerian variant or in Arnold Gehlen's conservative philosophical anthropology, according to which the natural incompleteness of human beings justify the call for stable social institutions (i.e., the shepherd-God is replaced with the shepherd-State). The key to avoid such an ideology of finitude is to recall that it is the very fragility and porosity of the human metabolism which has made humans so evolutionarily successful. Human corporeal organisation is the source of an immense flexibility and has enabled this animal to "break out of a narrow ecological niche". Far from being the sign of an inherent finitude of the human being, the loss of immediacy at the centre of its being is rather a sign of its infinity in the sense that it enables humans to socially mediate their relation to the rest of nature in an infinite number of ways.
Søren Mau (Mute Compulsion. A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital)
Holiness means wholeness. To say “God is holy” is to refer to the wholeness, fullness, beauty, and abundant life that overflows within the Godhead. God lacks nothing. He is unbroken, undamaged, unfallen, completely complete and entire within himself. He is the indivisible One, wholly self-sufficient, and the picture of perfection. When the angels sing “Holy is the Lord,” they are not admiring him for his rule-keeping or sin avoidance. They are marveling at the transcendent totality of his perfection. To worship God in the beauty of his holiness is to be awestruck by the infinite sweep and scale of his sublimity. It is to become lost in the limitless landscape of his loveliness. Holiness is not one aspect of God’s character; it is the whole package in glorious unity.
Paul Ellis (The Gospel in Ten Words)
Deep in our hearts, we feel sick about the hostility, dishonor, and disdain in our world. A kind of collective fatigue manifests itself in our disgust for our culture. We are exhausted by the devaluing of others but feel powerless to stop. I feel this at times after I am done looking at social media. There is so much condescension and so much anger. I feel both grieved and overwhelmed. I want to lash out, but I don’t exactly know how. We don’t know how to change the channel of contempt. Unity feels like a pipe dream, and healing, out of reach. Our hearts are grieved by the failure of the church as well. The way we devalue people for their theology or lack of it, different practices and traditions, and struggles with sin. Our vision of God has been lowered, his power is scarce, and his love is a rumor that’s been chased away. I believe there is a cure for the cancer of contempt: honor.
Jon Tyson (Beautiful Resistance: The Joy of Conviction in a Culture of Compromise)
Creatures are made in their varying ways images of God without their own collaboration or even consent. It is not so that they become sons of God. And the likeness they receive by sonship is not that of images or portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is unison or unity with God in will; but this is consistent with all the differences we have been considering. Hence, as a better writer has said, our imitation of God in this life—that is, our willed imitation as distinct from any of the likenesses which He has impressed upon our natures or states—must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.
C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
John Stott comments: Thank God there are those in the contemporary church who are determined at all costs to defend and uphold God’s revealed truth. But sometimes they are conspicuously lacking in love. When they think they smell heresy, their nose begins to twitch, their muscles ripple, and the light of battle enters their eye. They seem to enjoy nothing more than a fight. Others make the opposite mistake. They are determined at all costs to maintain and exhibit brotherly love, but in order to do so are prepared even to sacrifice the central truths of revelation. Both these tendencies are unbalanced and unbiblical. Truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love; love becomes soft if it is not strengthened by truth. The apostle calls us to hold the two together, which should not be difficult for Spirit-filled believers, since the Holy Spirit is himself ‘the Spirit of truth’, and his first fruit is ‘love’. There is no other route than this to a fully mature Christian unity.12
David Devenish (Fathering Leaders, Motivating Mission: Restoring the Role of the Apostle in Today's Church)
Any naturally self-aware self-defining entity capable of independent moral judgment is a human.” Eveningstar said, “Entities not yet self-aware, but who, in the natural and orderly course of events shall become so, fall into a special protected class, and must be cared for as babies, or medical patients, or suspended Compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “Children below the age of reason lack the experience for independent moral judgment, and can rightly be forced to conform to the judgment of their parents and creators until emancipated. Criminals who abuse that judgment lose their right to the independence which flows therefrom.” (...) “You mentioned the ultimate purpose of Sophotechnology. Is that that self-worshipping super-god-thing you guys are always talking about? And what does that have to do with this?” Rhadamanthus: “Entropy cannot be reversed. Within the useful energy-life of the macrocosmic universe, there is at least one maximum state of efficient operations or entities that could be created, able to manipulate all meaningful objects of thoughts and perception within the limits of efficient cost-benefit expenditures.” Eveningstar: “Such an entity would embrace all-in-all, and all things would participate within that Unity to the degree of their understanding and consent. The Unity itself would think slow, grave, vast thought, light-years wide, from Galactic mind to Galactic mind. Full understanding of that greater Self (once all matter, animate and inanimate, were part of its law and structure) would embrace as much of the universe as the restrictions of uncertainty and entropy permit.” “This Universal Mind, of necessity, would be finite, and be boundaried in time by the end-state of the universe,” said Rhadamanthus. “Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Supergalactic, who may freely assent to participate.” Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.” Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.” “Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with un-regretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.” Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited.
John C. Wright (The Phoenix Exultant (Golden Age, #2))
It has been said, in a tone of reproach, that Machiavelli makes no attempt *to persuade'. Certainly he was no prophet. For he was concerned first of all with truth, not with persuasion, which is one reason why his prose is great prose, not only of Italian but a model of style for any language. He is a partial Aristotle of politics. But he is partial not because his vision is distorted or his judgment biased, or because of any lack of moral interest, but because of his sole passion for the unity, peace, and prosperity of his country. What makes him a great writer, and for ever a solitary figure, is the purity and single-mindedness of his passion. No one was ever less Machiavellian' than Machiavelli. Only the pure in heart can blow the gaff on human nature as Machiavelli has done. The cynic can never do it; for the cynic is always impure and sentimental. But it is easy to understand why Machiavelli was not himself a successful politician. For one thing, he had no capacity for self-deception or self-dramatization. The recipe dors ton sommeil de brute is applied in many forms, of which Calvin and Rousseau give two variations; but the utility of Machiavelli is his perpetual summons to examination of the weakness and impurity of the soul. We are not likely to forget his political lessons, but his examination of conscience may be too easily overlooked.
T.S. Eliot (For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern)
maternal love, the most successful object of the religious imagination of romantic art. For the most part real and human, it is yet entirely spiritual, without the interest and exigency of desire, not sensuous and yet present: absolutely satisfied and blissful spiritual depth. It is a love without craving, but it is not friendship; for be friendship never so rich in emotion, it yet demands a content, something essential, as a mutual end and aim. Whereas, without any reciprocity of aim and interests, maternal love has an immediate support in the natural bond of connection. But in this instance the mother’s love is not at all restricted to the natural side. In the child which she conceived and then bore in travail, Mary has the complete knowledge and feeling of herself; and the same child, blood of her blood, stands all the same high above her, and nevertheless this higher being belongs to her and is the object in which she forgets and maintains herself. The natural depth of feeling in the mother’s love is altogether spiritualized; it has the Divine as its proper content, but this spirituality remains lowly and unaware, marvellously penetrated by natural oneness and human feeling. It is the blissful maternal love, the love of the one mother alone who was the first recipient of this joy. Of course this love too is not without grief, but the grief is only the sorrow of loss, lamentation for her suffering, dying, and dead son, and does not, as we shall see at a later stage,[9] result from injustice and torment from without, or from the infinite battle against sins, or from the agony and pain brought about by the self. Such deep feeling is here spiritual beauty, the Ideal, human identification of man with God, with the spirit and with truth: a pure forgetfulness and complete self-surrender which still in this forgetfulness is from the beginning one with that into which it is merged and now with blissful satisfaction has a sense of this oneness. In such a beautiful way maternal love, the picture as it were of the Spirit, enters romantic art in place of the Spirit itself because only in the form of feeling is the Spirit made prehensible by art, and the feeling of the unity between the individual and God is present in the most original, real, and living way only in the Madonna’s maternal love. This love must enter art necessarily if, in the portrayal of this sphere, the Ideal, the affirmative satisfied reconciliation is not to be lacking. There was therefore a time when the maternal love of the blessed Virgin belonged in general to the highest and holiest [part of religion] and was worshipped and represented as this supreme fact. But when the Spirit brings itself into consciousness of itself in its own element, separated from the whole natural grounding which feeling supplies, then too it is only the spiritual mediation, free from such a grounding, that can be regarded as the free route to the truth; and so, after all, in Protestantism, in contrast to mariolatry in art and in faith, the Holy Spirit and the inner mediation of the Spirit has become the higher truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
But never forget what I have told you so often: our mission is to recognize contraries for what they are: first of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity. Such is the nature of the Glass Bead Game. The artistically inclined delight in the Game because it provides opportunities for improvisation and fantasy. The strict scholars and scientists despise it—and so do some musicians also—because, they say, it lacks that degree of strictness which their specialties can achieve. Well and good, you will encounter these antinomies, and in time you will discover that they are subjective, not objective—that, for example, a fancy-free artist avoids pure mathematics or logic not because he understands them and could say something about them if he wished, but because he instinctively inclines toward other things. Such instinctive and violent inclinations and disinclinations are signs by which you can recognize the pettier souls. In great souls and superior minds, these passions are not found. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery. Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian, and at the same time full of imagination and music. One can be a musician or Glass Bead Game player and at the same time wholly devoted to rule and order. The kind of person we want to develop, the kind of person we aim to become, would at any time be able to exchange his discipline or art for any other. He would infuse the Glass Bead Game with crystalline logic, and grammar with creative imagination. That is how we ought to be.
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
If I as Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala take my family, my brothers and sisters, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable small business. If I take my extended family both maternal and partenal, my aunts and uncles and my cousins, myself, and our children, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable medium business. If I take Ba Ga Mohlala family in general, including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable Big Business business. If I take Banareng clan including aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, combined, we have all the resources, knowledge, skills, and capacity to run a successful, profitable, and sustainable multinational business. YET, we are not able to do that because of lack of unity, and the lack of unity is caused by selfishness and lack of trust. At the moment what we have is majority of successful independent individuals running their individual successful, profitable and sustainable small businesses and successful individuals pursuing their own fulfilling careers. If ever we want to succeed as families and one united clan, we need to start by addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness. Other than that, anything that we try to do to unite the family will fail. And to succeed in addressing the issue of trust, and selfishness, we must first start by acknowledging that we are related. We must start by living and helping oneanother as relatives, we must first start by creating platforms that will overtime make us to reestablish our genetic bond, and also to build platforms where we can do that. So, let us grab the opportunity to use existing platforms and build new ones, to participate, contribute positively, and add our brothers and sisters, our cousins, and other extended family members to those platforms as a way towards building unity, unity of purpose, purpose of reclaiming our glory and building a legacy. Unity of empowering ourself and our communities. Unity of building a successful and sustainable socioeconomic livelihood for ourselves and our communities. We will keep on preaching this gospel of being self sustainable as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general, until people start to stop and take notice, until people start listening and acting, we will keep on preaching this gospel of being self sustainable as Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general, until people take it upon themselves and start organizing themselves around the issue of social and economic development as a family and as a clan, until people realize the importance of self sufficiency as a family and as a clan. In times of election, the media always keep on talking about the election machinery of the ruling parties in refence to branches of the ruling parties which are the power base of those ruling parties. Luckily as Ba Gs Mohlala, we also have Ba Ga Mohlala branches across the country as basic units in addition to family, and extended family units. So, let us use those structures as basic units and building blocks to build up Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to become successful forces which will play a role in socioeconomic sphere locally, regionally, provinvially, nationally, and internationally. To build Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng to be a force to reckon with locally, provinvially, nationally, and internationally. The platforms are there, it is all up to us, the ball is in our court as a collective Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng. It must become a norn and a duty to serve the family and the clan, it must become a honour to selflessly serve the family and the clan without expecting anything in return. ALUTA !!!!!!!! "Struggle of selfsuffiency must continue
Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala
The AIDS obsession doubtless arises from the fact that the exceptional destiny of the sufferers gives them what others cruelly lack today: a strong, impregnable identity, a sacrificial identity -- the privilege of illness, around which, in other cultures, the entire group once gravitated, and which we have abolished almost everywhere today by the enterprise of therapeutic eradication of Evil [le Mal]. But in another way, the whole strategy of the prevention of illness merely shifts the problem [le mal] from the biological to the social body. All the anti-AIDS campaigns, playing on solidarity and fear -- `Your AIDS interests me' -- give rise to an emotional contagion as noxious as the biological. The promotional infectiousness of information is just as obscene and dangerous as that of the virus. If AIDS destroys biological immunities, then the collective theatricalization and brainwashing, the blackmailing into responsibility and mobilization, are playing their part in propagating the epidemic of information and, as a side-effect, in reinforcing the social body's immunodeficiency -- a process that is already far advanced -- and in promoting that other mental AIDS that is the Aids-athon, the Telethon and other assorted Thanatons -- expiation and atonement of the collective bad conscience, pornographic orchestration of national unity. AIDS itself ends up looking like a side-effect of this demagogic virulence. `Tu me préserves actif, je te préservatif' ['You keep me active, I condom you']: this scabrous irony, heavy with blackmail, which is also that of Benetton, as it once was of the BNP, in fact conceals a technique of manipulation and dissolution of the social body by the stimulation of the vilest emotions: self-pity and self-disgust. Politicians and advertisers have understood that the key to democratic government -- perhaps even the essence of the political? -- is to take general stupidity for granted: `Your idiocy, your resentment, interest us!' Behind which lurks an even more suspect discourse: `Your rights, your destitution, your freedom, interest us!' Democratic souls have been trained to swallow all the horrors, scandals, bluff, brainwashing and misery, and to launder these themselves. Behind the condescending interest there always lurks the voracious countenance of the vampire.
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
*There is only one God*. Whatever exists is *ipso facto* individual; to be one it needs no extra property and calling it one merely denies that it is divided. Simple things are neither divided nor divisible; composite things do not exist when their parts are divided. So existence stands or falls with individuality, and things guard their unity as they do their existence. But what is simply speaking one can yet in certain respects be many: an individual thing, essentially undivided, can have many non-essential properties; and a single whole, actually undivided, can have potentially many parts. Only when one is used to count with does it presuppose in what it counts some extra property over and above existence, namely, quantity. The one we count with contrasts with the many it counts in the way a unity of measurement contrasts with what it measures; but the individual unity common to everything that exists contrasts with plurality simply by lacking it, as undividedness does division. A plurality is however *a* plurality: though simply speaking many, inasmuch as it exists, it is, incidentally, one. A continuum is homogeneous: its parts share the form of the whole (every bit of water is water); but a plurality is heterogeneous: its parts lack the form of the whole (no part of the house is a house). The parts of a plurality are unities and non-plural, though they compose the plurality not as non-plural but as existing; just as the parts of a house compose the house as material, not as not houses. Whereas we define plurality in terms of unity (many things are divided things to each of which is ascribed unity), we define unity in terms of division. For division precedes unity in our minds even if it doesn’t really do so, since we conceive simple things by denying compositeness of them, defining a point, for example, as lacking dimension. Division arises in the mind simply by negating existence. So the first thing we conceive is the existent, then―seeing that this existent is not that existent―we conceive division, thirdly unity, and fourthly plurality. There is only one God. Firstly, God and his nature are identical: to be God is to be this individual God. In the same way, if to be a man was to be Socrates there would only be one man, just as there was only one Socrates. Moreover, God’s perfection is unlimited, so what could differentiate one God from another? Any extra perfection in one would be lacking in the other and that would make him imperfect. And finally, the world is one, and plurality can only produce unity incidentally insofar as it too is somehow one: the primary and non-incidental source of unity in the universe must himself be one. The one we count with measures only material things, not God: like all objects of mathematics, though defined without reference to matter, it can exist only in matter. But the unity of individuality common to everything that exists is a metaphysical property applying both to non-material things and to God. But what in God is a perfection has to be conceived by us, with our way of understanding things, as a lack: that is why we talk of God as lacking a body, lacking limits and lacking division.
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation)
This is the trait constituting the soulful, inner, higher ideal which enters here in place of the quiet grandeur and independence of the figures of antiquity. The gods of the classical ideal too do not lack a trait of mourning, of a fateful negative, present in the cold necessity imprinted on these serene figures, but still, in their independent divinity and freedom, they retain an assurance of their simple grandeur and power. But their freedom is not the freedom of that love which is soulful and deeply felt because this depends on a relation of soul to soul, spirit to spirit. This depth of feeling kindles the ray of bliss present in the heart, that ray of a love which in sorrow and its supreme loss does not feel sang-froid or any sort of comfort, but the deeper it suffers yet in suffering still finds the sense and certainty of love and shows in grief that it has overcome itself within and by itself. It is only the religious love of romanticism which has an expression of bliss and freedom. This oneness and satisfaction is in its nature spiritually concrete because it is what is felt by the spirit which knows itself in another as at one with itself. Here therefore if the subject-matter portrayed is to be complete, it must have two aspects because love necessarily implies a double character in the spiritual personality. It rests on two independent persons who yet have a sense of their unity; but there is always linked with this unity at the same time the factor of the negative. Love is a matter of subjective feeling, but the subject which feels is this self-subsistent heart which, in order to love, must desist from itself, abandon itself, and sacrifice the inflexible focus of its own private personality. This sacrifice is what is moving in the love that lives and feels only in this self-surrender. Yet on this account a person in this sacrifice still retains his own self and in the very cancelling of his independence acquires a precisely affirmative independence. Nevertheless, in the sense of this oneness and its supreme happiness there still remains left the negative factor, the moving sense not so much of sacrifice as rather of the undeserved bliss of feeling independent and at unity with self in spite of all the self-surrender. The moving emotion is the sense of the dialectical contradiction of having sacrificed one’s personality and yet of being independent at the same time; this contradiction is ever present in love and ever resolved in it. So far as concerns the particular human individual personality in this depth of feeling, the unique love which affords bliss and an enjoyment of heaven rises above time and the particular individuality of that character which becomes a matter of indifference. in the pure ray of bliss which has just been described, particular individuality is superseded: in the sight of God all men are equal, or piety, rather, makes them all actually equal so that the only thing of importance is the expression of that concentration of love which needs neither happiness nor any particular single object. It is true that religious love too cannot exist without specific individuals who have some other sphere of existence apart from this feeling. But here the strictly ideal content is provided by the soulful depth of spiritual feeling which does not have its expression and actuality in the particular difference of a character with its talent, relationships, and fates, but is rather raised above these.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
Gabor Maté
In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent. Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs. More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members. From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment. Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater. This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms. When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed. To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.
John Rees
Lack of unity favors the crooks who unfailingly use the situation to their advantage."- (pp. 75, " Arty Facts" )
Ankita Kapoor (Arty Facts)
MATERIAL SUBSTANCE was criticized by Berkeley with such telling effect that his name has reverberated through all subsequent philosophy. Berkeley's treatment of the notion of matter is so well known as to need hardly more than a mention. So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, BEHIND the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God, whom you can understand and approach, sends you the sensible world directly, and you confirm the latter and back it up by his divine authority. Berkeley's criticism of 'matter' was consequently absolutely pragmatistic. Matter is known as our sensations of colour, figure, hardness and the like. They are the cash-value of the term. The difference matter makes to us by truly being is that we then get such sensations; by not being, is that we lack them. These sensations then are its sole meaning. Berkeley doesn't deny matter, then; he simply tells us what it consists of. It is a true name for just so much in the way of sensations. Locke, and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of SPIRITUAL SUBSTANCE. I will only mention Locke's treatment of our 'personal identity.' He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says, so much consciousness,' namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments, and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of our soul-substance. But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should WE be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, | should we, as WE realize OURSELVES, be any the worse for that fact? In Locke's day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished. See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic: Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed? But | let him once find himself CONSCIOUS of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor. ... In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. It may be reasonable to think
William James
Materialism is, really, a system of belief or behavior which considers material things and in particular the control and possession of material things as more important than human values such as connection, love, or spiritual values such as "recognizing the unity of everything". And that's the kind of culture we live in. Interestingly enough, the religious right in their opposition to the very idea of climate change or to the idea that the environment is important to look at, they will quote the old testament where "man is given stewardship over the earth and all of the creatures", but when they talk about stewardship they mean control and dominance. There's another way to look at stewardship, which is caring and nurturing for it, looking after it. And, in the materialistic sense it's that control and ownership that we look at. And that means that the culture itself, quite apart from the physical toxins that we spill into the environment and the way in which we are altering the very air that we breathe or the very sun that shines down on us, we're actually also affected by the toxicity of human relationships or the lack of human relationships that this kind of society - that emphasizes material values - teaches us to pursue.
Gabor Maté
A revolutionary war is never confined within the bounds of military action. Because its purpose is to destroy an existing society and its institutions and to replace them with a completely new state structure, any revolutionary war is a unity of which the constituent parts, in varying importance, are military, political, economic, social, and psychological. For this reason, it is endowed with a dynamic quality and a dimension in depth that orthodox wars, whatever their scale, lack. This is particularly true of revolutionary guerrilla war, which is not susceptible to the type of superficial military treatment frequently advocated by antediluvian doctrinaires.” (“Antediluvian” means “really old-fashioned”; I didn’t know the word, either.)
Sebastian Marshall (PROGRESSION)
The world is in its inherent nature (swabhaav). Satyug (era of the time cycle that is characterized by unity in thoughts, speech, and action), Kaliyug (the current era of the time cycle, which is characterized by lack of unity in thought, speech, and action) is based on the intents of people!
Dada Bhagwan (Generation Gap)
What has God said? Do good in the Dwaparyug (the era of moral deterioration and decreased purity) and Satyug (era of the time cycle that is characterized by unity in thoughts, speech, and action) and in the Kaliyug (the current era of the time cycle, which is characterized by lack of unity in thought, speech, and action), do not do anything bad at all; that itself is tantamount to doing good!
Dada Bhagwan (Avoid Clashes!)
Even God is not willing to protect the humans of Kaliyug (the current era of the time cycle, which is characterized by lack of unity in thought, speech, and action). This is because they are not willing to listen to a single word of God. One listens to his wife, to his boss, but he will not listen to a single word of God.
Dada Bhagwan (Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization)
Individuality is a false concept. We are not individuals. We are just a little piece of the chain that is life. Your human body is made by billions of cells. Every little cell is a living being that can exist outside of your body. It can even reproduce outside of your body. You are that cell also. The cell itself has many inner elements and each of them is alive. The cell is part of a chain. With billions of cells we make a human body. You can say, "I am the body." Meanwhile, each cell can say, "I am a cell." The cell lacks awareness that many cells together make an organ. The liver, the heart, the intestines, the brain, the eyes-all the organs together form a human body, which is a unity.
Mary Carroll Nelson (Beyond Fear: A Toltec Guide to Freedom and Joy, The Teachings of Don Miguel Ruiz)
Individuality is a false concept. We are not individuals. We are just a little piece of the chain that is life. Your human body is made by billions of cells. Every little cell is a living being that can exist outside of your body. It can even reproduce outside of your body. You are that cell also. The cell itself has many inner elements and each of them is alive. The cell is part of a chain. With billions of cells we make a human body. You can say, "I am the body." Meanwhile, each cell can say, "I am a cell." The cell lacks awareness that many cells together make an organ. The liver, the heart, the intestines, the brain, the eyes-all the organs together form a human body, which is a unity. Each of us is a human being. Yet, just like a cell, we think we are separate and we are not. All humans on the planet create another organ for a larger living being, which is the earth. Planet Earth is a living being. We are the Planet Earth. A single cell is human. A single person is the planet. All humans form only one of earth's organs. There are many others. The trees, the atmosphere, the ocean, rocks and animals are all organs of the earth. The earth has etheric energy just like humans do. It has a soul. It has a mind. It is alive. It is a living being. It has a metabolism through which it receives energy from the outside. It transforms energy that it takes in and sends out its own form of energy. Planets receive energy from the sun and transform it. On earth, animals eat plants and transform the energy they receive. Humans eat plants and animals and transform the energy they receive from them.
Mary Carroll Nelson (Beyond Fear: A Toltec Guide to Freedom and Joy, The Teachings of Don Miguel Ruiz)
Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?
Arthur Keith
He wrote how this supposed inferiority led to their position within the slave-trading hierarchy. “Negroes, uninterested and lacking in interest, in a state of undisturbed naivety, are to be regarded as a nation of children. They are sold and allow themselves to be sold without any reflection as to the rights or wrongs of it.” Meanwhile, he thought that the white race represented the best of what humanity had to offer. “It is in the Caucasian race,” he wrote, “that spirit first reaches absolute unity with itself. It is here that it first enters into complete opposition to naturality, apprehends itself in its absolute independence, disengages from the dispersive vacillation between one extreme and the other, achieves self-determination, self-development, and so brings forth world history.
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
The opinions about deity that hold pride of place are in number: atheism, polytheism and monotheism. With the first two the children of Greece amused themselves. Let the game go on! Atheism with its lack of a governing principle involves disorder. Polytheism with a plurality of such principles, involves faction and hence the absence of a governing principle, and this involves disorder again. Both lead to an identical result-lack of order, which, in turn, leads to disintegration. Monotheism, with its single governing principle, is what we value-not monotheism defined as the sovereignty of a single person (after all, self-discordant unity can become a plurality) but the single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action and the convergence towards their source of what springs from unity-none of which is possible in the case of created nature. The result is that though there is numerical distinction, there is no division, there is no division of the substance. For this reason, a one eternally changes into a two and stops at three-meaning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In a serene, non-temporal, incorporeal way the Father is parent of the 'offspring'.
Gregory of Nazianzus
Hispanic" and "Latino" are terms whose descriptive legitimacy is premised on a startling lack of specificity. The categories encompass any and all individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean; Latinos hail from Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and beyond-more than twenty countries in all. Such inclusivity is part of the problem: "Hispanic" and "Latino" tell us nothing about country of origin, gender, citizenship status, economic class, or length of residence in the United States. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala is Hispanic; so is a third-generation Mexican American lawyer. Moreover, both categories are racially indeterminate: Latinos can be white, black, indigenous, and every combination thereof. In other words, characterizing a subject as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an exercise in opacity-the terms are so comprehensive that their explanatory power is limited. When referring to "Latinos in the United States," it is far from immediately clear whether the subjects under discussion are farmworkers living below the poverty line or middle-class homeowners, urban hipsters or rural evangelicals, white or black, gay or straight, Catholic or Jewish, undocumented Spanish monolinguals or fourth-generation speakers of English-only.
Cristina Beltrán (The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity)
Anderson’s use of the word ‘grotesque’ is quite important in this context. In its usual sense in reference to human beings it connotes disgust or revulsion, but Anderson’s use is quite different. To him a grotesque is, as he points out later, like the twisted apples that are left behind in the orchards because they are imperfect. These apples, he says, are the sweetest of all, perhaps even because of the imperfections that have caused them to be rejected. He approaches the people in his stories as he does the apples, secure in his knowledge that the sources or natures of their deformities are unimportant when compared to their intrinsic worth as human beings needing and deserving of understanding. This approach is based on intuition rather than objective knowledge, and it is the same sort of intuition with which one approaches the twisted apples; he believes that one dare not reject because of mere appearance, either physical or spiritual; that appearance may mask a significant experience made more intense and more worthwhile by the deformity itself. In the body of the work proper, following this introductory sketch, Anderson has set up an organizational pattern that no only gives partial unity to the book but explores systematically the diverse origins of the isolation of his people, each of whom is in effect a social displaced person because he is cut off from human intercourse with his fellow human beings. In the first three stories Anderson deals with three aspects of the problem of human isolation. The first story, ‘Hands,’ deals with the inability to communicate feeling; the second, ‘Paper Pills,’ is devoted to the inability to communicate thought; and the third, ‘Mother,’ focuses on the inability to communicate love. This three-phased examination of the basic problem of human isolation sets the tone for the rest of the book because these three shortcomings, resulting partially from the narrowness of the vision of each central figure but primarily from the lack of sympathy with which the contemporaries of each regard him, are the real creators of the grotesques in human nature. Each of the three characters has encountered one aspect of the problem: he has something that he feels is vital and real within himself that he wants desperately to reveal to others, but in each case he is rebuffed, and, turning in upon himself, he becomes a bit more twisted and worn spiritually. But, like the apples left in the orchards, he is the sweeter, the more human for it. In each case the inner vision of the main character remains clear, and the thing that he wishes to communicate is in itself good, but his inability to break through the shell that prevents him from talking to others results in misunderstanding and spiritual tragedy. David D. Anderson “Sherwood Anderson’s Moments of Insight
David D. Anderson (Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation (American Authors and Critics Series))
The opinions about deity that hold pride of place are in number: atheism, polytheism and monotheism. With the first two the children of Greece amused themselves. Let the game go on! Atheism with its lack of a governing principle involves disorder. Polytheism with a plurality of such principles, involves faction and hence the absence of a governing principle, and this involves disorder again. Both lead to an identical result-lack of order, which, in turn, leads to disintegration. Monotheism, with its single governing principle, is what we value-not monotheism defined as the sovereignty of a single person (after all, self-discordant unity can become a plurality) but the single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action and the convergence towards their source of what springs from unity-none of which is possible in the case of created nature. The result is that though there is numerical distinction, there is no division, there is no division of the substance. For this reason, a one eternally changes into a two and stops at three-meaning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In a serene, non-temporal, incorporeal way the Father is parent of the 'offspring'.
Gregory of Nazianzus (The Five Theological Orations)
Virtue No Ism (The Sonnet) What is this obsession with ism before human! Why are we still catering to ancestral stupidity! Are we really gonna let their shortsightedness, To define our capacity, character and destiny! Some of them might have had the vision of unity, Hence they spoke of peace and neighborly love. But most lacked the sight to live beyond ism, And we continue to prioritize ism over love. No ideology has a monopoly over virtue, Virtues are born of mind, not ideology. Yet all ideologies try to codify virtue, By doing so they only vilify all virtuosity. All virtues are but the descendants of love. To codify virtue is to ruin the universality of love.
Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament)
India and rest of the world has already taken the sustainable development concept, here two important key problems are context specific solutions and unity in diversity. As world has become one, hereafter no one can stop any foreign visitors, investments or anything that happens within nation. But due to pollution an over population everywhere is succumbed. To reduce population china took one child policy but failed due to lack of genetic diversity and male - femaela ratio and also working population. to meet this problem key solution only sustainable development that touches all scienctific and technological aspects. No technical advancements ahold be stopped but they have to regulated into eco friendly aspects. Industries should evolve into eco friendly and sustainable solutions and also banking sector. They should and should and should minimize pollution at any cost otherwise this chaos will continue and will lead disintegration of society and may also lead to civil war in future. so billionaires should consider humans ans humans just like them not as robots. So try to reach SDGs and policies for any industries that pollutes the environment. And once population is getting stabilized by 2030 as predicted by UN, if it stabilized then obviously fine and if it is not stabilized then it ie better to dismiss the concept of marriage and run into future with science.
Ganapathy K
Here it is claimed is the fatal defect of all monistic schemes: they disclose hopeless contradiction of our necessary laws of thought and truths of experience, as their inevitable corollaries. Thus Spinoza, having assumed that all real existence must be absolute, existence and therefore one is obliged to teach that modes of extension and modes of thought can both qualify and at the same time be the law; and thus, that phenomenal beings as real and true to our experience as any a priori cognition, or as this very law itself, are both modes of the One, although a part of them are qualified by size, figure, ponderosity, impenetrability, color; and the other part universally and utterly lack every one of these qualities, and are qualified by thought, sensibility, desire, spontaneity, and self-action. But this is not a mystery, it is a self-contradiction. The qualities of matter and extension cannot be relevant to spirit, nor those of thought, feeling, and volition to matter. They utterly exclude each other. Descartes was right: the common sense of mankind is right in thus judging. The proof is that just so soon as we attempt to ascribe intelligence and will to matter, or qualities of extension to spirit, utterly absurd and impossible fancies are asserted. Spinoza teaches us that the Absolute Being must inevitably have an immutable sameness and necessity of being so strict, as to necessitate its absolute unity. Yet he has to teach, in order to carry out this monism, that this monad exists, at the same instant of time, not only in numberless diversities of mode, but in utterly opposite modes, as for instance, as solid, liquid, and gaseous at the same instant...Or, worse yet, that this One so necessary, eternal and absolute in its unity, may at the same moment of time, hate a Frenchman and love a Frenchman in the two modal manifestations of German and Gaul, and may hate sin and love the same sin in the two manifestations, at the same moment, of good souls and bad souls! Yet this Spinoza could not admit that infinite, eternal power and wisdom can make a beginning of real being objective to itself. Truly, this is 'straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel.
Robert Lewis Dabney (Discussions: Secular)
An individual may have quite strong faith, much grace, and rich evidence of fruitful service yet lack full assurance because of natural temperament. We are, after all, physico-psychical unities. A melancholic disposition de facto creates obstacles to the enjoyment of assurance—partly because it creates obstacles to the enjoyment of everything. In this context, it is significant that the exhortation of the author of Hebrews to approach God in full assurance of faith (Heb. 10:22) is ultimately based on his exposition of the humanity of Christ as a merciful and sympathetic high priest, who has taken our frail flesh in a fallen world, shared our infirmities, experienced our temptations, and known what it is to pray with loud crying and tears.25 Those who are of a melancholic spirit and are prone to doubt need to have their minds steeped in the assurances of divine grace that are to be found in such a Savior fully clothed in the garments of his gospel. Such believers often feel Christ to be distant, so what Hebrews does is bring him near.26 The one whose penultimate recorded words in the frailty of pre-resurrection humanity began with an interrogative “My God, why?” is the God who is near enough to those who feel themselves distant from him to bring them into assurance of his grace.
Sinclair B. Ferguson (The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters)
To my knowledge, the best summation of this ideology appears in D. R. Goyal’s authoritative history of the RSS. In Goyal’s rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows: Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.29
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
Inasmuch as the prime minister had just bestowed on me the highest honor of the State of Guinea, I could make a long speech. And so I was able to say: “I am worried about Guinean society, which is built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic. . . I am speaking to you, Mister President of the Republic, even though you are not here. Endowed by the Lord with all sorts of natural and culture resources, Guinea, paradoxically, stagnates in poverty. . . I am concerned about the young people; they have no future because they are paralyzed by chronic unemployment. I am also concerned about national unity, cohesion, and harmony, which are greatly compromised by the lack of political dialogue and the refusal to accept differences. In Guinea, the law, justice, ethics, and human values no longer provide a frame of reference and a safeguard to regulate social, economic, and political life. Democratic freedoms are taken hostage by ideological trends that can lead to intolerance and dictatorship. In the
Robert Sarah (God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith)
Indeed, the first thing to be noticed is the complexity of the notions of apokatastasis that Clement received, as they were already present in various traditions with which he was acquainted: – the idea of ἀποκατάστασις in Stoic philosophy, which was characterized by necessity and an infinite repetition; – the notion of eschatological universal ἀποκατάστασις as described in Peter's speech in the Acts of the Apostles, who connects it with the return of Christ and with comfort and consolation coming from God; – the "Gnostic" (and especially "Valentinian") concept of ἀποκατάστασις which was generally neither holistic [e.g., denied physicality] nor universal; – the notion of an eschatological intercession of the just and of the salvation of the damned from the "river of fire" in the Apocalypse of Peter, which Clement considered to be divinely inspired; – Irenaeus's concept of ἀνακεφαλαίωσις [recapitulation] and of ἀναστασις-ἀποκατάστασις, which Clement very probably knew; – Bardaisan's clear concept of the eventual universal ἀποκατάστασις in which, thanks to instruction, "the fools will be persuaded," "the lacks will be filled," and "there will be safety and peace, as a gift of the Lord of all natures" (a concept that Clement may indeed have known); – the eschatological notion of ἀποκατάστασις as a return to unity in Pantaenus, a notion that Clement knew very well and indeed is preserved precisely by him (whatever its exact formulation by Pantaenus himself was). (pp. 119-120)
Ilaria Ramelli (The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena)
The Byzantines are logical and organized. They operate like a machine, like a catapult, for example. Everything works well when all steps take place as they should. But they are trained to follow rules, not to think for themselves. We, on the other hand, are good at improvising but lack control, we are, to a great extent, undisciplined, but have unity of Cause.
John Elray (Khalifah: A Novel of Conquest and Personal Triumph)
(If the expected does not occur—in event, reward, or punishment—the work may seem lacking in artistic unity, coherence, and integrity and can sorely surprise or disappoint the audience.)
Paula LaRocque (The Book on Writing)
1. The analysis of a nature: the reasoning of freedom from unity and multiplicity A. The formulation of the reasoning All phenomena-such as sprouts-do not really exist, because they lack unity and multiplicity, just as a reflection in a mirror. B. The three modes of the reason The subject of this reasoning is just mere appearances without examination and analysis. The subject property that applies to this subject is as follows: These mere appearances are not a real unity, because they possess many parts. Each of these parts can in turn be broken down into many subparts. Since this process can be infinitely repeated, there is not a single smallest particle that is a really existent and indivisible unity. Without even one real building block, how could you put together many so as to create a really existent thing? Consequently, there can be nothing that is a real multiplicity, because there is no real unity to begin with that could build up such a multiplicity. To be sure, this reasoning does not negate the mere conventionality that one thing has many parts. The point here is that neither the thing in question nor its parts really exist by themselves. Thus, what is denied is not the mere appearance of unity and multiplicity on the level of seeming reality but the existence of any unity or multiplicity that is really established and findable as such.
Karl Brunnhölzl (The Center of the Sunlit Sky: Madhyamaka in the Kagyu Tradition (Nitartha Institute Series))
He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by bit, and was welded into a much more familiar personality than the one he had chased after in his dreams. This figure was far more genuine, far stronger, and more richly endowed. It was no mere dead stump of an ideal, but a living thing, full of infinite shifting possibilities playing through it and shaping it to a thousand fold unity.
Jens Peter Jacobsen (Niels Lyhne)
Each confession understood the church in terms of what it believed its own adherents possessed and the others lacked, so Catholics prided themselves in the unity and visibility of their church, Protestants in their doctrinal impeccability.
David J. Bosch (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission)
Only when the brain-mind system is free from interpretations, do the neuronal field and the pre-space structure become identical. In this situation, the perception of reality is unitary, without ego and with a lack of any duality. In this situation, pure consciousness and a feeling of an all-embracing unity and luminosity is [sic] perceived. All the systems that spiritual leaders have developed . . . have had the goal of arriving at this direct perception of the pure pre-space structure.
David Wilcock (The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies)
And allowing oneself to remain vulnerable to disease remains a legal privilege today. Dictionaries aside, what it means to have a conscience may be no more clear to us now than it was in 1898. We do recognize when it is lacking—she has no conscience, we say. But what exactly is missing? I put this question to my sister, who teaches ethics at a Jesuit college and is a member of the North American Kant Society. “It’s tricky,” she says. “In the eighteenth century, Kant wrote that we have a duty to ourselves to examine our conscience. This implies that it’s not transparent, that it must be scrutinized and deciphered. Kant thought of conscience as an inner judge and used the metaphor of a courtroom to explain its operation. In the courtroom of conscience, the self is both judge and judged.” I ask her if this means our conscience emerges from thought and is a product of our minds. “It’s an evolving concept,” she says. “It may have once been more closely associated with the emotions, but we still say we feel a pang of conscience—it involves a unity of thought and feeling.” Kant, she tells me, called the inner judge a “scrutinizer of hearts.” “The part that’s tricky,” my sister says, “is how you discern between a sense of discomfort and what your conscience is telling you.” This question remains with me, and I am disturbed by the possibility that I could mistake the call of my conscience for something else. I ask a former professor of mine, a novelist who teaches the Old Testament as literature, how one recognizes one’s own conscience. She looks at me sternly and says, “It’s a very distinct feeling. I don’t think one’s conscience is easily confused with any other feeling.
Eula Biss (On Immunity: An Inoculation)
FUCK "UNITY"!! What a pathetic way of thinking. How arrogant of Progressives to think that my hopes and dreams mirror their hopes and dreams. What an absolute bore.... what an total lack of originality or individuality... I believe in individual liberty. I am an extremist on the topic of individual liberty, precisely because I value original thinking and original accomplishments. Fuck unity of purpose. Fuck collectivism. My life is not your life. I have my own path. Get out of my way.
A.E. Samaan
Constant population movements and an unsettled lifestyle reinforce loyalty to the clan at the cost of strong patriotism. In other words, identity articulated in the context of the clan has endured despite a common heritage of Somali language, which would ordinarily bring about a strong Pan-Somali consciousness. In light of this, Somalia’s current state of political factionalism and lack of common unity offer a unique study in ethnonationalistic identity. This is more fascinating because Somalia is the one country in Africa that comes closest to having a common linguistic heritage, which often serves as the glue that holds a people together as a homogenous society. But the society is too steeped in “clan familism”—that is, a persistent orientation to the economic interests of the nuclear family.52 As this phenomenon continues to manifest in the form of clan and subclan rivalries, it demands that scholars take a closer look at the concept of ethnicity, hence the argument made elsewhere contra the ethnonationalist paradigm that posits that ethnicity is the root of nationalism and that true nations are ethnic nations.53 The example of Somalia reveals that ethnic conflict is not solely a problem of multiethnic states; it is also a problem of homogenous groups where political practices fail to take into account the people’s inherited culture and sensibilities, especially where poverty is common.
Raphael Chijioke Njoku (The History of Somalia (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations))
This country is indeed in a melancholy situation; sunk in ease, devoted to the pursuits of gain, incumbered with a complicated and perplexed constitution, divided among themselves in interest and sentiment, they seem afraid of every thing.” While deteriorating in their economy and lack of national unity, as Adams now saw it, and with a deep gap between rich and poor, they remain “too complacent,” with a faded pride in the “strong sense of independence and republican temper” that was once so vital a trait of the national character.
Barbara W. Tuchman (The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution)
Quotes By Transcendologist Kurt Kawohl 1941 - If the medieval practices and the medieval beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that are based on superstitions were eliminated, then we could start building a rational and logical belief system that is based on truth and an understanding of spirituality. This is the value of truthfulness and rationality. The goals of ALL religions are the same; a deserved, appropriate, just finale. God is the rational Purity that does not require servitude, ritualistic prayers or a forced slavery in order for the soul to be a part of that Purity for eternity. God is spiritual, the progressive and accumulative spiritual intelligence of all the righteous souls who have passed into the spiritual realm. God does not and never has meddled in the tangible universe. It is of no importance during our physical life whether God exists or not if one so chooses. Whether or not one believes in a spirit or God really makes no difference to God. Righteous living will determine the continuance and destiny of our spirit/soul. Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Bahá'u'lláh, Zoroaster, Ahmad, Nanak and many others of various faiths are believed to have achieved spiritual enlightenment by mastering the art of spiritual transcendence. Everything in the universe follows the universal laws which separate the physical and the spiritual existence. Energy is power, vigor, liveliness, intensity. It is a measurable quantity, without reference to its nature or source. Energy, or life is a fundamental attribute and function of the universe. Our bodies build up and harness a minute amount of spiritual energy that is transferred into the spiritual dimension upon our death. Then this spiritual energy is limitless because it lacks resistance and this energy can assimilate as a unity or be separate and individual. It is this spiritual energy that is God. It is a composition of the spiritual intellect of the universe, of every soul that has passed from the physical universe into the spiritual universe. It can create a spiritual existence of beauty that is beyond the imagination…my spirit has experienced it.
Kurt Kawohl
That logic of American partisanship came under a more sustained and ultimately more effective assault in the Progressive Era, however, precisely because of its relation to the logic of the Constitution. As we have seen, the early progressives critiqued the American system for lacking coherence and sacrificing responsiveness, energy, and effectiveness in government for the sake of stability, safety, and cohesion in society. They argued that this trade-off was neither successful nor necessary, and that unity could be achieved by unified leadership, especially presidential leadership, not by aimless negotiation. So they sought a politics in which different parties offered thoroughly distinct and comprehensive policy programs, the public selected among them on Election Day, and then the winning party would have essentially unlimited power to pursue its program until the public voted for someone else. The competition among factions in society would not be resolved by their bargaining within the institutions of government but by voters choosing among them at the ballot box and letting whichever won a majority deploy all the powers of government in the service of its vision.
Yuval Levin (American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again)
One of the grossest misconceptions about the Hindu movement, is that it is an artificial creation of political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena. In reality, there is a substratum of Hindu activist tendencies in many corners of Hindu society, often in unorganized form and mostly lacking in intellectual articulation. To this widespread Hindu unrest about the uncertain future of Hindu culture, a discursive expression has been given by a small but growing group of independent writers.
Koenraad Elst (Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism)
That the Congress had to stress on the need for Hindu–Muslim unity as a goal in itself showed that this unity was lacking and needed to be achieved (after all they had no Hindu–Christian or Hindu–Parsi unity goals).
Vikram Sampath (Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966)
Poverty can be said to be the by-product of colonisation or lack of mental development.
Mwanandeke Kindembo (Destiny of Liberty)
While people are given freedom to vote, they still lack the education to know whom they are voting, and why they are doing the voting in the first place.
Mwanandeke Kindembo (Destiny of Liberty)
Our lack of praise may actually be the biggest cause of our divisions. Once we stop worshipping, all hope for unity is lost.
Francis Chan (Until Unity)
Here again we see the power of a great man to bring order out of ceaseless broils and command harmony and unity to be his servants, and how the lack of such men has to be paid for by the inestimable suffering of the many.
Winston S. Churchill (A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Collection: A One-Volume Abridgment by Christopher Lee)
the threat today is not western religions, but psychology and consumerism. is the Dharma becoming another psychotherapy, another commodity to be bought and sold? will western Buddhism become all too compatible with our individualistic consumption patterns, with expensive retreats and initiations, catering to overstressed converts, eager to pursue their own enlightenment? let’s hope not, because Buddhism and the west need each other. despite its economic and technologic dynamism, western civilisation and its globalisation are in trouble, which means all of us are in trouble. the most obvious example is our inability to respond to accelerating climate change, as seriously as it requires. if humanity is to survive and thrive over the next few centuries, there is no need to go on at length here about the other social and ecological crisis that confront us now, which are increasingly difficult to ignore [many of those are considered in the following chapters]. it’s also becoming harder to overlook the fact that the political and economic systems we’re so proud of seem unable to address these problems. one must ask, is that because they themselves are the problem? part of the problem is leadership, or the lack of it, but we can’t simply blame our rulers. it’s not only the lack of a moral core of those who rise to the top, or the institutional defamations that massage their rise, economical and political elites, and there’s not much difference between them anymore. like the rest of us, they are in need of a new vision of possibility, what it means to be human, why we tend to get into trouble, and how we can get out go it, those who benefit the most from the present social arrangements may think of themselves as hardheaded realists, but as self-conscious human beings, we remain motivated by some such vision, weather we’re aware of it or not, as why we love war, points out. even secular modernity is based on a spiritual worldview, unfortunately a deficient one, from a Buddhist perspective.
David R. Loy (Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution)
The Church thus wonderfully instituted could not cease to exist with the death of its Founder and of the Apostles, the pioneers of its propagation, for its mission was to lead all men to salvation without distinction of time or place. "Going therefore, teach ye all nations" (Matt. 28:19). Nor could the Church ever lack the effective strength necessary for the continued accomplishment of its task, since Christ Himself is perpetually present with it, according to His promise: "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (Matt. 28:20). Hence not only must the Church still exist today and continue always to exist, but it must even be exactly the same as it was in the days of the Apostles. Otherwise we must say - which God forbid - that Christ has failed in His purpose, or that He erred when He asserted of His Church that the gates of hell should never prevail against it (Matt. 16:18)l;
Pope Pius XI (On Fostering True Religious Unity: Mortalium Animos)
Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia, conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in a regime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect external measures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unity could only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way of thinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level. Then the marriage could even lack "happiness," the "needs of the soul" could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familial unity should persist even when the man or the woman "does not agree," and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increase of so-called failed marriages and related divorces and separations is natural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now a change of an existential order. After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify what can be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them. All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significant to merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes in itself, not from the social perspective.) The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane and its bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious, indissoluble, Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more than a facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concerned in the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is important only to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, or simply put up with each other, that they remain together for simple convenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, is of little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that the family remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization—as if it had any right—for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the "indissoluble" Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permits divorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedly for the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens in the United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than a puritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized free love.
Julius Evola (Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul)
The measure of our fear when we are confronted by the thought of death is an indication of how much we have truly understood the nature of our life. The less afraid we are of death, the greater our feeling of freedom, our lack of anxiety, our joy of life, and our awareness of the power of the spirit. If we can completely rid ourselves of the fear of death and become totally aware of the unity of this life with eternal truth, then we shall achieve a state of total, inviolable peace. Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy (A Calendar of Wisdom: New Translation (Alma Classics))