Phenomenal Person Quotes

I know that I'm not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don't know how not to.

You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless person. You can lose all your money or your job or a husband or a wife, or the worst thing imaginable, a child. You can lose your marbles. You can be standing inside your own failure, a small sad stone in your throat, and still you are beautiful, your story is worth hearing, because you--you rare and phenomenal misfit--are the only one in the world who can tell the story the way that only you can.

You are the last Five left in the competition, yes? Do you think that hurts your chances of becoming the princess?" The word sprang from my lips without thought. "No!" "Oh, my! You do have a spirit there!" Gavril seemed pleased to have gotten such an enthusiastic response. "So you think you'll beat out all the others, then? Make it to the end?" I thought better of myself. "No, no. It's not like that. I don't think I'm better than any of the other girls; they're all amazing. It's just...I don't think Maxon would do that, just discount someone because of their caste." I heard a collective gasp. I ran over the sentence in my head. It took me a minute to catch my mistake: I'd called him Maxon. Saying that to another girl behind closed doors was one thing, but to say his name without the word "Prince" in front of it was incredibly informal in public. And I'd said it on live television. I looked to see if Maxon was angry. He had a calm smile on his face. So he wasn't mad...but I was embarrassed. I blushed fiercely. "Ah, so it seems you really have gotten to know our prince. Tell me, what do you think of Maxon?" I ahd thought of several answers while I was waiting for my turn. I was going to make fun of his laugh or talk about the pet name he wanted his wife to call him. It seemed like the only way to save the situation was to get back the comedy. But as I lifted my eyes to make one of my comments, I saw Maxon's face. He really wanted to know. And I couldn't poke fun at him, not when I had a chance to say what I'd really started to think now that he was my friend. I couldn't joke about the person who'd saved me from facing absolute heartbreak at home, who fed my family boxes of sweets, who ran to me worried that I was hurt if I asked for him. A month ago, I had looked at the TV and seen a stiff, distant, boring person-someone I couldn't imagine anyone loving. And while he wasn't anything close to the person I did love, he was worthy of having someone to love in his life. "Maxon Schreave is the epitome of all things good. He is going to be a phenomenal king. He lets girls who are supposed to be wearing dresses wear jeans and doesn't get mad when someone who doesn't know him clearly mislabels him." I gave Gavril a keen look, and he smiled. And behind him, Maxon looked intrigued. "Whoever he marries will be a lucky girl. And whatever happens to me, I will be honored to be his subject." I saw Maxon swallow, and I lowered my eyes. "America Singer, thank you so much." Gavril went to shake my hand. "Up next is Miss Tallulah Bell." I didn't hear what any of the girls said after me, though I stared at the two seats. That interview had become way more personal than I'd intended it to be. I couldn't bring myself to look at Maxon. Instead I sat there replaying my words again and again in my head.

Sometimes time is irrelevant in understanding the beauty of another person’s soul.

It doesn't matter how you grew up, or what you've struggled with in life - your mind is unscathed by any circumstance you've yet to live and it's phenomenally powerful.

understand this, imagine what would happen if you started feeling tremendous love for all creatures, for every plant, for every animal, and for all the beauties of nature. Imagine if every child seemed like your own, and every person you saw looked like a beautiful flower, with its own color, its own expression, shape, and sounds. As you went deeper and deeper, you would start noticing a phenomenal thing—you are no longer judging. The process of judging has simply stopped. There is just appreciating and honoring. Where there used to be judging, there is now respecting, loving, and cherishing. To differentiate is to judge. To see, to experience, and to honor is to participate in life instead of standing back and judging it. When

The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM [Phenomenal Self Model] at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality - and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You - the physical person as a whole - look right through it. You do not see it. You see with it. The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others

When women saw her photo and heard her life story, they clamored to take her course and sit for her treatments. The twin promises of enhanced beauty and financial gain—not to mention Madam Walker’s own phenomenal personal example—served as a magnet to women who had always believed they would never be more than maids and laundresses.

Progress,' wrote C.S. Lewis, 'means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.' This is a phenomenally good way of looking at it, I think. Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum. Sometimes we push our lives in the wrong direction. If we feel it is making ourselves unhappy, progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. But we must never feel - personally or s a culture, that only one version of the future is inevitable. The future is ours to shape.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes. Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him? (Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A 1934 Symposium published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941; from Einstein's Out of My Later Years, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970, pp. 26-27.)

When I look at you, I still see the son I love more than my own life. But I also see a man who has become so far removed from what matters that his perception is skewed. Family is real, son. A home to settle into—that’s real. People who love you and care about you. You’ve had a phenomenal career, and I’m proud of you. But it’s time to stop basing your worth on championships and endorsement deals. You can’t buy happiness. You can’t earn it. God isn’t counting all the deals you’re racking up—and neither is your family.” He lifted his brow. “And neither is Lucy. For the first time someone’s looking at the person inside—and you have to decide if you’re going to let her in and be the man she needs you to be.” His father turned his head toward a family picture on the mantel. “It’s a risk. But one I’ve never regretted.

More than 2,000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffett built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child. As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s. Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him. Consider a little thought experiment. Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.16 What if he was a more normal person, spending his teens and 20s exploring the world and finding his passion, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let’s say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he’s been able to generate (22% annually), but quit investing and retired at age 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandkids. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $84.5 billion. $11.9 million. 99.9% less than his actual net worth. Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works. Think of this another way. Buffett is the richest investor of all time. But he’s not actually the greatest—at least not when measured by average annual returns.

Existentialism “every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind,” we have entered the familiar Wordsworthian Romantic territory in which nature is phenomena and spirit is noumena and the task of the human person is to draw his being from whatever inscrutable force produces, organizes, and infuses the phenomenal universe —an “ineffable essence which we call Spirit. Being as not being stable but forever in flux and transition. Even history, Which seems obviously about the past, has its true use as the servant of the present.' Emerson and Buddhism stand for spirituality purged of creed detritus.' the essence of Existentialism is that you find meaning in nature, wisdom, mind and body.

He continued, “Here’s the advice I give everyone about marriage—is she someone you find interesting?” I was initially confused by the question, but I figured he must have a point. “You will spend more time with this person than anyone else for the rest of your life, and there is nothing more important than always wanting to hear what she has to say about things,” Obama continued. “Does she make you laugh? And I don’t know if you want kids, but if you do, do you think she will be a good mom? Life is long. These are the things that really matter over the long term.” We had just pulled up to the plane, and the world was waiting for us to get out. “Howli is incredibly interesting, funnier than I am, and will be a phenomenal mom,” I told the president. “Sounds like she’s the one. Lucky you,” Obama told me as he exited the limo and headed up the stairs to get on Air Force One. A year later Howli and I were engaged. And this is the advice I now give everyone about relationships. I credit Obama (most of the time).

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

H appears no different from the corpses already here. But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on Earth. To be able as a dead person to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don't manage this sort of thing while they're alive. Cadavers like H are the dead's heroes. It is astounding to me and achingly sad that with 80,000 people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved one's lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy each other. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.

Everyone has a deck of cards for each person they love. You’ve got your regret cards, your good memory cards, bad memory cards. When one of your people dies, the deck of cards gets thrown up into the air and the cards scatter everywhere. Wakes and funerals are about putting them into a new order. You have to.

Refutation of the Assertion That the (Phenomenal) Appearances Are Mind Although forms appear to the mind, the (objective) appearances are not mind.... When the reflection of your face appears in a mirror, it appears as the face looks, because the clear surface of the mirror is capable of making the reflection appear and the face has the potential of appearing or of projecting the reflection. At that time, the reflection of the face is not the face, nor is there any other face than the face which imprinted it. Likewise, various kinds (of phenomena) are appearing in the deluded mind because of the interdependent origination of the causes and conditions of delusion. The various objective appearances, such as mountains, are not mind. Also there is nothing in the mind which truly exists, but (merely) appearances (created by the) delusory habituation of the mind. So they are the forms of delusory appearances. They are wrong appearances, just as the person who has "hairy vision" will see hair before his eyes....

A person's ability is gauged not by his education or degree but rather by his depth of understanding of what exists in the phenomenal existence.

There's a lot of pointing. A festival of pointing and at very close range to other people's eyes, given the width of the space. Also detracting from the exhibit's potential tranquility is the display cabinet of pinned specimens along one wall. I found this disturbing from the start. You don't see a whole lot of stuffed polar bears in the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, for instance. And butterflies have phenomenal vision so it's not like they can't see the mass crucifixion in their midst. I was offended on behalf of the butterflies and thus pleased with my offense. Let the empathizing begin! This volunteering thing was working already. I am a good person, hear me give!

His prescription to experience a deep sense of meaning, then, was remarkably pragmatic. He had three recommendations: 1. Have a project to work on, some reason to get out of bed in the morning and preferably something that serves other people. 2. Have a redemptive perspective on life’s challenges. That is, when something difficult happens, recognize the ways that difficulty also serves you. 3. Share your life with a person or people who love you unconditionally. Frankl called this treatment logotherapy, or a therapy of meaning. And surprisingly, it worked. He was put in charge of the mental-health division of the Viennese hospital system because they had lost far too many patients to suicide. When Frankl came aboard, he had more than thirty thousand suicidal patients under his care. The challenge was phenomenal. Frankl created community groups for the patients and taught counselors to identify projects the patients could contribute to, serious work the world needed that would give them a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Frankl also had the patients circle the difficult experiences they’d had and while allowing them to grieve, also asked them to list benefits that had come from their pain. The result of the program was transformational. Not one patient committed suicide on Frankl’s watch.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them.

Have you ever noticed how when someone you admire goes out and does something phenomenal, you're happy for her or him, but you're not surprised — of course they did something phenomenal, they’re a phenomenal person! But to get yourself to see how amazing you are is like pushing a giant marshmallow up a hill. Yes, there we go, we are up, we are awesome! Ooop! We’re sagging— we are sagging on the left! Push it up. There we go. We are all good! Wait, now we’re sagging on the right . . . We run around, taking one step forward and fourteen steps back when it’s so unnecessary.

When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements, yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion that is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none. The truth is: you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling, or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear. As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds? You say, “I want to know myself.” You are the “I.” You are the Knowing. You are the consciousness through which everything is known. And that cannot know itself; it is itself. There is nothing to know beyond that, and yet all knowing arises out of it. The “I” cannot make itself into an object of knowledge, of consciousness. So you cannot become an object to yourself. That is the very reason the illusion of egoic identity arose — because mentally you made yourself into an object. “That's me,” you say. And then you begin to have a relationship with yourself, and tell others and yourself your story. By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self-seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words: what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form — no more and no less.

As for having reached the top, with only one way to go from there, Lee had a point, no? I mean, if you cannot repeat a once-in-a-lifetime miracle—if you can never again reach the top—then why bother creating at all? Well, I can actually speak about this predicament from personal experience, because I myself was once “at the top”—with a book that sat on the bestseller list for more than three years. I can’t tell you how many people said to me during those years, “How are you ever going to top that?” They’d speak of my great good fortune as though it were a curse, not a blessing, and would speculate about how terrified I must feel at the prospect of not being able to reach such phenomenal heights again. But such thinking assumes there is a “top”—and that reaching that top (and staying there) is the only motive one has to create. Such thinking assumes that the mysteries of inspiration operate on the same scale that we do—on a limited human scale of success and failure, of winning and losing, of comparison and competition, of commerce and reputation, of units sold and influence wielded. Such thinking assumes that you must be constantly victorious—not only against your peers, but also against an earlier version of your own poor self. Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play. But what does any of that have to do with vocation? What does any of that have to do with the pursuit of love? What does any of that have to do with the strange communion between the human and the magical? What does any of that have to do with faith? What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations?

Holistic, unconditional love, agape, is the unity in which duality disappears. It is as if a certain internal boundary has vanished. With agape what we love is ourselves, the way a mother loves her child as herself. This is the meaning of loving another as yourself – transcending our phenomenal borders and experiencing ourselves in another and the other in, not apart from, us. Eventually, if love is comprehensive, it unites us with everything and allows us to know that we are everything. Therefore, how can we support the illusion of this isolated, separate self that is threatened by and defends itself from everything outside? Love returns us to the unity that is actually Reality. Reality is not the isolation, suspicion, envy, selfishness, and fear of loss that we have come to accept as normal; it is that we are all part of one Life. The same Spirit moves in us all. You come to know this better when you realize that we all have the same kinds of feelings, the same wish to be known and respected, to share ourselves and let down our defenses. We are continually faced with a choice between personal achievement, personal security, and comfort on the one hand, and working for the whole and helping everyone and everything toward perfection on the other. We are faced with a choice between looking out for ourselves and contributing wholeheartedly to a common good. We are faced with focusing on self-love or increasing our love of all Life. (p. 191)

No person is mistake free. I made some phenomenal errors in the first fifty years of traversing the rivers and valleys that formulate life’s marshy banks. I will always live with some deep regrets. Personal mistakes are part of everybody’s learning processes. Some people do live more carefully than other people do. I was too reckless at times and on other crucial situations too conservative, neither of which factor is a cause for mortification. It would represent a much bigger mistake never to give myself the freedom to test what life proffers.

To clarify the existentiality of the Self, we take as our ‘natural’ point of departure Dasein’s everyday interpretation of the Self. In *saying* “*I*,” Dasein expresses itself about ‘itself’. It is not necessary that in doing so Dasein should make any utterance. With the ‘I’, this entity has itself in view. The content of this expression is regarded as something utterly simple. In each case, it just stands for me and nothing further. Also, this ‘I’, as something simple, is not an attribute of other Things; it is not *itself* a predicate, but the absolute ‘subject’. What is expressed and what is addressed in saying “I,” is always met as the same persisting something. The characteristics of ‘simplicity’, ‘substantiality’, and ‘personality’, which Kant, for instance, made the basis for his doctrine ‘of the paralogisms of pure reason’, arise from a genuine pre-phenomenological experience. The question remains whether that which we have experienced ontically in this way may be Interpreted ontologically with the help of the ‘categories’ mentioned. Kant, indeed, in strict conformity with the phenomenal content given in saying “I,” shows that the ontical theses about the soul-substance which have been inferred [*erschlossenen*] from these characteristics, are without justification. But in so doing, he merely rejects a wrong *ontical* explanation of the “I”; he has by no means achieved an *ontological* Interpretation of Selfhood, nor has he even obtained some assurance of it and made positive preparation for it. Kant makes a more rigorous attempt than his predecessors to keep hold of the phenomenal content of saying “I”; yet even though in theory he has denied that the ontical foundations of the ontology of the substantial apply to the “I,” he still slips back into *this same* inappropriate ontology. This will be shown more exactly, in order that we may establish what it means ontologically to take saying “I” as the starting point for the analysis of Selfhood. The Kantian analysis of the ‘I think’ is now to be added as an illustration, but only so far as is demanded for clarifying these problems." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, p. 366

Studying the history of our ancestors is instructive. I understand some of my parents’ struggles and sacrifices. I am acquainted with my grandparents and great grandparents’ way of life. The common denominator that runs through their lifeblood is a hardpan of resiliency, courage, and work ethic. They also shared a phenomenal degree of competency essential to make due in an open land where the pioneering spirit meets nature under a big sky full of endless possibilities for triumph and setback. My forebears took care of their family members and tended their ancestral land before the word caretaker was a recognized term for a loving man, woman, or child. Self-reliant people who master the skills essential for survival in a harsh clime also value helping other people who are in a fix. All my predecessors were quick to lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Their ability to see life through the heart was the decisive feature of their pioneering pluck. How we start a day, presages how the day shall unfold. Each day when I awaken, I feel clobbered by the preceding day. At days end, I feel comparable to a chewed on piece of masticated beef. I devote all available personal energy reserves to simply getting by and muss over how I can engender the energy to make it through today’s pulp works. In reality, I go on because akin to every generation that preceded me and every generation that succeeds me, I must continue onward or I will expire. The one fact that keeps me going is the realization that all generations of people struggle. What we share with preceding generations is our heartaches and our willingness to struggle in order to make the world a better place for the next generation.

Zen Koans The koan is an enigmatic or paradoxical question used to develop a person’s Intuition.  Koans are a valuable tool in your quest for enlightenment, but how do they work and why use them? Koans work by confounding logic and forcing a person out of their normal thinking and into the realm of Intuition. In other words, the inherent meaning is inaccessible to rational understanding, but perhaps accessible to Intuition. This book presents some of the classic koans from traditional Zen, originally written hundreds of years ago in Japanese, and re-interpreted from early English translations into early 21st Century English. The underlying meaning is still there, so they will still work as a koan should, but they are expressed in language more easily understood by people in the 21st Century. Each koan encapsulates a profound truth for reflection. Zen counsels the lessening of the ego, not the strengthening of it as consumer culture would urge. Instead of making a name for ourselves in society, we should listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no wind stirs, in other words become no-thing, entering instead the field of pure being that is behind the phenomenal world.

Have you ever noticed how when someone you admire goes out and does something phenomenal, you’re happy for her or him, but you’re not surprised—of course they did something phenomenal, they’re a phenomenal person! But to get yourself to see how amazing you are is like pushing a giant marshmallow up a hill. Yes, there we go, we are up, we are awesome! Ooop! We’re sagging—we are sagging on the left! Push it up. There we go. We are all good! Wait, now we’re sagging on the right . . . We run around, taking one step forward and fourteen steps back when it’s so unnecessary. Instead, try seeing yourself through the eyes of someone who admires you. They get it. They believe in you leaps and bounds. They aren’t connected to your insecurities and negative beliefs about yourself. All they see is your true glory and potential. Become one of your own die-hard fans, look at yourself from the outside, where all your self doubts can’t crawl all over you, and behold what shines through. You get to choose how you perceive your reality. So why, when it comes to perceiving yourself, would you choose to see anything other than a super huge rock star of a creature? You are a badass. You were one when you came screaming onto this planet and you are one now. The Universe wouldn’t have bothered with you otherwise. You can’t screw up so majorly that your badassery disappears. It is who you are. It’s who you always will be. It’s not up for negotiation. You are loved. Massively. Ferociously. Unconditionally. The Universe is totally freaking out about how awesome you are. It’s got you wrapped in a warm gorilla hug of adoration. It wants to give you everything you desire. It wants you to be happy. It wants you to see what it sees in you. You are perfect. To think anything less is as pointless as a river thinking that it’s got too many curves or that it moves too slowly or that its rapids are too rapid. Says who? You’re on a journey with no defined beginning, middle or end. There are no wrong twists and turns. There is just being. And your job is to be as you as you can be. This is why you’re here. To shy away from who you truly are would leave the world you-less. You are the only you there is and ever will be. I repeat, you are the only you there is and ever will be. Do not deny the world its one and only chance to bask in your brilliance. We are all perfect in our own, magnificent, fucked-up ways. Laugh at yourself. Love yourself and others. Rejoice in the cosmic ridiculousness. PART 2: HOW

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet.

Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.

The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts. In the ‘I’, ‘nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts’. ‘Consciousness in itself (is) not so much a representation…as it is a form of representation in general.’ The ‘I think’ is ‘the form of apperception, which clings to every experience and precedes it.’ Kant grasps the phenomenal content of the ‘I’ correctly in the expression ‘I think’, or—if one also pays heed to including the ‘practical person’ when one speaks of ‘intelligence’—in the expression ‘I take action’. In Kant’s sense we must take saying “I” as saying “I think.” Kant tries to establish the phenomenal content of the “I” as *res cogitans*. If in doing so he calls this “I” a ‘logical subject’, that does not mean that the “I” in general is a concept obtained merely by way of logic. The “I” is rather the subject of logical behavior, of binding together. ‘I think’ means ‘I bind together’. All binding together is an ‘*I* bind together’. In any taking-together or relating, the “I” always underlies—the ὑποκείμενον [hypokeimenon; subjectum; subject]. The *subjectum* is therefore ‘consciousness in itself’, not a representation but rather the ‘form’ of representation. That is to say, the “I think” is not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented. When we speak of the “form” of representation, we have in view neither a framework nor a universal concept, but that which, as εἶδος [eidos], makes every representing and everything represented be what it is. If the “I” is understood as the form of representation, this amounts to saying that it is the ‘logical subject’. Kant’s analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the “I” to a substance; for another thing, he holds fast to the “I” as ‘I think’. Nevertheless, he takes this “I” as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject *characterizes not the Selfhood of the “I” qua Self, but the self-sameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand*. To define the “I” ontologically as “*subject*” means to regard it as something always present-at-hand. The Being of the “I” is understood as the Reality of the *res cogitans*." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 366-367

There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another.

The naturalistic hypothesis that it’s the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent with what meditation might reveal. Since experience seems a function (somehow – explaining consciousness is just getting underway) of what the brain and body do, the very sense of being a subject which purportedly “has” experience and “to whom” things happen is itself simply another neurally-instantiated aspect of subjectivity, albeit psychologically fundamental. What the brain constructs can perhaps be temporarily deconstructed, given the right conditions and sufficient practice. Thus the first-person meditative experience of the dropping away of ego, should it occur, is to experience what third-person science shows to be the dependent arising, and non-arising, of the phenomenal self. In this way, the scientific-physicalist and meditative-experiential perspectives, both empirical in different senses, end up with the same conclusion: the very core of self – the experienced locus of all our concern and striving – is a mutable, perishable, dependent phenomenon, just as the Buddha taught. Seeing this clearly from both perspectives might give us some psychological distance from the very self on behalf of which we’re striving, giving us a measure of equanimity and opening space for compassion centered on others. Science and Buddhist practice are thus consilient partners in the quest for liberation.

It is foolish to be in thrall to fame and fortune, engaged in painful striving all your life with never a moment of peace and tranquillity. Great wealth will drive you to neglect your own well-being in pursuit of it. It is asking for harm and tempting trouble. Though you leave behind at your death a mountain of gold high enough to prop up the North Star itself, it will only cause problems for those who come after you. Nor is there any point in all those pleasures that delight the eyes of fools. Big carriages, fat horses, glittering gold and jewels – any man of sensibility would view such things as gross stupidity. Toss your gold away in the mountains; hurl your jewels into the deep. Only a complete fool is led astray by avarice. Everyone would like to leave their name unburied for posterity – but the high-born and exalted are not necessarily fine people, surely. A dull, stupid person can be born into a good house, attain high status thanks to opportunity and live in the height of luxury, while many wonderfully wise and saintly men choose to remain in lowly positions, and end their days without ever having met with good fortune. A fierce craving for high status and position is next in folly to the lust for fortune. We long to leave a name for our exceptional wisdom and sensibility – but when you really think about it, desire for a good reputation is merely revelling in the praise of others. Neither those who praise us nor those who denigrate will remain in the world for long, and others who hear their opinions will be gone in short order as well. Just who should we feel ashamed before, then? Whose is the recognition we should crave? Fame in fact attracts abuse and slander. No, there is nothing to be gained from leaving a lasting name. The lust for fame is the third folly. Let me now say a few words, however, to those who dedicate themselves to the search for knowledge and the desire for understanding. Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires. Knowledge acquired by listening to others or through study is not true knowledge. So what then should we call knowledge? Right and wrong are simply part of a single continuum. What should we call good? One who is truly wise has no knowledge or virtue, nor honour nor fame. Who then will know of him, and speak of him to others? This is not because he hides his virtue and pretends foolishness – he is beyond all distinctions such as wise and foolish, gain and loss. I have been speaking of what it is to cling to one’s delusions and seek after fame and fortune. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.

This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).

12 Many uninformed persons speak of yoga as Hatha Yoga or consider yoga to be “magic,” dark mysterious rites for attaining spectacular powers. When scholars, however, speak of yoga they mean the system expounded in Yoga Sutras (also known as Patanjali’s Aphorisms): Raja (“royal”) Yoga. The treatise embodies philosophic concepts of such grandeur as to have inspired commentaries by some of India’s greatest thinkers, including the illumined master Sadasivendra. Like the other five orthodox (Vedas-based) philosophical systems, Yoga Sutras considers the “magic” of moral purity (the “ten commandments” of yama and niyama) to be the indispensable preliminary for sound philosophical investigation. This personal demand, not insisted on in the West, has bestowed lasting vitality on the six Indian disciplines. The cosmic order (rita) that upholds the universe is not different from the moral order that rules man’s destiny. He who is unwilling to observe the universal moral precepts is not seriously determined to pursue truth. Section III of Yoga Sutras mentions various yogic miraculous powers (vibhutis and siddhis). True knowledge is always power. The path of yoga is divided into four stages, each with its vibhuti expression. Achieving a certain power, the yogi knows that he has successfully passed the tests of one of the four stages. Emergence of the characteristic powers is evidence of the scientific structure of the yoga system, wherein delusive imaginations about one’s “spiritual progress” are banished; proof is required! Patanjali warns the devotee that unity with Spirit should be the sole goal, not the possession of vibhutis — the merely incidental flowers along the sacred path. May the Eternal Giver be sought, not His phenomenal gifts! God does not reveal Himself to a seeker who is satisfied with any lesser attainment. The striving yogi is therefore careful not to exercise his phenomenal powers, lest they arouse false pride and distract him from entering the ultimate state of Kaivalya. When the yogi has reached his Infinite Goal, he exercises the vibhutis, or refrains from exercising them, just as he pleases. All his actions, miraculous or otherwise, are then performed without karmic involvement. The iron filings of karma are attracted only where a magnet of the personal ego still exists.

The fourth is 'the non-deprivation of both subject and object'—that is to say, the non-denial of subject and object—a view which holds mind and body as one and the same reality. Mind, according to this view, is reality experienced inwardly by introspection, and body is the selfsame reality observed outwardly by senses. They are one reality and one life. There also exist other persons and other beings belonging to the same life and reality; consequently all things share in one reality, and life in common with each other. This reality or life is not transcendental to mind and body, or to spirit and matter, but is the unity of them. In other words, this phenomenal world of ours is the realm of reality. This view was held by the Avatamsaka School of Mahayanism, and is still held by Zenists. Thus Zen is not materialistic, nor idealistic, nor nihilistic, but realistic and monistic

The fourth is 'the non-deprivation of both subject and object'—that is to say, the non-denial of subject and object—a view which holds mind and body as one and the same reality. Mind, according to this view, is reality experienced inwardly by introspection, and body is the selfsame reality observed outwardly by senses. They are one reality and one life. There also exist other persons and other beings belonging to the same life and reality; consequently all things share in one reality, and life in common with each other. This reality or life is not transcendental to mind and body, or to spirit and matter, but is the unity of them. In other words, this phenomenal world of ours is the realm of reality. This view was held by the Avatamsaka School of Mahayanism, and is still held by Zenists. Thus Zen is not materialistic, nor idealistic, nor nihilistic, but realistic and monistic in its view of the world. [FN#201]

Some of my Black sistas don’t know any better, so I’d like to give them some enlightening food-for-thought. Many of them are in awe when it comes to Michelle Obama. They admire and celebrate her intelligence and beauty. For many Black women, she’s a positive and powerful role model. Our former First Lady is phenomenal to say the least! She’s a lawyer, writer, and she fearlessly wears many other hats with integrity and grace. But, here’s what I’d like to point out: If you can admire and celebrate her, why can’t you do the same for YOUR family and friends? Why is it that when people that you personally know obtain degrees, start a successful business, buy a home, are financially secure, happily married, etc… Here you go hatin’ on them. Why can’t you genuinely be happy for them and share in their greatness? I encourage you to celebrate the Black women around you, too!

Page 32: The phenomenal commercial success of the Chinese in Thailand, and indeed throughout Southeast Asia, has no single or simple explanation. Certainly this success is partly attributable to such personal qualities as perseverance, capacity for hard work, and business acumen, but one of the most important factors has been the tight social and economic organization developed by overseas Chinese communities. Such communities in Southeast Asia appear remarkable self-sufficient and to many observers seem to form alien societies within the host society. They have proved unusually effective, on the one hand, for encouraging mutual aid and co-operation among heterogeneous linguistic and socio-economic groups and, on the other, for providing protection from hostile or competitive individuals and governments. Better than most people the Chinese have learned the dictum that ‘in unity there is strength’. Their organizational cohesion furnishes much of the answer not only to the economic well-being of the Chinese as a group but also to the persistence of their cultural patterns and values in an alien and sometimes unfriendly social environment. This is a community of interest as well, for the wealth accumulated by the successful business man is used in part to support a multiplicity of ethnic organizations: trade guilds, a powerful Chinese Chamber of Commerce, dialect associations, benevolent and charitable organizations, surname associations, religious groups for both men and women, sports associations and social clubs.

Everyone has a deck of cards for each person they love. You’ve got your regret cards, your good memory cards, bad memory cards. When one of your people dies, the deck of cards gets thrown up into the air and the cards scatter everywhere. Wakes and funerals are about putting them into a new order. You have to. One half of every memory you had with them is gone. You have to figure out how to live with only your half. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Žižek's argument here is twofold. Firstly, founding itself upon classical biology, contemporary cognitive science presupposes that every organism is a self-contained system in harmony with itself seeking homeostasis and self-preservation, which prevents it from coming to terms with the psychoanalytical concept of Todestrieb. Representing a malfunction in biology, whereby a person no more strives for pleasure and satisfaction, for the minimal possible level of distress and affliction, but rather for pain and even self-destruction, psychoanalysis identifies this apparently negative moment of short circuit within the biological machine with one of the defining traits of human subjectivity and thus of culture itself. Instead of being a mere haphazard disorder or a contingent feature of a sick mind, Todestrieb comes to represent a necessary feature of the singularity of our being: the condition of the possibility of psychopathological self-destruction is ultimately linked to our very freedom because the two are structurally homologous. Secondly, what Žižek adds to this argument for the supremacy of psychoanalysis over reductionist biology is the following insight: if there were nothing but the self-contained, deterministic system of the neuronal interface of the brain, then why is there (self-)experience at all? Why is there not just blind existence, a mere mechanism that auto-develops according to its own laws? Why does the nonconscious trembling of brute matter in its dynamic pulsations need to be aware of itself? Since the category of subjective experience is superfluous, unnecessary, to the materialism displayed by science, the mere fact of experience proclaims that neurobiological activity is not-all—that there is a gap, a series of interstices, which arise within its logical fold as a kind of unpredictable short circuit to which, perhaps, phenomenal reality arises as a response. Naming the place of this rupture the subject itself, Žižek's own work on cognitive science consequently tries to underline the inherent difficulty that the discipline has (for this very reason) to explain the emergence of consciousness, insofar as it points to a limit-situation within which the discourse itself breaks down.

Jung’s point is that all we can ever ascertain is our own introspectively accessible phenomenal inner life, everything else being theory. However, as strictly correct as this may be, unless one is prepared to adopt solipsism—the notion that only one’s own personal experiences exist—and live accordingly, one cannot avoid metaphysical inferences of one sort or another. Even under idealism, one must metaphysically extrapolate the existence of experience beyond one’s own personal boundaries, so to account for the phenomenal inner lives of other living beings and the universe at large (cf. e.g. Kastrup 2019).

As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing himself," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his "averageness";—that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness—by the imperious "genius of the species" therein—and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual—there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer.... This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world;—that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid,—a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing or for "truth"; we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.

Making ourselves feel solid, permanent, separate, continuous and defined – by constantly scanning the phenomenal horizon for reference points which substantiate these criteria – is a convoluted process. The phenomena of our perception will only serve us temporarily in this capacity. So if we take this course, we sentence ourselves to the continuous activity of establishing and replacing reference points. When we engage in this process, we convert our perceptual circumstances into a prison. In fact, our perceptual circumstances not only become an incarceration, but a very subtle personal torture chamber. We need to be continually on the look-out for new reference points. We need to reassess old reference points. We need to imbue ourselves with a certain pervasive nervousness. We need to foster a sense of unease about the whole process of experiencing existence. It could become unrelenting hard work in our own personal forced labour camp. In our attempts to establish reference points we react to the phenomena of our perception in three ways. We are either attracted, we are averse or we are indifferent. Attraction, aversion and indifference are usually referred to, in the translations of Buddhist texts, as lust (desire or attachment); hatred (anger or aggression); and ignorance. Although these words have a distinct application to the three distorted tendencies (usually referred to as ‘the Three Poisons’), they have connotations in English that lend them the tone of ‘the Seven Deadly Sins’. If we encounter anything that seems to substantiate our fictions of solidity, permanence, separateness, continuity, and definition – we are attracted, we reach out for it. If we encounter anything that threatens these fictions – we are averse, we push it away. If we encounter anything that neither substantiates nor threatens these fictions – we are indifferent. What we cannot manipulate, we ignore. But what is left of our responses if these three fictions dissolve? The question of what our experience would be like without attraction, aversion, and indifference poses an interesting challenge to our rationale. In fact, we cannot approach this question at all, if we approach it through conventional reasoning. Fundamentally this question deals with the nature of experience itself. If attraction, aversion, and indifference dissolve, what remains is not any ‘kind of experience’; it is simply experience – experience as such. In terms of experience as such; we are completely present, open, and free in the experience of whatever arises as a perception. Dechen, Khandro; Chogyam, Ngakpa (2014-01-14). Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism (p. 45). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

I mean, if you cannot repeat a once-in-a-lifetime miracle—if you can never again reach the top—then why bother creating at all? Well, I can actually speak about this predicament from personal experience, because I myself was once “at the top”—with a book that sat on the bestseller list for more than three years. I can’t tell you how many people said to me during those years, “How are you ever going to top that?” They’d speak of my great good fortune as though it were a curse, not a blessing, and would speculate about how terrified I must feel at the prospect of not being able to reach such phenomenal heights again. But such thinking assumes there is a “top”—and that reaching that top (and staying there) is the only motive one has to create. Such thinking assumes that the mysteries of inspiration operate on the same scale that we do—on a limited human scale of success and failure, of winning and losing, of comparison and competition, of commerce and reputation, of units sold and influence wielded. Such thinking assumes that you must be constantly victorious—not only against your peers, but also against an earlier version of your own poor self. Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play.

By saying that phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence, we are declaring not their nonexistence but their interdependence, their absence of concrete reality. And the emptiness of phenomena, far from being a mental construct or a concept, corresponds to the reality itself of the phenomenal world.

You’re not dealing with quick fix; you’re dealing with a Quadrant II activity that will bring phenomenal long-term results. Ask anyone who has done it consistently. Little by little, your resting pulse rate will go down as your heart and oxygen processing system becomes more efficient. As you increase your body’s ability to do more demanding things, you’ll find your normal activities much more comfortable and pleasant. You’ll have more afternoon energy, and the fatigue you’ve felt that’s made you “too tired” to exercise in the past will be replaced by an energy that will invigorate everything you do.

When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese. For example, a person in charge of a physical asset, such as a machine, may be eager to make a good impression on his superiors. Perhaps the company is in a rapid growth stage and promotions are coming fast. So he produces at optimum levels—no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the machine day and night. The production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket. Within a short time, he’s promoted. Golden eggs! But suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a machine that, by this time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest heavily in downtime and maintenance. Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs, and profit. The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization—the customers and the employees. I

To call someone a navel gazer on the mainland is to say that they're narcissistic, self-absorbed in their introspective pursuits. This perspective, I realize, might be the very reason I've come to think of a spiritual life as some sort of luxury. I'm suddenly struck by the irony of a culture that seems to point to personal spiritual quests as somehow selfish when, in the end, those journeys, like the discredited belly button, are ultimately a search for connectivity.

I took a deep, overly exaggerated breath, the sort of over-the-top gesture that was filmed for commercials about scented laundry detergent, but in this case was my way of trying to absorb every molecule of my old normal life. I loved the smell of the living room, the kitchen, Jenna's recycling porch, the cupboards, and the basement laundry room. I loved everything, and it seemed to love me back. It was as if my heart had grown to three times its normal size, and it could now hold the specialness of every person who crossed my path; it could track how phenomenal every scent, sound, taste, or texture was. Everything was beautiful, even if it was just the laundry that I'd pulled out of the dryer, still warm, and hugged like a small, lost child.

There is no explaining the "pure" experience. There is only the completely unwarranted presupposition that others should others should somehow "understand" that it has taken place. but the judgement whether a "pure" rather than a secondary "experience" has actually occurred can, by definition, only be self-referential.&that would be in order if, simultaneously, there were not the presumption that something objectively meaningful about phenomenal reality had been illuminated.Or, putting it another way,the problem is not what James Joyce termed the "epiphany," the momentary glimpse of meaning experienced by an individual, but rather the refusal to define its existential "place" or recognize its explanatory limits....Insisting upon the absolute character of revelatory truth obviously generates a division between the saved & the damned.There arises the simultaneous desire to abolish blasphemy and bring the heathen into the light.Not every person in quest of the "pure experience,"of course,is a religious fanatic or obsessed with issues of identity.Making existential sense of reality through the pure experience,feeling a sense of belonging, is a serious matter & a legitimate undertaking.But the more the preoccupation with the purity of the experience, it only follows,the more fanatical the believer. In political terms,therefore,the problem is less the lack of intensity in the lived life of the individual than the increasing attempts by individuals and groups to insist that their own,particular,deeply felt existential or religious or aesthetic experience should be privileged in the public realm.Indeed, this runs directly counter to the Enlightenment.... Different ideas have a different role in different spheres of social action.Subjectivity has a pivotal role to play in discussing existential or aesthetic experience while the universal subject is necessary understanding of citizenship or the rule of law.From such a perspective,indeed,the seemingly irresolvable conflict between subjectivity and the subject becomes illusory: it is instead a matter of what should assume primacy in what realm....From the standpoint of a socially constructed subjectivity,however, only members of a particular group can have the appropriate intuition or "experience," to make judgements about their culture or their politics...This stance now embraced by so many on the left,however, actually derives from arguments generated first by the Counter-Enlightenment & then the radical right during the Dreyfus Affair.These reactionaries, too, claimed that rather than introduce "grand narratives" or "totalizing ambitions" or "universal" ideas of justice, intellectuals should commit themselves to the particular groups with whose unique discourses and experiences they, as individuals, are intimately and existentially familiar.The "pure"-or less contaminated- experience of group members was seen as providing them a privileged insight into a particular form of oppression. Criticism from the "outsider" loses its value and questions concerning the adjudication of differences between groups are never faced, ...Not every person who believes in the "pure experience" -again-was an anti-Semite or fascist.But it is interesting how the "pure experience," with its vaunted contempt for the "public" and its social apathy,can be manipulated in the realm of politics.Utopia doesn't appear only in the idea of a former "golden age" located somewhere in the past or the vision of future paradise...history has shown the danger of turning "reason" into an enemy and condemning universal ideals in the name of some parochial sense of "place" rooted in a particular community, Or, put another way, where power matters the "pure" experience is never quite so pure and no "place" is sacrosanct.Better to be a bit more modest when confronting social reality and begin the real work of specifying conditions under which each can most freely pursue his or her existential longing &find a place in the sun.

Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.

Pantheism merges the natural and supernatural, the finite and infinite, into one substance. It often speaks of God as the hidden ground of the phenomenal world, but does not conceive of Him as personal, and therefore as endowed with intelligence and will. It boldly declares that all is God, and thus engages in what Brightman calls “the expansion of God,” so that we get “too much of God,” seeing that He also includes all the evil of the world.

Since such realization is undeceiving, it is called "seeing what is true." As it is the opposite of worldly seeing, it may also be called "not seeing anything." Since it is the opposite of reification, it is expressed as "seeing emptiness." It is also referred to as "being released from empty and nonempty," because neither something empty nor something nonempty is observed. Since emptiness is nothing but a name, it is also described as "not seeing emptiness." Because it is the source of all positive qualities, it is designated as "seeing the emptiness endowed with the supreme of all aspects." It is called "seeing identitylessness," for it is the opposite of clinging to personal and phenomenal identities. Since it is the opposite of both clinging to a self and clinging to the lack of a self, it is said to be "seeing the genuine self." As any notion of a mind has vanished, it is labeled as "mind having vanished." It is also referred to as "realizing or seeing one's own mind," because the primordial basic nature of one's own mind is realized in just the primordial way it is. When "not seeing anything" is explained as "seeing what is true," this is to he understood just like our immediate certainty that we see space when we do not see anything. As the Buddha said: Beings constantly use the words, "I see space." You should examine the point of how you see space. Those who see in this way see all phenomena. I am not able to explain seeing through another example.

The admiration you lavish on others phenomenally reflects the admiration you give to yourself.

Through all my later literary life I have sought to make it plain, as the result of antecedent years spent in occult research, that the occult sciences—in all their general understanding—are paths of danger when they are not paths of simple make-believe and imposture. The importance of Éliphas Lévi’s account at large of the claims, and of their story throughout the centuries, arises from the fact (a) that he is the authoritative exponent-in-chief of all the alleged sciences; (b) that it is he who, in a sense, restored and placed them under a new and more attractive vesture, before public notice at the middle period of the nineteenth century; (c) that he claimed, as we shall see, the very fullest knowledge concerning them, being that of an adept and master; but (d) that—subject to one qualification, the worth of which will be mentioned—it follows from his long examination that Magic, as understood not in the streets only but in the houses of research concerning it, has no ground in the truth of things, and is of the region of delusion only. It is for this reason that I have translated his History of Magic, as one who reckons a not too gracious task for something which leans toward righteousness, at least in the sense of charity. The world is full at this day of the false claims which arise out of that region, and I have better reasons than most even of my readers can imagine to undeceive those who, having been drawn in such directions, may be still saved from deception. It is well therefore that out of the mouth of the masters we can draw the fullest evidence required for this purpose. In the present prefatory words I propose to shew, firstly, the nature of Éliphas Lévi’s personal claims, so that there may be no misconception as to what they were actually, and as to the kind of voice which is speaking; secondly, his original statement of the claims, nature and value of Transcendental Magic; and, thirdly, his later evidences on its phenomenal or so-called practical side, as established by its own history.

They aren’t thugs,” I balk, unable to do this again. It’s like she forgets who she is. “No more than Dad is, and you married him. They’re sweet and smart. Wells treats Ivy like a queen. Any woman should be so fortunate. Gage bakes with her all the time and loves period drama. Ty has a way of tapping into the heart of a person, like he’s rescuing the world one battered soul at a time. And Liam … Liam is so many things. He’s a genius for one. Devoted. And funny. And much deeper than anyone would expect. And all of them are phenomenal with that little girl.

Since the evolution of the human race shifted from a mother-centered to a father-centered structure of society, as well as of religion, we can trace the development of a maturing love mainly in the development of patriarchal religion. In the beginning of this development we find a despotic, jealous God, who considers man, whom he created, as his property, and is entitled to do with him whatever he pleases. This is the phase of religion in which God drives man out of paradise, lest he eat from the tree of knowledge and thus could become God himself; this is the phase in which God decides to destroy the human race by the flood, because none of them pleases him, with the exception of the favorite son, Noah; this is the phase in which God demands from Abraham that he kill his only, his beloved son, Isaac, to prove his love for God by the act of ultimate obedience. But simultaneously a new phase begins; God makes a covenant with Noah, in which he promises never to destroy the human race again, a covenant by which he is bound himself. Not only is he bound by his promises, he is also bound by his own principle, that of justice, and on this basis God must yield to Abraham's demand to spare Sodom if there are at least ten just men. But the development goes further than transforming God from the figure of a despotic tribal chief into a loving father, into a father who himself is bound by the principles which he has postulated; it goes in the direction of transforming God from the figure of a father into a symbol of his principles, those of justice, truth and love. God is truth, God is justice. In this development God ceases to be a person, a man, a father; he becomes the symbol of the principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena, of the vision of the flower which will grow from the spiritual seed within man. God cannot have a name. A name always denotes a thing, or a person, something finite. How can God have a name, if he is not a person, not a thing? The most striking incident of this change lies in the Biblical story of God's revelation to Moses. When Moses tells him that the Hebrews will not believe that God has sent him, unless he can tell them God's name (how could idol worshipers comprehend a nameless God, since the very essence of an idol is to have a name?), God makes a concession. He tells Moses that his name is 'I am becoming that which I am becoming.' 'I-am-becoming is my name.' The 'I-am-becoming' means that God is not finite, not a person, not a 'being.' The most adequate translation of the sentence would be: tell them that 'my name is nameless'. The prohibition to make any image of God, to pronounce his name in vain, eventually to pronounce his name at all, aims at the same goal, that of freeing man from the idea that God is a father, that he is a person. In the subsequent theological development, the idea is carried further in the principle that one must not even give God any positive attribute. To say of God that he is wise, strong, good implies again that he is a person; the most I can do is to say what God is not, to state negative attributes, to postulate that he is not limited, not unkind, not unjust. The more I know what God is not, the more knowledge I have of God. Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God's name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology, the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all existence; God becomes truth, love, justice. God is inas much as I am human.

Since the evolution of the human race shifted from a mother-centered to a father-centered structure of society, as well as of religion, we can trace the development of a maturing love mainly in the development of patriarchal religion. In the beginning of this development we find a despotic, jealous God, who considers man, whom he created, as his property, and is entitled to do with him whatever he pleases. This is the phase of religion in which God drives man out of paradise, lest he eat from the tree of knowledge and thus could become God himself; this is the phase in which God decides to destroy the human race by the flood, because none of them pleases him, with the exception of the favorite son, Noah; this is the phase in which God demands from Abraham that he kill his only, his beloved son, Isaac, to prove his love for God by the act of ultimate obedience. But simultaneously a new phase begins; God makes a covenant with Noah, in which he promises never to destroy the human race again, a covenant by which he is bound himself. Not only is he bound by his promises, he is also bound by his own principle, that of justice, and on this basis God must yield to Abraham's demand to spare Sodom if there are at least ten just men. But the development goes further than transforming God from the figure of a despotic tribal chief into a loving father, into a father who himself is bound by the principles which he has postulated; it goes in the direction of transforming God from the figure of a father into a symbol of his principles, those of justice, truth and love. God is truth, God is justice. In this development God ceases to be a person, a man, a father; he becomes the symbol of the principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena, of the vision of the flower which will grow from the spiritual seed within man. God cannot have a name. A name always denotes a thing, or a person, something finite. How can God have a name, if he is not a person, not a thing? The most striking incident of this change lies in the Biblical story of God's revelation to Moses. When Moses tells him that the Hebrews will not believe that God has sent him, unless he can tell them God's name (how could idol worshipers comprehend a nameless God, since the very essence of an idol is to have a name?), God makes a concession. He tells Moses that his name is 'I am becoming that which I am becoming.' 'I-am-becoming is my name.' The 'I-am-becoming' means that God is not finite, not a person, not a 'being.' The most adequate translation of the sentence would be: tell them that 'my name is nameless'. The prohibition to make any image of God, to pronounce his name in vain, eventually to pronounce his name at all, aims at the same goal, that of freeing man from the idea that God is a father, that he is a person. In the subsequent theological development, the idea is carried further in the principle that one must not even give God any positive attribute. To say of God that he is wise, strong, good implies again that he is a person; the most I can do is to say what God is not, to state negative attributes, to postulate that he is not limited, not unkind, not unjust. The more I know what God is not, the more knowledge I have of God. Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God's name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology, the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all existence; God becomes truth, love, justice. God is inasmuch as i am human.

There is only one person in the US with Down’s syndrome who owns a restaurant as of 2015

In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions—they are both décadence religions—but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.—Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity—it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, “god,” was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism). It does not speak of a “struggle with sin,” but, yielding to reality, of the “struggle with suffering.” Sharply differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral concepts behind it; it is, in my phrase, beyond good and evil.—The two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and upon which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the “impersonal.” (—Both of these states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objectivists, by experience, as they are to me). These physiological states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in eating and a careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no worry, either on one’s own account or on account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good cheer—he finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health. Prayer is not included, and neither is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery (—it is always possible to leave—). These things would have been simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion, ressentiment (—“enmity never brings an end to enmity”: the moving refrain of all Buddhism....) And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too much “objectivity” (that is, in the individual’s loss of interest in himself, in loss of balance and of “egoism”), he combats by strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego. In Buddha’s teaching egoism is a duty. The “one thing needful,” the question “how can you be delivered from suffering,” regulates and determines the whole spiritual diet. (—Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who also declared war upon pure “scientificality,” to wit, Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality). The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must get its start among the higher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.—

Manga represents and extremely unfiltered view of the inner workings of their creator's minds. This is because manga are free of the massive editing and "committee"-style production used in other media like film, magazines and television. Even in American mainstream comics, the norm is to have a stable of artists, letterers, inkers, and scenario writers all under the control of the publisher. In Japan, a single artist might employ many assistants and act as a sort of "director," but he or she is usually at the core of the production process and retains control over the rights to the material created. That artists are not necessarily highly educated and deal frequently in plain subject matter only heightens the sense that manga offer the reader an extremely raw and personal view of the world. Thus, of the more than 2 billion manga produced each year, the vast majority have a dreamlike quality. They speak to people's hope, and fears. They are where stressed-out modern urbanites daily work out their neuroses and their frustrations. Viewed in their totality, the phenomenal number of stories produced is like the constant chatter of the collective unconscious -- and articulation of the dream world. Reading manga is like peering into the unvarnished, unretouched reality of the Japanese mind.

Apple’s P-type loonshots, of course, transformed their industries: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. But what ultimately made them so successful, aside from excellence in design and marketing (most, although not all, of the technologies inside had been invented by others), was an underlying S-type loonshot. It was a strategy that had been rejected by nearly all others in the industry: a closed ecosystem. Many companies had tried, and failed, to impose a closed ecosystem on customers. IBM built a personal computer with a proprietary operating system called OS/2. Both the computer and the operating system disappeared. Analysts, observers, and industry experts concluded that a closed ecosystem could never work: customers wanted choice. Apple, while Jobs was exiled to NeXT, followed the advice of the analysts and experts. It opened its system, licensing out Macintosh software and architecture. Clones proliferated, just like Windows-based PCs. When Jobs returned to Apple, he insisted that the board agree to shut down the clones. It cost Apple over $100 million to cancel existing contracts at a time when it was desperately fighting bankruptcy. But that S-type loonshot, closing the ecosystem, drove the phenomenal rise of Apple’s products. The sex appeal of the new products lured customers in; the fence made it difficult to leave.

The trans-phenomenal reality of love would be, not that of a positive being who is without doubt, but that of...a lack...the other person as occupying the entire horizon of my life and not as a positive being. Love is the same thing as privation.

Comedians used Christine jokes with abandon, frequently when I was present, as even my name was good for a surefire laugh. Many of the stories were very unappetizing, and almost always dealt with the more lewd and phonographic aspects of sex. Probably it's because I was the subject of the commentary, but I've never quite understood why it reached such levels of popularity, though I admit that the sources showed phenomenal imagination.

Your life is a personal story of Godhead.

Hallucinations play out on a different stage than that of the perceived world; it is as if they are superimposed...If the hallucination does not take place in the stable and intersubjective world, this is because it lacks the plenitude and the internal articulation that makes it the case that the real thing remains 'in itself'...The hallucinatory thing is not, like the real thing, a deep being that contracts a thickness of duration in itself; the hallucination is not, like perception, my concrete hold upon time within a living present. Rather, the hallucination slides across time, just as it slides across the world...The hallucination is not in the world, but rather 'in front of' it, because the body of the person suffering from hallucinations has lost its insertion in the system of appearances. Every hallucination is first an hallucination of one's own body...The visual illusion is thus much less the presentation of an illusory object than the unfolding and, so to speak, wild fluctuations of a visual power henceforth lacking a sensory counterpart. There are hallucinations because we have, through the phenomenal body, a constant relation with a milieu into which it is projected, and because, being detached from the actual milieu, the body remains capable of evoking a pseudo-presence of this milieu through its own arrangements. To this extent, the hallucinatory thing is never seen and is never visible.

Ten Principles of Jurisprudence Rights originate where existence originates. That which determines existence determines rights. Since it has no further context of existence in the phenomenal order, the universe is self-referent in its being and self-normative in its activities. It is also the primary referent in the being and the activities of all derivative modes of being. The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be used. As a subject, each component of the universe is capable of having rights. The natural world on the planet Earth gets its rights from the same source that humans get their rights: from the universe that brought them into being. Every component of the Earth community has three rights: the right to be, the right to habitat, and the right to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community. All rights are role-specific or species-specific, and limited. Rivers have river rights. Birds have bird rights. Insects have insect rights. Humans have human rights. Difference in rights is qualitative, not quantitative. The rights of an insect would be of no value to a tree or a fish. Human rights do not cancel out the rights of other modes of being to exist in their natural state. Human property rights are not absolute. Property rights are simply a special relationship between a particular human ‘owner’ and a particular piece of ‘property,’ so that both might fulfil their roles in the great community of existence. Since species exist only in the form of individuals, rights refer to individuals, not simply in a general way to species. These rights as presented here are based on the intrinsic relations that the various components of Earth have to each other. The planet Earth is a single community bound together with interdependent relationships. No living being nourishes itself. Each component of the Earth community is immediately or mediately dependent on every other member of the community for the nourishment and assistance it needs for its own survival. This mutual nourishment, which includes the predator-prey relationship, is integral with the role that each component of the Earth has within the comprehensive community of existence. In a special manner, humans have not only a need for but also a right of access to the natural world to provide for the physical needs of humans and the wonder needed by human intelligence, the beauty needed by human imagination, and the intimacy needed by human emotions for personal fulfilment.33

It took some time before he became aware of a faint shifting in power, a ripple of awareness, like a searching crystal, an eye opening in the earth beside them. They were not alone. The presence touched him, stirred in his mind. Male. Powerful. Gregori. You are well, my friend. There was that cool menace in his mind. They knew one another so well after all the centuries of standing together against all odds. Gregori had not voiced it as a question, and Mikhail was shocked, truly shocked, that he could make contact. Raven and he were deep in the bowels of the earth. The sun was at its greatest peak, and all Carpathians were weak. How could Gregori accomplish such a feat? It was unheard of, even in the legends and myths of the past. Your woman needs to sleep, Mikhail. Allow me to assist you. Gregori was far away--Mikhail could detect that--yet the bond between them was strong. Sending Raven to sleep gave Gregori a semblance of power over her. Indecision. Did he trust Gregori? The power that Gregori wielded was phenomenal. For the mental well-being of his lifemate, did he do what no Carpathian would ever consider? Allow me to do this for you, old friend. She will not survive this day, Mikhail. Even locked with you, her human limitations will overcome her desire to aid you. And you can do this? Even at this distance? You can safely send her to sleep? Take away her torment? There will be no mistakes? Mikhail found himself wanting to believe that Gregori was indeed powerful enough to do such a thing. Gregori was their healer. If he said Raven would be unable to last buried within the earth, it only confirmed his own belief. Yes, through you. You are the only person on this planet I have given my allegiance to. You have always had my loyalty. I count you as my family and my friend. Until your woman or some other gives me my lifemate, you are the only person standing between the darkness and me. Gregori would never have admitted such a thing unless he considered the situation a dire emergency. He was giving Mikhail the only reason he could to reassure Mikhail that he could be trusted.

Dasein *is authentically itself* in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. *As something that keeps *silent*, authentic *Being*-one’s-Self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying ‘I’; but in its reticence it ‘*is*’ that thrown entity as which it can authentically be. The Self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’. Only if we are oriented phenomenally by the meaning of the Being of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self are we put in a position to discuss what ontological justification there is for treating substantiality, simplicity, and personality as characteristics of Selfhood. In the prevalent way of saying “I,” it is constantly suggested that what we have in advance is a Self-Thing, persistently present-at-hand; the ontological question of the Being of the Self must turn away from any such suggestion. *Care does not need to be founded in a Self. But existentiality, as constitutive for care, provides the ontological constitution of Dasein’s Self-constancy, to which there belongs, in accordance with the full structural content of care, its Being-fallen factically into non-Self-constancy*. When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. This phenomenon is clarified by Interpreting the meaning of care; and it is as care that Dasein’s totality of Being has been defined.” ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 369-370