Oriental Music Quotes

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The highly sensitive [introverted] tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions--sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments--both physical and emotional--unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss--another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too try, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They're often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there are new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron's husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions -- sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments -- both physical and emotional -- unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss -- another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’
Ozzy Osbourne (I Am Ozzy)
If there is a God, she thought, music must be his language.
Lindsay Jayne Ashford (The Woman on the Orient Express)
Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.
Patti Smith
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages; she must be well trained in the fighting styles of the Kyoto masters and the modern tactics and weaponry of Europe. And besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved. All this she must possess, and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading, meditation, and Oriental discipline.
Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, #1))
I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly "done," there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art pictures books and music. EXTREME palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else: the x-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don't do anything at all. Would that be so bad?
Roz Chast (Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?)
What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.
Daniel Coyle (The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else)
I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mornings, and the old kitchen around me, and Aurelia's gold smile and quick hands and eyes rich with love for me.
Anne Rivers Siddons (Colony)
Expressive arts therapy--the purposeful application of art, music, dance/movement, dramatic enactment, creative writing, and imaginative play--is a non-verbal way of self-expression of feelings and perceptions. More importantly, they are action-oriented and tap implicit, embodied experiences of trauma that can defy expression through verbal therapy or logic.
Cathy A. Malchiodi (Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process)
A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.
Miles Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime)
When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc.
Maya Deren
Highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They're often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there are new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron's husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art. They feel exceptionally strong emotions -sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments -both physical and emotional -unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss - another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
The conference is geared to people who enjoy meaningful discussions and sometimes "move a conversation to a deeper level, only to find out we are the only ones there." . . . When it's my turn, I talk about how I've never been in a group environment in which I didn't feel obliged to present an unnaturally rah-rah version of myself. . . . Scientists can easily report on the behavior of extroverts, who can often be found laughing, talking, or gesticulating. But "if a person is standing in the corner of a room, you can attribute about fifteen motivations to that person. But you don't really know what's going on inside." . . . So what is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it? . . . The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive . . . . They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions--sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments--both physical and emotional--unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss--another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly. . . . [Inside fMRI machines], the sensitive people were processing the photos at a more elaborate level than their peers . . . . It may also help explain why they're so bored by small talk. "If you're thinking in more complicated ways," she told me, "then talking about the weather or where you went for the holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality." The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. They avoid violent movies and TV shows; they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. In social settings they often focus on subjects like personal problems, which others consider "too heavy.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical--because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Music expresses both in lyrics and in tune something of the orientation of the composer and author as to what the truth of religion is and how we ought to practice it
Robert Godfrey
Uh-oh," Will muttered. "This is going to be ... interesting." It turned out the creative genius behind the movie was Will's dad - the god Apollo, which meant this was not going to be a typical orientation flick. No, as we soon found out, Apollo had written, directed, produced, hosted and starred in ... a variety show. For those of you who don't know what a variety show is, imagine a talent show on steroids, complete with canned laughter, pre-recorded applause, and an extra-large helping of hokeyness. For the next hour, we cringe-watched as Apollo and our demigod predecessors performed in song-and-dance numbers, recited poetry, acted in comedy sketches and harmonized in a musical group called the Lyre Choir. Naturally, Apollo featured prominently in most of the acts. The one of him hula-hooping shirtless while satyrs capered around with long rainbow ribbons on sticks ... you can't unsee that kind of thing.
Rick Riordan (Camp Half-Blood Confidential (The Trials of Apollo))
A wonderful point in favor of some kind of hereafter is this: When the mind rejects as childishly absurd a paradise with musical angels or abstract colonnades with Horace and Milton in togas conversing and walking together through the eternal twilight, or the protracted voluptas of the orient or any other eternity -- such as the one with devils and porcupines -- we forget that if we could have imagined life before living it would have seemed more improbable than all our hereafters
Vladimir Nabokov
...a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical--because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl. “What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again. “I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.” “And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily. “Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.
Jason Matthews (Red Sparrow (Red Sparrow Trilogy, #1))
Going to church gets us out of our self-oriented prison. We are forced to sit next to someone who reeks of garlic. We are forced to put up with music that is not to our taste. We are made to listen to truths that we wish were rather not true. All this is good for us. It is not only good for us; it is essential if we are to find joy.
Josh Moody (How Church Can Change Your Life: Answers to the ten most common questions about church)
Typically, preachers in our work-oriented society teach that God rested to provide humanity with a precedent for rest, an example for our good. Seldom have I heard mention of the other meaning for rest, the one used in musical notation. This meaning refers to cessation rather than recovery from weariness. Our enjoyment of music owes much to these brief pauses.
Hugh Ross (Hidden Treasures in the Book of Job (Reasons to Believe): How the Oldest Book in the Bible Answers Today's Scientific Questions)
In 2005, The Color Purple became a phenomenally successful Broadway musical, playing to packed houses every night for over a year. In the process it transformed the “Great White Way” into a place where people of all colors, orientations and identities gathered to experience the show and to celebrate “God” as Life and Love, Perseverance, Hope, Creativity and Joy.
Alice Walker (The Color Purple Collection: The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy)
ref·u·gee noun: a person who flees for refuge or safety We are, each of us, refugees when we flee from burning buildings into the arms of loving families. When we flee from floods and earthquakes to sleep on blue mats in community centres. We are, each of us, refugees when we flee from abusive relationships, and shooters in cinemas and shopping centres. Sometimes it takes only a day for our countries to persecute us because of our creed, race, or sexual orientation. Sometimes it takes only a minute for the missiles to rain down and leave our towns in ruin and destitution. We are, each of us, refugees longing for that amniotic tranquillity dreaming of freedom and safety when fences and barbed wires spring into walled gardens. Lebanese, Sudanese, Libyan and Syrian, Yemeni, Somali, Palestinian, and Ethiopian, like our brothers and sisters, we are, each of us, refugees. The bombs fell in their cafés and squares where once poetry, dancing, and laughter prevailed. Only their olive trees remember music and merriment now as their cities wail for departed children without a funeral. We are, each of us, refugees. Don’t let stamped paper tell you differently. We’ve been fleeing for centuries because to stay means getting bullets in our heads because to stay means being hanged by our necks because to stay means being jailed, raped and left for dead. But we can, each of us, serve as one another’s refuge so we don't board dinghies when we can’t swim so we don’t climb walls with snipers aimed at our chest so we don’t choose to remain and die instead. When home turns into hell, you, too, will run with tears in your eyes screaming rescue me! and then you’ll know for certain: you've always been a refugee.
Kamand Kojouri
But there were also new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron's husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions-sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
Susan Cain (Quiet Power & Quiet The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking By Susan Cain 2 Books Collection Set)
And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between, but then along comes the fingers and, with a gesture of gathering in, as if harvesting a wheat field, they pluck from the ground all the colors of the world. What seemed unique was plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colors that have already been name, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experience in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity. What this clay hides and shows is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance and merging with each other. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted.
José Saramago (The Cave)
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
Steve Jobs (Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words)
They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there were also new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron’s husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
La cultura lleva a cabo síntesis deseables en el terreno artístico, donde préstamos, plagios y combinaciones forman la sustancia misma de la fecundidad creadora, pero que son imposibles en la existencia cotidiana. No puede uno beneficiarse del estilo de vida de otra civilización sin renunciar poco o mucho a la suya propia. A menos que llamemos cosmopolitismo al hecho de comer cuscús, tacos mexicanos, arroz cantonés, de llevar kimonos, escuchar música oriental o teñirse el pelo con henna. Pero sobre todo ningún libro, cuadro o pieza musical son en sí mismos portadores de un determinado precepto moral. Creer, por ejemplo, que 'el espíritu de la novela', es decir, 'la subversión lúdica de los dogmas y de las ortodoxias', podría actuar como conciencia crítica, erradicar nuestras pulsiones identitarias, pone de manifiesto un punto de vista muy generoso pero inverificable.
Pascal Bruckner (Le Vertige de Babel)
Saul had seen the rash of demonic-children entertainments as a symptom of deeper underlying fears and hatreds; the “me-generation’s” inability to shift into the role of responsible parenthood at the cost of losing their own interminable childhood, the transference of guilt from divorce—the child is not really a child, but an older, evil thing, capable of deserving any abuse resulting from the adult’s selfish actions—and the anger of an entire society revolting after two decades of a culture dominated by and devoted to youthful looks, youth-oriented music, juvenile movies, and the television and movie myth of the adult-child inevitably wiser, calmer, and more “with-it” than the childish adults in the house hold. So Saul had lectured that the child-fear and child-hatred becoming visible in popular shows and books had its irrational roots in common guilts, shared anxieties, and the universal angst of the age. He had warned that the national wave of abuse, neglect, and callousness toward children had its historical antecedents and that it would run its course, but that everything possible must be done to avoid and eliminate that brand of violence before it poisoned America.
Dan Simmons (Carrion Comfort)
She named the people who embodied these attributes “highly sensitive.” Some of these twenty-seven attributes were familiar from Kagan and others’ work. For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They’re often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there were also new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron’s husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl. “What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again. “I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.” “And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily. “Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.
Jason Matthews (Red Sparrow (Red Sparrow Trilogy #1))
Violent atrocities by teenagers against one another have become the stuff of headlines: at Columbine High School in Colorado; in Tabor, Alberta; in Liverpool, England. But to focus on the grim statistics and media stories of bloody violence is to miss the full impact of children's aggression in our society. The most telling signs of the groundswell of aggression and violence are not in the headlines but in the peer culture — the language, the music, the games, the art, and the entertainment of choice. A culture reflects the dynamics of its participants, and the culture of peer-oriented children is increasingly a culture of aggression and violence. The appetite for violence is reflected in the vicarious enjoyment of it not only in music and movies but in the schoolyards and school halls. Children fuel hostilities among their peers rather than defuse them, encourage others to fight rather than dissuade them from violence. The perpetrators are only the tip of the iceberg. In one schoolyard study, researchers found that most schoolchildren were likely to passively support or actively encourage acts of bullying and aggression; fewer than one in eight attempted to intervene. So ingrained have the culture and psychology of violence become that peers in general expressed more respect and liking for the bullies than for the victims.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
Herzog nodded. Once more he was being lectured. And he didn’t really mind it. That he needed straightening out was only too obvious. And who had more right than a woman who gave him asylum, shrimp, wine, music, flowers, sympathy, gave him room, so to speak, in her soul, and finally the embrace of her body? We must help one another. In this irrational world, where mercy, compassion, heart (even if a little fringed with self-interest), all rare things—hard-won in many human battles fought by rare minorities, victories whose results should never be taken for granted, for they were seldom reliable in anyone—rare things, were often debunked, renounced, repudiated by every generation of skeptics. Reason itself, logic, urged you to kneel and give thanks for every small sign of true kindness. The music played. Surrounded by summer flowers and articles of beauty, even luxury, under the soft green lamp, Ramona spoke to him earnestly—he looked affectionately at her warm face, its ripe color. Beyond, hot New York; an illuminated night which did not need the power of the moon. The Oriental rug and its flowing designs held out the hope that great perplexities might be resolved. He held Ramona’s soft cool arm in his fingers. His shirt was open on his chest. He was smiling, nodding a little as he listened to her. Much of what she said was perfectly right. She was a clever woman and, even better, a dear woman. She had a good heart. And she had on black lace underpants. He knew she did.
Saul Bellow (Herzog)
In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.
R.F. Georgy (Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story)
Despite the superficial similarities created by global technology, the dynamics of peer-orientation are more likely to promote division rather than a healthy universality. One need only to look at the extreme tribalization of the youth gangs, the social forms entered into by the most peer-oriented among our children. Seeking to be the same as someone else immediately triggers the need to be different from others. As the similarities within the chosen group strengthen, the differences from those outside the groups are accentuated to the point of hostility. Each group is solidified and reinforced by mutual emulation and cue-taking. In this way, tribes have formed spontaneously since the beginning of time. The crucial difference is that traditional tribal culture could be passed down, whereas these tribes of today are defined and limited by barriers among the generations. The school milieu is rife with such dynamics. When immature children cut off from their adult moorings mingle with one another, groups soon form spontaneously, often along the more obvious dividing lines of grade and gender and race. Within these larger groupings certain subcultures emerge: sometimes along the lines of dress and appearance, and sometimes along those of shared interests, attitudes, or abilities, as in groups of jocks, brains, and computer nerds. Sometimes they form among peer-oriented subcultures like skateboarders, bikers, and skinheads. Many of these subcultures are reinforced and shaped by the media and supported by cult costumes, symbols, movies, music, and language. If the tip of the peer-orientation iceberg are the gangs and the gang wannabes, at the base are the cliques. Immature beings revolving around one another invent their own language and modes of expression that impoverish their self-expression and cut them off from others. Such phenomena may have appeared before, of course, but not nearly to the same extent we are witnessing today. The result is tribalization.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst. Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work. After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair. Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.
David Eagleman (Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives)
Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation was the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called it “the new tribalism of the Electric Age.” Hair and dress and music played a significant part in shaping this culture, but what defined it more than anything was its glorification of the peer attachment that gave rise to it. Friends took precedence over family. Physical contact and connection with peers were pursued; the brotherhood of the pop tribe was declared, as in the generation-based “Woodstock nation.” The peer group was the true home. “Don't trust anyone over thirty” became the byword of youth who went far beyond a healthy critique of their elders to a militant rejection of tradition. The degeneration of that culture into alienation and drug use, on the one hand, and its co-optation for commercial purposes by the very mainstream institutions it was rebelling against were almost predictable. The wisdom of well-seasoned cultures has accumulated over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Healthy cultures also contain rituals and customs and ways of doing things that protect us from ourselves and safeguard values important to human life, even when we are not conscious of what such values are. An evolved culture needs to have some art and music that one can grow into, symbols that convey deeper meanings to existence and models that inspire greatness. Most important of all, a culture must protect its essence and its ability to reproduce itself — the attachment of children to their parents. The culture generated by peer orientation contains no wisdom, does not protect its members from themselves, creates only fleeting fads, and worships idols hollow of value or meaning. It symbolizes only the undeveloped ego of callow youth and destroys child-parent attachments. We may observe the cheapening of cultural values with each new peer-oriented generation. For all its self-delusion and smug isolation from the adult world, the Woodstock “tribe” still embraced universal values of peace, freedom, and brotherhood. Today's mass musical gatherings are about little more than style, ego, tribal exuberance, and dollars.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction)
Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old. You see, from the honky tonks you got such a mixture of all different types of music, and I think what happened is that when Elvis busted through, it enabled all these other groups that had been going along more or less the same avenue—I’m sure there were hundreds of them—to tighten up and focus on what was going to be popular. If they had a steel guitar they dropped it. The weepers and slow country ballads pretty much went out of their repertoire. And what you had left was country-orientated boogie music.
Peter Guralnick (Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians)
emerged from dance-oriented early hip-hop (which, like jazz, evolved by extending the breaks for dancers), it’s morphed into something else entirely: music that sounds best in cars. People do dance in their cars, or they try to.
David Byrne (How Music Works)
Charlie Gillett wrote that “folk existed in a world of its own until Bob Dylan dragged it, screaming, into pop,” and while folk fans might frame that the opposite way—Dylan had dragged pop, screaming very loudly, into their world—it was the iconic moment of intersection, when rock emerged, separate from rock ’n’ roll, and replaced folk as the serious, intelligent voice of a generation. In the process, rock fans adopted many of the folk world’s prides and prejudices: Rock ’n’ rollers had worn matching outfits, played teen-oriented dance music, and strove to cut hit singles. Rock musicians wore street clothes, sang poetic and meaningful lyrics accompanied by imaginative or self-consciously rootsy instrumentation, and recorded long-playing albums that demanded repeated, attentive listening. Those albums might sell in the millions, but they were presented as artistic statements, and by the later 1960s it was considered insulting to call someone like Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin “commercial.
Elijah Wald (Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties)
Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways. Let’s consider three of the most common active ingredients found in communal rituals: synchrony, goal-oriented collaboration, and rhythmic music. Synchrony seems to exploit both our evolved action-representation system and our mentalizing abilities. When moving in step with others, the neurological mechanisms used to represent our own actions and those used for others’ actions overlap in our brains. This is a neurological by-product of how our body’s own representational system is deployed to help model and predict others’ movements—it’s a glitch. The convergence in these representations blurs the distinction between ourselves and others, which leads us to perceive others as more like us and possibly even as extensions of ourselves. For evolutionary reasons, this illusion draws people closer together and creates a feeling of interdependence.
Joseph Henrich (The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
This is a very basic understanding of modes. As your understanding and application in playing deepens, you will start seeing them as completely separate scales rather than simple note re-orientations of the parent scales (that’s why you can sometimes use the terms ‘scale’ and ‘mode’ interchangeably).
Nicolas Carter (Music Theory: From Beginner to Expert - The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide to Understanding and Learning Music Theory Effortlessly (Essential Learning Tools for Musicians Book 1))
Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the moves and television shows we watch-these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most valuable tool to inspire the social change these times demand… As the old narrative of capitalism reveals its devastating failures, we urgently need more compelling and relatable stories that show us what a just, sustainable, and healthy world can look like. The old myths will die when we replace them with new ones. … A recent look at episodic TV shows found that in 2019 only three dealt with climate change (excluding docuseries that explicitly focus on climate); “a crisis that’s reshaping every aspect of human experience is being effectively ignored.” … Stories are like individual stars. For thousands of years, humans used the stars to tell stories, to help make sense of their lives, to orient them on the planet. Stories work in the same way. When many stars coalesce around similar themes, they form a narrative constellation that can disrupt business as usual. They reveal patterns and help illuminate what was once obscured. The powerful shine in one story can inspire other stories. HARNESSING CULTURAL POWER by Favianna Rodriguez
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
But it isn’t just nostalgia or retrospectives that keep emo alive; it’s that confusing, made-up thing we talked about called “identity.” An identity is something you create. It’s a portrait you paint that you feel represents your soul most accurately. We define ourselves by the books we read, the photos we take, and the music that we listen to. Emo is very much alive within my identity; I consider it a part of who I am. But it’s not just a hobby or an interest. It is as much a core fiber of my being as are my heart and my thoughts. For some, it is as much a part of their identity as their gender or sexual orientation. Within these songs are my best and worst memories and my best and worst self. Within me is a desire to keep reminding the world how important emo was and is. Because no, it wasn’t just a phase or a passing fad. It wasn’t that music you listened to when you were thirteen and then gave up on when you became a “real adult.” Emo is credible. It is valuable. It is irreplaceable, and my friends and I—everyone in this book—want the world to recognize that.
Taylor Markarian (From the Basement: A History of Emo Music and How It Changed Society)
What is sensory integration therapy? This form of occupational therapy helps children and adults with SPD (sensory processing disorder) use all their senses together. These are the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Sensory integration therapy is claimed to help people with SPD respond to sensory inputs such as light, sound, touch, and others; and change challenging or repetitive behaviours. Someone in the family may have trouble receiving and responding to information through their senses. This is a condition called sensory processing disorder (SPD). These people are over-sensitive to things in their surroundings. This disorder is commonly identified in children and with conditions like autism spectrum disorder. The exact cause of sensory processing disorder is yet to be identified. However, previous studies have proven that over-sensitivity to light and sound has a strong genetic component. Other studies say that those with sensory processing conditions have abnormal brain activity when exposed simultaneously to light and sound. Treatment for sensory processing disorder in children and adults is called sensory integration therapy. Therapy sessions are play-oriented for children, so they should be fun and playful. This may include the use of swings, slides, and trampolines and may be able to calm an anxious child. In addition, children can make appropriate responses. They can also perform more normally. SPD can also affect adults Someone who struggles with SPD should consider receiving occupational therapy, which has an important role in identifying and treating sensory integration issues. Occupational therapists are health professionals using different therapeutic approaches so that people can do every work they need to do, inside and outside their homes. Through occupational therapy, affected individuals are helped to manage their immediate and long-term sensory symptoms. Sensory integration therapy for adults, especially for people living with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, may use everyday sounds, objects, foods, and other items to rouse their feelings and elicit positive responses. Suppose an adult is experiencing agitation or anxiety. In that case, soothing music can calm them, or smelling a scent familiar to them can help lessen their nervous excitement and encourage relaxation, as these things can stimulate their senses. Seniors with Alzheimer's/Dementia can regain their ability to connect with the world around them. This can help improve their well-being overall and quality of life. What Are The Benefits of Sensory Integration Therapy Sensory integration treatment offers several benefits to people with SPD: * efficient organisation of sensory information. These are the things the brain collects from one's senses - smell, touch, sight, etc. * Active involvement in an exploration of the environment. * Maximised ability to function in recreational and other daily activities. * Improved independence with daily living activities. * Improved performance in the home, school, and community. * self-regulations. Affected individuals get the ability to understand and manage their behaviours and understand their feelings about things that happen around them. * Sensory systems modulation. If you are searching for an occupational therapist to work with for a family with a sensory processing disorder, check out the Mission Walk Therapy & Rehabilitation Centre. The occupational therapy team of Mission Walk uses individualised care plans, along with the most advanced techniques, so that patients can perform games, school tasks, and other day-to-day activities with their best functional skills. Call Mission Walk today for more information or a free consultation on sensory integration therapy. Our customer service staff will be happy to help.
Missionwalk - Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation
There is an urge to self-transcendence and, with it, the victims of tension, becomes acute and agonizing. In every human culture certain procedures for achieving temporary self-transcendence, and thereby relieving tension, have been developed and systematically employed. These procedures may be classified under a few comprehensive headings. There are chemical methods, the musical and gymnastic methods, the methods that depend on the subjection of insulated individuals to the influence of the crowds, the various religious methods and, finally the methods whose purpose is mystical self-transcendence -the various yogas and spiritual exercises of Oriental and Western traditions.
Aldous Huxley (Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience)
When I was a boy I once received, as a Christmas gift, a beautiful book of oriental fairy tales. The stories all took place in India. They told of mighty kings riding to war on elephants; of marble palaces with golden domes where lovely princesses were imprisoned; of magic music that came at midnight from an enchanted grove in the jungle.
Richard Halliburton (Richard Halliburton's Second Book of Marvels: The Orient)
To the primitive mind—and to the poet in all ages—mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, stars, sun, moon and sky are sacramentally holy things, because they are the outward and visible signs of inward and invisible souls. To the early Greeks the sky was the god Ouranos, the moon was Selene, the earth was Gaea, the sea was Poseidon, and everywhere in the woods was Pan. To the ancient Germans the forest primeval was peopled with genii, elves, trolls, giants, dwarfs and fairies; these sylvan creatures survive in the music of Wagner and the poetic dramas of Ibsen. The simpler peasants of Ireland still believe in fairies, and no poet or playwright can belong to the Irish literary revival unless he employs them. There is wisdom as well as beauty in this animism; it is good and nourishing to treat all things as alive. To the sensitive spirit, says the most sensitive of contemporary writers, Nature begins to present herself as a vast congeries of separate living entities, some visible, some invisible, but all possessed of mind-stuff, all possessed of matter-stuff, and all blending mind and matter together in the basic mystery of being. . . . The world is full of gods! From every planet and from every stone there emanates a presence that disturbs us with a sense of the multitudinousness of god-like powers, strong and feeble, great and little, moving between heaven and earth upon their secret purposes.103
Will Durant (Our Oriental Heritage (Story of Civilization 1))
Consciousness activists in history have discovered ways of freeing the default awareness from its normal bondage to sensory-intellectual life. There are methods for opening the mental space that allows transpersonal breakthroughs to occur more readily. Traditional methods like the many yogas, like prayer, fasting, meditation, drumming, music, and so on, all are methods of purifying, directing, and sometimes, vacating consciousness of specific content. The great lesson seems to be one of right orientation, so, for example, Augustine said, “If you seek the truth, go within.
Reinerio Hernandez (Vol 1. A Greater Reality: The New Paradigm of Nonlocal Consciousness, the Paranormal & the Contact Modalities (A GREATER REALITY: The New Paradigm of Non-local ... and the Contact Modalities Book 2))
Not only Newton's classical physics but also wave mechanics ultimately originated in the tension between those eight minutes of arc - less than one-seventh of one degree - and Kepler's Pythagorean metaphysics. Like the theory of atoms, which began in its Greek form as metaphysics in the fifth century B.C. (Leucippus and Democritus) and acquired scientific status only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries A.D., Kepler's Harmony of the World acquired scientific status only with Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger. In fact, Schrodinger's wave mechanics takes the transition from geometric radial optics to wave optics and attempts to transpose it to the theory of matter, to the theory of elementary particles. Wave optics in turn takes its orientation from musical theory, from the theory of acoustic vibrations and waves, resonance and dissonance. But in this theory Kepler and his doctrine of harmony - hence Pythagoras in the end - plays a decisive role. Kepler, then, plays a role in the prehistory of Schrodinger's wave mechanics. But that is not all. Of all Schrodinger's precursors, Kepler is the only one who foresaw that harmony - resonance - holds the world together.
Karl Popper (All Life is Problem Solving)
Saul took a deep breath. He had lectured at Columbia and other universities on the peculiar and perverse strain of modern violence in such books and movies as The Exorcist, The Omen, and innumerable imitations, going back to Rosemary’s Baby. Saul had seen the rash of demonic-children entertainments as a symptom of deeper underlying fears and hatreds; the “me-generation’s” inability to shift into the role of responsible parenthood at the cost of losing their own interminable childhood, the transference of guilt from divorce—the child is not really a child, but an older, evil thing, capable of deserving any abuse resulting from the adult’s selfish actions—and the anger of an entire society revolting after two decades of a culture dominated by and devoted to youthful looks, youth-oriented music, juvenile movies, and the television and movie myth of the adult-child inevitably wiser, calmer, and more “with-it” than the childish adults in the house hold. So Saul had lectured that the child-fear and child-hatred becoming visible in popular shows and books had its irrational roots in common guilts, shared anxieties, and the universal angst of the age. He had warned that the national wave of abuse, neglect, and callousness toward children had its historical antecedents and that it would run its course, but that everything possible must be done to avoid and eliminate that brand of violence before it poisoned America.
Dan Simmons (Carrion Comfort)
1 Chronicles 16:8 and many other portions of Scripture relate calling upon the Lord to the telling of all his deeds. Calling upon the Lord is equivalent to seeking him by faith (Ps. 14:2; Rom. 10:12–13). When we do, he gives us our desires (Ps. 145:18). Neither can worship be isolated from culture. Nor can culture be developed without religion, which is a form of worship. Just at the factual level this is clear. We don’t worship on the Sabbath without a number of cultural elements: the style of music, the language we use, a preaching style, the building we worship in, the dress code, etc. And when we engage in culture, be it science or politics or art, or even marriage and procreation, there is always a fundamental spiritual orientation involved.
Doug Serven (Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs)
The day on which she turned eleven, Grandfather Bill had presented her with her very own orchid. "This is especially for you, Julia. Its name is 'Aerides odoratum,' which means 'children of the air.'" Julia studied the delicate ivory and pink petals of the flower sitting in its pot. They felt velvety beneath her touch. "Where does this one come from, Grandfather Bill?" she had asked. "From the Orient, in the jungles of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand." "Oh. What kind of music do you think it likes?" "It seems particularly partial to a touch of Mozart," chuckled her grandfather. "Or if it looks like it's wilting, perhaps you could try some Chopin!
Lucinda Riley (The Orchid House)
traditional folk music and dance in India ,specially women oriented . every folk music has a homely story where women are portraits as house wife within four walls ,who has only knowledge about her husband and households activities. world is for men . though this is changing now .
litymunshi
But the Oriental musician has a rough notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of a teacher, getting the “feel” of it, and copying him, and this enables him to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched only by those Western jazz artists who use the same approach.
Alan W. Watts (The Way of Zen)
The problem of specialization of knowledge makes them reach conclusions which are bounded by the specific jargon and scope of their disciplines. Prof. Dawkins as a biologist asks naïve question that if there is complexity in observable life, then what will be the biological complexity of the Creator. Atheists who belong to physics profession try to ascribe origins to physical forces and physical laws. Physicists like Prof. Michio Kaku having a mathematical orientation describe God’s mind as ‘Music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace’. Technical entrepreneurs like Elon Musk describe existence as part of a possible simulation. Unfortunately, there is no serious effort to understand the point of view of faith beyond the narrow confinements of one’s field of specialization.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
Women [who are] sick with an itch, dissatisfied to the point of dancing alone in their homes to music that isn’t so much music but dull pain with a tune. Women with demands that are mysterious even to themselves. Women who are runaways in their own kitchens. Women who are in no rush to respond to a world that’s only conceived them as its consequence. Who experience deep movement by playing air piano. Who are wind-oriented.
Durga Chew-Bose (Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays)
No, I’m talking about being a complete loser. That’s something totally new to the rock idiom, which by its very nature is immature and totally macho-orientated in its basic attitude.
Nick Kent (The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993)
Culture is a vehicle for true self-expression. The flowering of individual creativity takes place in the context of culture. When a child becomes peer-oriented, the transmission lines of civilization are downed. The new models to emulate are other children or peer groups or the latest pop icons. Appearance, attitudes, dress, and demeanor all adapt accordingly. Even children's language changes — more impoverished, less articulate about their observations and experience, less expressive of meaning and nuance. Peer-oriented children are not devoid of culture, but the culture they are enrolled in is generated by their peer orientation. Although this culture is broadcast through media controlled by adults, it is the children and youth whose tastes and preferences it must satisfy. They, the young, wield the spending power that determines the profits of the culture industry — even if it is the parents’ incomes that are being disposed of in the process. Advertisers know subtly well how to exploit the power of peer imitation as they make their pitch to ever-younger groups of customers via the mass electronic media. In this way, it is our youth who dictate hairstyles and fashion, youth to whom music must appeal, youth who primarily drive the box office. Youth determine the cultural icons of our age. The adults who cater to the expectations of peer-oriented youth may control the market and profit from it, but as agents of cultural transmission they are simply pandering to the debased cultural tastes of children disconnected from healthy adult contact. Peer culture arises from children and evolves with them as they age. Peer orientation breeds aggression and an unhealthy, precocious sexuality. The result is the aggressively hostile and hypersexualized youth culture, propagated by the mass media, to which children are already exposed by early adolescence. Today's rock videos shock even adults who themselves grew up under the influence of the “sexual revolution.” As the onset of peer-orientation emerges earlier and earlier, so does the culture it creates. The butt-shaking and belly-button-baring Spice Girls pop phenomenon of the late 1990s, as of this writing a rapidly fading memory, seems in retrospect a nostalgically innocent cultural expression compared with the pornographically eroticized pop idols served up to today's preadolescents.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
Children displaced from their families, unconnected to their teachers, and not yet mature enough to relate to one another as separate beings, automatically regroup to satisfy their instinctive drive for attachment. The culture of the group is either invented or borrowed from the peer culture at large. It does not take children very long to know what tribe they belong to, what the rules are, whom they can talk to, and whom they must keep at a distance. Despite our attempts to teach our children respect for individual differences and to instill in them a sense of belonging to a cohesive civilization, we are fragmenting at an alarming rate into tribal chaos. Our very own children are leading the way. The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. Children nurtured in traditional hierarchies of attachment are not nearly as susceptible to the spontaneous forces of tribalization. The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment. The culture created by peer orientation does not mix well with other cultures. Because peer orientation exists unto itself, so does the culture it creates. It operates much more like a cult than a culture. Immature beings who embrace the culture generated by peer orientation become cut off from people of other cultures. Peer-oriented youth actually glory in excluding traditional values and historical connections. People from differing cultures that have been transmitted vertically retain the capacity to relate to one another respectfully, even if in practice that capacity is often overwhelmed by the historical or political conflicts in which human beings become caught up. Beneath the particular cultural expressions they can mutually recognize the universality of human values and cherish the richness of diversity. Peer-oriented kids are, however, inclined to hang out with one another exclusively. They set themselves apart from those not like them. As our peer-oriented children reach adolescence, many parents find themselves feeling as if their very own children are barely recognizable with their tribal music, clothing, language, rituals, and body decorations. “Tattooing and piercing, once shocking, are now merely generational signposts in a culture that constantly redraws the line between acceptable and disallowed behavior,” a Canadian journalist pointed out in 2003. Many of our children are growing up bereft of the universal culture that produced the timeless creations of humankind: The Bhagavad Gita; the writings of Rumi and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes and Faulkner, or of the best and most innovative of living authors; the music of Beethoven and Mahler; or even the great translations of the Bible. They know only what is current and popular, appreciate only what they can share with their peers. True universality in the positive sense of mutual respect, curiosity, and shared human values does not require a globalized culture created by peer-orientation. It requires psychological maturity — a maturity that cannot result from didactic education, only from healthy development. Only adults can help children grow up in this way. And only in healthy relationships with adult mentors — parents, teachers, elders, artistic, musical and intellectual creators — can children receive their birthright, the universal and age-honored cultural legacy of humankind. Only in such relationships can they fully develop their own capacities for free and individual and fresh cultural expression.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
It is easy to blame television or the movies or rap music for desensitizing our children to human suffering, to violence, and even to death. Yet the fundamental invulnerability does not come from commercialized culture, reprehensible as it is for pandering to and exploiting children's emotional hardening and immaturity. The invulnerability of peer-oriented kids is fueled from the inside. Even if there were no movies or television programs to shape its expression, it still would spring forth spontaneously as the modus operandi of peer-oriented youth. Though peer-oriented children can come from all over the world and belong to an infinite number of subcultures, the theme of invulnerability is universal in youth culture. Fashions may come and go, music can change form, the language may vary, but cool detachment and emotional shutdown seem to permeate it all. The pervasiveness of this culture is a powerful testimony to the desperate flight from vulnerability of its members.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism. As
Mark A. Noll (The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
What Can You Do About a Passive Child? Parents of passive children have a double problem. These kids have the same boundary problems of irresponsibility or resistance to ownership, but it’s harder to engage them in the learning process. Here are some ways children exhibit passivity: • Procrastination. The child responds to you at the last possible moment. He finishes school tasks late and “makes” you wait in the car for him to get ready for school or other meetings. When you ask him to turn the music down or set the dinner table, a normally energetic and quick-moving child slows his pace down immeasurably. He takes enormous time to do what he doesn’t want, and little time to do what he wants. • Ignoring. Your child shuts your instruction out, either pretending not to hear you or simply disregarding you. She keeps attending to her toy, her book, or her daydreaming. • Lack of initiative and risk-taking. Your child avoids new experiences, such as meeting new friends or trying out a sport or artistic medium, and he stays in familiar activities and patterns. • Living in a fantasy world. Your child tends to be more inward-oriented than invested in the real world. He seems happier and more alive when he is lost in his head, and he retreats there at the first sign of problems or discomfort. • Passive defiance. The child resists your requests by looking blankly or sullenly at you, then simply doing nothing. She is obviously angry or contemptuous of your authority, but shows you without words. • Isolation. Your child avoids contact with others, preferring to stay in her room. Rather than confront, argue, or fight with you, she instead reacts against some problem you present by leaving you. Passive kids aren’t bad or evil. They simply have a particular way of approaching life that
Henry Cloud (Boundaries with Kids: When to Say Yes, How to Say No)
As their ties to social, political, and religious institutions loosened, they could increasingly fashion their work solely according to the dictates of their own consciences. Beholden to no higher authority than their creative imagination, the progressive composer could experiment at will, following the inclination of the age to pursue the unique and unusual at the expense of the conventional and accepted. This new artistic freedom went hand in hand with the period's overall esthetic orientation, for the music was able to follow an independent course, without concern for the comprehension and receptivity of a broadly based public, the more it was able to serve as a vehicle for personal expression and to assume it's new role as a symbol of individuality or, eventually, of open revolt.
Robert P. Morgan (Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America)
Music transcends all the labels people want to slap on us like race, religion, gender, and orientation. People might not always rise above the fray, but music does.
Aimee Nicole Walker (Inside Out (Road to Blissville, #6))
If we want them to buy a box of expensive chocolates, we can first arrange for them to write down a number that’s much larger than the price of the chocolates. If we want them to choose a bottle of French wine, we can expose them to French background music before they decide. If we want them to agree to try an untested product, we can first inquire whether they consider themselves adventurous. If we want to convince them to select a highly popular item, we can begin by showing them a scary movie. If we want them to feel warmly toward us, we can hand them a hot drink. If we want them to be more helpful to us, we can have them look at photos of individuals standing close together. If we want them to be more achievement oriented, we can provide them with an image of a runner winning a race. If we want them to make careful assessments, we can show them a picture of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.
Robert B. Cialdini (Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade)
Traditional rock music favors a working-class body with callused hands and a whisky-rough voice, and by denying this particular brand of physicality the body of electronic music was easily heard as lazy, weak, undisciplined, and effete. The criticism in the 1980s and 1990s that electronic musicians were fake or talentless, then, is a response to a perceived threat against a specific bodily identity as encoded in sound—an identity within a narrow range of class, gender, sexual orientation, and race. As
S. Alexander Reed (Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music)
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages; she must be well trained in the fighting styles of the Kyoto masters and the modern tactics and weaponry of Europe. And besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved. All this she must possess, and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading, meditation, and Oriental discipline.
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
identify your employee adjectives, (2) recruit through proper advertising, (3) identify winning personalities, and (4) select your winners. Step One: Identify Your Employee Adjectives When you think of your favorite employees in the past, what comes to mind? A procedural element such as an organized workstation, neat paperwork, or promptness? No. What makes an employee memorable is her attitude and smile, the way she takes the time to make sure a customer is happy, the extra mile she goes to ensure orders are fulfilled and problems are solved. Her intrinsic qualities—her energy, sense of humor, eagerness, and contributions to the team—are the qualities you remember. Rather than relying on job descriptions that simply quantify various positions’ duties and correlating them with matching experience as a tool for identifying and hiring great employees, I use a more holistic approach. The first step in the process is selecting eight adjectives that best define the personality ideal for each job or role in your business. This is a critical step: it gives you new visions and goals for your own management objectives, new ways to measure employee success, and new ways to assess the performance of your own business. Create a “Job Candidate Profile” for every job position in your business. Each Job Candidate Profile should contain eight single- and multiple-word phrases of defining adjectives that clearly describe the perfect employee for each job position. Consider employee-to-customer personality traits, colleague-to-colleague traits, and employee-to-manager traits when making up the list. For example, an accounting manager might be described with adjectives such as “accurate,” “patient,” “detailed,” and “consistent.” A cocktail server for a nightclub or casual restaurant would likely be described with adjectives like “energetic,” “fun,” “music-loving,” “sports-loving,” “good-humored,” “sociable conversationalist,” “adventurous,” and so on. Obviously, the adjectives for front-of-house staff and back-of-house staff (normally unseen by guests) will be quite different. Below is one generic example of a Job Candidate Profile. Your lists should be tailored for your particular bar concept, audience, location, and style of business (high-end, casual, neighborhood, tourist, and so on). BARTENDER Energetic Extroverted/Conversational Very Likable (first impression) Hospitable, demonstrates a Great Service Attitude Sports Loving Cooperative, Team Player Quality Orientated Attentive, Good Listening Skills SAMPLE ADJECTIVES Amazing Ambitious Appealing Ardent Astounding Avid Awesome Buoyant Committed Courageous Creative Dazzling Dedicated Delightful Distinctive Diverse Dynamic Eager Energetic Engaging Entertaining Enthusiastic Entrepreneurial Exceptional Exciting Fervent Flexible Friendly Genuine High-Energy Imaginative Impressive Independent Ingenious Keen Lively Magnificent Motivating Outstanding Passionate Positive Proactive Remarkable Resourceful Responsive Spirited Supportive Upbeat Vibrant Warm Zealous Step Two: Recruit through Proper Advertising The next step is to develop print or online advertising copy that will attract the personalities you’ve just defined.
Jon Taffer (Raise the Bar: An Action-Based Method for Maximum Customer Reactions)
Evgeny Morozov, the most bracing critic of modern optimism, emphasizes the anaesthetizing effects of perpetual amusement. People use new means of communication not to engage in political activism, but to find entertainment. The Net is no exception, and has increased the opportunities for the masses to find pleasing diversions to a level that no one had previously imagined possible. In Russia, China, Vietnam and the other formerly puritan communist countries, the decision by the new market-orientated regimes to allow Western-style media to provide high-quality escapism, sport, dating and gossip sites was a smart move that made their control of the masses more effective. In Belarus, Morozov discovered Internet service providers that were offering free downloads of pirated movies and music. The dictatorship ‘could easily put an end to such practices, [but] prefers to look the other way and may even be encouraging them’. Unlike so many who write about the Net, Morozov was brought up in a dictatorship – Belarus, as it happens – and the knowledge that freedom is hard to win explains his impatience with wishful thinking.
Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
have forty-three years behind me and I feel as lonely as if I were a child.” All remains to be done and said. His work is still only the outline of an idea, a promise, and he would falter at his task if it were not for music. “She alone delivers me from myself, she sobers me up, orientates me towards myself, as if I looked down on myself from a great height, as if I had the sensation of being at a very high vantage point. She fortifies me, and regularly, following an evening of music (I have listened to Carmen now four times), a morning dawns redolent with energetic sights and discoveries. It is quite remarkable. It is as if I have bathed in a more neutral element. Life without music is simply a mistake, enfeeblement, an exile.” (Letter to Gast.)
Guy de Pourtalès (Nietzsche in Italy)