Materialistic Possessions Quotes

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.

Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness, possesses you. And in this materialistic age, a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.

The love that we feel for each other is not about the worldly things, those materialistic possessions, or great looks either. It’s about the breath I hold at your sheer sight. It’s about the constant drumming of my heart when you come near me, making me aware of your control on me, and how my senses crave for more of you. My love for you is ‘you’, and it will still take me eternity to figure out more of it!

Love does not claim materialistic possession of any kind, it yields complete freedom.

We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other words a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers. The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age.

A man worth being with is one… That never lies to you Is kind to people that have hurt him A person that respects another’s life That has manners and shows people respect That goes out of his way to help people That feels every person, no matter how difficult, deserves compassion Who believes you are the most beautiful person he has ever met Who brags about your accomplishments with pride Who talks to you about anything and everything because no bad news will make him love you less That is a peacemaker That will see you through illness Who keeps his promises Who doesn’t blame others, but finds the good in them That raises you up and motivates you to reach for the stars That doesn’t need fame, money or anything materialistic to be happy That is gentle and patient with children Who won’t let you lie to yourself; he tells you what you need to hear, in order to help you grow Who lives what he says he believes in Who doesn’t hold a grudge or hold onto the past Who doesn’t ask his family members to deliberately hurt people that have hurt him Who will run with your dreams That makes you laugh at the world and yourself Who forgives and is quick to apologize Who doesn’t betray you by having inappropriate conversations with other women Who doesn’t react when he is angry, decides when he is sad or keep promises he doesn’t plan to keep Who takes his children’s spiritual life very seriously and teaches by example Who never seeks revenge or would ever put another person down Who communicates to solve problems Who doesn’t play games or passive aggressively ignores people to hurt them Who is real and doesn’t pretend to be something he is not Who has the power to free you from yourself through his positive outlook Who has a deep respect for women and treats them like a daughter of God Who doesn’t have an ego or believes he is better than anyone Who is labeled constantly by people as the nicest person they have ever met Who works hard to provide for the family Who doesn’t feel the need to drink alcohol to have a good time, smoke or do drugs Who doesn't have to hang out a bar with his friends, but would rather spend his time with his family Who is morally free from sin Who sees your potential to be great Who doesn't think a woman's place has to be in the home; he supports your life mission, where ever that takes you Who is a gentleman Who is honest and lives with integrity Who never discusses your private business with anyone Who will protect his family Who forgives, forgets, repairs and restores When you find a man that possesses these traits then all the little things you don’t have in common don’t matter. This is the type of man worth being grateful for.

Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions...

Those who make no contributions to the society, show off with cars, motorcycles, credit cards and other meaningless material possessions.

Happiness is never found in materialistic things; it exists in things that cannot be physically possessed. Therefore, happiness is priceless. It can never be purchased.

Happiness is never found in materialistic things; it exists in things that cannot be physically possessed. Therefore, happiness is priceless. It can never be purchased. Love is happiness.

It is wiser to love who you are than what you want.

Hiding some people’s possessions would reveal the depth of their shallowness.

Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?

Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, The Titanic: how the might are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in AMerica is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. Is is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

If you become a king, you will be excited for a few days. Then you will become used to it. A new normal will set in. There will be exciting days, depressing days and mostly normal days. The net joy and sorrow will be same as you have now. Understand this illusion and enjoy the present moment.

The biggest and, outwardly, most trustful banker in history is God, the administrator delegated to eternity. And his credit institute is Paradise. Billions of faithfuls, for centuries, have invested in the hope of God, expecting redemption in eternal life. And since the celestial agency is going bankrupt, nothing is left of its capital, on which the hopes of six billion faithful consumers rely. Capitalism is a project of universal anthropology. Humans primarily are beings who desire. Not in an hedonistic, but in a materialistic sense: in the modern period, Westerners have looked for felicity through the possession of objects and the consumption of commodities.

God created us to love people and use things, but materialists love things and use people.

Whether you buy a new TV, or car, (etc.) or any other “material” thing is often “immaterial” to God.

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

He who dies with the most toys...dies a child.

First and foremost, shift your focus from materials to mind - from possession to people - and all the necessary happiness will come chasing after you.

The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.

Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.

I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and traveled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience and lighthearted gallantry. Among no other people have I ever felt the same sense of personal inferiority.

it is good to have wealth. It is great to leave in comfort. It is awesome to obtain possessions but, don't be too eager for material possessions for the same material possessions that bring joy are the same possessions that bring sorrow and pain and also leave a big had I know on our minds

In reality, for anybody to make real impact, he ought to be real. He ought to know the real position of materialism in purposefulness. He ought to understand the real reasons to act and the consequences for staying dormant. He ought to know the people who matter most in making true impacts and build the best synergy. As a matter of fact, he ought to be ready to embrace the real challenges that come with staying purposeful and making real impact. In fact, he ought to be able to turn what least counts and what is so uncanny to what really counts. He ought to be a mindset changer.He ought to know the real essence of time and timing and the value of patience and assertiveness. He ought to be strong. Living to leave footprints that count is what will make us count

So when I talk about the toxic culture that a materialistic society offers its members, what am I refering to? Well materialism is really a system of belief or behavior which considers material things and particularly 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.

intellectual imperialism. It has been, and still is, used to denigrate the orientation that many people still experience, that the world, and the other organisms with which we share this Earth, are alive, intelligent, and aware. It has been used to stifle the response of the heart to what has been presented to the senses. This has resulted in the creation of a conceptual monoculture that can’t see outside its limitations. Such imperialists have set out to conquer the superstitious natives inhabiting the dark continent, the place where the general populace lives. Midgley makes the point that arguments such as Day’s rest in a belief in human beings as “an isolated will, guided by an intelligence, arbitrarily connected to a rather unsatisfactory array of feelings, and lodged, by chance, in an equally unsatisfactory human body.”18 Or as Susan Sontag once described it: “consciousness harnessed to flesh,”19 as if there could be consciousness without the emergence of the self-organized system we call the body. This type of dissociation is a common side effect of the materialist and very reductionist view of the world most of us are trained in. But as Midgely notes, this system of thought is not reason, not science, but behavioral examples of, as she puts it, an unexamined, “exuberant power fantasy.” It is bad software, generated out of unexamined psychological frameworks. The evolutionary escalator metaphor and the assumptions of what constitutes intelligence (and value) that are embedded within it create, automatically, behavior that is very dangerous to every other life-form on this planet—in fact to the health of every ecosystem this planet possesses.

People of Earth know nothing about the heart. And the ones who do, address love as the need to bleed. And it is indeed so. This materialistic world of mentally-obsessed humanoids will never allow true love to show itself. The ones who possess a better understanding often walk alone, love alone, and feel alone, with their partners, groups and the world itself. Altruism is not a disease, a curse or a punishment, although it usually feels that way. Altruism is not even a price we pay for being spiritually free. Altruism, as death or birth, is just what it is. It just happens. The feelings attached to it are merely an awakening to the realization of the gap between oneself and the remaining of his prehistoric ancestors. One moves apart, into the future, in his evolution, and looks back at his brothers and sisters, trapped in the dogmas of the past, not realizing one can’t travel in time in body but only in spirit. And in this sense, none of us ever escapes the prison. Not in body. Only in mind. The mind has the key we look for outside ourselves. The heart helps the blind of spirit find it. And when humanity, as a whole, realizes this, it will ascend. But for now, unfortunately, many will have to suffer and pay with their own life, before this realization becomes common sense. Before the many books that have been written, are finally read by the masses and understood as they were intended by the creators. Before we realize that all the wars are being fought in our mind and merely being represented in the material playground like a theatrical play to which we all contribute with our own mental script, daily written and adjusted by the collective conscience and its concepts of right and wrong, true and false, justice and injustice, real and unreal.

You are familiar with The Decline of the West, in which Oswald Spengler takes note of the current decadence of painting, as well as literature and music, and concludes that the end of our cultural epoch has arrived. He is a philosopher, but one descended from the natural sciences. He arranges observations, he records insights and knowledge. He takes a graphic view of history. And if he sees that a line curves downward, he considers the trend a proven fact, so that zero must be reached at a particular time and place. And that moment represents the end, the decline of the West! "But his graphing has no bearing on any of my ideas and plans as architect and politician. I study the reasons why the line curves downward, and I try to remove the causes. But at the same time, I examine the reasons why at an earlier time the line curved upward! And then I set out to restore the conditions of that day, to awake anew the creative wall of that time, and to bring about a new crest in the constantly fluctuating curve of history. "No doubt about it! Our culture has entered on stagnation, it looks like old age. But the reasons for this state do not lie in the fact that it has genuinely passed its manhood, but rather that the upholders of this culture, the Germanic-European peoples, have neglected it and have turned their attention to material tasks, to technology, industry, to hunger for material possessions, to rapacity, and to an economic egocentrism that overwhelms everything else. All their thinking and striving reaches its only climax in account books and in the outward show of the worldly goods they possess. "I am overcome with disgust, a vexing scorn, when I see the way such people live and behave! [ . . . ] But thank God, it is only the top ten thousand who think along these lines. It is true that the whole of the bourgeoisie is already strongly infected and sickly. But bourgeois youth are still healthy and can be shown the way back to nature, to a higher development, to new cultural will, provided only that they do not become enmeshed in the treadmill of meaningless and wholly materialistic contemporary life, only to drown either in the cupidity of business or in the tedium of the middle-class workaday routine or in the corruption of the big city. “If we succeed in replacing the egocentric cupidity of business with a socialist communal wall and a work-affirming responsibility for the common-weal; in abolishing the tedium of middle-class workaday monotony by substituting for it the potential enjoyment of personal liberty, the beauty of nature, the splendor of our own Fatherland and the thousandfold diversity of the rest of the world; and if we put an end to the corruption of omnipresent degeneracy, bred in the warrens of buildings and on the asphalt streets of the cities of millions - then the road is clear to a new life, to a new creative will, to a new flight of the free, healthy spirit and mind. And then, my dear Herr Roselius, your bricks will form themselves into entirely new shapes all by themselves. Temples of life will be built, cathedrals of a higher cult will be raised, and even thousands of years later, the walls will bear witness to the exalted times out of which even more exalted ones were bom!” When Roselius had left Hitler’s room with me, he took my hand and said: “Wagener, I thank you for having made this hour possible. What a man! And how small we feel, concerned as we are with those things that preoccupy us! But now I know' what I have to do! In spite of my sixty years, I have only one goal: to join in the work of helping the young people and the German Volk to find internal and external freedom!

The avarice, the hunger for materialistic possessions and the dependency upon alcohol had gradually become stronger and stronger. And now, it was the sum total of what she was.

By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode - what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is a culmination of our experiences in a way that we - biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions - can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.

They are so motivated to possess that thing they want, that it can raise a specter of irritability in them until they get it. Sadly, covetousness is a beast that cannot be fed, a sort of materialistic gateway drug, and, if they do finally obtain the coveted object, it can be a setup to want more.

Imagine how much more crazy money would drive us if we could each drive more than one car at the same time.

is far easier to agree with the eminent researchers Penfield and Eccles and hypothesize that there exists a greater “organ” possessing enormous powers — which, although completely invisible to our present materialistic knowledge, certainly must exist. And it was this “organ” that John Traynor and Mason somehow activated — although, of course, quite inadvertently.

Christians today who focus almost the entire effort of their lives on earning more money and acquiring more possessions become “practical” materialists in their activity, since their lives would be not much different if they did not believe in God at all.

Had she become one of those materialistic fools whose entire sense of self and place lay in the possessions she owned? -Three Daughters of Eve

A large body of studies now supports the theory that people become more materialistic when they feel insecure about meeting their material and psychological needs, and that inequality aggravates feelings of insecurity. Wide gaps between rich and poor also create more opportunities to compare one's own lifestyle with others', which in turn leads us to focus on what possessions or experiences we might need to have in order to attain Veblen's 'complacency which we call self-respect.' In the end, Partanen moved back to Finland. Immediately, she said, she felt like she could put aside the success-signaling wardrobe that she wore in New York. No longer feeling pressured to focus on status, she felt freer to think about what she truly wanted to accomplish.

Minimize your kids' playtime possessions and you may find that they become less selfish and less materialistic, cherish more and take better care of the toys they do have, and have more time for reading, writing, art, and imaginative play. They might spend more time with real live human beings. They might even go outdoors!

The more you seek happiness in vacation, possession and admiration, the more miserable you'll be. Forgetting all that lift another soul, and you'll have all the happiness you truly need.

Because life is so much more than internet, bank balance, and materialistic possessions. Poets don't dream of becoming millionaires.

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions, was telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it was to the men about him.

Contemporary man has not been able to organize his life in such a way as to allow himself sufficient leisure- free time- for prayer and the contemplation of Divine Being. The reason for this is covetousness, that passion which St. Paul called 'idolatry' and St. John Climacus 'the daughter of unbelief ... blasphemy against the Gospel, a turning aside from God'. True Christian 'poverty' is unknown and uncomprehend by the world. And if we go on to say that this spirit of non-acquisition grows and develops until it embraces not only the material but 'intellectual' possessions too, to the majority of people this will seem madness. Men regard their learning as spiritual riches, not suspecting the existence of a higher knowledge and riches quite incomparable, since they bring with them a deep peace. In pursuing material comfort men have lost spiritual comfort. The materialistic dynamism which dominates our century is rapidly acquiring a demoniacal character; which is not surprising, since it is nothing else but the dynamics of sin.

It’s funny when people think we’re materialistic. Sure, as quickly as things come into our possession, they can be taken away. Was life really that different with or without those things? It wasn’t that Gala was sad about the things in particular; she mourned how happy they made her when she wore them. Because when she wore them, they were decidedly an extension of her. But when someone takes that from you, it cements how illusory that feeling is. When you come around to realizing it, you can never be totally held by objects. It’s the same for money. Money is always coming and going. It’s hard to be attached to it.

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

We exist in so far as we have performed adequately in the marketplace. Our longing for respect is only satisfied through the right sort of rank. It is easy to accuse modern humans of being materialistic. This seems wrong. We may be interested in possessions and salaries, but we are not on that basis ‘materialistic’. We are simply living in a world where the possession of certain material goods has become the only conduit to the emotional rewards that we crave deep down. It isn’t the objects and titles we are after; it is, more poignantly, the feeling of being ‘seen’ and liked that is only available to us via material means.

Dagny, we who’ve been called ‘materialists’ by the killers of the human spirit, we’re the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we’re the ones who create their value and meaning. We can afford to give them up, for a short while, in order to redeem something much more precious. We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body—and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement. Without us, they are corpses and their sole product is poison, not wealth or food, the poison of disintegration that turns men into hordes of scavengers. Dagny, learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce. But the looters—by their own stated theory—are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter. Why don’t you take them at their word? They need railroads, factories, mines, motors, which they cannot make or run. Of what use will your railroad be to them without you? Who held it together? Who kept it alive? Who saved it, time and time again? Was it your brother James? Who fed him? Who fed the looters? Who produced their weapons? Who gave them the means to enslave you? The impossible spectacle of shabby little incompetents holding control over the products of genius—who made it possible? Who supported your enemies, who forged your chains, who destroyed your achievement?

I have seen people with smiling faces and feeling lonely desolate inside their hearts. I have seen people with public success and private failures in their life. I have seen most of us chasing small highs in their life rather than trying to achieve something concrete. I have seen big giants losing basic moral values for small profits in their materialistic pursuit. I have seen people dancing whole day to the tunes of life and crying alone at midnight. I have seen best of relationships breaking off with the test of time. I have seen young teenagers with broken hearts and old ones with cracked minds. And you know what this is not the end of the list. To put it simple, I just wish to say that, life is short. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself trying to overdo everything. Don’t hanker after all the things you see others doing or achieving. Have some good moral values in your life. Be with friends who possess golden hearts rather than gold in their pockets or lockers. Keep few but good relationships. Have absolute faith in God and yourself. And try to be simple yet Happy. In the end what matters is not the number of cars you drive or money you possess in your bank account but what matters most is how well you sail through the winds of life against all the storms and hurricanes past over you. Think what makes you – YOU.

She liked materialistic people who prioritized money and worldly possessions. She liked them because they were predictable, like a dog at the track chasing the mechanical hare. In the end, if they came out ahead, it was almost guaranteed that they wouldn’t complain. Their friendship could be bought, literally, and their actions and reactions were always oriented towards the same thing—money.

Logically, there is nothing in Buddhism that possess free will. If all ingredients in Buddhism are non-Selves that participate in an elaborate system of karmic determinism, then, just as with scientific atoms and the scientific forces that act on these atoms, there is no agent that has free will, hence no agent that can break out of this system (i.e. to attain "enlightenment"). Just as it is absurd for a scientific materialist to claim that a bunch of atoms under the direction of atomic forces could ever become "enlightened" (what could such an assertion possibly mean in relation to atoms and atomic forces?), so it is surely every bit as absurd for Buddhists to claim that non-Self entities and processes under the karmic law of "cause and effect" ever become "enlightened.

It is from the point of view of how does a culture meet the needs of human beings and how does it promote healthy or unhealthy development that we have to judge any society. Now we have the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this is how we measure success and wealth. In a materialistic society we measure success by the possession or the control or the production of matter, of materials. That's what it means to be materialistic, it is materials that matter. Well, is that really the true measure of a human society? It is one measure, but is it a true measure of a successful society? Can a society be called "successful" because it produces more matter or controls or owns more matter than some other society? I would suggest that an equally important measure of a society and a culture and a system is to what degree does it meet human needs and how well does it promote healthy human development and to what degree or in what ways does it undermine it. So what is the nature of human nature? Well.. again, in this system, it is believed and often thought that human nature is essentially selfish, individualistic, aggressive and competitive. That's human nature. And so when somebody behaves that way, you say "oh well.. what can you do.. it is human nature.." But I believe that to speak of that is to make a rather elementary mistake. Which is to take this society as the standard over how human beings are supposed to be. It's true that we are taught to behave that way, as a matter of fact, not only we are taught to behave that way, the most successful people in this society do behave that way. That's how they become successful. But what if that is not human nature? What if that is a distortion of human nature? What if, in fact, our nature demands something else entirely? To look at human nature, we need to look at how human beings developed through aeons and then we have to look at what are the needs of the human child and what needs does the human being actually have. And rather than trying to determine the nature of human nature from our human behavior in certain situations, let's look at it from the point of view of their needs. And then, what I think we will find, it is not so much that there is human nature that predicts certain behaviors, because there are so many different human behaviors.. I mean you can have a Hitler or you can have a Jesus or a Martin Luther King. These are all human beings. So what then is human nature? What if we understood that there isn't so much a human nature that predicts human behavior, but what there actually is, is a human nature that means that we have certain needs. And if those needs are met, we are going to behave in predictable ways. And if those needs are not met, we are also going to behave in predictable ways. So it is not our behavior that defines our nature, but our needs that define our nature. And the behavior reflects the degree to which those needs are met or they are not met. What if we look from that point of view? Well.. what do we find from that point of view? And how would it looking at human nature from that angle lead us to understand what we call physical or mental pathology? And I say "what we call" because diagnoses and pathology and so on are just a certain way of looking at something. It doesn't necessarily reflect reality. Or it might describe a certain reality but it doesn't necessarily explain reality. And we have to make a distinction between descriptions and explanations.

In a materialistic world you can take it all from me My superficial beauty My intelligence and integrity Just please don't take my mind With all my memories stored Where loved ones still reside I need not eyes to see it Nor eyes to gaze upon It is the birthplace of my dreams And they fuel me to live on Just please don't take my mind Possessions are meaningless without memory

We lose peace of mind when we indulge in the materialistic things. We see our reflections in these possessions and properties and attach ourselves to the point of becoming saddened by them. These possessions gradually become our identity and these identities start disturbing us with time.

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.

I began lamenting the terrible social consequences of materialism and my view that the less-than-laudable moral condition of America in general and Santa Cruz in particular (I was grumpy from overwork and have never been particularly enamored of the moral condition of Santa Cruz in any event) could be laid at the feet of nearly three centuries of materialist ascendancy. The reigning belief that the thoughts we think and the choices we make reflect the deterministic workings of neurons and, ultimately, subatomic particles seemed to me to have subverted mankind’s sense of morality. The view that people are mere machines and that the mind is just another (not particularly special) manifestation of a clockwork physical universe had infiltrated all our thinking, whether or not someone knew a synapse from an axon. Do you know what the most addressable cause of all this moral decrepitude is?, I asked Dave. Materialism! Not the materialism of Rodeo Drive, SUVs, and second homes in Telluride, but materialism as a worldview, a view that holds that the physical is all that exists, and that transcendent human mental experiences and emotions, no matter what grandeur they seem—from within—to possess, are in reality nothing but the expressions of electrical pulses zipping along neurons. Chalmers wouldn’t be the first (or the last) to express incredulity that I was blaming the moral morass of the late twentieth century on a school of philosophy that most people had never heard of.

APRIL 30 NOWADAYS THE WORLD is becoming increasingly materialistic, and mankind is reaching towards the very zenith of external progress, driven by an insatiable desire for power and vast possessions. Yet by this vain striving for perfection in a world where everything is relative, they wander ever further away from inward peace and happiness of the mind. This we can all bear witness to, living as we do plagued by unremitting anxiety in this dreadful epoch of mammoth weapons. It becomes more and more imperative that the life of the spirit be avowed as the only firm basis upon which to establish happiness and peace.

An increase of value – crucial in exchange and trade – is indeed different from increases in quantity observable by our senses. Increase in value is something for which laws governing physical events, at least as understood within materialist and mechanistic models, do not account. Value indicates the potential capacities of an object or action to satisfy human needs, and can be ascertained only by the mutual adjustment through exchange of the respective (marginal) rates of substitution (or equivalence) which different goods or services have for various individuals. Value is not an attribute or physical property possessed by things themselves, irrespective of their relations to men, but solely an aspect of these relations that enables men to take account, in their decisions about the use of such things, of the better opportunities others might have for their use. Increase