Perspective Upside Down Quotes

When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.” In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem. But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.

He stared at me. “Every person exists in their own shallow bowl, and they can’t see over the rim,” he explained. “But they think that their world is the world—the truth. When in reality, no two bowls are identical, and all people are stuck trapped in their own.” Listening to my love, I felt as if we were transported back to the trail, staring at the inky field of ghostly stars. My hair dangling off our bed and onto the hardwood floor, almost upside down, I challenged him, intoxicated. “No that’s silly. We see the color of the walls, the same.” “There is no way to prove that your blue is my blue,” he said. And sobering, I began seeing how my love’s allegory was a hard truth, very dark—how our shallow bowls, differences of perspective, account for all declarations of others’ “wrongness” (one’s own rightness), and the sense of being wronged.

My views in my early 20’s and kept me separate from those around me. Those views were all about making myself feel significant by bringing other people down. I thought having special problems made me special. Problems don’t make people special. Solving them does. My views created an Us-vs-Them perspective of the world. Solving my problem required finding more Us people and to avoid Them. I wanted a special club of Us people. The problem was that all the Us people I found thought that their problems were more unique than the other Us people. We never bonded. We were still separating ourselves by one-upping each other about the uniqueness of our problems. The upside to Us-Vs-Them is that we feel special being Us. Unfortunately feeling special doesn’t outweigh the significant downside. There will always be more Them than Us There has to be. Otherwise, the exclusively club of Us wouldn’t be exclusive. So to maintain the exclusivity, we make more rules in our head to keep others out. We become more dependent on less people and are devastated when those people don’t reciprocate by valuing our friendship with the same mindfulness. Finding more people to connect with seems beyond our control because we automatically put everyone in the Them column and wait for people to work their way into the Us column. The problem is no one wants to have to prove themselves in order to become friends. We end up waiting and waiting.

In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over. Some of these earliest offspring eventually join forces (one major crane, symbiosis), which leads to multicellularity (another major crane), which leads to the more effective exploration vehicles made possible by sexual reproduction (another major crane), which eventually leads in one species to language and cultural evolution (cranes again), which provide the medium for literature and science and engineering, the latest cranes to emerge, which in turn permits us to “go meta” in a way no other life form can do, reflecting in many ways on who and what we are and how we got here, modeling these processes in plays and novels, theories and computer simulations, and ever-more thinking tools to add to our impressive toolbox. This perspective is so widely unifying and at the same time so generous with detailed insights that one might say it’s a power tool, all on its own. Those who are still strangely repelled by Darwinian thinking must consider the likelihood that if they try to go it alone with only the hand tools of tradition, they will find themselves laboring far from the cutting edge of research on important phenomena as diverse as epidemics and epistemology, biofuels and brain architecture, molecular genetics, music, and morality.

Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny's whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he'd forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he'd never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.

I can’t help sharing a pattern I have observed about tourists: they often come across as not only individuals who weren’t profoundly altered by their travel experiences, but also, in many cases, I find them to be more narrow-minded and sticking to their old beliefs and values, as if what they already know is and remains the only truth in the universe. Many encounters with tourists have proven to me that … travel is a way to confirm their biases and worldviews rather than challenge, expand, disrupt, and turn their worlds upside down. It is like people who only watch TV news channels or read books that confirm their prejudices and beliefs of being from the ‘best, most wonderful, most civilized country in the world,’ or such nonsense. This perhaps explains why the perspective and worldview of many tourists not only are not expanded after traveling, but their perspective is arguably narrowed further after touring other countries.” [From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]

This, plus the inherent drive of the religious reformations, made them work towards the disenchantment of the world, and the abolition of society based on hierarchical equilibrium, whether that of élite and mass, or that we find reflected in the Carnival, and the “world turned upside down”. Indeed, the hostility to Carnival and such-like remains of popular culture is one of the evident points in common between religious and secular re-orderings. In the perspective of élites of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world upside down of Carnival was neither a subject of amusement, nor a salutary correction for élite pride, nor an “air-hole” (safety valve), nor a recognition of the depth and many-sidedness of human life. It was simply an image of, and an invitation to sin. Starting with Brant’s Ship of Fools, a stream of writing, painting (Bosch, Breughel), illustrations begin to moralize this theme of reversal. It is in the end no laughing matter. Indeed, the world

irony here is kind of cringe-inducing, too. If I try to put the effect of that earliest workshop into less bromidic words, the best I can do is this: it was like having my world turned upside-down, and then realizing that, in fact, the world had always been upside-down, and I had just come right-side up. There was a sense of relief in knowing that all those things that had looked so wrong—the injustice of violence against women, the limits placed on us because of our gender, the fear of losing our mothers, our sisters, ourselves—were, in fact, wrong. That I was right to be angry about them. Empowerment-based self-defense training left me with a completely new way of looking at self-defense—a perspective diametrically opposed to mainstream approaches to safety.

If the Beatitudes were describing how we view blessing from a cultural perspective, we would read something like, “Blessed are you when everything goes your way.” Or, “Blessed are you when all your dreams come true.” A blessed life, as any normal person would define it, would be a life free from mourning, not a life marked by it!

Al is the upside down man. Back home, you work all day and night to learn how to paint, learn linseed and cadmium and badger-hair and perspective, which is just math in art-school drag, you know? And maybe you still can't do anything worth phoning the Met over. But hey, getting a boy to fuck you is just the easiest thing since Sunday naps. Up top, getting drunk at a party is what you do when you're all out of art. But in...Canada? Are we calling it Canada now? Ok! Al's the King of Canada and he says: fuck that for a lark! The world feels like being a bastard-and-a-half this decade, let's play nine-pins on its grave. Down here it's all the same! Kiss a boy and books come out! Ralph up Parthenons into the upstairs toilet! Dance poems, shit showtunes! Art is easy! Pick up genius at the corner shop! Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin!' He looks up at Zelda Fair and his poor goblin face goes all twisted up and desperate. 'It's all fucked anyway, you see? The end of the world already happened. It's happening all the time. It's gonna happen again. And again after that. Just when you think it's done falling on its face, the world picks itself up and throws itself off a roof. Boom. Pavement. The world's ending forever and ever and we're not even allowed to toast at her funeral. So we gotta do something else or she won't know we ever loved her.

So if we approach church membership from the perspective of entitlement, we have it upside down. You always ask first what you can do for your church.

When your world gets turned upside down view it from a new perspective

For example, the moon’s Tyco crater is visible to the naked eye. Yet it’s only fifty-three miles wide. Impossible to see if the moon were two-hundred and thirty-eight-thousand miles away. The static moon appears upside-down when viewed from the southern hemisphere because the moon never changes perspective. Only you do.

What would happen if we looked at the world beyond the garden this way, regarded our place in nature from the same upside-down perspective?

is a huge lapse in judgment that can warp your perspective on both yourself and the object of your affection, and prompt you to make decisions based on fantasy.

But since our sluggish minds rest far beneath the height of divine providence, we must have recourse to a distinction which may assist them in rising. I say then, that though all things are ordered by the counsel and certain arrangement of God, to us, however, they are fortuitous,—not because we imagine that fortune rules the world and mankind, and turns all things upside down at random, (far be such a heartless thought from every Christian breast); but as the order, method, end, and necessity of events, are, for the most part, hidden in the counsel of God, though it is certain that they are produced by the will of God, they have the appearance of being fortuitous, such being the form under which they present themselves to us, whether considered in their own nature, or estimated according to our knowledge and judgment.

Langdon used his heel to scratch some lines on the gravel path between them. “True or false?” he asked. Puzzled, Ambra eyed his scratchings—a simple Roman-numeral equation. I + XI = X One plus eleven is ten? “False,” she said immediately. “And can you see any way this could be true?” Ambra shook her head. “No, your statement is definitely false.” Langdon gently reached out and took her hand, guiding her around to where he had been standing. Now, when Ambra glanced down, she saw the markings from Langdon’s vantage point. The equation was upside down. X = IX + I Startled, she glanced up at him. “Ten equals nine plus one,” Langdon said with a smile. “Sometimes, all you have to do is shift your perspective to see someone else’s truth.

Choose a different perspective to change how you see things - the word "NO" turned upside-down becomes "ON

Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny’s whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this.

Yet this physical life is a unique experience, and it is entrancing from the perspective of expanded awareness. It is utterly lovely, delicious and strange, challenging, and wildly exciting. The razor focus required to remain in the collective physical is intensely satisfying for the Whole Self. Physical reality is a balancing trick, a performance high, an intensely concentrated speed test of complex skill sets. We’re each an F-22 pilot flying fifty feet off the deck through an impossibly narrow canyon. Finding myself in the unusual situation of having been blown up, I felt as if I were flying that jet fifty feet off the deck through the narrow canyon upside down.

Reintegrating a truly feminist, woman-honoring perspective on menstruation means turning a whole system of thought upside down. It means saying that a cyclical change in feelings and body sensations is valuable and interesting; it means saying that the emotions women experience premenstrually carry useful information and should be paid attention to; it means acknowledging that a menstruating woman has access to sacred energy, and that if she wishes, she should have space and time to explore this dimension of experience.

It is common to hear, from both those who truly want to change and those who seem to be speaking through clenched jaws, the same phrase, “bottom-up,” thinking that this phrase signifies a real change. It usually follows a pledge to put away their “top-down” ways. But here’s the thing: Bottom-up is just the same Pyramid perspective, only upside down. And being the recipient of this leader’s sloganeering is hardly inspiring when your input is welcomed because you are at the “bottom.” We’re still in the shape of dependence.

The lesson in this path is taught sufficiently by the trump of the Hanged Man, a personal favorite. The Hanged Man is one of the better teachers of all the trumps on how to train the human mind (Hod) to work from the spiritual perspective. Since the figure on the card is being hung upside down, this indicates that the values of the higher world are most often the reverse of the lower. The Hanged Man gives an indication of serenity through chaos, as his face is placid despite being strung up and his head about to be submerged in a body of water in the Thoth Tarot. This explains why most mystics throughout time have been thought to be insane: their ideas and values are normally at odds with dogma and culture, and they are revolutionaries and radicals. Most often, when engaging with the higher spheres of consciousness, one encounters realities that far surpass culture’s understanding of what is and is not acceptable. The Hanged Man encapsulates the expression of mystic action, which is rarely understood in conventional culture. When these spiritual ideas and values are expressed, the prevailing mindset of society often misinterprets these expressions, becomes afraid, and retaliates either through crucifixion, persecution, or banishment. Hence, the secrecy of occultism. Crowley calls this path and trump the “card of the Dying God,” and perhaps he has a point. Path 23 is the roadway where old ideas are purged to make way for a new, higher perspective in accordance with the spiritual Will of the universe. Turning one’s point of view upside down, in reverse, a pachakuti, is the magical formula of seeing the world via the perspective of spirit. It is the prime elixir of alchemy.