Paradox And Dream Quotes

The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

She stared at her console, wanting to punch it. Her dream, running to save her life, to save everything, was all going to come true down on the planet’s surface. And when it did, she knew this time she wasn’t going to wake up.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

There are many, many, many worlds branching out at each moment you become aware of your environment and then make a choice.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time. Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed. If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister… Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable. The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty. You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you. If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.

I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

Ayla, I looked for you all my life and didn't know I was looking. You are everything I ever wanted, everything I ever dreamed of in a woman, and more. You are a fascinating enigma, a paradox. You are totally honest, open; you hide nothing: yet you are the most mysterious woman I've ever met.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write in a solitude born out of community. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep. I write to the answers that keep me complacent. I write to remember. I write to forget…. I write because I believe in words. I write because I do not believe in words. I write because it is a dance with paradox. I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand. I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide. I write because it is the way I take long walks. I write as a bow to wilderness. I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness…. write as ritual. I write because I am not employable. I write out of my inconsistencies. I write because then I do not have to speak. I write with the colors of memory. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine…. I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient we are. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

It's not easy to do the things you dream of doing. Sometimes it's not that easy just to get up in the morning. That's how it is for everyone.

Most people would assume Gideon was a pessimist because hello, look at the obvious (everything fucking sucked) but actually he wasn’t, because he enjoyed being alive. He loved being awake. He missed being awake.

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

I want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have. I want to tell them they can overcome everything, if the are courageous, resilient and brave. Paradoxically, I also want to tell them their crowns have already been bought and paid for and that all they have to do is put them on their heads. But the world keeps tripping me up. My certainty keeps flailing.

And when I'm lonely, with everyone around I go to my happy place where I'm alone

The cherished dream of every chessplayer is to play a match with the World Champion. But here is the paradox: the closer you come to the realization of this goal, the less you think about it.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that "shaping" force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.

Life is my nightmare now, and paradoxically, my dreams have become escapes.

Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for—ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake—for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread of argument slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.

Sonnet I If thee must say that I am not who I am, That I am not real or true, Then thou must say you are not as well, For we either walk in fairytales and dance to our dreams, Or we die trying to capture a miracle between the ordinary moments, We rejoice in the gratitude for our needs met, But we pray for the staircases and open doors to our desires, We redefine our gratitude with another day, Another dance of praise to Thee for undoing are mistakes of unneeded wants and needs we want, but not met.

Yes, here, this was his domain now, because they were in a dream and Gideon was a dreamer. He was an optimist, an idiot prince. He saw the possibility of doom and said not today, fucker!, flipping off the whims of fate while diving backward into hell.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Poor old G.K.C.! It's too bad he didn't live to see the change. What paradoxes he would have dreamed up!

Aristotle was right—the way to overcome the paradox of democracy is by reducing inequality, not reducing democracy.

And therein lies the paradox that would haunt me for almost ten years: the tug-of-war between two worlds. A world of freedom versus a world of stability and family. A world of dreams versus a world of tradition.

Aspirations,dreams were some of the most powerful components that also held life from falling apart. They propelled life towards the fulfilment of a destiny. All those hard tests required to pass in the boot camp and outside in the Dravi community on this journey to the safe haven were worthy trade-offs thereof. The presence of the paradoxical absence of the ONE, and His selective random process as to who won and who didn't was one of those many unresolved puzzles. However, His existence was as immutable as the law of gravity to the faithful." - Moiae, Mehreen Ahmed

I am simply a complicated girl Mesmerized by mystery Enchanted with shadows Intrigued by glitter and gray in each of us A girl fascinated with word-play; Paradoxes, ironies, conundrums In love with adventure and curious about the world A girl who feels and dreams deeply Loves passionately Lives recklessly But about all else, I am a girl insanely in love with you! You are my greatest inspiration!

On Editors: "... The chief qualification of ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have failed as writers. Don't think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal to success in literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures of literature. The editors, the sub-editors, associate editors, most of them, and the manuscript readers for the magazines and book-publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write and failed. And yet they, of all creatures under the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find its way into print–they, who have proved themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius. And after them comes the reviewers, just so many more failures. Don't tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to write poetry and fiction; for they have, and they have failed. Why, the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil....

As we dreamers make our souls into evolved fields, our genius is nutured and our presence and everything we create becomes charged and capable of positively altering the fields of others. In this process, we become more essentially human-which is to say, paradoxically, more divine.

How did this happen? How did we start up a nation from nothing and transform it into a nation of start-ups? The answer lies in a paradox: having nothing was at once our greatest challenge and our greatest blessing of all. Without natural resources, our hopes were tied to our own creativity.

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.

Deep sleep is when you are asleep but not dreaming. Paradoxical sleep is the sleep in which you dream. So, only paradoxical thought is the thought in which you think. Is there, by analogy, a paradoxical state of death - a deep death and a death with dreams? It is evil that speaks evil: evil can ventriloquize.

Whatever. I know that when a monster is chasing you. You take your high-heeled shoes off. I’ve learned that … And you never, ever dangle your legs over the edge of the bed at night … And clowns, well, you get rid of them right away; they are just way too freaky. If the monster doesn’t get you, the clown sure will.

Above all, believe. Cultivate your swagger. Make this your new religion: You are funny and talented, and you’re going to try something new. This is the exact right time for that. This is the most important year of your life, and for once you are NOT going to let yourself down. If you fall down and feel depressed, you will get back up. If you feel lethargic and scared, you will try something else: a new routine, a new roommate situation, a healthier diet. You will read books about comedy. You will work tirelessly and take pride in your tireless work. And you will take time every few hours to stop and say to yourself, “Look at me. I’m doing it. I’m chasing my dream. I am following my calling.” It doesn’t matter if your dreams come true, if agents swoon and audiences cheer. Trust me on that: It truly doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling that you’re doing it, every day. What matters is the work—diving in, feeling your way in the dark, finding the words, trusting yourself, embracing your weird voice, celebrating your quirks on the page, believing in all of it. What matters is the feeling that you’re not following someone else around, that you’re not half-assing this, that you’re not waiting for something to happen, that you’re not waiting for your whole life to start. What matters is you, all alone at your desk at five in the morning. I write this from my own desk at five in the morning, my favorite place, a place where I know who I am and what I’m meant to accomplish in this life. Savor that precious space. That space will feel like purgatory at first, because you’ll realize that it all depends on you. That space will feel like salvation eventually, because you’ll realize that it all depends on you.

Aiming to see darkness when I close my eyes.

Birds that cannot fly high into the sky rejoice exceedingly and sing sweet melodies when they get to the top of the tallest tree on the highest mountain!

Every father wants his son to have the advantages he himself was denied. But then, if you provide those advantages, you risk producing a weakling. The core parental paradox.

All their life, people work hard to earn money, and they never earn enough money to fulfill their dreams. Is this a paradox?

paradoxical insomnia.

The Sick Woman begins to see that life is wilder, more chaotic, harsher and more loving, paradoxical, and downright strange than she was ever taught. She discovers for herself the power of moon and the tides, the shifting of the stars and the seasons, the haze of pollen and shift in air pressure and how they impact her dreams, her moods, her body processes. She learns that she is not an independent automaton but a wild being woven of life and death, a chaos of magic, not a machine of logic. She learns that the outer impacts the inner in myriad ways. And vice versa. She learns that she is simultaneously weaker and yet more powerful than she ever knew. She is dangerous with this knowledge which does not appear in the medical books and bibles except as anomalies. She’s singing from the wrong hymn sheet and messing up the patina of perfection that the patriarchy is aiming for. In a display of a million marching soldiers with polished boots, gleaming medals and straight legs, there is the sick woman, bare breasted, hair loose, scars showing, shameless, dancing to her own tune.

Welcome my new paranoia, if you are not my reality, so where the hell is the fucking reality!?!?! To be or not to be?! this is the paranoia of my sweet dreams. So you are more than welcome to my paradox, to my mind, to my existence. Consume from my brains flesh. There is no ending of this portion for you. My mind is the Prometheus of the time. Endless resource for paranoia.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

Life is hard when you don’t do what you truly value because you are putting all your energy into trying to get rid of your fears rather than into materializing your dreams. When you’re stuck within your comfort zone, life becomes stifling—and therefore, very uncomfortable! In a paradoxical way, the easy life includes the experience of discomfort. It is when we try to avoid naturally occurring pain or discomfort that life becomes difficult.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

Just so," said Bariano with equanimity. "But let me cite you a parable, or, if you prefer, a paradox. Assume that you are lying in bed asleep. Your dreaming brings you into the company of an alluring woman who starts to make exciting suggestions. At this moment a large dirty pet animal clambers upon the bed and sprawls its hairy bulk beside you with its tail draped over your forehead. You move restlessly in your sleep and in so doing press your face against one of its organs. In your dream it seems that the beautiful woman is kissing you with warm moist lips, causing a delightful sensation. You are thrilled and exalted! Then you wake up and discover the truth of the contact, and you are displeased. Now then: consider carefully! Should you enjoy the rapture of the dream? Or, after beating the animal, should you huddle cheerlessly in the dark brooding upon the event? Arguments can be developed in either direction.

You are thunder and lightning Love and rage Intensity and sensitivity Made of mountains, oceans Fire and fierce things Dreams and curiosity You are paradoxes and contradictions Some days soft, some days Strong as fuck Always beautiful.

I should still, paradoxical as it may sound, like to maintain the opposite valuation of the dream in relation to the mysterious foundation of our being, whose phenomena we are. The more aware I become of these omnipotent art impulses in nature, and find in them an ardent longing for illusion and for redemption by illusion, the more I feel compelled to make the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent, the primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption: an illusion that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it—as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality, in other words—are required to see as empirical reality.

There's folly in her stride that's the rumor justified by lies I've seen her up close beneath the sheets and sometime during the summer she was mine for a few sweet months in the fall and parts of December ((( To get to the heart of this unsolvable equation, one must first become familiar with the physical, emotional, and immaterial makeup as to what constitutes both war and peace. ))) I found her looking through a window the same window I'd been looking through She smiled and her eyes never faltered this folly was a crime ((( The very essence of war is destructive, though throughout the years utilized as a means of creating peace, such an equation might seem paradoxical to the untrained eye. Some might say using evil to defeat evil is counterproductive, and gives more meaning to the word “futile”. Others, like Edmund Burke, would argue that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.” ))) She had an identity I could identify with something my fingertips could caress in the night ((( There is such a limitless landscape within the mind, no two minds are alike. And this is why as a race we will forever be at war with each other. What constitutes peace is in the mind of the beholder. ))) Have you heard the argument? This displacement of men and women and women and men the minds we all have the beliefs we all share Slipping inside of us thoughts and religions and bodies all bare ((( “Without darkness, there can be no light,” he once said. To demonstrate this theory, during one of his seminars he held a piece of white chalk and drew a line down the center of a blackboard. Explaining that without the blackness of the board, the white line would be invisible. ))) When she left she kissed with eyes open I knew this because I'd done the same Sometimes we saw eye to eye like that Very briefly, she considered an apotheosis a synthesis a rendering of her folly into solidarity ((( To believe that a world-wide lay down of arms is possible, however, is the delusion of the pacifist; the dream of the optimist; and the joke of the realist. Diplomacy only goes so far, and in spite of our efforts to fight with words- there are times when drawing swords of a very different nature are surely called for. ))) Experiencing the subsequent sunrise inhaling and drinking breaking mirrors and regurgitating just to start again all in all I was just another gash in the bark ((( Plato once said: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Perhaps the death of us all is called for in this time of emotional desperation. War is a product of the mind; only with the death of such will come the end of the bloodshed. Though this may be a fairly realistic view of such an issue, perhaps there is an optimistic outlook on the horizon. Not every sword is double edged, but every coin is double sided. ))) Leaving town and throwing shit out the window drinking boroughs and borrowing spare change I glimpsed the rear view mirror stole a glimpse really I've believed in looking back for a while it helps to have one last view a reminder in case one ever decides to rebel in the event the self regresses and makes the declaration of devastation once more ((( Thus, if we wish to eliminate the threat of war today- complete human annihilation may be called for. )))

This is one of those moments when I wish I could be young forever. Not just stop time for a second, but for an eternity. The old paradox that youth is wasted on the young is not true for us. Neither I nor my friends take our youth for granted. In fact, all of the young people I know are all too aware that someday soon time and gravity won’t be on their side anymore. And there’s nothing we can do about it. So the young do the only thing they can do. They live and they love and they dance and they sing, they dream and they scheme, they ponder and they plan. Like there’s no tomorrow. For tomorrow brings us one day closer to the inevitable and one day further from the impossible. And being young is all about achieving the impossible. Or at least believing you can. The old mistake our denial for ignorance, our immaturity for irresponsibility. We understand the rules of life, we just don’t want to play by them. Not yet. Not today. Not tonight. Because tonight is a good night to be young and alive.

Tambolia is where dreams live and forgotten things go. It is also, where socks, pins and keys go unless you are paying particularly close attention to them when you put them down. People sometimes go to Tambolia, more than you might think, but it is the ones that come back that are interesting.

It's usually the father who teaches the child his first moves in the game. And the dream of any son who plays chess is to beat his father. To kill the king. Besides, it soon becomes evident in chess that the father, or the king, is the weakest piece on the board. He's under continual act, in constant need of protection, of such tactics as castling, and he can only move one square at a time. Paradoxically, the king is also indispensable. The king gives the game its name, since the word 'chess' derives from the Persian word shah meaning king, and is pretty much the same in most languages.

What’s with the jade?” The apartment was Japanese in style. Not Chinese. “The apartment’s Japanese, I know, but I have a thing for most Asian things.” “Why?” He shrugged. “Don’t know. I just love the complicated simplicity of it all. The paradox pleases me.” Well, those were wet dream-inspiring words.

We are the center. In each of our minds - some may call it arrogance, or selfishness - we are the center, and all the world moves about us, and for us, and because of us. This is the paradox of community, the one and the whole, the desires of the one often in direct conflict with the needs of the whole. Who among us has not wondered if all the world is no more than a personal dream? I do not believe that such thoughts are arrogant or selfish. It is simply a matter of perception; we can empathize with someone else, but we cannot truly see the world as another person sees it, or judge events as they affect the mind and the heart of another, even a friend. But we must try. For the sake of all the world, we must try. This is the test of altruism, the most basic and undeniable ingredient for society. Therein lies the paradox, for ultimately, logically, we each must care more about ourselves than about others, and yet, if, as rational beings we follow that logical course, we place our needs and desires above the needs of our society, and then there is no community. I come from Menzoberranzan, city of drow, city of self. I have seen that way of selfishness. I have seen it fail miserably. When self-indulgence rules, then all the community loses, and in the end, those striving for personal gains are left with nothing of any real value. Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around us. Because there is nothing material that measures against the intangibles of love and friendship. Thus, we must overcome that selfishness and we must try, we must care. I saw this truth plainly following the attack on Captain Deudermont in Watership. My first inclination was to believe that my past had precipitated the trouble, that my life course had again brought pain to a friend. I could not bear this thought. I felt old and I felt tired. Subsequently learning that the trouble was possibly brought on by Deudermont's old enemies, not my own, gave me more heart for the fight. Why is that? The danger to me was no less, nor was the danger to Deudermont, or to Catti-brie or any of the others about us. Yet my emotions were real, very real, and I recognized and understood them, if not their source. Now, in reflection, I recognize that source, and take pride in it. I have seen the failure of self-indulgence; I have run from such a world. I would rather die because of Deudermont's past than have him die because of my own. I would suffer the physical pains, even the end of my life. Better that than watch one I love suffer and die because of me. I would rather have my physical heart torn from my chest, than have my heart of hearts, the essence of love, the empathy and the need to belong to something bigger than my corporeal form, destroyed. They are a curious thing, these emotions. How they fly in the face of logic, how they overrule the most basic instincts. Because, in the measure of time, in the measure of humanity, we sense those self-indulgent instincts to be a weakness, we sense that the needs of the community must outweigh the desires of the one. Only when we admit to our failures and recognize our weaknesses can we rise above them. Together.

We lose people who are dear to us on the way to reaching our dreams and goals. In the end, we don’t even understand how we allowed this to happen. After a while, all of a sudden, you open your eyes and realize that you have lost somebody you cared for, just because you were not right beside them recently. All these remote conversations, correspondence, likes on social media, all this worthless virtual reality will never replace the physical presence of someone valuable in your life. And what is the result? The paradox of this situation is that nothing special seems to have happened. You did not quarrel, you did not hold grudges against each other, but in the end, you became strangers.

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, void of all humanly qualities, even the categories of scientific description. ...... I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

That’s the paradox, people aren’t interested in reading about settling on Mars or flying to the stars—all the things that people really can achieve, but Others can’t. But they dream about becoming magicians, rushing into battle with a big sharp sword…. If only they knew what the wounds from a real sword look like!…What does all this mean? That a medieval world in which magic exists is the one most attractive to people!

. . . I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous - here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune . . . But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are . . . I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should've stuck around. But I know that you feel best when you're not doing much - when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music . . . We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of the needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that's often when we see Spirit most brightly . . . In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years - it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone. You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And - oh my God - I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too. So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you're capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another. And give thanks, like this: Thank you.

The canyon and her dories embody and elusive riddle. It is a paradox rooted in the dream that many of us share of immersing ourselves so deeply, so inextricably, into a pocket of landscape, or a stretch of river - anything that seems to embody the wildness we have lost - that we may somehow take possession of those places and make them ours. Yet the truth, like an eddy, runs in the opposite direction. In the end, it is they that claim us. And we who belong to them.

Nash’s lifelong quest for meaning, control, and recognition in the context of a continuing struggle, not just in society, but in the warring impulses of his paradoxical self, was now reduced to a caricature. Just as the overconcreteness of a dream is related to the intangible themes of waking life, Nash’s search for a piece of paper, a carte d’identité, mirrored his former pursuit of mathematical insights. Yet the gulf between the two recognizably related Nashes was as great as that between Kafka, the controlling creative genius, struggling between the demands of his self-chosen vocation and ordinary life, and K, a caricature of Kafka, the helpless seeker of a piece of paper that will validate his existence, rights, and duties. Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion. Survival, both of the self and the world, appears to be at stake. Where once he had ordered his thoughts and modulated them, he was now subject to their peremptory and insistent commands.

Wars and chaoses and paradoxes ago, two mathematicians between them ended an age d began another for our hosts, our ghosts called Man. One was Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man's perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives. ... The other was Goedel, a contemporary of Eintstein, who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined: In any closed mathematical system--you may read 'the real world with its immutable laws of logic'--there are an infinite number of true theorems--you may read 'perceivable, measurable phenomena'--which, though contained in the original system, can not be deduced from it--read 'proven with ordinary or extraordinary logic.' Which is to say, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio. There are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined the extent of the rational. Goedel stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it held still long enough for people to know it was there. ... The visible effects of Einstein's theory leaped up on a convex curve, its production huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling off. The production of Goedel's law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einsteinian curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of intersection, humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe... ... And when the line of Goedel's law eagled over Einstein's, its shadow fell on a dewerted Earth. The humans had gone somewhere else, to no world in this continuum. We came, took their bodies, their souls--both husks abandoned here for any wanderer's taking. The Cities, once bustling centers of interstellar commerce, were crumbled to the sands you see today.

Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.

Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it. The goal, thereafter, is to cease to overlook what is already the case. Paradoxically, this still requires discipline, and setting aside time for meditation is indispensable. But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one’s life, to waking up from the dream of the self. We need not take anything on faith to do this. In fact, the only alternative is to remain confused about the nature of our minds.

We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days-that's something else.

If you don’t know what became of someone, if you don’t attend a person’s funeral or hear word from a friend of a friend, these persons who float from our lives attain a kind of immortality, always hovering around the next corner. By closing your eyes, you can attach to them any set of attributes: the various chairs he reclines in, the soda she might sip from, the dreams they have of you they can’t remember in the morning. This brings me to life’s great paradox: for someone to truly be a part of you – to live in your thoughts, roaming your memory and vision, occupying planes of hope, nostalgia, and speculation in your mind – he or she must be wholly inaccessible to you. Twin

Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren't in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You need other people to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might just be a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, but it must be so. She knew other people were real by thinking about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, were proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone's head?

Bohr’s idea of complementarity is especially interesting to Jungian psychologists, for Jung saw that the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind also forms a complementary pair of opposites. Each new content that comes up from the unconscious is altered in its basic nature by being partly integrated into the conscious mind of the observer. Even dream contents (if noticed at all) are in that way semi-conscious. And each enlargement of the observer’s consciousness caused by dream interpretation has again an immeasurable repercussion and influence on the unconscious. Thus the unconscious can only be approximately described (like the particles of microphysics) by paradoxical concepts. What it really is “in itself” we shall never know, just as we shall never know this about matter.

The psyche could be regarded as a mathematical point and at the same time as a universe of fixed stars. It is small wonder, then, if, to the unsophisticated mind, such a paradoxical being borders on the divine. If it occupies no space, it has no body. Bodies die, but can something invisible and incorporeal disappear? What is more, life and psyche existed for me before I could say “I,” and when this “I” disappears, as in sleep or unconsciousness, life and psy- che still go on, as our observation of other people and our own dreams inform us. Why should the simple mind deny, in the face of such experiences, that the “soul” lives in a realm beyond the body? I must admit that I can see as little nonsense in this so-called superstition as in the findings of research regarding heredity or the instincts.

Start releasing the American dream. In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook uses parameters like healthcare, options, living space per person and mobility to conclude that we who live middle-class lives in North America or Europe are living a lifestyle that is, materially speaking, "better than 99 percent of all the people who have ever lived in human history." 2 He goes on to show the great paradox of our material wealth. As our lives have grown more comfortable, more affluent and filled with more possessions, "depression in the Western nations has increased ten times."3 Why? Easterbook cites Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, who identifies rampant individualism (viewing everything through the "I," which inevitably leads to loneliness) and runaway consumerism (thinking that owning more will make us happy and then being disappointed when it fails to deliver) .4 Like the rich farmer in Luke's parable, excessive individualism and rampant consumerism distracts us from the care of our souls. We enlarge on the outside and shrivel on the inside, and we find ourselves spiritually bankrupt. If any characteristic of North American society might disqualify us from effective involvement in mission in our globalized world, it is the relentless pursuit of the so-called American dream. (I think it affects Canadians too.) The belief that each successive generation will do better economically than the preceding one leads to exaggerated expectations of life and feelings of entitlement. If my worldview dictates that a happy and successful life is my right, I will run away from the sacrifices needed to be a genuine participant in the global mission of God.

Settling an Argument Mark 9:33–37 After Jesus and his disciples traveled to Capernaum, he asked them what they had been arguing about on the way. At first, the men were silent, too embarrassed and ashamed to answer his question. Finally, the disciples admitted that they had argued about which one of them was the greatest. Rank and position were important to the Jews, and in light of the messianic kingdom they expected Jesus to set up, they probably dreamed about status and honor. Jesus gave them a new perspective on greatness and leadership in the form of a paradox. To be important in God’s eyes, he explained, a person must voluntarily become a servant to other people. The goal is not to be first, but rather to take the last place. The highest positions in God’s kingdom go to those who are willing to be lowly enough to serve the needs of others. To illustrate this concept of service, Jesus put his arms around a little child, considered an insignificant person in that culture. He said that when anyone welcomed or showed kindness to a little child in his name, it was the same as doing it for Jesus himself. There’s nothing wrong with ambition or pursuit of excellence as long as they don’t become a source of pride. When we try to achieve greatness by chasing after positions of power, physical strength, popularity, or worldly success, we’re going in the wrong direction. God evaluates us on the basis of humility and service. If we look for opportunities to serve others and put their needs ahead of our own, if we never consider ourselves above doing tasks that seem menial, if we build others up instead of ourselves—that’s when we’re on the track to greatness in God’s eyes. And we just might discover that last place is the best place to be after all.

The principle of conscious life is: 'Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu.' But the principle of the unconscious is the autonomy of the psyche itself, reflecting in the play of its images not the world but itself, even though it utilizes the illustrative possibilities offered by the sensible world in order to make its images clear. The sensory datum, however, is not the causa efficiens of this; rather, it is autonomously selected and exploited by the psyche, with the result that the rationality of the cosmos is constantly being violated in the most distressing manner. But the sensible world has an equally devastating effect on the deeper psychic processes when it breaks into them as a causa efficiens. If reason is not to be outraged on the one hand and the creative play of images not violently suppressed on the other, a circumspect and farsighted synthetic procedure is required in order to accomplish the paradoxical union of irreconcilables.

It would all be so much simpler if we could only deny the existence of the psyche. But here we are with our immediate experiences of something that is—something that has taken root in the midst of our measurable, ponderable, three-dimensional reality, that differs bafflingly from this in every respect and in all its parts, and yet reflects it. The psyche may be regarded as a mathematical point and at the same time as a universe of fixed stars. It is small wonder, then, if, to the unsophisticated mind, such a paradoxical being borders on the divine. If it occupies no space, it has no body. Bodies die, but can something invisible and incorporeal disappear? What is more, life and psyche existed for me before I could say "I", and when this "I" disappears, as in sleep or unconsciousness, life and psyche still go on, as our observation of other people and our own dreams inform us. Why should the simple mind deny, in the face of such experiences, that the "soul" lives in a realm beyond the body? I must admit that I can see as little nonsense in this so-called superstition as in the findings of research regarding heredity or the basic instincts.

In True Meditation, we’re in the body as a means to transcend it. It is paradoxical that the greatest doorway to the transcendence of form is through form itself. And so, when you sit down to meditate, connect with your senses— connect with how you feel, what you hear, what you sense, what you smell. Your senses actually anchor you in the moment. When your mind wanders, anchor yourself in your senses. Start to listen. What are the sounds outside? Start to feel. How do you feel in your body? Enter into the felt sense, the kinesthetic sense of your being. Connect not only with what you feel in your body, but also with what you sense in the room. Start to smell. As you are sitting, what does it smell like? Through your senses, open to the whole world within and around you. This grounds you in a deeper reality than your mind, and it also helps focus you in a place other than your mind. Allowing everything to be is extraordinarily simple, but it’s not as easy as people imagine. If you’re actually doing it correctly, you’ll find yourself vividly present to your five senses, vividly present to your body, vividly present to your experience. If, on the other hand, you find that you’re in a hazy dream zone, then it’s very important to come back to your senses. Your body is a beautiful tool to anchor consciousness in a deeper sense of reality.

This is the Paradox of the Universe, resulting from the Principle of Polarity which manifests when THE ALL begins to Create — hearken to it for it points the difference between half-wisdom and wisdom. While to THE INFINITE ALL, the Universe, its Laws, its Powers, its Life, its Phenomena, are as things witnessed in the state of Meditation or Dream; yet to all that is Finite, the Universe must be treated as Real, and life, and action, and thought, must be based thereupon, accordingly, although with an ever understanding of the Higher Truth. Each according to its own Plane and Laws. Were THE ALL to imagine that the Universe were indeed Reality, then woe to the Universe, for there would be then no escape from lower to higher, divineward — then would the Universe become a fixity and progress would become impossible. And if Man, owing to half-wisdom, acts and lives and thinks of the Universe as merely a dream (akin to his own finite dreams) then indeed does it so become for him, and like a sleep-walker he stumbles ever around and around in a circle, making no progress, and being forced into an awakening at last by his falling bruised and bleeding over the Natural Laws which he ignored. Keep your mind ever on the Star, but let your eyes watch over your footsteps, lest you fall into the mire by reason of your upward gaze. Remember the Divine Paradox, that while the Universe IS NOT, still IT IS. Remember ever the Two Poles of Truth — the Absolute and the Relative. Beware of half-Truths.

It’s a heady question, how women balance these concerns. Recently, the question has found its way back to the center of a contentious and very emotional debate. If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants. If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for The Atlantic in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required. There’s truth to both arguments. They’re hardly mutually exclusive. Yet this question tends to get framed, rather tiresomely, as one of how and whether women can “have it all,” when the fact of the matter is that most women—and men, for that matter—are simply trying to keep body and soul together. The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.

The cessation of art is something that can only be accomplished when art disappears into its own excess. And that occasion, according to Baudrillard, has already happened. In fact, "art" disappeared a while back (When? Sometimes in the 70's, probably, when information technologies were electrified and became the dominant way in which Western cultures mediated its self-expressions), and its sublimations into the everyday order of simulation was overlooked. Too busy watching reruns of I dream of Jeannie or betwitched I suppose. What is called "art" now is itself a continuous rerun, a rerun of the image of its own disappearance. But said another way, which I'm sure some would rather it be said (though it makes no difference) art is everywhere one and the same with the image of the everyday, if not actually, then potentially. Under these circumstances, because art and the reality that is supposed to set off aesthetic properties have lost their operational difference, unmusic is everywhere Music is not. However, according to the logic of simulation, Music is everywhere so unmusic is nowhere. Yet being everywhere is the same as being nowhere, therefore Music is nowhere, which makes unmusic everywhere. But this is hyperreality and hyperreality trucks no difference between the real and the unreal (artifice), the musical and the unmusical. Thus unmusic eschews Adorno's dialectical impasse to the extent that it is total nonsense, a byproduct of the hyperreal that supervenes a discourse of contradictions and paradoxes where everything is coming up signs.

When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness) of the conscious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose centre of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego, but which, on the contrary, as the patient’s insights increase, may even thwart his ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre attracts to itself that which is proper to it, the “signs of the Father,” i.e., everything that pertains to the original and unalterable character of the individual ground-plan. All this is older than the ego and acts towards it as the “blessed, nonexistent God” of the Basilidians acted towards the archon of the Ogdoad, the demiurge, and—paradoxically enough—as the son of the demiurge acted towards his father. The son proves superior in that he has knowledge of the message from above and can therefore tell his father that he is not the highest God. This apparent contradiction resolves itself when we consider the underlying psychological experience. On the one hand, in the products of the unconscious the self appears as it were a priori, that is, in well-known circle and quaternity symbols which may already have occurred in the earliest dreams of childhood, long before there was any possibility of consciousness or understanding. On the other hand, only patient and painstaking work on the contents of the unconscious, and the resultant synthesis of conscious and unconscious data, can lead to a “totality,” which once more uses circle and quaternity symbols for purposes of self-description.15 In this phase, too, the original dreams of childhood are remembered and understood. The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the uroboros, the snake that bites its own tail.

I am in no rush. Let Life happen to me just as Life has planned. Because at the end of the day, when the sun sets there is always a horizon somewhere waiting to call forth another sun, in a paradox of Time. Because at the end of each chapter, the story walks towards its culmination. But just like it is not in the setting or rising of the sun but in the sunshine that one basks, just like it is not the finishing line but the voyage through the storyline where one finds the true understanding of the book, Life is about exploring the voyage all the while knowing full well that each chapter shall find its beginning middle and end just how it's meant to be. It is about the truth that Life is but a dream in Time's illusion and the only sharp truth is to love and be loved, and through that assemble moments in Time that smile beyond Time, to make a garden of experiences through lessons and understandings that Life puts at our journey only to walk us closer to our destination. It is not about the destination rather about the journey, and perhaps about who we share the journey with at each crossroad. And no matter how Time walks by, until and unless we cross all the alleys along the way, until and unless we climb up the peak bit by bit, we cannot reach that destination where we belong. But if we tread along the mountain peak or a winding alley soaking in all the freshness of the air enjoying the crispness of our walk, the journey becomes even more enriching not just to our soul but to all of our senses and our very heart. While if we try to run along the way, we might actually topple down a bad turn, taking in a scar that might demand another cup of our soul's portion to heal. Such is Life. A journey that takes smiles and tears, a voyage that bathes in hope and hopelessness, but in all of it, it never stays stagnant, always tiptoeing to exactly where we are meant to be, at any point of our journey. So when something seems to go stagnant or few things make no sense, I tell myself to pause and pat my soul acknowledging each and every decision or detour of mine as part and parcel of Life's plan. I close my eyes and breathe in the freshness of air that flows in every part of my soul to know, to feel alive to all that this journey has shared with me, while believing in the grace and magnanimity of Time who takes Time but eventually shows and leads us to where we belong. And I hear my heart smiling, Let Life happen to me just as Life has planned. I am in no rush.

All these indifferent passions, or passions born of indifference, all these negative passions, culminate in hatred. A strange expression: `I've got the hate' [J'ai la haine]. No object. It is like `I'm demonstrating', but for whom, for what? `I take responsibility' [J'assume], but for what? Nothing in particular. One perhaps takes responsibility precisely for the nothing. One demonstrates for or against the nothing -- how are we to know? This is the fate of all these intransitive verbs. The graffiti said: `I exist', `I live at this particular place'. This was stated with a kind of exultation, yet at the same time it said: `There is no meaning to my life'. Similarly, `I've got the hate' says at the same time: `This hate I have has no object'; `There's no meaning to it'. Hatred is doubtless something which does indeed outlive any definable object, and feeds on the disappearance of that object. Who are we to take against today? There, precisely, is the object: the absent other of hatred. `Having' hatred is like a sort of potential of -- negative and reactive -- energy, but energy all the same. These are, indeed, the only passions we have today: hatred, disgust, allergy, aversion, rejection and disaffection. We no longer know what we want, but we know what we don't want. In its pure expression of rejection, it is a non-negotiable, irremediable passion. Yet there is in it something like an invitation to the absent other to offer himself as an object for that hatred. The dream of hatred is to give rise to a heartfelt enmity, which is scarcely available at all in our world now, as all conflicts are immediately contained. Over against the hatred born of rivalry and conflict there is a hatred born of accumulated indifference which can suddenly crystallize in an extreme physical outburst. We are not speaking of class hatred now, which, paradoxically, remained a bourgeois passion. That had a target, and was the driving force behind historical action. This hatred is externalized only in episodes of `acting-out'. It does not give rise to historical violence, but to a virulence born of disaffection with politics and history. In this sense, it is the characteristic passion not of the end of history but of a history without end, a history which is a dead-end, since there has been no resolution of all the problems it posed. It is possible that beyond the end, in those reaches where things turn around, there is room for an indeterminate passion, where what remains of energy also turns around, like time, into a negative passion.

Every great idea has a spark of inspiration. Divine…if the shoe fits. Every great spark of inspiration comes from a remarkably intense passion, love, or desire. It can be out of love for God, a family member, a lover, child, friend, or just out of a desire to be compassionate and help others. It can be an intense passion for music, art, physical comforts, or beauty. It can be from the desire to prove those who hurt, wrong, or doubt them wrong because they themselves are not yet capable of asking questions and chasing dreams which seem so far away. The paradox of any genius or creative virtuoso is that they see one plus one does not equal two and they do not consult the mathematicians to hear what they have to say about this. When the idea or project they desire to create is fueled from a combination of these previously mentioned factors and then ignited by a pure intention of their heart and soul it is more than the sum of its’ parts. It is no longer a song composed of a melody and words or a picture brushed with paint upon an easel. It is a masterpiece with an explanation which can only be hinted or pointed at. Just like the moon can only reflect the light passed on to it by the sun. Personally, a master watch maker is a person I look up to. They lovingly and thoughtfully put immense energy and concentration on putting seemingly small pieces into place that once put into place learn to work on their own in perfect synchronization and harmony. However, this working together of gears and pieces does not happen by itself; It happens because the master had a vision of what he wanted and put in the time, energy, love, and effort to make it happen. The designer didn’t have it materialize right in front of their face instantly. Rather, they had faith it would come together a piece at a time. It’s my mission to find as many of these Masters who don’t run away from their ability to love, be loved, and create. The more we present beauty to those around us, the quicker others will find light within themselves. The more assistance we give to those we know struggling with poverty both inside and externally, the quicker we change this world into what it’s meant to be.

The paradox is that without desire, we cannot be successful. When we are striving for desires that will give us what we want and enrich the lives of the people around us directly or indirectly, the Universe works with us to manifest it.

The dark came down on All Hallows’ Eve. We went to sleep to the sound of howling wind and pelting rain, and woke on the Feast of All Saints to whiteness and large soft flakes falling down and down in absolute silence. There is no more perfect stillness than the solitude in the heart of a snowstorm. This is the thin time, when the beloved dead draw near. The world turns inward, and the chilling air grows thick with dreams and mystery. The sky goes from a sharp clear cold where a million stars burn bright and close, to the gray-pink cloud that enfolds the earth with the promise of snow. I took one of Bree’s matches from its box and lit it, thrilling to the tiny leap of instant flame, and bent to put it to the kindling. Snow was falling, and winter had come; the season of fire. Candles and hearth fire, that lovely, leaping paradox, that destruction contained but never tamed, held at a safe distance to warm and enchant, but always, still, with that small sense of danger. The smell of roasting pumpkins was thick and sweet in the air. Having ruled the night with fire, the jack-o’-lanterns went now to a more peaceful fate as pies and compost, to join the gentle rest of the earth before renewal. I had turned the earth in my garden the day before, planting the winter seeds to sleep and swell, to dream their buried birth. Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of snow and silence. Waking to the shock of frozen lakes under waning moonlight and the cold sun burning low and blue in the branches of the ice-cased trees, returning from our brief and necessary labors to food and story, to the warmth of firelight in the dark. Around a fire, in the dark, all truths can be told, and heard, in safety. I pulled on my woolen stockings, thick petticoats, my warmest shawl, and went down to poke up the kitchen fire. I stood watching wisps of steam rise from the fragrant cauldron, and felt myself turn inward. The world could go away, and we would heal.

If God chooses for you never to have physical children, He's calling you to a far bigger family! God purposely placed the dream of fruitful lives in our hearts. Oh, how I love the paradoxical ways our glorious heavenly Father works. Only He can bring gain from loss. Only He can make us more fruitful in barrenness!

A wish: to abolish walls between mouths. Mm-mmm the taste of it. Luckily keeps flowing in the text and on my tongue, erotic substitutes, and luckily that tipsy feeling in the dark, inside beside a cheek so just enjoy, rejoice in the juice, turn and return to that first excitement. What is excitement? Encouragement to do what you feel like doing when seen by someone else / the reader in company with Lucy, Georges or Alexandre, or Elle; being used to spinning out one’s dreams by muddling one’s own reflection in the mirror so marvellously that paradoxes come to life and whatever the cost force a retake of the sentences, the caresses that started the excitement (what did we say it was?), stimulated spine and breasts dandled in a hand, a phallus emerged invitation to oblivion, to the feel of rhythmic shudder, loins more titillating than some corny happy-ever-after tale, pelvic basins the pornographic mudholes of one’s imagination. Narrator fem. / masc. Pelvic basins liquid base.

Sometimes in life, you may take a step, only to realize the steps you missed. Sometimes in life, you may delay a step taking, only to see a step you shouldn’t have miss. Notwithstanding the results of your steps, you still ought to take steps. Life keeps moving and you can’t afford to be static! Keep on moving on!

What are the hallmarks of a patient? Let's see - passive, helpless, things are done sequentially, and well, that is not how people recover. That is not how people learn to live the lives they want or dream of.

human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price.

each person has a particular secret desire which they think will bring fulfillment—restored youth, sex with the beauty of their fantasies, athletic prowess, lots of money.118 But when they sell everything to get their dream, they are enslaved by it rather than satisfied. That fits with the biblical teaching of idolatry. Anything more important to you than the real God is an alternate god. Idols have no power (verses 5–7) to give you the love, forgiveness, and guidance you need. But paradoxically they do have power to make you like them (verse 8) and to keep you both spiritually blind and unable to see as well as spiritually lame and unable to change. Prayer: Lord, I confess that I make an idol out of people’s approval. Let me be so satisfied with your love that I no longer respond to people out of fear of displeasing them but only in love, seeking what is best for them. Remove my idols of approval—which can never give me the approval I need. Amen.

In the workday world, complainers will not go far. When someone asks how you are doing, you had better be wise enough to reply "I can't complain." If you do complain, even justifiably, people will stop asking how you are doing. Complaining will not help you succeed and influence people. You can complain to your physician or psychiatrist because they are paid to hear you complain. But you cannot complain to your boss or your friends, if you have any. You will soon be dismissed from your job and dropped from the social register. Then you will be left alone with your complaints and no one to listen to them gratis. Perhaps then the message will sink into your head: If you do not feel good enough for long enough, you should act as if you do and even think as if you do. That is the way to get yourself to feel good for long enough and stop you from complaining for good, as any self-improvement book can affirm. But should you not improve, someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. This is monumentally so if you are a pessimist or a depressive. Should you conclude that life is objectionable or that nothing matters, do not waste our time with your nonsense. We are on our way to the future, and the philosophically disheartening or the emotionally impaired are not going to hinder our progress. If you cannot say something positive, or at least equivocal, keep it to yourself. Pessimists and depressives need not apply for a position in the enterprise of life. You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsake by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin our fabricated reality or stubbornly insist on... what? That we should mollycoddle non-positive thinkers like you or rethink how the whole world transacts it's business? That we should start over from scratch? Or that we should go extinct? Try to be realistic. We did the best we could with the tools we had. After all, we are only human, as we like to say. Our world may not be in accord with nature's way, but it did develop organically according to our consciousness , which delivered us to a lofty prominence over the Creation. The whole thing just took on a life of its own, and nothing is going to stop it anytime soon. There can be no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no melancholic head-case is going to bad-mouth our catastrophe. The universe was created by the Creator, by damn. We live in a country we love and that loves us back, We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to be overhauled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not double-plus-good and never will be. Our lives may not be unflawed, that would deny us a better future to work towards but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. Lighten up or leave us alone. You will never get us to give up our hopes. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. We are not contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. Such opinions will not be accredited by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity. To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may emerge from your deviant brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only "one of those people." So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line.

BLUEBERRY GIRL Ladies of light and ladies of darkness and ladies of never you mind, This is a prayer for a blueberry girl. First, may you ladies be kind. Keep her from spindles and sleeps at sixteen, Nightmares at three or bad husbands at thirty, These will not trouble her eyes. Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen– Let her have brave days and truth, Let her go places that we’ve never been, trust and delight in her youth. Ladies of grace and ladies of favor and ladies of merciful night, This is a prayer for a blueberry girl. Grant her your clearness of sight. Words can be worrisome, people complex, motives and manners unclear, Grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear. Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble & run, Her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep. Let her grow like a weed in the sun. Ladies of paradox, ladies of measure, ladies of shadow that fall, This is a prayer for a blueberry girl. Words written clear on a wall. Help her to help herself, help her to stand, help her to lose and to find, Teach her we’re only as big as our dreams. Show her that fortune is blind. Truth is a thing she must find for herself, precious and rare as a pearl. Give her all these and a little bit more: Gifts for a blueberry girl.

If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants.

It is the same with endings as it is with death - the dream is never to arrive at them, and simultaneously to pass beyond. 'Each of the moments separating me from the ordeal seemed infinitely divisible - the particle of time to come being always the one that would enable me at last to face reality and concentrate' (Updike). Another miracle of division: given that life expectancy is constantly increasing, we gain time against the final reckoning as we go on. Thanks to the indefinite interval involved, and applying the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, we shall never catch up with death. We have become virtually immortal.

There are two kinds of sleep. The first is an energy-conserving state known as Quiet Sleep (QS) associated with growth, repair, restoration, a relaxed body, and an idling brain. The second is a very different state known variously as Active Sleep, Paradoxical Sleep (PS), or REM.

The psychoanalyst picks our dreams as if they were our pockets.” “The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

There is so much to be grateful for, and the paradox is- I learned this after losing so much. After losing everything I feared, I gained an insight into how much I already have. I need no opportunity or approval to realize my dream. Instead, I can start realizing my dream with so much I already have. I learned that when you are on the path of pursuing your dream, great opportunities may or may not come on your way depending on the decisions you make and on the decisions others make on whom you are dependent.

when you push beyond your boundaries and align your steps with the heart of God, He will break the rules to accelerate blessings in your life. During challenging seasons that test us spiritually, emotionally, and relationally, it’s easy to want to step back instead stepping forward. We all want to know what’s next, but if we know every step that comes next, we will live from a limited dream and limited faith. It’s not in the known that we discover God’s plan of paradox; it’s in the unknown. And it’s only when we push the boundaries of faith and logic that we begin to step into the unknown.

In the realm of blue air more than elsewhere, we feel that the world may be permeated by the most indeterminate reverie. This is when reverie really has depth. The blue sky opens up in depth beneath the dream. Then dreams are not limited to one-dimensional images. Paradoxically, the aerial dream soon has only a depth dimension… The world is then truly beyond the unsilvered mirror. There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, open without a within. First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is blue