Laws Of Detachment Quotes

I returned from the village. The house seemed unbearably dull. But I bore it. "There is no escape from loneliness and separation...." I told myself often. "Wife, child, brothers, parents, friends.... We come together only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us as we move away from them. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. My mother got away from her parents, my sisters from our house, I and my brother away from each other, my wife was torn away from me, my daughter is going away with my mother, my father has gone away from his father, my earliest friends - where are they? They scatter apart like the droplets of a waterspray. The law of life. No sense in battling against it...." Thus I reconciled myself to this separation with less struggle than before.

I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me, as I have perished on her. Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have each our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved, unextricated one from the other. It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction of being, that one is free, not in mixing, merging, not in similarity. When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest sources, the darkest outgoings, when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_" she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible _other_, when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark- ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the _other_, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver, having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere, one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she also, pure, isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction. Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect. VIII AFTER that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique, that we are all detached, moving in freedom more than the angels, conditioned only by our own pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being. Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing singleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un-dimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, we shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight out of the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us unbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall _be_, _now_. We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW. (From the poem the Manifesto)

We come together only to go apart again. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle & misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. The law of life. No sense in battling against it...

Uncertainty is fearful to the ego, which always wants to control reality, but from the viewpoint of detachment, a constantly shifting and changing universe must remain uncertain. If things were certain, there could be no creativity. Therefore spirit works through surprises and unexpected outcomes. We achieve peace of mind only when we accept the wisdom of uncertainty.

James Madison, the author of the First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting any law respecting an establishment of religion, was also an author of Article VI, which states unambiguously that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.” His later Detached Memoranda make it very plain that he opposed the government appointment of chaplains in the first place, either in the armed forces or at the opening ceremonies of Congress. “The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles.

To materialize your wish, the universe has to change the things around you. Your body is also one of those things. Drop the idea of ownership over your body and consider it as just another part of the universe. Otherwise either your wish will never materialize or it will materialize in a distorted way.

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

We’ve all encountered those people who out of the corner of our eye, from across the street, at magic hour appear astoundingly attractive, even god or goddess like: the way they move, the way the light hits them, invokes reverence and all, the impression. And then we got a closer look. Damn it. Let down. Good from afar, but far from good. Some people will never be more attractive than in that first impression, from a distance, in that light, at that time, in that way we saw them, when our hopes became highest and our wish fulfillment was fully let it. They will never look better than in that initial fuzzy edge clingups, impressions. The white shot. Some relationships are better in a white shot. More impressive in the impressions. Like in-laws, best to only see an hour a day, like neighbors, its while we have walls and fences, like that long distance romance that fell apart when you moved in together, like that summer fling that only lasted through August, that friend that became a lover that you now miss as a friend, like ourselves when we are a fraud. They are better from a distance, with less frequency, with less intimacy. Sometimes we need more space, it’s romance, it’s imagination. Distance is the flirt in a wing, it is frivolous, its mysterious, a fantasy, a constant honeymoon because we can’t quite see it, we aren’t quite sure about it, we don’t quite know it. It’s a fuck, it’s detachment, it’s separate, it’s public, it’s carefree, it’s painless, it’s for rent. And we like it that way, because sometimes it is better with the lights dimmed.

A quote from Alī, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammed, best explains the monk idea of detachment: “Detachment is not that you own nothing, but that nothing should own you.” I love how this summarizes detachment in a way that it’s not usually explained.

Detachment from the outcome frees us from the constraints of our limited perspectives, opening the door to possibilities we may have never imagined.

Detachment is a prerequisite for enlightenment

...But besides the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Government, there is an evil which ought to be guarded agst in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations. ...Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does not this involve the principle of a national establishment, applicable to a provision for a religious worship for the Constituent as well as of the representative Body, approved by the majority, and conducted by Ministers of religion paid by the entire nation. The establishment of the chaplainship to Congs is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles: The tenets of the chaplains elected [by the majority] shut the door of worship agst the members whose creeds & consciences forbid a participation in that of the majority. ...Better also to disarm in the same way, the precedent of Chaplainships for the army and navy, than erect them into a political authority in matters of religion. [Detached Memoranda, ca. 1817 W. & M. Q., 3d ser., 3:554--60 1946]

From your birth, they started feeding you the idea that the universe has only 3 dimensions and limited resources for which you have to fight with each other. If you detach from this idea and spend some time with yourself, you will realize that there are hidden dimensions from which a soul can manifest anything for itself.

The analysis of the last age, the 'dark age' or Kali Yuga, brings to light two essential features. The first is that mankind living in this age is strictly connected to the body and cannot prescind from it; therefore, the only way open is not that of pure detachment (as in early Buddhism and in the many varieties of yoga) but rather that of knowledge, awakening, and mastery over secret energies trapped in the body. The second characteristic is that of the dissolution typical of this age. During the Kali Yuga, the bull of dharma stands on only one foot (it lost the other three during the previous three ages). This means that the traditional law (dharma) is wavering, is reduced to a shadow of its former self, and seems to be almost succumbing. During Kali Yuga, however, the goddess Kali, who was asleep in the previous ages, is now fully awake. . . . let us say that this symbolism implies that during the last age elementary, infernal, and even abyssal forces are untrammeled.

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty … in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

Nothing lasts forever.

When you maintain a certain amount of detachment to what it is you desire, you will allow that very thing to manifest itself into your existence.

Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

A wise man is detached from the drama of the material world because he focuses instead on the source from which all dualities of light and darkness, good and evil, pleasure and pain actually originate.

For some reason she found that Allan Harrington's attitude of absolute detachment made the whole affair seem much easier for her. And when Mrs. Harrington slipped a solitaire diamond into her hand as she went, instead of disliking it she enjoyed its feel on her finger, and the flash of it in the light. She thanked Mrs. Harrington for it with real gratitude. But it made her feel more than ever engaged to marry her mother-in-law.

The old gods of revenge, the Furies, who are all women, put the family ahead of all other values; the new gods, mostly men, are for detached universal law that makes no exception for particular individuals, families, or cities.

The Law of Spiritual Detachment: Detachment and Non-resistance means to not resist moving ahead in harmony with the currents of life while maintaining and growing a sense of peace. Not allowing simple external things to hold you back.

You put a hard question on the virtue of discipline. What you say is true: I do value it—and I think that you do too—more than for its earthly fruit, proficiency. I think that one can give only a metaphysical ground for this evaluation; but the variety of metaphysics which gave an answer to your question has been very great, the metaphysics themselves very disparate: the bhagavad gita, Ecclesiastes, the Stoa, the beginning of the Laws, Hugo of St Victor, St Thomas, John of the Cross, Spinoza. This very great disparity suggests that the fact that discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror—But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

I returned from the village. The house seemed unbearably dull. But I bore it. "There is no escape from loneliness and separation...." I told myself often. "Wife, child, brothers, parents, friends.... We come together only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us as we move away from them. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false.

You're too straight, you just don't understand these guys' priorities. They don't expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don't even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather. It's something you just endure.

Ego contraction, however, prevents precisely the free expansion that enables us to find our connection to spirit. This is often described as the difference between the self and the Self. The self is the isolated ego clinging to its small reality; the Self is the unbounded spirit that can afford not to cling at all. Detachment means that you live from the Self instead of the self.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

Once music is detached from function, once it becomes a repertory art, it explicitly strives to define itself, out of itself, to become "mathemat- ical"—that is to say, to begin from premises and proceed to conclusions by interpreting its own universe, finding its own laws. Systems of harmony and counterpoint become tools for elaborate musical explorations. A great deal of Western music is as much a manifestation of idealism as is mathematics.

My son is not very complicated, Mariotta, although the artifice glitters. He’s afraid—” “Afraid!” Blue eyes, dead of feeling, looked into blue. “Afraid of what? Damned by the church and condemned by the law: what possible capacity for fear can heart and head still find? Oimè el cor, oimè la testa … After five years of villainy, I promise you, I have the refinement of a cow-cabbage.” “—Afraid I might puncture the cocoon of Attic detachment. What we see is acting, isn’t it, Francis?” “Is it?” he said derisively. “You won’t get your diamonds back, I fear, when the curtain comes down. And the name, please, is Lymond: a new medal: choose the trussell or the pile. My present face is the provident, forbearing one.

Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive. I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I am dead or alive. Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next. There are no observers. But I am an observer. I am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with something more than detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins, but before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, I will know which way the universe has chosen to sort itself out. At least, I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe’s resolution with which most of us are concerned.

There is some quite trivial, distant noise; a sound, moreover, which has nothin to do with me, to which there is not the slightest need for me to pay any attention; yet it suffices to wake me, and in no gentle way, either, but savagely, violently, shockingly, like an air raid alarm. The wheels, my masters, are already vibrating with incipient motion; the whole mechanism is preparing to begin the monotonous, hateful functioning of which I am the dispirited slave. I began to feel that if I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should suddenly become mad, scream, perpetrate some shocking act of violence in the open street. But worst of all was the knowledge that the laws of my temperament would forbid me even a relief of this kind. I was inexorably imprisoned behind my own determination to display no emotion whatever. Now I saw that I was in a street which I did not know very well. Night had fallen, the lights glowed mistily through a thin haze. It was as though, in some mysterious way, I had become the central point around which the night scene revolved. People walking on the pavement looked at me as they passed. Some with pity, some with detached interest, some with more morbid curiosity. Some appeared to make small, concealed sights, but whether these were intended for warning or encouragement I could not be sure. The windows lighted or unlighted, were like eyes more or less piercing, but all focused upon me. The houses, the traffic, everything in sight, seemed to be watching to see what I would do. To wait — with no living soul in whom to confide one's doubt, one's fears, one's relentless hope. Some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence. Coiling itself round me it knows I cannot escape. Imprisoned in its very fabric, I am like a small worm, a parasite, which the host harbors not altogether unwillingly. A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point. When this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure. No matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all.

The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view—and in this view alone—never for despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair—the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind—that's our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth—a task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion, and the illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.

Through the buzzing in her ears, she heard new sounds from outside, shouting and cursing. All of a sudden the carriage door was wrenched open and someone vaulted inside. Evie squirmed to see who it was. Her remaining breath was expelled in a faint sob as she saw a familiar glitter of dark golden hair. It was Sebastian as she had never seen him before, no longer detached and self-possessed, but in the grip of bone-shaking rage. His eyes were pale and reptilian as his murderous gaze fastened on Eustace, whose breath began to rattle nervously behind the pudgy ladder of his chin. “Give her to me,” Sebastian said, his voice hoarse with fury. “Now, you pile of gutter sludge, or I’ll rip your throat out.” Seeming to realize that Sebastian was eager to carry out the threat, Eustace released his chokehold on Evie. She scrambled toward Sebastian and took in desperate pulls of air. He caught her with a low murmur, his hold gentle but secure. “Easy, love. You’re safe now.” She felt the tremors of rage that ran in continuous thrills through his body. Sebastian sent a lethal glance to Eustace, who was trying to gather his jellylike mass into the far end of the seat. “The next time I see you,” Sebastian said viciously, “no matter what the circumstances, I’m going to kill you. No law, nor weapon, nor God Himself will be able to stop it from happening. So if you value your life, don’t let your path cross mine again.” Leaving Eustace in a quivering heap of speechless fear, Sebastian hauled Evie from the vehicle. She clung to him, still trying to regain her breath as she glanced apprehensively around the scene. It appeared that Cam had been alerted to the fracas, and was keeping her two uncles at bay. Brook was on the ground, while Peregrine was staggering backward from some kind of assault, his beefy countenance turning ruddy from enraged surprise. Swaying as her feet touched the ground, Evie turned her face into her husband’s shoulder. Sebastian was literally steaming, the chilly air striking off his flushed skin and turning his breath into puffs of white. He subjected her to a brief but thorough inspection, his hands running lightly over her, his gaze searching her pale face. His voice was astonishingly tender. “Are you hurt, Evie? Look up at me, love. Yes. Sweetheart… did they do you any injury?” “N-no.” Evie stared at him dazedly. “My uncle Peregrine,” she whispered, “he’s very p-powerful—” “I’ll handle him,” he assured her, and called out to Cam. “Rohan! Come fetch her.” The young man obeyed instantly, approaching Evie with long, fluid strides. He spoke to her with a few foreign-sounding words, his voice soothing her overwrought nerves. She hesitated before going with him, casting a worried glance at Sebastian. “It’s all right,” he said without looking at her, his icy gaze locked on Peregrine’s bullish form. “Go.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who  teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits  a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should  be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

Yet a much more fundamentally political dimension of the socially constructed nature of capital - nothing less than the specification of a parallel universe with its own natural laws and rules for the physical existence and subsistence of financial capital and its interaction with the other factors of production - has also often been overlooked in contemporary academic literature. Under the current monetary arrangements financial capital is a peculiar creature indeed. Money can be created ex nihilo at the stroke of a pen - or a keyboard - by a specific type of legal person entrusted with the task, not other legal or natural person. With the socially constructed ability to attract compound interest in a world where physical assets rot and break, it does not share the same physical reality with the mere mortal factors of production: even in cases where productive investments which enable the payment of interest in real terms can be identified, the compounding of interest on financial capital is not temporally limited to the period that the relevant physical assets can continue to produce exponential returns in real terms. Rather than representing accumulated wealth that could be "saved" to finance investment, the bulk of money disappears as soon as other factors of production are not willing to pay a tribute to induce its continuing circulation in the form of interest payments. In addition to the inherently political nature of specifications of money have been detached from virtually any substantive connection to the rules or the realities experienced by other factors of production in the physical world that is nonetheless supposed to achieve economic efficiency and a host of other objectives through monetary calculation and monetarily mediated social relationships deserves particular scrutiny.

How are Good Europeans such as ourselves distinguished from the patriots? In the first place, we are atheists and immoralists, but we take care to support the religions and the morality which we associate with the gregarious instinct: for by means of them, an order of men is, so to speak, being prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands, which must actually crave for our hands. Beyond Good and Evil, — certainly; but we insist upon the unconditional and strict preservation of herd-morality. We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable. We should probably support the development and the maturation of democratic tendencies; for it conduces to weakness of will: in "Socialism" we recognise a thorn which prevents smug ease. Attitude towards the people. Our prejudices; we pay attention to the results of cross-breeding. Detached, well-to-do, strong: irony concerning the "press" and its culture. Our care: that scientific men should not become journalists. We mistrust any form of culture that tolerates news-paper reading or writing. We make our accidental positions (as Goethe and Stendhal did), our experiences, a foreground, and we lay stress upon them, so that we may deceive concerning our backgrounds. We ourselves wait and avoid putting our heart into them. They serve us as refuges, such as a wanderer might require and use — but we avoid feeling at home in them. We are ahead of our fellows in that we have had a disciplina voluntatis. All strength is directed to the development of the will, an art which allows us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the passions (also "super-European" thought at times). This is our preparation before becoming the law-givers of the future and the lords of the earth; if not we, at least our children. Caution where marriage is concerned.

The interpreter should not turn narratives into law (for instance, by arguing that Acts 2:44–45 requires Christians to own all things in common) or rules into principles (for instance, by suggesting that the commandment to sell possessions and give alms [Luke 12:33] is not meant literally but that it points to the principle of inner detachment from wealth). Legalists and antinomians are equally guilty of hermeneutical gerrymandering to annex New Testament texts to foreign modes of ethical discourse.

The passing of years had made him indifferent to feminine beauty, and long association with the police had utterly calloused him to human misery. His manner indicated that he had detached himself from the scene of which he was a part. His body hulked between the prisoners and the door, which constituted a discharge of his duty. His mind was far away, occupied with the mathematical percentages of his prospects for winning on the races the next afternoon; daydreaming what he would do when he became eligible for pension; and rehashing in his mind an argument he had had with his wife that morning, thinking somewhat ruefully of her natural aptitude for delivering an extemporaneous tongue lashing, whereas he hadn’t thought of his best retorts until long afterward. His wife had a gift that way. No, damn it, she’d inherited it from her mother—that must be it. He remembered some of the scenes with his mother-in-law before she’d died some ten years ago. At that time, Mabel had been all worked up over the way the old lady used to have tantrums. That was before Mabel had got fat. She certainly had a good figure in those days. Well, come to think of it, he’d put on a little weight himself.

It was Sebastian as she had never seen him before, no longer detached and self-possessed, but in the grip of bone-shaking rage. His eyes were pale and reptilian as his murderous gaze fastened on Eustace, whose breath began to rattle nervously behind the pudgy ladder of his chin. "Give her to me," Sebastian said, his voice hoarse with fury. "Now, you pile of gutter sludge, or I'll rip your throat out." Seeming to realize that Sebastian was eager to carry out the threat, Eustace released his chokehold on Evie. She scrambled toward Sebastian and took in desperate pulls of air. He caught her with a low murmur, his hold gentle but secure. "Easy, love. You're safe now." She felt the tremors of rage that ran in continuous thrills through his body. Sebastian sent a lethal glance to Eustace, who was trying to gather his jellylike mass into the far end of the seat. "The next time I see you," Sebastian said viciously, "no matter what the circumstances, I'm going to kill you. No law, nor weapon, nor God Himself will be able to stop it from happening. So if you value your life, don't let your path cross mine again.

So I lived in their midst, always on the fringes, insignificant, and they spoke freely in my presence. I saw how little regard they had for us, how much they held us in low esteem. They did not know us, and were not really interested in knowing us either. By virtue of their faith, their mission, and their biases, they did not have to: they knew better than us, both what we needed and how we should live. I cannot discount the unparalleled work they did in education and healthcare. I would not have had a formal education had it not been part of their plan. The free dispensary was always full, rolling back childhood diseases in the region. I saw them clean the most putrid wounds with a straight face. Yet, their mission required locals to forfeit ancestral practices, including our indigenous languages, which we were forbidden from using in their presence. The essence of our being in the world, its core tenet, ingrained in us across generations, was being violently questioned. Their work demanded allegiance, utter surrender, from us. I did not realise this then, but these demands threw us off balance, divided us, made us doubt ourselves and weakened us. They birthed a cruel conflict in us, putting our loyalty to the test. We were inhabited by this childish and conflicting desire to please and resist them all at the same time. Our people claimed neither detachment from the world nor dominion over it. We did not have the universe and its mysteries, meant to be conquered, subjugated on one side, and humankind, the mighty owner of it all, on the other. We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead... we were all woven into the fabric of the world. They, however, had appropriated it, simplified it to make it intelligible and malleable. They had invented words and concepts that dismissed our more complex and comprehensive intuitive understanding of reality. There is no denying that, seen through their eyes, conceptualised in their terms, the world was unmistakeably coherent, logical. For those of us who embraced the mysteries of the world, the encounter was a matter of course, and a tragedy. I doubt we will ever fully grasp the exact extent of our distress. Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic. There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price. The sole measure of success is material. Our paths in life are already charted, marked out, and you can choose to follow... the path assigned to you. A promise of comfort, a ready-made life so enticing it warrants universalisation; a dream no human should be denied. Masters, gurus travel the world to guide lost peoples towards this path of salvation, readily resorting to violence to crush every resistance, driven by the firm conviction that their philosophy is the philosophy and their religion the religion. Perhaps it spread so far and wide due to the active proselytism inherent to the Western vision of the world, or maybe it was so easy to replicate because it was the most simplistic doctrine ever developed by humans—it did a better job of dismissing our diversity and disregarding the complexity of our being. Our material realities would become more bearable, that was the promise. It mattered not that this would devastate nature and leave our inner beings shuddering with anxiety.

Men who worship pain—thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies he had never been able to understand—they’re men who worship pain. It seemed monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance. He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate objects, toward refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed—but one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless motions of the unliving; no, worse, he thought—the anti-living. The same sense of detached unconcern remained with him while he sat in a Philadelphia courtroom and watched men perform the motions which were to grant him his divorce. He watched them utter mechanical generalities, recite vague phrases of fraudulent evidence, play an intricate game of stretching words to convey no facts and no meaning. He had paid them to do it—he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth—the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.

I speak of distant things, from before the French Revolution. Perhaps one could say that these words might have been spoken by Montesquieu, perhaps. He pondered, “Who would have thought that a country could fall victim to its magistrates in collusion with political power?” He believed that a magistrate should be the mouth of the law, yet even the laws cannot be trusted, let alone magistrates, and even less so jurisprudence. Justice precedes Law, and Law precedes legislation. In those times, the law was reduced to the misguided opinions of a class of vain, self-important bureaucrats clinging to their own power. There is no will of the Constitution, but rather the will of the Class. The nation’s political culture was corrupted, and so, nothing more can be done, especially in an era where ethics is understood as the individual judgment of social values, detached from morality. Nothing anachronistic, we must admit...

They said goodbye which took another five minutes because kind people here, not used to phones, not trustful of them either, didn't want to be rude or abrasive by hanging up after just one goodbye in case the other's leave-taking was still travelling its way, with a delay, over the airwaves towards them. Therefore, owing to phone etiquette, there was lots of "Bye", "Bye", "Goodbye, son-in-law", "Goodbye, mother-in-law", "Goodbye", "Goodbye", "Bye", "Bye", with each person's ear still at the earpiece as they bent their body over, inching the receiver ever and ever closer on each goodbye to the rest of the phone. Eventually it would end up back on its hook with the human ear physically removed from it. There might be further insurance goodbyes even at this stage, out of compulsion to seal and make sure the matter, which didn't mean the person who'd gone through the protractions wasn't contorted in body and exhausted in mind by the effort of detaching from a phone conversation. What it did mean was that that conversation - without any anxious "Did I cut him off? Will he be hurt? Have I hung up too soon and damaged his feelings?" - had finally reached its traditional end.

Leaves fall, not out of weakness, but of knowing when to let go.

Why does Jesus regard the Father and himself as the best model for all humans? Because neither the Father nor the Son desires greedily, egotistically. God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends his rain on the just and on the unjust." God gives to us without counting, without marking the least difference between us. He lets the weeds grow with the wheat until the time of harvest. If we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us. This is why Jesus says also, "Ask, and it will be given to you.... " When Jesus declares that he does not abolish the Law but fulfills it, he articulates a logical consequence of his teaching. The goal of the Law is peace among humankind. Jesus never scorns the Law, even when it takes the form of prohibitions. Unlike modern thinkers, he knows quite well that to avoid conflicts, it is necessary to begin with prohibitions.

An unconditional equivalence of law with the results of any particular formal process, therefore, would only be blind subordination to the pure decision of the offices entrusted with lawmaking, in other words, a decision detached from every substantive relation to law and justice, and, consequently, an unconditional renunciation of any resistance.

The novel constitutes the milieu of perversion, par excellence, of all sensibility; it detaches the soul from all that is immediate and natural in feeling and leafs it into an imaginary world of sentiments violent in proportion to their unreality, and less controlled by the gentle laws of nature; 'The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women's health, the principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years.

A deep study in the law of detachment, supposedly there is wisdom in uncertainty. I have yet to find it. Uncertainty to me is filled with terror; all my demons live in the unknown. This is the season I am in because there were times in my life when uncertainty brought me so much joy and freedom. It is a surrendering. A surrendering. Eastern religion tells me to surrender to the unknown. It teaches that I must be willing to step into the unknown. That works when you are willing but what if I’m not. I am not too eager to step into the unknown right now in my life. I want certainty and stability. I’ve never wanted definitiveness more in my life and I believe that is where my troubles come from. It’s a law that by surrendering to the unknown you are surrendering to God.

Deepak Chopra says, in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, “The Law of Detachment says that in order to acquire anything in the physical universe, you have to relinquish your attachment to it.

I haven’t seen Molly in years . . . not since Montlake. Last night I ended up painting a mural of David and Goliath, like something from a Sunday School story, instead of painting the picture I’d been commissioned to paint. Now I’m behind. And I blame you.” “Me?” I was only half listening as I backed out of the parking lot and began to drive. I didn’t know where I was going. “Yeah. You. The David in my mural looks suspiciously like you. So your dead sister is obviously trying to tell me something. That, or she doesn’t like your chosen profession.” “David kicked Goliath’s ass, remember? Nothing to worry about.” I was conducting the conversation from a very mechanical, detached side of my brain, and I observed myself talking to Moses even as my thoughts were bouncing in a million different directions. “I don’t think Goliath’s ass was involved,” Moses growled. “If I remember right, it was his head. Goliath took a blow between the eyes.” “Yeah . . . right. That must be it. I got cracked between the eyes with a bottle of beer last night.” Was it just last night? “Guy laid my head open. I have a few stitches. I’m impressed, Mo. So now you’re a psychic too?” “You okay?” There it was again. The demand to tell him everything. “Yeah. All stitched up. Doesn’t even hurt.” I wasn’t lying. It didn’t hurt. But I was skirting the truth. I wasn’t okay. Not at all. “Well, that’s not surprising. You have the hardest head of anyone I know

Before the siege, a documentary film about the Davidians had been produced by the Australian version of 20/20 as a result of child-abuse complaints made by two ejected Davidians from Australia. The film footage was instructive. They had filmed Koresh giving lengthy sermons to his followers at the compound. When our profilers brought these tapes in for us to review, the man we observed, with his silky smile, air of superiority, and emotionally laden sermonizing, came across as a slick con artist more than anything else. But we were detached law enforcement officers, not naive seekers after enlightenment. As we examined the faces of his followers, they appeared absolutely mesmerized, hanging on his every word. Comparing various statements he had made on these tapes, as well as statements he made to us, we could also see how easily he altered his stated beliefs to serve whatever seemed to be in his interest at the moment.

The best vantage point for clarifying one’s moral responsibility when harm has occurred is in the dirt and blood alongside the wounded party, not at the safe distance of a detached jurist debating the details of the relevant legislation.

WHILE HOOVER DAM was under construction, California began building the Colorado River Aqueduct and Parker Dam. Arizona’s governor, Benjamin B. Moeur, viewed the dam as an act of theft. Like many Arizonans, he worried that Southern California would suck the river dry before Arizona was in a position to divert almost any of its own share, whatever that turned out to be, so he sent a small National Guard detachment to the construction site to make sure that neither the workers nor the dam touched land on the Arizona side of the river—a challenge for a dam builder, you would think. The National Guardsmen borrowed a small ferryboat from Nellie Trent Bush, a state legislator who lived in the town of Parker, a few miles downstream. As the boat approached the site, it became entangled in a cable attached to a construction barge, and the National Guardsmen had to be rescued by their putative enemies, the people working on the dam. Moeur later sent a message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in which he said that he had “found it necessary to issue a proclamation establishing martial law on the Arizona side of the river at that point and directing the National Guard to use such means as may be necessary to prevent an invasion of the sovereignty and territory of the State of Arizona.” By that time, his National Guard detachment had grown to include many more soldiers, as well as a number of trucks with machine guns mounted on them. Moeur also made Nellie Bush “Admiral of the Arizona Navy.” Nellie

Barthes announced, “I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay— allows me to ‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.” The lesson of Japan for Barthes was “the possibility of difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.” Like Wilde, Barthes does not locate Japaneseness in a place called Japan. But if for Wilde Japaneseness offered a new way of seeing, for Barthes, more complexly, Japan offered a new way of seeing himself being seen, which resulted in a new relationship to language. About himself, Barthes wrote, “The author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashes’; or better still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” Japan allowed Barthes to “descend into the untranslatable . . . until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the ‘father tongue’ vacillate—that tongue which comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers and proprietors of a culture which, precisely, history transforms into ‘nature.’”3 Barthes’s growing sense of the “repressive value” of text as the “level” at which “the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested” animated his delight in a Japanese “situation” that allowed freedoms he associated with images to trump the authority of text in the West.4 Reflecting later on this book about the “system of signs I call Japan,” Barthes emphasized that it “occupied a moment in my life when I felt the necessity of entering completely into the signifier, i.e., of disconnecting myself from the ideological instance as signified, as the risk of the return of the signified, of theology, monologism, of law.

As a 12th house stellium, the Law of Assumption has been my gold mine. I assume that something has already gone in my favor, detach from the idea, and then it shows up in my physical reality. This is a very spiritual house. So the more faith and detachment you possess, the better.

I suddenly find that I’m thirsty,” Radje said, his voice lowering to a menacing purr. “This human will do.” Radjedef moved, his hand closing around Kira’s arm before she could even flinch . . . and then his whole body froze. Mencheres slowly tightened his power around the Law Guardian until nothing twitched on his old enemy except his mouth. Kira’s eyes were wide as she stepped away from Radje, but she didn’t run. Smart. “You dare to assault me?” Radjedef hissed. “If I assaulted you, you’d be missing your head,” Mencheres responded coldly. “Yet I am well within my rights to stop you from putting your hands on one of my people without my permission, Guardian.” Radje’s gaze burned with the promise of vengeance, but both of them knew it was futile. He wasn’t strong enough to break Mencheres’s hold, and the laws were on Mencheres’s side. He allowed himself another moment to enjoy Radje’s helplessness before releasing him from the hold of his power. As soon as he could move, Radjedef backed away from Kira as though she were a snake. Then he caught himself, glaring at both of them. Mencheres smiled. Kira hadn’t moved since she’d detached her arm from Radje’s frozen grip, showing more poise than the ancient Law Guardian. From Radje’s furious expression before he schooled his features into blankness, he knew he’d been shown up by her.

A negative passion cannot become universal. You cannot imagine a federation of hatreds. You might almost wish to see such a scenario come about. But the worst situation doesn't always materialize. The fact remains that from this point on there is something which is completely beyond social regulation. If this is not the end of History, it is certainly the end of the social. We are no longer in anomie, but in anomaly. Anomaly is what escapes not only the law but the rule. What is outside the game, `offside', no longer in a position to play. The outlaw space bred violence; this offside space breeds virulence. But as to what exactly is being bred in anomaly, we have no notion. When a system becomes universal (the media, networks, the financial markets, human rights), it automatically becomes anomalous and secretes virulences of all kinds: financial crashes, AIDS, computer viruses, deregulation, disinformation. Hatred itself is a virus of this kind. Take Paulin, the man from Guadeloupe who went around murdering old ladies a few years ago. A monstrous individual, but cool, and with no apparent hatred in him. He had no identity, and was of indeterminate sex and mixed race. He committed his murders without violence or bloodshed. And he recounted them with an odd detachment. Being indifferent to himself, he was eliminating people who were themselves indifferent. But we can assume that behind all this there was a deep fund of radical hatred. Doubtless Paulin `had the hate', but he was too classy, too educated, to express it openly.

Detach it from sense of self-worth.

But as the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling points out, connectivity is not necessarily a symbol of affluence and plenty. It is, in a sense, the poor who most prize connectivity. Not in the sense of the old classic stereotype that 'the poor love their cellphones': no powerful group would turn down the opportunities that smartphones and social media offer. The powerful simply engage differently with the machine. But any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed. What Bruce Alexander calls the state of permanent 'psychosocial dislocation' in late capitalism, with life overrun by the law of markets and competition, is the context for soaring addiction rates. It is as if the addictive relationships stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism. The nature of this social poverty can be recognized in a situation typical of a social industry addict. We often use our smartphones to take us away from a social situation, without actually leaving that situation. We develop ways of simulating conversational awareness while attending to our phones, a technique known as 'phubbing.' We experience this weirdly detached 'uniform distancelessness,' as Christopher Bollas calls it. We becomes nodes in the network, equivalent to 'smart' devices, mere points for relay for fragments of information; as much extensions of the tablet or smartphone as they are of us. We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.

The point of the Fourth Amendment which often is not grasped by zealous officers is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.

To resist this downward pull that groups inevitably exert on us, we must conduct a kind of experiment in human nature with a simple goal in mind—to develop the ability to detach ourselves from the group and create some mental space for true independent thinking.

You are angry. Let the feeling settle from within, and think about it. Was it triggered by something seemingly trivial or petty? That is a sure sign that something or someone else is behind it. Perhaps a more uncomfortable emotion is at the source—such as envy or paranoia. You need to look at this square in the eye. Dig below any trigger points to see where they started. For these purposes, it might be wise to use a journal in which you record your self-assessments with ruthless objectivity. Your greatest danger here is your ego and how it makes you unconsciously maintain illusions about yourself. These may be comforting in the moment, but in the long run they make you defensive and unable to learn or progress. Find a neutral position from which you can observe your actions, with a bit of detachment and even humor. Soon all of this will become second nature, and when the Emotional Self suddenly rears its head in some situation, you will see it as it happens and be able to step back and find that neutral position.

The law of detachment reminds you that becoming too attached to any outcome—whether a particular goal or even a particular person—can ruin your life. You become desperate, and you clutch and cling. Detach from the result and remind yourself that the current condition is only temporary, just part of the process. You will get there because you are committed to putting one foot in front of the other until you win. Success is the only option.

Whenever you notice rising pressure and stress levels in your life, you must watch yourself carefully. Monitor any signs of unusual brittleness or sensitivity, sudden suspicions, fears disproportionate to the circumstances. Observe with as much detachment as possible, finding time and space to be alone. You need perspective. Never imagine that you are someone who can withstand rising stress without emotional leakage. It is not possible. But through self-awareness and reflection you can prevent yourself from making decisions you will come to regret.

1. You are responsible for each and everything that is happening in your life. 2. Judgments and blames are mental projections of your own inadequacies. 3. You create your own sickness, dysfunctional relationships, poverty and disasters in your life. 4. Self-righteousness, Arrogance / Ego isolate you and cause a sense of disconnectedness. 5. Only you can make the effort to work towards your own enlightenment. Be a light unto yourself. 6. Everything is fair and everything operates according to the cosmic laws. 7. Attachment is not love. Love flows in true detachment. Attachment, clinging and bondage bring misery. 8. Nirvana can’t be found in the Himalayas or in exalted places or with the grace of a Guru. Nirvana is a state of being. 9. Nirvana and Samsara are not two different aspects, and they are not opposites. 10. Many of us believe in an angry, judgmental God who has not forgiven him or her, but the truth is that we are already forgiven by the universe. 11. Grace is our natural state, not something that we have to struggle to reach. You are already blessed!

I don’t know if I’ve written about this and I haven’t talked about this much, so in a way what I’m about to say is self-condemnatory, but I think it is one of the greatest tragedies of the American evangelical church—and I think in large measure the British evangelical church—that in our focus on how to get saved, we completely lost the sense of what it meant not to be saved, but to be created. And so many Christians grew up with very little appreciation of the idea that we are made as the image of God. And so long as that was true, I think—and I’m not saying it was inevitable—but I think that made it far more likely that the law of God would be detached from the person of God. And then in understanding the whole of Scripture, the imperatives of the gospel would be detached from the indicatives of the gospel. The truest Reformed faith did not see the teaching of Scripture in the somewhat narrower spectrum of—for example, Martin Luther, or that stage of the reformation. Luther says things are either law or they’re gospel... But it seems to me that in the best Reformed tradition, the story of the Bible is not law and gospel; the story of the Bible is actually—the way I would put it, and I could demonstrate this from the literature—is the grace of creation as the image of God. Now, we use the word grace and we’ve almost defined it in terms of sin. The Reformed fathers didn’t define it in terms of sin. They defined it in terms of God—his graciousness—so that creation is an act of condescension—his relationship with Adam and Eve, making them as his image. We are non-existence that he brings into existence, and he didn’t need to bring them into existence... The creation of man and woman as the image of God and all that that means is an act of infinite grace. It’s nothingness being brought into creation to be a miniature likeness of God. And so the whole story is one of graciousness and promise implied in the statements that are made—now, that’s another long story. And therefore, in order that the man and the woman would grow and would grow in fulfilling their commission to, as I say, garden the whole earth. They’re given this little garden and they’re to extend it to the end of the earth, which for all I know, might have taken millennia of their family, but probably speedier development of technology than there has actually been. All of this sets our existence within the context of the person of God, the generosity of God, the integrity of God. But then comes the fall. The restoration, therefore... is always a means of answering the question, How does God restore us to what we were originally created to be and then take us on to what we were ultimately destined to be?

While all this was occurring, elsewhere about the Republic celebrators of the Fourth suffered shattered fingers, wounded heads, and blinded eyes from excessive use of fireworks. In New York City, eighty-eight conflagrations were started by fireworks. In Montgomery, Alabama, the first Confederate capital, thirteen guns were fired in salute to the reunited nation; in Richmond, Virginia, the second Confederate capital, flags of the United States and Virginia were hoisted together for the first time since 1860. In New Orleans, parades and rhetorical exercises honored the day, but in Charleston, South Carolina, only the Negroes celebrated. An attempt was made in Oronogo, Missouri, to raise the Confederate flag, but an opposing party gathered and threatened to shoot the perpetrators of the deed. In Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, the Confederate flag and a banner bearing the names of the Democratic party’s candidates for President and Vice-President, Tilden and Hendricks, were suspended from the dome of the county courthouse. In Wyoming, ranchers heard rumors from friendly Indians that General Custer had suffered a great defeat north of Powder River, but none believed the story. Late in the day, a Helena, Montana, newspaper received a brief dispatch dated July 2 from Stillwater: “Muggins Taylor, a scout from General Gibbon, arrived here last night from Little Horn River and reports that Gen. Custer found the Indian camp of 2,000 lodges on the Little Horn and immediately attacked it. He charged the thickest portion of the camp with five companies … The Indians poured a murderous fire from all directions, Gen. Custer, his two brothers, his nephew, and brother-in-law were all killed, and not one of the detachment escaped.

Vishnu maintains the worlds and upholds the dharma, or universal law, but he is also the deity of statecraft, rulership, and politics. That means he is a master of expediency. One of his gifts is the discernment to know when a righteous end justifies unusual means. His Shakti consort is Lakshmi, goddess of abundance, fertility, and wealth. She is the power of attraction that holds life together. Powered by Lakshmi’s Shakti, Vishnu represents both the love that upholds the worlds and the social mores that resonate with divine law. He is a deity of the enlightened public sphere, embodying classical virtues like detachment, generosity, and forbearance as well as the powers of governance, royal authority, and strategy.

She lived in a semi-destroyed city. When evil attacked it, half the people left or just went missing. Houses were left open. There was no interference with the search. Looking for the remains of former paradise or the generated evil, it didn't matter what she will find, it was all of equal value. Detached from history, from time, from life, she wandered around other people's homes in seeking. Knowing no rules, no laws, no belonging to anything, she existed in one of the cities somewhere in the west of one of the worlds. A city that can replace any city from any time as accurately as possible. It is the combination of the incongruous. This is all from everything. Absolute Chaos. No having knowledge even about herself, she was just looking for and solving something. She was finding manuscript texts that could not be solved. They were musical, religious, historical, belonging to different epochs, cultures. She was finding cards: playing, gimmick, geographical; periodic printing editions. "There are no more heroes" is written in an old newspaper. A hint of the same is visible in modern newspapers. "Everyone recounts what has already been said”, «The world loses magic”, "The world is deprived of naturalness”, "People suffer from morning frustration, and not only morning". The world is losing fun, the natural joy of life, people have become closed and stop communications with other people, full of uncontrolled emotions. Latest news reports: there are fires, deaths, floods, global warming. Obituaries are replenished every second. The world loses faith. The world is increasingly covered in darkness. War is inevitable. Mass destruction or disappearance. Plague approaches. The world's response to all this will be unpredictable. This will be the last time people will be surprised, even though many have forgotten how it happens.

Father Joe grinned. “What is good, and what is evil?” People shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. “Islam says good is doing whatever Allah has decreed is good. Evil is the opposite. Hinduism talks about ignorance that causes one to err and those errors are the karma of past lives that hurt one in the present. Not only is evil inevitable in creation, but it is said to be a good thing, a necessary part of the universe, the will of Brahma, the creator. If the gods are responsible for the existence of evil in the world, they either create it willingly—and are thus evil themselves—or are forced to create it by the higher law of karma, which makes them weak. “Buddhism disagrees. In fact, the whole of life for the Buddhist is suffering that stems from the wrong desire to perpetuate the illusion of personal existence. The Noble Truth of Suffering, dukkha, is this: ‘Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering—in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.’ Samyutta Nikaya 56, 11. According to that belief, good is the complete abolition of personhood, because that is what ends suffering. “The monotheistic religions go another route. Now listen to this: “‘When you reap your harvest, leave the corners of your field for the poor. When you pluck the grapes in your vineyard, leave those grapes that fall for the poor and the stranger. Do not steal; don’t lie to one another, or deny a justified accusation against you. Don’t use My name to swear to a lie. Don’t extort your neighbor, or take what is his, or keep the wages of a day laborer overnight. Don’t curse a deaf man or put a stumbling block before a blind man. Don’t misuse the powers of the law to give special consideration to the poor or preferential honor to the great; according to what is right shall you judge your neighbor. Don’t stand by when the blood of your neighbor is spilled. Don’t hate your fellow man in your heart but openly rebuke him. Do not take revenge nor bear a grudge. Love your neighbor’s well-being as if it were your own.’ “And overarching all these commandments is the supreme admonition not to be good but to be holy, ‘because I am holy.’” The class looked stunned. “Pretty specific, no?” He smiled. “Especially in contrast to the detachment from life of the Eastern religions. In this, we find perhaps the greatest piece of moral education and legislation ever given to mankind in all human history. Do any of you recognize the source?” “Gospels?” someone guessed. “It’s from the Old Testament of the Jews. From the book of Leviticus.

A detachment of General Cos's army appeared at the village of Gonzales, on the 28th of September, and demanded the arms of the inhabitants; it was the same demand, made for the same purpose, which the British detachment, under Major Pitcairn, had made at Lexington, on the 16th of April, 1775. It was the same demand l And the same answer was given—resistance—battle—victory ! The American blood was at Gonzales what it had been at Lexington; and between using their arms, and surrendering their arms, that blood can never hesitate. Then followed the rapid succession of brilliant events, which in two months left Texas without an armed enemy in her borders, and the strong forts of Goliad and the Alamo, with their garrisons and cannon, the almost bloodless prizes of a few hundred Texan rifles. This was the origin of the revolt; and a calumny more heartless can never be imagined than that which would convert this rich and holy defence of life, liberty, and property, into an aggression for the extension of slavery. Just in its origin, valiant and humane in its conduct, the Texan revolt has illustrated the Anglo-Saxon character, and given it new titles to the respect and admiration of the world. It shows that liberty, justice, valor—moral, physical, and intellectual power— characterise that race wherever it goes. Let our America rejoice, let old England rejoice, that the Brasos and Colerado, new and strange names—streams far beyond the western bank of the Father of Floods—have felt the impress, and witnessed the exploits of a people sprung from their loins, and carrying their language, laws, and customs, their magna charta and its glorious privileges, into new regions and far distant climes.

— Let’s say that it’s a good idea to see these things as they are, in order to gain some necessary detachment... — He gave a sad little smile. — I know, I know - the hardest peace treaties are the ones one has to conclude with oneself.

Pure freedom is chaos, anarchy, and moral decay. Freedom to do what you like—without any moral compass—can quickly result in the temptation to indulge in habits that may feel good momentarily but are wholly detrimental to yourself and others. Pure freedom detached from a higher sense of purpose results at best in overindulgence, lack of discipline, unfaithful relationships, and some minor drug use. At worst, it can result in the total deterioration of a society as moral relativism takes hold and humanity’s darkest proclivities become justified in the name of ‘doing what we like.’ Ordered liberty is at the heart of our founding, not pure freedom. Ordered liberty is the understanding that law exists to prevent individuals from infringing on the inalienable rights of others.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Greenspan chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System—a portentous name for the central bank of the United States, usually called, without affection, “the Fed.” By law, the mission of the Fed was, and still is, to maintain the stability of prices while promoting sustainable growth and full employment. The claims behind these goals possessed what I can only describe as a magical quality. They presupposed powers of prophecy and control wholly detached from economic reality. The chairman of the Fed, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, was expected to tame the whirlwind.

Intention combined with detachment leads to life-centered, present-moment awareness. And when action is performed in present-moment awareness, it is most effective. Your intent is for the future, but your attention is in the present. As long as your attention is in the present, then your intent for the future will manifest, because the future is created in the present.

As the smallest drop of water detached from the ocean contains all the qualities of the ocean, so man, detached in consciousness from the Infinite, contains within him its likeness; and as the drop of water must, by the law of its nature, ultimately find its way back to the ocean and lose itself in its silent depths, so must man, by the unfailing law of his nature, at last return to his source, and lose himself in the great ocean of the Infinite.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not a detached and distant deity, whom we cannot know or feel. He is closer than Mount Sinai; He does more than make laws and set rules; He is not a pillar of fire and cloud. He is personal, intimate, and involved in our lives. He appeared to our forefathers in the form of a Man and an Angel, and made covenant with them

This invisible, these ideas, cannot be detached from the sensible appearances and erected into a second positivity. The musical idea, the literary idea, the dialectic of love, and also the articulations of the light, the modes of exhibition of sound and of touch speak to us, have their logic, their coherence, their points of intersection, their concordances, and here also the appearances are the disguise of unknown 'forces' and 'laws.' But it is as though the secrecy wherein they lie and whence the literary expression draws them were their proper mode of existence. For these truths are not only hidden like a physical reality which we have not been able to discover, invisible in fact but which we will one day be able to see facing us, which others, better situated, could already see, provided that the screen that masks it is lifted. Here, on the contrary, there is no vision without the screen.

Intention combined with detachment leads to life-centered, present-moment awareness. And when action is performed in present-moment awareness, it is most effective.

Your intent is for the future, but your attention is in the present. As long as your attention is in the present, then your intent for the future will manifest, because the future is created in the present. You must accept the present as is. Accept the present and intend the future. The future is something you can always create through detached intention, but you should never struggle against the present.

Sunday Law of Pure Potentiality Monday Law of Giving and Receiving Tuesday Law of Karma (or Cause and Effect) Wednesday Law of Least Effort Thursday Law of Intention and Desire Friday Law of Detachment Saturday Law of Dharma (or Purpose in Life)

Yet al-Afghani rarely spoke of Islam in religious terms. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Islamic political thought was his insistence that Islam, detached from its purely religious associations, could be used as a sociopolitical ideology to unite the whole of the Muslim world in solidarity against imperialism. Islam was for al-Afghani far more than law and theology; it was civilization. Indeed, it was a superior civilization because, as he argued, the intellectual foundations upon which the West was built had in fact been borrowed from Islam. Ideals such as social egalitarianism, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit and preservation of knowledge had their origins not in Christian Europe, but in the Ummah. It was Muhammad’s revolutionary community that had introduced the concept of popular sanction over the ruling government while dissolving all ethnic boundaries between individuals and giving women and children unprecedented rights and privileges.

In our image of the physical world, we are obliged to introduce partial totalities without which there would be no laws and which partial totalities are precisely what we understood above by form. The combined interplay of laws could withdraw existence from structures which had become stable and bring about the appearance of other structures, the properties of which are not predictable. Thus there is a flow of things which supports the laws and which cannot be definitively resolved into them. To treat the physical world as if it were an intersecting of linear causal series in which each keeps its individuality, as if it were a world in which there is no duration, is an illegitimate extrapolation; science must be linked to a history of the universe in which the development is discontinuous. We cannot even pretend to possess genuine "causal series," models of linear causality, in our established science. The notion of causal series can be considered a constitutive principle of the physical universe only if the law is separated from the process of verification which gives it objective value. The physical experiment is never the revelation of an isolated causal series: one verifies that the observed effect indeed obeys the presumed law by taking into account a series of conditions, such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, altitude, in brief, that is, a certain number of laws which are independent of those which constitute the proper object of the experiment. Properly speaking, therefore, what one verifies is never a law but a system of complementary laws. There could be no question of supposing a point-for-point correspondence between the experiment and the physical laws; the truth of physics is not found in the laws taken one by one, but in their combinations. Since the law cannot be detached from concrete events where it intersects with other laws and receives a truth value along with them, one cannot speak of a linear causal action which would distinguish an effect from its cause; for in nature it is impossible to circumscribe the author, the one responsible as it were, of a given effect. Since we nevertheless succeed in formulating laws, clearly all the parts of nature must not contribute equally in producing the observed effect. The only valid formulation of the principle of causality will be that which affirms, along with the solidarity of phenomena in the universe, a sort of lessening—proportional to the distance—of the influences exercised on a given phenomenon by prior and simultaneous phenomena. Thus laws and the linear relation of consequence to conditions refer us back to events in interaction, to "forms" from which they should not be abstracted.

On Wednesday, he chaired another meeting of the War Council, enlarged by the addition of Bonar Law and the Unionist leader in the House of Lords, Lord Lansdowne. What had begun as a purely naval operation had now, in the face of Turkish and German resistance, swollen to a plan for a full-scale land invasion. Kitchener proposed to send the best of his new armies training in England, the 29th Division, which together with French, Australian and New Zealand divisions would bring the task force’s strength to almost seventy thousand men. They would land on the Gallipoli Peninsula. During the discussion, the Prime Minister kept his eye on Jackie Fisher, who seemed as usual detached, his faintly Oriental face with its yellowish complexion – a consequence of malaria and dysentery caught on active service in Egypt – staring out of the window, as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him.

apply these three questions to every option that comes your way: 1. Does this option violate God’s law? 2. Does this option violate a principle? 3. In light of the story I want to tell, what is the wise thing to do? If, while in the throes of decision making, you pause and temporarily detach yourself from the emotion and the urgency of the moment and ask these three questions, you will gain extraordinary clarity. They will enable you to see each option in a new light.

Science or Christ enters the cities or towns, and pleads the case of the senses that are imprisoned, and if he gets the case, the prisoner is set at liberty, or the senses detached from the idea, and the error in the mind explained.

16. The human soul degrades itself: i. Above all, when it does its best to become an abscess, a kind of detached growth on the world. To be disgruntled at anything that happens is a kind of secession from Nature, which comprises the nature of all things. ii. When it turns its back on another person or sets out to do it harm, as the souls of the angry do. iii. When it is overpowered by pleasure or pain. iv. When it puts on a mask and does or says something artificial or false. v. When it allows its action and impulse to be without a purpose, to be random and disconnected: even the smallest things ought to be directed toward a goal. But the goal of rational beings is to follow the rule and law of the most ancient of communities and states.