Mindless Person Quotes

The human phenomenon is but the sum Of densely coiled layers of illusion Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity That there are persons of any kind When all there can be is mindless mirrors Laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream

Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.

How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jacklet humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folk's seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of Earth's sweet gas.

You know, for the record, I hate to take orders. But! I realize I'm in over my head. You have no idea how much I hate all this supernatural garbage. So I'm willing to listen to you, but you better start acting like I'm a person and not some mindless blow-up doll. (Amanda)

It's a thought," I said with a grin. "That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair. "I'm not sure all of that sank in." "Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last.

My feeling toward Republicans is like my feeling about sharks: of course they're stupid and vicious. It's in their nature to be mindless, ravening killing machines. It's nothing personal. They don't know any better. Pretty much the only thing you can do about them is stay out of their waters and, if you're unlucky enough to meet with one, shoot it through its rudimentary brain with a spear gun.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

The suffering or the bad memories are as important as the good memories, and the good experiences. If you sort of, can imagine life as being 99% of the time quite linear, and most of the time you're in a state of neither happiness nor sadness. And then that 1% of the time you experience moments of very crystalised happiness, or crystalised sadness, or loneliness or depression. And I believe all of those moments are very pertinant. It's like I said to you, that for me it's mostly those crystalised moments of melancholy which are more inspirational to me. And in a strange way they become quite beautiful in their own way. Music that is sad, melancholic, depressing, is in a kind of perverse way more uplifting. I find happy music extremely depressing, mostly - mostly quite depressing. It's particularly this happy music that has no spirituality behind it - if it's just sort of mindless party music, it'd be quite depressing. But largely speaking, I was the kind of person that responds more to melancholia, and it makes me feel good. And I think the reason for this is, I think if you respond strongly to that kind of art, it's because in a way it makes you feel like you're not alone. So when we hear a very sad song, it makes us realise that we do share this kind of common human experience, and we're all kind of bonded in sadness and melancholia and depression.

Graham Chapman, co-author of the "Parrot Sketch", is no more. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He's kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky. And I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he'd achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say: nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries. And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. (He paused, then claimed that Chapman had whipered in his ear while he was writing the speech): All right, Cleese. You say you're very proud of being the very first person ever to say 'shit' on British television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to become the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'fuck'.

Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to life nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing their means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man's throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than individuals who compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but any notion that strikes the fancy of that society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, becomes deadly masters.

Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Evil is not one large entity, but a collection of countless, small depravities brought up from the muck by petty men. Many have traded the enrichment of vision for a gray fog of mediocrity--the fertile inspiration of striving and growth, for mindless stagnation and slow decay--the brave new ground of the attempt, for the timid quagmire of apathy. Many of you have traded freedom not even for a bowl of soup, but worse, for the spoken empty feelings of others who say that you deserve to have a full bowl of soup provided by someone else. Happiness, joy, accomplishment, achievement . . . are not finite commodities, to be divided up. Is a child’s laughter to be divided and allotted? No! Simply make more laughter! Every person’s life is theirs by right. An individual’s life can and must belong only to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave. No one can deny another person their right to their life, nor seize by force what is produced by someone else, because that is stealing their means to sustain their life. It is treason against mankind to hold a knife to a man’s throat and dictate how he must live his life. No society can be more important than the individuals who compose it, or else you ascribe supreme importance, not to man, but to any notion that strikes the fancy of the society, at a never-ending cost of lives. Reason and reality are the only means to just laws; mindless wishes, if given sovereignty, become deadly masters. Surrendering reason to faith in unreasonable men sanctions their use of force to enslave you--to murder you. You have the power to decide how you will live your life. Those mean, unreasonable little men are but cockroaches, if you say they are. They have no power to control you but that which you grant them!

PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done. And it's our job to stop them.

To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one’s strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.

Earth society has programmed us to keep our heads down and remain as these mindless drones. Everyone tells us we all have to follow the same blueprint: You gotta go to school. Graduate. Go to college, if you want the best job. Get married. Make babies. Work some more, get promoted. Then you retire. We want, and want, and want, and then we die. Then people say, Oh, what a great life that person led. But that's not living. It's just a way to exist.

Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before

Pain is a crucial part of our reality; it awakens a person from a mental stupor. A person must never be afraid to discover where their pain originates, follow pain to where it emanates from, learn from its messages, and reject the mindless business and busyness of contemporary culture in order to fuel an artistic vision of the self.

It is such a rare thing in this world to find someone who is not constantly trying to impress someone, be liked, or fill empty airspace with mindless chatter. A person who is completely, unapologetically okay with who they are and what they feel is like a beacon of light in the dark. As author Anne Lamott once said, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I would like this to end now, no more mornings, goodbyes or fighting determined sunsets. I would like this to end now, no more tear drops, suffocated breathing or life's cruelest memories. I would like this to end now, no more thinking beyond thought, eggshell walking or awkward hyper-self awareness. I would like this to end now, no more masking, imitating, or mindless mirroring. I would like this to end now, no more, me.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good. Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.

My parents are locked in their room, so I don’t have to engage in mindless chitchat. Sometimes Sidney walks around in his underwear. I’m used to dealing with his abundance of chest hair, but the white briefs are too much. I have a solid understanding—pun completely intended—why my mom married him, beyond his stellar personality.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

So now, not only did my best friend leave, but the cheerleaders and their mindless followers assumed I was personally responsible for the petition (which, yeah, I was) and started being openly rude to me - shutting doors in my face, leaving nasty notes on my desk and in my locker, making fun of me when I could obviously hear them. That's when I started keeping really quiet in class, and finding ways to show the other kids I wasn't afraid of them - like staring them straight in the eye when they looked at me, taking a step toward them when they talked to me, or walking right up to them and getting their personal space if I heard them say my name. Saying the meanest things I could think of whenever I had the chance - repeating rumors, embellishing them. I found out Kira Conroy had been arrested for shoplifting at the mall, and made sure everyone knew about it. The girl who burped in a boy's face during her first kiss, the girl who tripped and fell off the stage at the Miss Teen California pageant - I shared those stories the moment I heard them. All's fair in war, right? Suddenly I wasn't a nobody anymore. I was a somebody. Somebody everyone was afraid of.

The two most common lies in our world are 'I'm fine' and 'You'll be okay'. They are said without harmful intent, and often said in an attempt to placate worries, but still they tell us it is not our place to make another person uncomfortable or to draw too much attention to ourselves. Over and over, we mindlessly repeat variations of the same two phrases as we hide within our lies and attempt to spare others from the miserable truth. I'm fine. I'm okay. You're fine. You'll be okay. Everything will be all right. We become our lies, but only on the surface. Underneath, we are not fine and they will not be okay. We all know this but we're afraid to speak it.

Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm

Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, identified a minority of self-actualized individuals who did not act simply out of conformity to society but chose their own path and lived to fulfill their potential. This type of person was as representative of human nature as any mindless conformist.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.

Why do we so mindlessly abuse our planet, our only home? The answer to that lies in each of us. Therefore, we will strive to bring about understanding that we are--each one of us--responsible for more than just ourselves, our family, our football team, our country, or our own kind; that there is more to life than just these things. That each one of us must also bring the natural world back into its proper place in our lives, and realize that doing so is not some lofty ideal but a vital part of our personal survival.

Hearing "can't" dares a person to find a workaround. It's a basic psychological theory called reactance - telling someone "no" just makes them want it more.

software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.”33

Yet the heavier a person was—American or French—the more they relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating and the less they relied on whether they felt full.13

When you start dreaming, you become just a body because your mind is now somewhere else! A dreaming person is just a mindless body!

Creation is either the result of an eternal, personal, and intelligent being or the accidental effect of eternal, impersonal, and mindless matter with unknowable origins.

Discuss every matter with everybody in accordance to your knowledge of the subject but stop taking part further when you see a person whom you are discussing is a stupid, ignorant and mindless.

People scooped up these tabloids, devoured their gossip.. But now, for some reason, I found myself thinking about Morrie whenever I read anything silly or mindless. I kept picturing him there, in the house with the Japanese maple.. counting his breath, squeezing out every moment with his loved ones, while I spent so many hours on things that meant absolutely nothing to me personally.

Our actions reflect the distilled wisdom that we possess of the innermost self. Our personal philosophy is an activated way of living. A peaceful person delves the truest definition of the self by maintaining an attentive state of conscious awareness and ceases escaping from reality with mindless diversions. Self-inquiry is the principal method to remove ignorance, increase self-awareness, and abide in a tranquil existence

If some pleasure is promised to you and it seductively calls to you, step back and give yourself some time before mindlessly jumping at it. Dispassionately turn the matter over in your mind: Will this pleasure bring but a momentary delight, or real, lasting satisfaction? It makes a difference in the quality of our life and the kind of person we become when we learn how to distinguish between cheap thrills and meaningful, lasting rewards.

The great rationalist Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” The religious mystic the Buddha said, “I think, therefore I am not.” Why is the Buddha much more popular than Descartes? Because the average person barely thinks at all.

In 1 Corinthians 14:13–17, Paul mentioned that the gift of tongues was used in public prayer for the purpose of edification. Charismatics, however, have tried to redefine the gift of tongues as a special mode of supernatural expression for their personal devotions and private prayers. But notice how different Paul’s description is from that of modern tongues-speakers. First, Paul was not commending any form of gibberish, since he had already established that the real gift consisted of speaking in translatable foreign languages (vv. 10–11). Second, Paul would never extol prayers that bypass the mind, as many charismatics do. That was—and still is today—a pagan practice. In the Greco-Roman mystery religions, ecstatic utterances were commonly employed as a way to circumvent the mind in order to commune with demonic entities. So it is likely that Paul’s words in these verses include a sarcastic tone, as he rebuked the Corinthian Christians for their attempt to imitate the mindless practices of their pagan neighbors.

So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and double for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.

When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process… So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading… he gradually loses the capacity for thinking…such is the case with very many scholars; they have read themselves stupid… Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. When there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge, and very little experience, the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary.

If we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we're at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).

The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.

We had better want the consequences of what we believe or disbelieve, because the consequences will come! . . . But how can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite? . . . The basic strands which have bound us together socially have begun to fray, and some of them have snapped. Even more pressure is then placed upon the remaining strands. The fact that the giving way is gradual will not prevent it from becoming total. . . . Given the tremendous asset that the family is, we must do all we can within constitutional constraints to protect it from predatory things like homosexuality and pornography. . . . Our whole republic rests upon the notion of “obedience to the unenforceable,” upon a tremendous emphasis on inner controls through self-discipline. . . . Different beliefs do make for different behaviors; what we think does affect our actions; concepts do have consequences. . . . Once society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, revising rationales, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything! Take away a consciousness of eternity and see how differently time is spent. Take away an acknowledgement of divine design in the structure of life and then watch the mindless scurrying to redesign human systems to make life pain-free and pleasure-filled. Take away regard for the divinity in one’s neighbor, and watch the drop in our regard for his property. Take away basic moral standards and observe how quickly tolerance changes into permissiveness. Take away the sacred sense of belonging to a family or community, and observe how quickly citizens cease to care for big cities. Those of us who are business-oriented are quick to look for the bottom line in our endeavors. In the case of a value-free society, the bottom line is clear—the costs are prohibitive! A value-free society eventually imprisons its inhabitants. It also ends up doing indirectly what most of its inhabitants would never have agreed to do directly—at least initially. Can we turn such trends around? There is still a wealth of wisdom in the people of this good land, even though such wisdom is often mute and in search of leadership. People can often feel in their bones the wrongness of things, long before pollsters pick up such attitudes or before such attitudes are expressed in the ballot box. But it will take leadership and articulate assertion of basic values in all places and in personal behavior to back up such assertions. Even then, time and the tides are against us, so that courage will be a key ingredient. It will take the same kind of spunk the Spartans displayed at Thermopylae when they tenaciously held a small mountain pass against overwhelming numbers of Persians. The Persians could not dislodge the Spartans and sent emissaries forward to threaten what would happen if the Spartans did not surrender. The Spartans were told that if they did not give up, the Persians had so many archers in their army that they would darken the skies with their arrows. The Spartans said simply: “So much the better, we will fight in the shade!

In fact, these reference works, with their careful attention to history, literature, and actual usage, are the most adamant debunkers of grammatical nonsense. (This is less true of style sheets drawn up by newspapers and professional societies, and of manuals written by amateurs such as critics and journalists, which tend to mindlessly reproduce the folklore of previous guides.)

But maybe it takes a slightly unhinged person to reverse our decades of mindless consumption. Who else would dare suggest, “The basic rule for papers: Discard everything”? (Are they not required to keep tax records in Japan?) Who else would name a section of her book “Photos: Cherish who you are now”? Imagine Southwest Airlines changing their slogan from “Wanna get away?” to “What are you running from?

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours. “But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth. “You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort. “Synchronise watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead; the prosaic, civilian looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time… “Oh, let me see now,” says the ancient man, tilting his withered head to wince and blink at the sun in bewildered reminiscence, “my first wife passed away the spring of -” and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and “The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six,” he is able to say. “Or no, wait-” and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. “Wait! Nineteen-Ought — Four.”… He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife’s smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death, he has imposed coherence on his own life and on life itself… “Yes sir,” he can say with authority, “nineteen-Ought-Four,” and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos.

[...] true hedonic engineering, as distinct from mindless hedonism or reckless personal experimentation, can be profoundly good for our character. Character-building technologies can benefit utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike. Potentially, we can use a convergence of biotech, nanorobotics and information technology to gain control over our emotions and become better (post-)human beings, to cultivate the virtues, strength of character, decency, to become kinder, friendlier, more compassionate: to become the type of (post)human beings that we might aspire to be, but aren't, and biologically couldn't be, with the neural machinery of unenriched minds. Given our Darwinian biology, too many forms of admirable behaviour simply aren't rewarding enough for us to practise them consistently: our second-order desires to live better lives as better people are often feeble echoes of our baser passions.

This shallow, mindless nature, which constantly thirsted to subordinate itself to another person’s will, had a need to see orders through — oh, for no other reason, of course, than for the sake of a ‘common’ or ‘great’ cause. But even this didn’t matter, because petty fanatics like Erkel are utterly incapable of understanding service to an idea other than by conflating it with the very individual who, as they understand it, gives expression to this idea.

September 10, 1965 Dear Francesca, Enclosed are two photographs. One is the shot I took of you in the pasture at sunrise. I hope you like it as much as I do. The other is of Roseman Bridge before I removed your note tacked to it. I sit here trolling the gray areas of my mind for every detail, every moment, of our time together. I ask myself over and over, “What happened to me in Madison County, Iowa?” And I struggle to bring it together. That’s why I wrote the little piece, “Falling from Dimension Z,” I have enclosed, as a way of trying to sift through my confusion. I look down the barrel of a lens, and you’re at the end of it. I begin work on an article, and I’m writing about you. I’m not even sure how I got back here from Iowa. Somehow the old truck brought me home, yet I barely remember the miles going by. A few weeks ago, I felt self-contained, reasonably content. Maybe not profoundly happy, maybe a little lonely, but at least content. All of that has changed. It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable—it could not have been any other way—a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable. So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity. Somehow, we must see each other again. Any place, anytime. Call me if you ever need anything or simply want to see me. I’ll be there, pronto. Let me know if you can come out here sometime—anytime. I can arrange plane fare, if that’s a problem. I’m off to southeast India next week, but I’ll be back in late October. I Love You, Robert P. S., The photo project in Madison County turned out fine. Look for it in NG next year. Or tell me if you want me to send a copy of the issue when it’s published. Francesca Johnson set her brandy glass on the wide oak windowsill and stared at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of herself.

So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.

So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.

Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organized crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. This may reflect homo sapiens position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men's ability to physically coerce women.

On the bright side,” he went on, gesturing to the massive quantities of alcohol they had laid out on the table for their lackeys, “You get to drink loads of expensive whiskey, instead.” “I don’t like whiskey,” Tyson told him.  “I like steak knives.” “Poddite,” Slade sighed. Tyson squinted at him.  “What?” “Poddite,” Slade said, carefully arranging his plastic cutlery.  “It means that your uninspired tastes mark you as one of the mindless ranks of pod-people that mechanically wander this earth, doing whatever their television or personal devices tell them to, like drinking piss because it’s been marketed as ‘refreshing.’” 

I've stopped taking it all so personally. The racism and capitalism and ecocide, the sexism and homophobia, how tired everyone in the United States seems even though they claim they are living the best life in the best country in the world. When folks are being worked to the bone and drinking poisoned water in their coffee every morning, there isn't a lot of psychological energy left to figure out that this "best life" is all hoax and a wink. I imagine that anti-Blackness and capitalism and ableism are huge mindless machines hooked into people's spines, making unable to stand for what is right, Every day I pray, not for the revolution, not a savior, just to have the strength to constantly disentangles myself from the machine.

Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes – it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hand of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast out the devil with Beelzebub – the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not burden themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, or rebirth of the spirit – deo concedente. It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try – as they apparently do – to rope the individual into a social organization and reduce him to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising him out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to him that he is the one important factor and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.

A rejection of the prevailing state of affairs accounts, I think, for the explosive growth of intuitive anarchism among young people today. Their love of nature is a reaction against the highly synthetic qualities of our urban environment and its shabby products. Their informality of dress and manners is a reaction against the formalized, standardized nature of modern institutionalized living. Their predisposition for direct action is a reaction against the bureaucratization and centralization of society. Their tendency to drop out, to avoid toil and the rat race, reflects a growing anger towards the mindless industrial routine bred by modern mass manufacture in the factory, the office or the university. Their intense individualism is, in its own elemental way, a de facto decentralization of social life—a personal withdrawal from mass society.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Part IV If you are mighty, gain respect through knowledge And through gentleness of speech. Don’t command except as is fitting, He who provokes gets into trouble. Don't be haughty, lest you be humbled, Don’t be mute, lest you be chided. When you answer one who is fuming, Avert your face, control yourself. The flame of the hot-heart sweeps across. He who steps gently, his path is paved. He who frets all day has no happy moment, He who’s gay all day can’t keep house. Don’t oppose a great man’s action. Don’t vex the heart of one who is burdened; If he gets angry at him who foils him, The ka will part from him who loves him. Yet he is the provider along with the god, What he wishes should be done for him. When he turns his face back to you after raging, There will be peace from his ka; As ill will comes from opposition,. So goodwill increases love. Teach the great what is useful to him, Be his aid before the people; If you Set his knowledge impress his lord, Your sustenance will come from his ka As the favorite's belly is filled. So your back will be clothed by it, And his help will be there sustain you. For your superior whom you love And who lives by it, He in turn will give you good support. Thus will love of you endure In the belly of those who love you, He is a ka who loves to listen. If you are a magistrate of standing. Commissioned to satisfy the many, Hew a straight line, When you speak don't lean to one side. Beware lest one complain: “Judges, he distorts the matter!” And your deed turns into a judgment (of you). If you are angered by misdeed. Lean toward a man account of his rightness; Pass it over, don’t recall it, Since he was silent to you the first day If you are great after having been humble, Have gained wealth after having been poor In the past, in a town which you know, Knowing your former condition. Do not put trust in your wealth, Which came to you as gift of god; So that you will not fall behind one like you, To whom the same has happened, Bend your back to your superior, Your overseer from the palace; Then your house will endure in its wealth. Your rewards in their right place. Wretched is he who opposes a superior, One lives as long as he is mild, Baring the arm does not hurt it Do not plunder a neighbor’s house, Do not steal the goods of one near you, Lest he denounce you before you are heard A quarreler is a mindless person, If he is known as an aggressor The hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood. This maxim is an injunction against illicit sexual intercourse. It is very obscure and has been omitted here. If you probe the character of a friend, Don’t inquire, but approach him, Deal with him alone, So as not to suffer from his manner. Dispute with him after a time, Test his heart in conversation; If what he has seen escapes him, If he does a thing that annoys you, Be yet friendly with him, don’t attack; Be restrained, don’t let fly, Don’t answer with hostility, Neither part from him nor attack him; His time does not fail to come, One does not escape what is fated Be generous as long as you live, What leaves the storehouse does not return; It is the food to be shared which is coveted. One whose belly is empty is an accuser; One deprived becomes an opponent, Don’t have him for a neighbor. Kindness is a man’s memorial For the years after the function.

She gives just enough hints about him to make you wonder why he became so villainous. And if he dies, I’ll never learnt the answer.” Oliver eyes her closely. “Perhaps he was born villainous.” “No one is born villainous.” “Oh?” he said with raised eyebrow. “So we’re all born good?” “Neither. We start as animals, with an animal’s needs and desires. It takes parents and teachers and other good examples to show us how to restrain those needs and desires, when necessary, for the greater good. But it’s still our choice whether to heed that education or to do as we please.” “For a woman who loves murder and mayhem, you’re quite the philosopher.” “I like to understand how things work. Why people behave as they do.” He digested that for a moment. “I happen to think that some of us, like Rockton, are born with a wicked bent.” She chose her words carefully. “That certainly provides Rockton with a convenient excuse for his behavior.” His features turned stony. “What do you mean?” “Being moral and disciplined is hard work. Being wicked requires no effort at all-one merely indulges every desire and impulse, no matter how hurtful or immoral. By claiming to be born wicked, Rockton ensures that he doesn’t have to struggle to be god. He can just protest that he can’t help himself.” “Perhaps he can’t,” he clipped out. “Or maybe he’s simply unwilling to fight his impulses. And I want to know the reason for that. That’s why I keep reading Minerva’s books.” Did Oliver actually believe he’d been born irredeemably wicked? How tragic! It lent a hopelessness to his life that helped to explain his mindless pursuit of pleasure. “I can tell you the reason for Rockton’s villainy.” Oliver rose to round the desk. Propping his hip on the edge near her, he reached out to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear. A sweet shudder swept over her. Why must he have this effect on her? It simply wasn’t fair. “Oh?” she managed. “Rockton knows he can’t have everything he wants,” he said hoarsely, his hand drifting to her cheek. “He can’t have the heroine, for example. She would never tolerate his…wicked impulses. Yet he still wants her. And his wanting consumes him.” Her breath lodged in her throat. It had been days since he’d touched her, and she hadn’t forgotten what it was like for one minute. To have him this near, saying such things… She fought for control over her volatile emotions. “His wanting consumes him precisely because he can’t have her. If he thought he could, he wouldn’t want her after all.” “Not true.” His voice deepening, he stroked the line of her jaw with a tenderness that roused an ache in her chest. “Even Rockton recognizes when a woman is unlike any other. Her very goodness in the face of his villainy bewitches him. He thinks if he can just possess that goodness, then the dark cloud lying on his soul will lift, and he’ll have something other than villainy to sustain him.” “Then he’s mistaken.” Her pulse trebled as his finger swept the hollow of her throat. “The only person who can lift the dark cloud on his soul is himself.” He paused in his caress. “So he’s doomed, then?” “No!” Her gaze flew to his. “No one is doomed, and certainly not Rockton. There’s still hope for him. There is always hope.” His eyes burned with a feverish light, and before she could look away, he bent to kiss her. It was soft, tender…delicious. Someone moaned, she wasn’t sure who. All she knew was that his mouth was on hers again, molding it, tasting it, making her hungry in the way that only he seemed able to do. “Maria…” he breathed. Seizing her by the arms, he drew her up into his embrace. “My God, I’ve thought of nothing but you since that day in the carriage.

Whatever pain you think you are in right now cannot begin to compare to the peace that will one day come over you. It cannot begin to compare to the joy that you will one day know. You will fall in love with life again, and it will be better than it was before, because you will become a different person. You will become someone who is more capable of appreciating what matters, who will not be as reckless with their choices, who can no longer be so easily swayed or mindlessly trusting. You will require a new level of integrity within your life, which will transpire into better boundaries and a more stable foundation. You will strengthen in the most unexpected ways, and from that, your happiness will be even more sincere, even more apparent. This will not happen overnight, though it will seem like it did in retrospect. Like the changing of a season, everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after, in all you feared would never come. You’re through it, but you’re different, because something also moved through you and cleared out what you didn’t even realize was standing in the way.

The central ceremony of Ritual Witchcraft was the so-called "Sabbath" - a word of unknown origin having no relation to its Hebrew homonym. Sabbaths were celebrated four times a year - on Candlemass Day, February 2nd, on Rood Mass Day, May 1st, on Lammas Day, August 1st, and on the eve of All Hallows, October 31st. These were great festivals, often attended by hundreds of devotees, who came from considerable distances. Between Sabbaths there were weekly "Esbats" from small congregations in the village where the ancient religion was still practiced. At all high Sabbaths the devil himself was invariably present, in the person of some man who had inherited, or otherwise acquired, the honor of being the incarnation of the two-faced god of the Dianic cult. The worshipers paid homage to the god by kissing his reverse face - a mask worn, beneath an animal's tail, on the devil's backside. There was then, for some at least of the female devotees, a ritual copulation with the god, who was equipped for this purpose with an artificial phallus of horn or metal. This ceremony was followed by a picnic (for the Sabbaths were celebrated out of doors, near sacred trees or stones), by dancing and finally by a promiscuous sexual orgy that had, no doubt, originally been a magical operation for increasing the fertility of the animals on which primitive hunters and herdsmen depend for their livelihood. The prevailing atmosphere at the Sabbaths was one of good fellowship and mindless, animal joy. When captured and brought to trial, many of the who had taken part in the Sabbath resolutely refused, even under torture, even at the stake, to abjure the religion which had brought them so much happiness.

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS A MAN CAN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A MOTHER A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS A SINCERE EFFORT IS ALL YOU CAN ASK A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS A SOLID HOME BASE BUILDS A SENSE OF SELF A STRONG SENSE OF DUTY IMPRISONS YOU ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE ACTION CAUSES MORE TROUBLE THAN THOUGHT ALIENATION PRODUCES ECCENTRICS OR REVOLUTIONARIES ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED AMBITION IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS COMPLACENCY AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE ANIMALISM IS PERFECTLY HEALTHY ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL ANYTHING IS A LEGITIMATE AREA OF INVESTIGATION ARTIFICIAL DESIRES ARE DESPOILING THE EARTH AT TIMES INACTIVITY IS PREFERABLE TO MINDLESS FUNCTIONING AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND AUTOMATION IS DEADLY AWFUL PUNISHMENT AWAITS REALLY BAD PEOPLE BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS BEING ALONE WITH YOURSELF IS INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE BEING JUDGMENTAL IS A SIGN OF LIFE BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU'RE A FOOL BELIEVING IN REBIRTH IS THE SAME AS ADMITTING DEFEAT BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS CALM IS MORE CONDUCIVE TO CREATIVITY THAN IS ANXIETY CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING CHANGE IS VALUABLE WHEN THE OPPRESSED BECOME TYRANTS CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE CHILDREN ARE THE MOST CRUEL OF ALL CLASS ACTION IS A NICE IDEA WITH NO SUBSTANCE CLASS STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST CRIME AGAINST PROPERTY IS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT DECADENCE CAN BE AN END IN ITSELF DECENCY IS A RELATIVE THING DEPENDENCE CAN BE A MEAL TICKET DESCRIPTION IS MORE VALUABLE THAN METAPHOR DEVIANTS ARE SACRIFICED TO INCREASE GROUP SOLIDARITY DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS DISORGANIZATION IS A KIND OF ANESTHESIA DON'T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES DREAMING WHILE AWAKE IS A FRIGHTENING CONTRADICTION DYING AND COMING BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE AS VALUABLE AS INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU EVERY ACHIEVEMENT REQUIRES A SACRIFICE EVERYONE'S WORK IS EQUALLY IMPORTANT EVERYTHING THAT'S INTERESTING IS NEW EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE DESERVE SPECIAL CONCESSIONS EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID EXPRESSING ANGER IS NECESSARY EXTREME BEHAVIOR HAS ITS BASIS IN PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY EXTREME SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO PERVERSION FAITHFULNESS IS A SOCIAL NOT A BIOLOGICAL LAW FAKE OR REAL INDIFFERENCE IS A POWERFUL PERSONAL WEAPON FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE FEAR IS THE GREATEST INCAPACITATOR FREEDOM IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY GIVING FREE REIN TO YOUR EMOTIONS IS AN HONEST WAY TO LIVE GO ALL OUT IN ROMANCE AND LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY GOING WITH THE FLOW IS SOOTHING BUT RISKY GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE GRASS ROOTS AGITATION IS THE ONLY HOPE

People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women.

So we all ran around in mad, mindless, meaningless circles, as if we were in a cotton-candy eating contest where the grand prize was getting kicked in the face. We were oblivious to everything around us that no truly sane person would ever tolerate. And we needed someone else to tell us to stop it.

There simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence.

Just being here, at ease, alone in the dark, made me realize I had been mindlessly maneuvering just-the-way-things-are, accepting that violence was always a possibility, never realizing there are other places where it doesn’t feel that way. Of course, my dad had a saying for this: “They might have a different way of doing things across the river.” Or in this case, the middle of the ocean. I liked the idea of my own, personal Tenth Island, made only of things I wanted to keep. I’d start by carrying inside me a place where a desk clerk looked confused when a woman asked where it was safe for her to walk alone.

Mindful or Mindless? When we last met Harvard professor Ellen Langer, she was astonishing the psychology world by sending seventy-year-old men into a time capsule and bringing them out seemingly younger. But time travel isn’t applicable to everyday life. Having proved her point in spectacular fashion, Langer took up a larger cause: mindfulness. We’ve been using this term also, showing how being mindful reaches beyond the word’s old association with Eastern spiritual practices. Langer has totally Westernized mindfulness with the following definition: Mindfulness, she said before a medical school audience, is the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on the new observations. Our goal here, of unfolding a healing lifestyle, includes the same things. Langer was very blunt—everyday behavior is mindless most of the time. One of her favorite examples, she said, comes from personal experience: “I once went to make a purchase and I gave [the cashier] my credit card, and she saw it wasn’t signed.” Langer dutifully signed the card, and the cashier ran it through the machine. She asked Langer to sign the receipt. “[The cashier] then compared the two signatures to make sure they were the same person,” Langer recalled. She paused, and it took a moment before the audience caught on and started to laugh. Why would two signatures need to be compared when you’ve just witnessed the same person signing both? Small instances of mindless behavior tie us to the past and block the possibility of being alive in the moment, alert to possibilities we will never see. In fact, Langer calls her pursuit of mindfulness “the psychology of possibility.

It had begun not long after he had learned that she had no procrustus. Tikan, who hardly knew Sielle or her history, and whose sleeves were ever streaked with his heart’s blood, had started taking her as a blank canvas on which to project his own idea of her. And this idea was, insidiously, an abstraction he made out of her. To him, she was becoming the living symbol of his cause. Despite her flesh and her mind and words—rather, due to these—he began seeing her as a mere ideal of humanity, a fleshless world-soul containing in her the essences of each living person. A spirited, thinking person in a world dispirited and mindless. The torch-bearer and the posterity. The reason, the final cause. In her he saw some image of survival in the ideal unity of freedom. And in some sense, as the moment lingered, it was as if he were aiming his gaze through her, beyond her, and not quite at her.

In my personal life, especially as I am aging, I find that the biggest mistakes I make and the biggest risks I run all result form mindless hurrying.

Zimbardo could not see the brutality himself because he was already too deep into his chosen role of Warden and lost his exterior view of his sociological “experiment”. He could not see clearly what was happening. More recently, Zimbardo has acted as a consultant to one of the arrested soldiers in the recent Abu Ghraib prison torture. He never denied the culpability of the individuals involved but was certain to bring up the lack of oversight and structure. In his recent book he states “Aberrant, illegal or immoral behavior by individuals in service professions, such as policemen, corrections officers, and soldiers, are typically labeled the misdeeds of “a few bad apples”. The implication is that they are a rare exception and must be set on one side of the impermeable line between evil and good, with the majority of good apples set on the other side. But who is making the distinction? Usually it is the guardians of the system, who want to isolate the problem in order to deflect attention and blame away from those at the top who may be responsible for creating untenable working conditions or for a lack of oversight or supervision. Again the bad-apple dispositional view ignores the apple barrel and its potentially corrupting situational impact on those within it. “A systems analysis focuses on the barrel makers, on those with the power to design the barrel.” Zimbardo isolated 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. I found myself in all of these seven steps, to a greater or lesser degree. They are: 1) Mindlessly taking the first step. 2) Dehumanization of others. 3) De-individualization of self (anonymity). 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility. 5) Blind obedience to authority. 6) Uncritical conformity to the group’s norms. 7) Passive tolerance of evil, through inaction, or indifference. In hindsight, I can see each one of these points were present in the apple barrel of Scientology that I lived through.   Acknowledgments                     There are numerous people I would like to acknowledge for their support and encouragement during the very difficult task of going back to some dark places in my past to get this book written. They do no want their names used, but they know who they are, and my appreciation is deep and well known to them. I would like to thank Jeferson Hawkins for both his Cover designs and other help along this road. I want to acknowledge Bernice Mennis, Ben Bashore for their personal help over the years. There is much I can say about Vermont College, but the simplest is that they gave me the environment, freedom and courage to study what I needed to write

The transmission of culture assures the survival of the particular forms given to our existence and expression as human beings. It goes much beyond our customs and traditions and symbols to include how we express ourselves in gestures and language, the way we adorn ourselves in dress and decoration, what and how and when we celebrate. Culture also defines our rituals around contact and connection, greetings and good-byes, belonging and loyalty, love and intimacy. Central to any culture is its food — how food is prepared and eaten, the attitudes toward food, and the functions food serves. The music people make and the music they listen to is an integral part of any culture. The transmission of culture is, normally, an automatic part of child-rearing. In addition to facilitating dependence, shielding against external stress, and giving birth to independence, attachment also is the conduit of culture. As long as the child is properly attaching to the adults responsible, the culture flows into the child. To put it another way, the attaching child becomes spontaneously informed, in the sense of absorbing the cultural forms of the adult. According to Howard Gardner, a leading American developmentalist, more is spontaneously absorbed from the parents in the first four years of life than during all the rest of a person's formal education put together. When attachment is working, the transmission of culture does not require deliberate instruction or teaching on the part of the adult or even conscious learning on the part of the child. The child's hunger for connection and inclination to seek cues from adults take care of it. If the child is helped to attain genuine individuality and a mature independence of mind, the passing down of culture from one generation to another is not a process of mindless imitation or blind obedience.

Flow is characterised by nine different elements: Clear goals at each step of the way Immediate feedback: knowing that you are doing it properly A balance between challenge and skills: if it is too difficult it will lead to anxiety and if too easy it will cause boredom The merging of action and awareness No distractions No fear of failure No feeling of self-consciousness Sense of time is distorted It is done for its own sake (such as playing a musical instrument) You can go through your own list and see which ones match the criteria for being ‘flow’ activities. Csikszentmihalyi defines happiness as having an active sense of accomplishment and improvement, whereas pleasure is the satisfaction of basic biological desires or static contentment. So the state of happiness would be at the top of Maslow’s triangle, and the best way to achieve it would be through ‘flow’ (whereas pleasure would be included within physical needs). This is not to say that we don’t need pleasure, but it can be short-lived and, it is argued, mindless. In other words, ‘flow’ requires more mental energy and effort but is, ultimately, more rewarding and leads to increased skill and challenge because the activities are more complex. Csikszentmihalyi claims that flow means that all the brain’s available inputs are occupied with one activity. This means, of course, that it is impossible for negative and chaotic thoughts to come charging into your head. He says that the mind ‘with nothing to do, begins to follow random patterns, usually stopping to consider something painful or disturbing. Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations.’ So the mind with nothing to do becomes a mind full of negativity, whereas a mind in a state of flow is so engaged there is no room for undesirable thoughts. The more flow activities that you have in your life, the more rewarding and happy your life will be.

How to see anyone that he or she is a personality or just an ordinary person Sober, wise and mature minded people do not perform any false, fake, and torturing ways in any form that, make them personality The people, who adopt such ways, are just the ordinary and mindless person

Will we continue wasting all our efforts and treasure mindlessly expanding our empire, slowly sacrificing our democracy bit by bit until we collapse, like the Romans, or will we finally abandon our empire and rebuild our democracy, like the British?

We have to have a reason for what we’re doing if it’s to mean anything - otherwise it’s just a mindless existence.

Discuss every matter with everybody by your knowledge of the subject but stop taking part further when you see a person whom you are discussing is stupid, ignorant, and mindless.

Myths & Comics (The Sonnet) Some modern superheroes are green in color, Some ancient superheroes are blue in color. Some worship hulk, ironman, captain marvel, Some are fanatics of Zeus, Poseidon, Krishna. Mythologies are but comics of the old days, Just like comics are nothing but modern myths. Fiction is okay in its place, but trouble begins, When life is belittled and fiction is worshiped. Inspiration can come from anywhere, real or not, But all is useless, if it produces mindless savages. Even I've written fiction to explore some situations, Though based on reality, some of it is highly exaggerated. If it brings you back to life, only then it's worth it. Fiction is supposed to enhance reality, not enslave it.

In the post-World War II era in the United States the shape of the cultural landscape has configured the self of the middle and upper classes into a particular kind of masterful, bounded self: the empty self. By this I mean a self that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning—a self that experiences these social absences and their consequences “interiorly” as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger. It is this undifferentiated hunger that has provided the motivation for the mindless, wasteful consumerism of the late twentieth century. The post-World War II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost, and unknowingly it fuels the new consumer-orientated economy: the self is empty, and it strives, desperately, to be filled up.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a man of action, but he was also a good listener, and he appreciated that quality in other people. Once at a gala ball, he grew tired of meeting people who returned his remarks with stiff, mindless pleasantries. So he began to greet people with a smile, saying, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.” Most people, so nervous about meeting him, didn’t even hear what he said. But one diplomat did. Upon hearing the president’s remark, he leaned over and whispered to him, “I’m sure she had it coming to her!” The only way to find out what you’re missing is to start listening.

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief. It is this alone that can explain the "uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations." The chief is a "dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one's will has to be surrendered,-while to be alone with him, 'to look him in the face,' appears a hazardous enterprise." This alone, says Freud, explains the "paralysis" that exists in the link between a person with inferior power to one of superior power. Man has "an extreme passion for authority" and "wishes to be governed by unrestricted force." It is this trait that the leader hypnotically embodies in his own masterful person. Or as Fenichel later put it, people have a "longing for being hypnotized" precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the "oceanic feeling" that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents. And so, as Freud argues, it is not that groups bring out anything new in people; it is just that they satisfy the deep-seated erotic longings that people constantly carry around unconsciously. For Freud, this was the life force that held groups together. It functioned as a kind of psychic cement that locked people into mutual and mindless interdependence: the magnetic powers of the leader, reciprocated by the guilty delegation of everyone's will to him.

Though no immediate and complete escape from the ongoing power system is possible, least of all through mass violence, the changes that will restore autonomy and initiative to the human person all lie within the province of each individual soul, once it is roused. Nothing could be more damaging to the myth of the machine, and to the dehumanized social order it has brought into existence, than a steady withdrawal of interest, a slowing down of tempo, a stoppage of senseless routines and mindless acts. And has not all this in fact begun to happen?

Faith is faith that there is something that lifts us above the blind force of things, a mind in all this mindlessness. That there is something – like the Force in Star Wars, which is, as we have seen, a bit of a transcription of the Buddha nature – or someone, as in the personal conceptions of God found in the great monotheisms, who stands by us when we are up against the worst, who stands by others, by the least among us. Faith is faith that we can say that certain things are wrong, are evil. Faith is the memory of evil done, the dangerous memory of suffering that cannot be undone, and the hope of a transforming future.

True love is exactly what she warned us it would be: strength and fragility all at once. True love can fortify a person or it can shatter them mindlessly. We who experience it, truly feel it in the depths of our bones and the strands of each hair, often allow it to color our field of vision.

It’s hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.

The first is what some psychologists call “hot hate,” based on anger. Imagine yourself yelling at the television, and you get the picture. Most Americans would be ashamed to say “I hate Republicans” or “I hate Democrats.” But our market preferences tell the true story. We reward professional political pundits who say or write that the other side is evil or stupid or both. For some haters, the hot variety is a little too crude. They prefer “cool hate,” based on contempt, and express disgust for another person through sarcasm, dismissal or mockery. Cool hate can be every bit as damaging as hot hate. The social psychologist and relationship expert John Gottman was famously able to predict with up to 94 percent accuracy whether couples would divorce just by observing a brief snippet of conversation. The biggest warning signs of all were indications of contempt, such as sarcasm, sneering and hostile humor. Want to see if a couple will end up in divorce court? Watch them discuss a contentious topic — which Mr. Gottman has done thousands of times — and see if either partner rolls his or her eyes. Disagreement is normal, but dismissiveness can be deadly. As it is in love, so it is in politics. With just an ironic smile, one can dismiss an entire class of citizens as uncultured rubes or mindless theocrats. Feigning shock and dismay at the resulting indignation simply adds insult to injury. The last variety is anonymous hate.

A foolish man enjoys the company of prostitutes; a wise man enjoys the company of his wife. The mother of a prudent son will rejoice; the father of a mindless son will groan.

Your Mindless Margin. By making 100–200 calorie changes in your daily intake, you won’t feel deprived and backslide. • Mindless Better Eating. Focus on reengineering small behaviors that will move you from mindless overeating to mindless better eating. Five common places to look (diet danger zones) include meals, snacks, parties, restaurants, and your desk or dashboard. • Mindful Reengineering. To trim your mindless margin, you can use basic diet tips, but a more personalized approach is to use 1) food trade-offs, or 2) food policies. Both give you a chance to eat some of what you want without making it a belabored decision. • The Power of Three. Design three easy, do-able changes that you can mindlessly make without much sacrifice. • Mindless Margin Checklist. Use this daily checklist to help you move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.

Perseverance is so important to these young people. Most of these quotes are from the poorest of the poor. They know that life is hard, that failure is likely, but they also intend never to give up. In the literature on young men in Africa, it has become so common to describe them only as angry, frustrated, drifting into mindless violence – potential rapists and killers, all of them, it seems. In some theories, their very existence is taken as an indicator of violence, regardless of their personalities, beliefs, dreams. And yet, when you talk with them, how different they are from these simplistic images – how filled with perseverance and hope, ready to take on life and all that it may bring.

When you write poetry honestly, and when you read it honestly, then you become an individual and build up a defense against becoming programmed. And if you read poetry to young people, which I very often do—I go to schools, I have even gone to prisons—I feel you can raise in people’s minds the wish never to be an opportunist, never to be a mindless follower. To look always at what’s happening and not to look away from it. That’s the most you can do. You cannot change the world, but you can change the single person, I guess. And a single person who decides not to join the crowd….

I think about this when I watch those frantic, overdressed evangelists on television, raving and promising people power. Then people in the crowd, in a mindless acquiescence to an altered state of consciousness—wanting so desperately to get the power that they’ll do anything the speaker suggests—fall over in a faint. It’s a sad situation when people want the power more than they want the Person. No one on earth can have the power of Jesus Christ to do what He did, and anybody who promises otherwise is lying. God granted the power of Jesus Christ only to the apostles and those who followed in the apostolic age to establish His messiahship. You will never have the power to heal the sick or raise the dead, walk on water, or cast out demons. But anyone can be saved who believes in Him.

It is wise to do what you love only if it loves you back. Follow your passion only if it rewards you in return. We have been made to believe that there is glory in suffering when you follow your passion. Suffering for a certain time when the reward or the result will make up for it is certainly worth it, but there is no glory in mindless suffering for years when there is not even a light at the end of the tunnel. So do what you love but ensure that it loves you back and if it doesn’t it is ok to love something else. When you follow your passion and it does not reward you despite your best efforts, it is okay to pursue another passion.

When I claim, as my standards, values in which I fail to see any personal gain, I am in as risky a position insofar as expressing those values, as were the parrots in the tree, mindlessly repeating the words. Enjoined or obligatory values will become assimilated personal values only when I see their value for me clearly and assimilate these values in terms of knowledge. For the person with assimilated ethical values, life becomes very simple. No conflicts cloud his or her mind. For such a person, the teaching of Vedanta is like the meeting of gas and fire; knowledge ignites in a flash.

Is the theory that lifeless, mindless atoms (obeying either deterministic laws or probabilistic laws of indeterminism) produce weird, unfathomable, ineffectual, pointless, mental illusions supposed to be more convincing than that we have genuine free will? The whole notion that a world made exclusively of matter, as materialist fundamentalists such as Harris insist, can suffer from illusions, delusions, hallucinations, mental illness, mental breakdowns, mental disorders, is so spectacularly silly that no sane person could ever take it seriously. Harris, in his pathological determination to rid us of free will, has posited instead a world of delusional atoms in need of psychiatric help! What, do electrons hallucinate? Do protons have delusions of grandeur? Do quarks imagine themselves free? Are 1D-strings narcissistic? If none of these things is true, how on earth does Sam Harris propose that if humans are made of atoms alone, we can suffer from such illusions? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Harris doesn’t offer any evidence at all!

Yeah, so she was a bit of a geek, but for some reason, that appealed to me. She didn't just spout bullshit. She was a well-rounded person who made informed statements. After all the mindless blathering I heard from everyone around me, speaking to someone who was honest and also smart was a huge turn-on. What the fuck? Was Echo Devlin turning me on? Since when the fuck did hell freeze over?

We were at the very end of the era of fearless girls. Soon, women would learn distrust, pumped full of fear by serial-killer news reels and common sense. But those things weren't in our reality yet. They existed but seemed impossible. Faraway. False. Sure, soon, every girl would look over her shoulder at every turn and lock her car as soon as she hopped in- but not quite yet. We were still lawless and mindless. Gaggles of bright-eyed girls would prod at each other on the bus, sharing lipstick by kissing, leaving home with only a five-dollar bill and, if they were cautious, a house key. It wasn't true, but we thought everyone loved everyone else. We'd kiss anyone and touch anyone and go anywhere with anyone, as long as the person smiled.

The kind of praise the Father seeks is not a cacophony of mindless pandemonium. Worship is not mere frenzy and feelings. “Those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). God “delight[s] in truth in the inward being” (Ps. 51:6 ESV). Therefore true worship (like authentic sanctification) cannot bypass the mind; it is all about the renewing of the mind (Rom. 12:1–2; cf. Eph. 4:23–24). As Jonathan Edwards said, genuine, biblical worship should bring people “to high and exalting thoughts of the divine Being and his glorious perfections [and it] works in them an admiring, delightful sense of the excellency of Jesus Christ.”58 The effect is that we become whole new persons—“renewed in knowledge” (Col. 3:10). Scripture knows nothing of any type of spirituality that bypasses intellect and operates only on feelings.

This struck me as a pretty basic misunderstanding of the way capitalism works—as does, in fact, the whole notion of a nurturing “ecosystem” dedicated to “mentoring” and “incubating” other people’s precious startups. (It’s a basic misunderstanding of ecology, too, but we will let that pass.) Other than the chance to make some money, why would a capitalist participate in such a thing? If startups really were to encourage other startups, they would be contributing pretty directly to their own competition—and robust competition is precisely what today’s thinking business person wants to avoid. The winning quality today is monopoly, not competition. But this is not a literature given to subtlety or introspection. As the tech writer Evgeny Morozov points out in To Save Everything, Click Here, the cult of innovation holds every info-age novelty to be “inherently good in itself, regardless of its social or political consequences.” Sure enough, as far as I have been able to determine, few of the people who write or talk about innovation even acknowledge the possibility that innovations might be harmful instead of noble and productive. And yet recent history is littered with exactly such stuff: Innovations that allow companies to spy on us. Innovations that allow terrorist groups to recruit online. Innovations that allowed Enron to do all the fine things it used to do. Come to think of it, the whole economic debacle of the last ten years owes its existence to the financial innovations of the Nineties and the Aughts—the credit default swaps, or the algorithms companies used to hand out mortgage loans—innovations that were celebrated in their day in the same mindlessly positive way we celebrate tech today.