“
Think of the universal substance, of which thou has a very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it thou art
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius)
“
...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.
...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.
But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
”
”
Charles Darwin (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82)
“
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third
”
”
Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations)
“
It was so stupid, and random, but at that second, with the morning sun hitting her auburn hair, and her huge brown eyes fixed on him, the lock flew off the “do-not-allow-yourself-to-even-think-about-it” portion of his brain, and every feeling he ever had for her—feelings he never even realized he had for her—flooded over him like a tidal wave. Love, tenderness, desire—it hit him so hard he had to excuse himself, go to the men’s room, rest his forehead against the cool metal of the bathroom stall, breathing heavily, wondering what the hell had just happened. It left him exhausted and spent, as if he’d just run a hundred miles.
And almost a year later, he was still exhausted, spent, frustrated … and madly in love.
”
”
Claire Matthews (Intimate Friends)
“
Tis a barbaric fancy," said Roxholm thoughtfully as he turned the stem of his glass, keeping his eyes fixed on it as though solving a problem for himself. "A barbaric fancy that a woman needs a master. She who is strong enough is her own conqueror--as a man should be master of himself.
”
”
Frances Hodgson Burnett (His Grace of Osmonde: Being the Portions of the Nobleman's Life Omitted in the Relation of His Lady's Story Presented to the World of Fashion)
“
These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow. There are moments in the developed movement of capital which delay this movement other than by crises; such as e.g. the constant devaluation of a part of the existing capital: the transformation of a great part of capital into fixed capital which does not serve as agency of direct production; unproductive waste of a great portion of capital etc.
”
”
Karl Marx (Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy)
“
We can thus understand why bourgeois political economy held instinctively to Adam Smith’s confusion of the categories ‘fixed and circulating capital’ with the categories ‘constant and variable capital’, and uncritically echoed it from one generation down to the next for a whole century. It no longer distinguished at all between the portion of capital laid out on wages and the portion of capital laid out on raw material, and only formally distinguished the former from constant capital in terms of whether it was circulated bit by bit or all at once through the product. The basis for understanding the real movement of capitalist production, and thus of capitalist exploitation, was thus submerged at one blow. All that was involved, on this view, was the reappearance of values advanced.
”
”
Karl Marx (Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2)
“
Fixed and circulating capital are now no longer distinct and independent capital investments, but rather different portions of the same productive capital, which form different shares of the total value in different spheres of investment.
”
”
Karl Marx (Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2)
“
In all of these areas, the human brain is asked to do and handle more than ever before. We are dealing with several fields of knowledge constantly intersecting with our own, and all of this chaos is exponentially increased by the information available through technology. What this means is that all of us must possess different forms of knowledge and an array of skills in different fields, and have minds that are capable of organizing large amounts of information. The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same. In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn. The Apprenticeship Phase is more relevant and important than ever, and those who discount this notion will almost certainly be left behind. Finally, we live in a culture that generally values intellect and reasoning with words. We tend to think of working with the hands, of building something physical, as degraded skills for those who are less intelligent. This is an extremely counterproductive cultural value. The human brain evolved in intimate conjunction with the hand. Many of our earliest survival skills depended on elaborate hand-eye coordination. To this day, a large portion of our brain is devoted to this relationship. When we work with our hands and build something, we learn how to sequence our actions and how to organize our thoughts. In taking anything apart in order to fix it, we learn problem-solving skills that have wider applications. Even if it is only as a side activity, you should find a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you. Many Masters
”
”
Robert Greene (Mastery)
“
A man who suffers can lessen his anguish by knowing whence it comes. By thought he can locate it in a certain portion of his body which can be cured, or, if necessary, torn away. He fixes the bounds of it, and separates it from himself. A child has no such illusive resource. His first encounter with suffering is more tragic and more true. Like his own being, it seems infinite. He feels that it is seated in his bosom, housed in his heart, and is mistress of his flesh. And it is so. It will not leave his body until it has eaten it away.
”
”
Romain Rolland
“
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me; not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. [A] To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)
“
She didn’t dream, but when she awoke, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Small white flowers lay at the foot of her cot, and many infant-sized footprints led in and out of the tent. Before someone could enter and notice, Celaena swept a foot over the tracks, destroying any trace, and stuffed the flowers into a nearby satchel. Though no one mentioned another word about faeries, as they traveled onward, Celaena continually scanned the soldiers’ faces for any indication that they’d seen something strange. She spent a good portion of the following day with sweaty palms and a racing heartbeat, and kept one eye fixed on the passing woods.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1))
“
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds
”
”
Wallace Stevens
“
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third component part.
”
”
Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations)
“
Whether the author of the universe, when the fire gave place and he first took in his hand the shapeless realm of raw matter, established the chain of causes for all eternity, and bound himself as well by universal law, and portioned out the universe, which endures the ages prescribed for it, by a fixed line of destiny; or whether nothing is ordained and Fortune, moving at random, brings round the cycle of events, and chance is master of mankind - in either case, let they purpose, whatever it be, be sudden; let the mind of man be blind to coming doom; he fears, but leave him hope.
”
”
Lucan (Lucan: The Civil War (Loeb Classical Library No. 220))
“
Such a nasty bruise,” he says, staring straight into my eyes. I am stunned he can see it. Delicate to the touch and tender on every side, the bruise is deeper than days. My hand automatically moves to my chest.
Science taught me with valid assurance that my heart was fixed in my rib cage, but life has since shown me otherwise. My heart in fact dangles from a tangle of strings. The ends are grasped tight by numerous people who yank and release, having caused many painful bruises over time. I cry because they are invisible to most.
“Such a nasty bruise,” he repeats, tugging on my poor heart.
His kind eyes fall away from mine as I feel a squeeze on my arm. He twists it enough to show me a small, round patch of purple surrounded by a sickly yellowish corona.
“Oh. My elbow.” I let the air exhale from my lungs. Another bruise forms where my heart has hit the floor. It is jerked up again.
“Can I do anything for you?” I see in his eyes the mirror image of a finger—his finger—wrapped in one of the dangling strings. He tugs and I feel it.
“No,” I reply to his question. But it is a lie. There is something he could do, along with all who grasp a portion of the web entangling my heart. I wish they would mercifully let go.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year)
“
Here then we have the standing and fixed measures of life and death. Immortality and bliss, belong to the righteous; those who have lived in an exact conformity to the law of God, are out of the reach of death; but an exclusion from paradise and loss of immortality is the portion of sinners; of all those who have any way broke that law, and failed of a complete obedience to it, by the guilt of any one transgression
”
”
John Locke (The Reasonableness of Christianity, As Delivered in the Scriptures)
“
BEGIN the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I, who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
Notwithstanding the security for future repose which the United States ought to find in their love of peace and their constant respect for the rights of other nations, the character of the times particularly inculcates the lesson that, whether to prevent or repel danger, we ought not to be unprepared for it. This consideration will sufficiently recommend to Congress a liberal provision for the immediate extension and gradual completion of the works of defense, both fixed and floating, on our maritime frontier, and an adequate provision for guarding our inland frontier against dangers to which certain portions of it may continue to be exposed.
[7th Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 5, 1815]
”
”
James Madison
“
Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it thou art.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius)
“
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these - to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
”
”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“
Monica nudged her husband’s shoulder. “On-time flights are easier when you’re behind the controls.” Trent Fairchild and his two brothers owned and operated Fairchild Charters. A private air charter company with a fleet of jets, big and small, not to mention more helicopters than one could count, which was why they were attending the conference of International Emergency Medicine . . . a conference where professionals worked to improve the emergency response to natural disasters all over the world. “Is Glen with you?” Glen was Trent’s brother and liaison to the fixed-wing portion of air travel for the sick and injured.
”
”
Catherine Bybee (Not Quite Forever (Not Quite, #4))
“
...and in the age to come, through the divinization which will be given to him [the Christian], he will love and cleave affectionately to the aforementioned logoi that preexist in God, or rather he will love and cleave affetionately to God Himself, in whom the logoi of beautiful things are steadfastly fixed. He is a 'portion of God,' then, insofar as he exists, for he owes his existence to the logos of being that is in God; and he is a "portion of God" insofar as he is Good, for he owes his goodness to the logos of well-being that is in God; and he is a 'portion of God' insofar as he is God, owing to the logos of his eternal being that is in God.
”
”
Maximus the Confessor (Ambigua (Problemi metafisici e teologici su testi di Gregorio di Nazianzo e Dionigi Areopagita))
“
There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear.
There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young nun not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you Secondly there is the slow erosion-a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child's nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no rare. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees' faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business. And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.
”
”
Claire North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August)
“
I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius)
“
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me; not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.[A] To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
There are two parts to growing as a person—well, no, there aren’t, there’s more, but you can simplify it down—the first is pinpointing problematic areas, the toxic parts, as you said, and cutting them out. You are immensely good at this,” he said, and it sounded a quite genuine compliment, “but it is only one half of the equation. The other part, once you have hollowed out all the offensive parts, is to replace them with healthy, constructive parts. New behaviours; new patterns of thought. Something to nurture those empty spaces back to whole. Because otherwise those holes stay open, and they beg to be filled, and they will collapse on themselves and cause even bigger problems than the things that once lived inside of them. And you, Ronoah? You are singularly lacking in imagination in this respect. You take half the bricks out of a veritable castle of behavioural instinct and you expect it to hold—you never put new ones back in. And I shall tell you why. “There is a difference between action and character. One you change on purpose, but the other, it changes clandestine, without your noticing, until one day you have to run to catch up with where it’s got to. There is a difference between making a mistake, and being a mistake,” he said, tapping Ronoah’s shoulder with one, and then two fingers. “Your problem, Ronoah, quite possibly one of the only problems I can offer that you have not already thought of, is that you are constantly conflating the two. To the everyday eye, character is immovable, immutable—how do you solve a problem when the problem is you? You cannot improve a broken system when the only tool you have with which to do the fixing-up is the system itself. You need new parts, better data—and it just so happens you are discarding a rather sizeable portion of the available data on yourself while you’re at it, which makes your calculations even more erroneous. Because, and get ready for this, it might come as a bit of a shock—because you are not actually broken.
”
”
Sienna Tristen (Theory (The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming #1))
“
Most disconcerting of all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore what it was like to be other living things and even other objects. For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.
”
”
Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe)
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This transmutation of the reproductive energy gives great vitality to those practicing it. They will be filled with great vital force, which will radiate from them and will manifest in what has been called "personal magnetism." The energy thus transmuted may be turned into new channels and used to great advantage. Nature has condensed one of its most powerful manifestations of prana into reproductive energy, as its purpose is to create. The greatest amount of vital force is concentrated in the smallest area. The reproductive organism is the most powerful storage battery in animal life, and its force can be drawn upward and used, as well as expended in the ordinary functions of reproduction, or wasted in riotous lust. The majority of our students know something of the theories of regeneration; and we can do little more than to state the above facts, without attempting to prove them. The Yogi exercise for transmuting reproductive energy is simple. It is coupled with rhythmic breathing, and can be easily performed. It may be practiced at any time, but is specially recommended when one feels the instinct most strongly, at which time the reproductive energy is manifesting and may be most easily transmuted for regenerative purposes. The exercise is as follows: Keep the mind fixed on the idea of Energy, and away from ordinary sexual thoughts or imaginings. If these thoughts come into the mind do not be discouraged, but regard them as manifestations of a force which you intend using for the purposes of strengthening the body and mind. Lie passively or sit erect, and fix your mind on the idea of drawing the reproductive energy upward to the Solar Plexus, where it will be transmuted and stored away as a reserve force of vital energy. Then breathe rhythmically, forming the mental image of drawing up the reproductive energy with each inhalation. With each inhalation make a command of the Will that the energy be drawn upward from the reproductive organization to the Solar Plexus. If the rhythm is fairly established and the mental image is clear, you will be conscious of the upward passage of the energy, and will feel its stimulating effect. If you desire an increase in mental force, you may draw it up to the brain instead of to the Solar Plexus, by giving the mental command and holding the mental image of the transmission to the brain. The man or woman doing metal creative work, or bodily creative work, will be able to use this creative energy in their work by following the above exercise, drawing up the energy with the inhalation and sending it forth with the exhalation. In this last form of exercise, only such portions as are needed in the work will pass into the work being done, the balance remaining stored up in the Solar Plexus. You will understand, of course, that it is not the reproductive fluids which are drawn up and used, but the etheripranic energy which animates the latter, the soul of the reproductive organism, as it were. It is usual to allow the head to bend forward easily and naturally during the transmuting exercise.
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William Walker Atkinson (The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath)
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gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
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Paul suffered and struggled mightily in the service of his faith. Perhaps you could argue that he simply wasn’t the best example after which to model our own behavior. What if we look at the ultimate example of a Christian teacher and expositor, Christ Himself? Surely then we’ll see how to handle this unappealing message of a crucified Savior whom only the dregs of society preached. Surely at last we’ll see a glimmer of success. But by worldly standards, when Jesus began preaching His own gospel in His own hometown, He was an even more spectacular failure than Paul! This episode in Jesus’ life is one of the most gripping and powerful portions of the Bible. His words in Scripture capture the shock and emotion of the moment, and they still stun us with their power and their force. The riveting drama begins in Luke 4, verses 16 through 21: So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, Because He anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.” Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Imagine going to church next Sunday, expecting to hear your pastor preaching, and having the Lord Jesus Christ appear in person to tell you that He had come to fulfill all the prophecies of His second coming—all the prophecies of the glory of His kingdom of salvation on earth! Imagine that you had gone that morning, and Jesus was standing in the pulpit to tell you that the time was now for the fulfillment of all divine promises connected to His return. Well, that’s something like what the Jews in the Nazareth synagogue experienced that day. They had attended that synagogue all their lives, and they had heard reading after reading of the Torah, the Law, and the Haftarah, the prophets, and sermon after sermon on Sabbath after Sabbath throughout their lifetimes. They had heard much teaching about the Messiah, and they had been reading many Scriptures about His coming and kingdom. But all of a sudden, on this Sabbath in the year A.D. 28, in an obscure synagogue in a nothing blue-collar town called Nazareth, He was there!
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus)
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Mortgage Workouts Even if you don’t qualify for any of the government loan modification programs or your lender doesn’t agree to participate, you may be able to arrange a “mortgage workout.” A workout is any agreement you make with the lender that changes how you pay the delinquency on your mortgage or otherwise keeps you out of foreclosure. Many lenders require this formal process even for short-term fixes. Here are some workout options your lender might agree to: • Spread repayment of missed payments over a few months. For example, if your monthly payment is $1,000 and you missed two payments ($2,000), the lender might let you pay $1,500 for four months. • Reduce or suspend your regular payments for a specified time, and then add a portion of your overdue amount to your regular payments later on. • Extend the length of your loan and add the missed payments at the end. • For a period of time, suspend the amount of your monthly payment that goes toward the principal and only require payment of interest, taxes, and insurance. • Let you sell the property for less than you owe the lender and waive the rest. This is called a “short sale.” It’s best to start the workout negotiations as early as possible. But before you contact the lender about a workout, you should prepare information about your situation, including: • a reasonable budget for the
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Robin Leonard (Solve Your Money Troubles: Debt, Credit & Bankruptcy)
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Returning to Deuteronomy 32 and going back a few more verses in context, we read of a reality-changing incident that occurred at Babel: Deut. 32:8-9 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage. The reference to the creation of nations through the division of mankind and fixing of the borders of nations is clearly a reference to the event of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 and the dispersion of the peoples into the 70 nations listed in Genesis 10.
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Brian Godawa (Noah Primeval (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 1))
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Smee understood the inescapable bureaucracy and rigidly enforced assumptions of formal systems. He suggested, with an unspoken nod to the thirteenth-century Ars Magna of Ramon Lull, that one of his differential machines “might be beneficially brought into use by those who use fixed and unchangeable creeds; for if they be arranged correctly then any deviation from them would be immediately registered. It must be apparent that such a machine would not estimate the quality of the creed, but only show whether any new creed, or portion of creed, coincided or not with the former creed. For whether the creed inferred a belief in the true God, in Mohammed, in ibises, crocodiles, or saints, in the power of the Virgin, or winking pictures of her, or the qualities of relics, or the virtues of images, or in the parties’ own inspiration, the effect would be the same.”42
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George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
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The progressives pose as the champions not only of fairness and social justice but also of compassion. They are the ones who insist on our obligation to those from whom we have allegedly stolen. Let’s leave aside for the moment whether they are right about the theft. What we do know for sure is that progressives assert there has been a theft. They further acknowledge that they are among the beneficiaries of it. Based on this, they would seem to have a clear obligation to return the stolen goods that they are currently enjoying. We might expect, from this analysis, to discover that progressives are the most generous people in America. We can anticipate that they contribute the highest portion of their incomes and time to help their wronged and less fortunate fellow men and women. The truth, however, is that progressives are the least generous people in America. I saw this personally with Obama, who unceasingly declares that “we are our brother’s keeper” even as he refuses to help his own half brother, George, who lives in a hut in the Huruma slum of Nairobi. I met George in early 2012 when I interviewed him for my film 2016: Obama’s America. A few months after that, when I was back in America, George called me from Kenya to ask me to give him $1,000 because his baby son was sick. Surprised, I asked him, “Why are you calling me? Isn’t there someone else you can call?” He said, “No.” So I sent him the money. I guess on that occasion it was I, not Obama, who proved to be his brother’s keeper. And besides George, the president has other relatives in dire need—his aunt Hawa Auma, for example, sells charcoal on the roadside in rural Kenya, and desperately needs money to get her rotting teeth fixed. Although Obama is aware of their plight, he refuses to help them.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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March 9 MORNING “Yea, He is altogether lovely.” — Song of Solomon 5:16 THE superlative beauty of Jesus is allattracting; it is not so much to be admired as to be loved. He is more than pleasant and fair, He is lovely. Surely the people of God can fully justify the use of this golden word, for He is the object of their warmest love, a love founded on the intrinsic excellence of His person, the complete perfection of His charms. Look, O disciples of Jesus, to your Master’s lips, and say, “Are they not most sweet?” Do not His words cause your hearts to burn within you as He talks with you by the way? Ye worshippers of Immanuel, look up to His head of much fine gold, and tell me, are not His thoughts precious unto you? Is not your adoration sweetened with affection as ye humbly bow before that countenance which is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars? Is there not a charm in His every feature, and is not His whole person fragrant with such a savour of His good ointments, that therefore the virgins love Him? Is there one member of His glorious body which is not attractive? — one portion of His person which is not a fresh loadstone to our souls? — one office which is not a strong cord to bind your heart? Our love is not as a seal set upon His heart of love alone; it is fastened upon His arm of power also; nor is there a single part of Him upon which it does not fix itself. We anoint His whole person with the sweet spikenard of our fervent love. His whole life we would imitate; His whole character we would transcribe. In all other beings we see some lack, in Him there is all perfection. The best even of His favoured saints have had blots upon their garments and wrinkles upon their brows; He is nothing but loveliness. All earthly suns have their spots: the fair world itself hath its wilderness; we cannot love the whole of the most lovely thing; but Christ Jesus is gold without alloy — light without darkness — glory without cloud — “Yea, He is altogether lovely.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Morning and Evening—Classic KJV Edition: A Devotional Classic for Daily Encouragement)
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Divination is not mere fortune-telling or superstition. Rather, it is an exceedingly subtle psychological technique whereby the secrets of the unconscious can be discovered, its powers (extrasensory and others) can be made accessible, and guidance for our confused and disordered lives can be obtained. The most important fact to fix in one’s mind is that there is nothing haphazard or accidental in the universe, and that external events—no matter how seemingly trivial—are intimately related to happenings within the human psyche. Thus, if we learn the art of discovering and interpreting the external signs, we may thereby gain access to the world of inward realities in our own souls and in the soul of the cosmos. The magic of Tarot divination is not in the cards but in ourselves. The cards can and do act as instrumentalities whereby the subjective reality within the unconscious becomes able to project a portion of itself into objective existence. Through this projection, a meaningful and useful relationship or a creative dialogue between the subjective and objective sides of our lives may be established, which is a great accomplishment. Thus divination by means of the Tarot may be defined as a practical way in which a bridge is built between the temporal world of physical events, on the one hand, and the timeless world of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, on the other. It may be useful to recall that divination was considered an important part of the curriculum of certain mystery schools, not primarily in order to teach how to foretell the future, but in order to construct a psychic mechanism within the initiate whereby a source of guidance and insight might be made accessible to his conscious self.
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Stephan A. Hoeller (The Fool's Pilgrimage: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tarot)
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This shift has led some economists to use the term “usership” rather than ownership to describe the kind of control we increasingly want over the products and services we need or want. In other words, we want to use a product, not necessarily own it. Consumers are interested in flexibility, not in long term commitment and fixed costs. And they are willing to pay for only the portion they use directly from its owner either on a case-by-case basis—such as taking an Uber or renting an Airbnb—or a recurrent one.
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Rohit Bhargava (Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series))
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According to analysts, 666 Fifth Avenue had about a 30 percent vacancy rate and only generated about half of its annual mortgage. It was rumored that the largest tenant was planning to move out. A Canadian company named Brookfield Property Partners took a ninety-nine-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue. Brookfield paid the rent for the entire century-long lease, upfront, which amounted to about $1.1 billion—removing Kushner’s biggest financial headache (a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower due in February 2019). Brookfield got its financing for this deal from a $750 million mortgage from ING Group, a Dutch multinational and financial services corporation, and a $300 million mezzanine loan from Apollo Global Management.9 However, the Qatar Investment Authority, the government-run agency that made decisions about the nations’ financial investments, bought a $1.8 billion stake in Brookfield Property Partners. As the second largest shareholder, they had a lot to say about what should be purchased; in this instance, they apparently used Brookfield to bail out 666 Fifth Ave. This investment was a godsend to Kushner, who was now out of debt just as Qatar was suddenly no longer blockaded by Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, crown prince of Saudi Arabia (known colloquially as MBS), and his allies.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It)
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Donald Trump is a special kind of cultist. He is in no way totalistic—his beliefs can be remarkably fluid—nor is he the leader of a sealed-off cultic community. Rather, his cultism is inseparable from his solipsistic reality. That solipsism emanates only from the self and what the self requires, which makes him the most bizarre and persistent would-be owner of reality. And in his way he has created a community of zealous believers who are geographically dispersed. A considerable portion of his base can be understood as cultist, as followers of a guru who is teacher, guide, and master. From my studies of cults and cultlike behavior, I recognize this aspect of Trump’s relationship to his followers. It is evident at his large-crowd events, which began as campaign rallies but have continued to take place during his presidency. There is a ritual quality to the chants he has led such as “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” The latter chant is followed by the guru’s question “And who will pay for it?,” then the crowd’s answer, “Mexico!” The chants and responses are less about policy than they are assertions of guru-disciple ties. The chants are rituals that generate “high states”—or what can even be called experiences of transcendence—in disciples. The back-and-forth brings them closer to the guru and enables them to share his claim to omnipotence and his sacred aura. Trump does not directly express an apocalyptic narrative, but his presence has an apocalyptic aura. He tells us that, as not only a “genius” but a “very stable genius,” he alone can “fix” the terrible problems of our society. To be sure these are bizarre expressions of his extreme grandiosity, but also of a man who would be a savior to a disintegrating world.
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Robert Jay Lifton (Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry)
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Further, unlike traditional retailers for which rent typically had a fixed cost component regardless of sales, Zoom proposed a profit-sharing model, paying the property owner a portion of the revenues (between 5 and 10 percent) for the physical space it used.39 While the profit-sharing model didn’t necessarily decrease Zoom’s operating costs, it did lessen Zoom’s risk and its breakeven point. By moving a potential fixed cost (rent) to variable cost (the landlord’s share of revenue) Zoom reduced the costs of testing its leaps of faith too. If the Zoom store didn’t generate enough revenue, Zoom could simply move it to a more promising location.
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John W. Mullins (Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model)
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I do not blame myself for running from those feelings. No one would deliberately subject himself to the discomfort I carried inside my skin unless he had a very good reason to. As a little boy fleeing into the streets and waiting neighborhood games, as an adolescent fleeing toward drugs that soothed me like a mother, I have taken flight throughout most of my life. Hurt, grandiose, blaming others for not filling me up, I was in search of the next big fix, in search of love without having the skills to love well in return. Like Perceval, I have spent a good portion of my life wandering, searching for the right question.
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Terrence Real (I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression)
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We rarely use much debt and, when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. This conservatism has penalized our results but it is the only behavior that leaves us comfortable, considering our fiduciary obligations to policyholders, depositors, lenders and the many equity holders who have committed unusually large portions of their net worth to our care. Warren Buffett, annual letter to shareholders, 1983
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Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
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It is the power of quickly forming a correct geometrical idea of any portion of country, and consequently of being able to find one’s place in it exactly at any time. This is plainly an act of the imagination. The perception no doubt is formed partly by means of the physical eye, partly by the mind, which fills up what is wanting with ideas derived from knowledge and experience, and out of the fragments visible to the physical eye forms a whole; but that this whole should present itself vividly to the reason, should become a picture, a mentally drawn map, that this picture should be fixed, that the details should never again separate themselves—all that can only be effected by the mental faculty which we call imagination.
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Carl von Clausewitz (On War)
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If the widget company consistently earned a superior return on capital throughout the period, or if capital employed only doubled during the CEO’s reign, the praise for him may be well deserved. But if return on capital was lackluster and capital employed increased in pace with earnings, applause should be withheld. A savings account in which interest was reinvested would achieve the same year-by-year increase in earnings—and, at only 8% interest, would quadruple its annual earnings in 18 years. The power of this simple math is often ignored by companies to the detriment of their shareholders. Many corporate compensation plans reward managers handsomely for earnings increases produced solely, or in large part, by retained earnings—i.e., earnings withheld from owners. For example, ten-year, fixed-price stock options are granted routinely, often by companies whose dividends are only a small percentage of earnings. An example will illustrate the inequities possible under such circumstances. Let’s suppose that you had a $100,000 savings account earning 8% interest and “managed” by a trustee who could decide each year what portion of the interest you were to be paid in cash. Interest not paid out would be “retained earnings” added to the savings account to compound. And let’s suppose that your trustee, in his superior wisdom, set the “pay-out ratio” at one-quarter of the annual earnings.
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Lawrence A. Cunningham (The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America)
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As to life in a prison, of course there may be two opinions, said the prince. I once heard the story of a man who lived twelve years in a prison-I heard it from the man himself. He was one of the persons under treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy, then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide. His life in prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances were spiders and a tree that grew outside his grating-but I think I had better tell you of another man I met last year. There was a very strange feature in this case, strange because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had once been brought to the scaffold in company with several others, and had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and some other punishment substituted; but the interval between the two sentences, twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die. I was very anxious to hear him speak of his impressions during that dreadful time, and I several times inquired of him as to what he thought and felt. He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of the experience.
About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals. The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross: and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live.
He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions--one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good- bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.
The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it!
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
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...and in the age to come, through the divinization which will be given to him [the Christian], he will love and cleave affectionately to the aforementioned logoi that preexist in God, or rather he will love and cleave affectionately to God Himself, in whom the logoi of beautiful things are steadfastly fixed. He is a 'portion of God,' then, insofar as he exists, for he owes his existence to the logos of being that is in God; and he is a 'portion of God' insofar as he is Good, for he owes his goodness to the logos of well-being that is in God; and he is a 'portion of God' insofar as he is God, owing to the logos of his eternal being that is in God.
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Maximus the Confessor (Ambigua (Problemi metafisici e teologici su testi di Gregorio di Nazianzo e Dionigi Areopagita))
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Wall Street’s shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged. Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they may as well begin cheating in small ways. And when they think the game is rigged, they’re easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas. Wall
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Robert B. Reich (Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it)
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It’s unfair that middle- and lower-income Americans have been paying a smaller share of federal income taxes and some pay no income tax at all. There’s nothing unfair about it. Fairness requires that people who make more money pay a higher portion of their incomes in taxes than people with less money. That’s called a progressive tax system, and it’s been a foundation stone of America’s tax code.
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Robert B. Reich (Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it)
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Regressives say small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax. Don’t believe this, either. Only just over 1 percent of small-business owners earn enough to be taxed at the top rate—and that’s just on the portion of their incomes exceeding $379,000. The
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Robert B. Reich (Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it)
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Dear Christopher,
You’ve made me realize that words are the most important things in the world. And never so much as now. The moment Audrey gave me your last letter, my heart started beating faster, and I had to run to my secret house to read it in private.
I haven’t yet told you…last spring on one of my rambles, I found the oddest structure in the forest, a lone tower of brick and stonework, all covered with ivy and moss. It was on a distant portion of the Stony Cross estate that belongs to Lord Westcliff. Later when I asked Lady Westcliff about it, she said that keeping a secret house was a local custom in medieval times. The lord of the manor might have used it as a place to keep his mistress. Once a Westcliff ancestor actually hid there from his own bloodthirsty retainers. Lady Westcliff said I could visit the secret house whenever I wanted, since it has long been abandoned. I go there often. It’s my hiding place, my sanctuary…and now that you know about it, it’s yours as well.
I’ve just lit a candle and set it in a window. A very tiny lodestar, for you to follow home.
Dearest Prudence,
Amid all the noise and men and madness, I try to think of you in your secret house…my princess in a tower. And my lodestar in the window.
The things one has to do in war…I thought it would all become easier as time went on. And I’m sorry to say I was right. I fear for my soul. The things I have done, Pru. The things I have yet to do. If I don’t expect God to forgive me, how can I ask you to?
Dear Christopher,
Love forgives all things. You don’t even need to ask.
Ever since you wrote to me about the Argos, I’ve been reading about stars. We’ve loads of books about them, as the subject was of particular interest to my father. Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements--a quintessence--that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man’s spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that’s not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there’s a little starlight in each of us.
I carry thoughts of you like my own personal constellation. How far away you are, dearest friend, but no farther than those fixed stars in my soul.
Dear Pru,
We’re settling in for a long siege. It’s uncertain as to when I’ll have the chance to write again. This is not my last letter, only the last for a while. Do not doubt that I am coming back to you someday.
Until I can hold you in my arms, these worn and ramshackle words are the only way to reach you. What a poor translation of love they are. Words could never do justice to you, or capture what you mean to me.
Still…I love you. I swear by the starlight…I will not leave this earth until you hear those words from me.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
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Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members.
The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships.
Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female.
Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.)
It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest.
Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’
Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....
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Lionel Tiger (Men in Groups)
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If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet these fifteen thousand acres are a creditable showing,—a proof of no little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, migration to town.
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W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford World's Classics))
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If you have a traditional fixed-rate mortgage, all you have to do is make early principal payments over the life of the loan. Prepay your next month’s principal, and you could pay off a 30-year mortgage in 15 years in many cases! Does that mean double your monthly payments? No, not even close! Here’s the key: Money Power Principle 3. Cut your mortgage payments in half! The next time you write your monthly mortgage check, write a second check for the principal-only portion of next month’s payment. It’s money you’ll have to pay anyway the following month, so why not take it out of your pocket a couple of weeks early and enjoy some serious savings down the road? Fully 80% to 90%, and in some cases even more, of your early payments will be interest expense anyway. And on average, most Americans either move or refinance within five to seven years (and then start the insanity all over again with a new home mortgage). “It’s a pity,” mortgage expert Marc Eisenson, author of The Banker’s Secret, told the New York Times. “There are millions of people out there who faithfully make their regular mortgage payments because they don’t understand . . . the benefits of pocket-change prepayments.
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Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
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Bering Strait and the Pacific Ocean, leading the twenty-four Atlantic Fleet submarines making the inter-fleet transit across the top of the world. Standing on the Conn of his Los Angeles class fast attack submarine, Commander Ramsey Hootman leaned against the railing, his eyes fixed on the display of his Sail High-Frequency under-ice sonar. His eyelids were getting heavier, but this was no time to leave Control for an hour or two down. Annapolis was approaching the most hazardous portion of her passage under the ice cap and there was no way he could tear himself away now. Had he managed the transit better, he might have been able to nab a few hours of sleep before reaching this point. But the ice pack seemed to be conspiring against him. Two days earlier, Annapolis had slipped under the polar ice pack, proceeding at ahead flank through the deep water portion of the Arctic Ocean. The Commanding Officer’s Eyes Only message had instructed him to abandon all caution; time was paramount. As Annapolis began the most dangerous leg of its underwater journey—transiting the Alaskan continental shelf toward the Bering Strait passage—Ramsey had maintained a high speed, slowing only to ahead full. But the high speed increased their peril. The last portion of their voyage beneath the ice cap required transit in water depth less than six hundred feet. Although the bottom was mapped, not every feature was known and water
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Rick Campbell (Empire Rising)
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How sad and astonishing a spectacle it is to see a man near the coast of eternity--namely, to behold a wretched sinner in his cold sweats and dying groans with his precious and immortal soul standing on his pale, cold, quivering lips; and death, the great conqueror and king of terrors, marching furiously with his writ of removal in one hand, not to be reversed, and his deadly dart and sting in the other hand; conscience on the rack, barking, biting, and tearing him like a lion; the devil, God's executioner, looking on and standing by; the heart under dejecting and sinking despair; the eyes dim and fixed; his heart strings ready to break with anguish; his wife, children, and friends at the bedside, weeping, sighing, crying, wring their hands, beating their breasts; the wife crying out, "Alas, my husband!"; the child crying out, "Alas, my father!"; the poor perishing soul all this while looking backward on his misspent time and bypast sins, inward on his own heart--a dreadful sight! Where he sees no Christ, no grace, no purity, nothing but sin, guilt, death, darkness. Then, looking upward to that God who has been provoked, to that Christ who has been rejected, to that heaven and eternity that he has lost. And looking downward to that dark and dreadful pit that must be his place and portion (with a fearful looking for judgment), seeing the devils come and ready to seize on him. Oh what a dreadful outcry and shriek will the soul make when it departs! Perceiving itself sinking down, down to the burning lake and bottomless pit, where he must take up his lodging with devouring fire to all eternity.
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John Fox (Time and the End of Time: Discourses on Redeeming the Time and Considering Our Latter End)
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The contractile portions of the intrafusal fibers are innervated by motor neurons in the same fashion as are the larger skeletal muscle cells. The intrafusal membrane is contacted by a motor end plate, which stimulates the spindle cell into contracting or fixing its length, or ceases stimulation to allow the cell to be lengthened passively. But the motor neurons which control the intrafusals are altogether separate from the ones which control the skeletal muscles. The skeletal motor neurons are larger in diameter, with their own vertical tracts through the length of the spinal cord, and end their paths near the summit of the brain, in the motor cortex. They are called alpha motor neurons. The motor neurons for the intrafusal fibers, in contrast, are smaller in diameter, have their own discrete pathways up the spinal cord, and end in collections of cell bodies, or ganglia, deep within the brain, in the brain stem. These are called the gamma neurons.
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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yet discover the charm and wisdom of Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent portions of their day talking about the needs, desires, and points of leverage among various members of Congress, the president and Hicks spent a great deal of time talking about a fixed cast of media personalities, trying to second-guess the real agendas and weak spots among cable anchors and producers and Times and Post reporters.
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Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
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The East India Company ensured that both growing opium and selling it were to be British government monopolies. The facts were laid out in an 1838 account: Throughout all the territories within the Company’s jurisdiction, the cultivation of the poppy, the preparation of the drug, and the traffic in it, […] are under a strict monopoly…the growing of opium is compulsory on the part of the ryot. Advances are made by Government through its native servants, and if a ryot refuses the advance, ‘the simple plan of throwing the rupees into his house is adopted; should he attempt to abscond, the peons seize him, tie the advance up in his clothes, and push him into his house. The business being now settled, and there being no remedy, he applies himself, as he may, to the fulfilment of his contract…’14 The evils which the cultivation of opium entails upon our fellow-subjects in India, arise partly from the ryots in the opium districts of Patna and Benares being compelled to give up fixed portions of their lands for the production of the poppy.
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Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
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Alas, the big data profiles of teenagers can’t support the same robustness of growth as entire continents of slaves and spices. Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. They make the differential between real growth and return on capital worse, not better. This means they push the banks and investors even further away from anything like real earnings until eventually there’s a complete disconnect between capital and value.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
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By nature, men are called "fixers!" More than likely, they'll want a small portion of an explanation while putting on their hero outfit and cape so that they can spring into action and fix the problems. Whereas women, we usually want to explain things in details, step by step, word by word expecting men to do something they rarely do...that is to LISTEN!
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Marcia M. Edwards
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Every belief in the value and worthiness of life rests upon defective thinking; it is for this reason alone possible that sympathy with the general life and suffering of mankind is so imperfectly developed in the individual. Even exceptional men, who can think beyond their own personalities, do not have this general life in view, but isolated portions of it. If one is capable of fixing his observation upon exceptional cases, I mean upon highly endowed individuals and pure souled beings, if their development is taken as the true end of world-evolution and if joy be felt in their existence, then it is possible to believe in the value of life, because in that case the rest of humanity is overlooked: hence we have here defective thinking. So, too, it is even if all mankind be taken into consideration, and one species only of impulses (the less egoistic) brought under review and those, in consideration of the other impulses, exalted: then something could still be hoped of mankind in the mass and to that extent there could exist belief in the value of life: here, again, as a result of defective thinking. Whatever attitude, thus, one may assume, one is, as a result of this attitude, an exception among mankind. Now, the great majority of mankind endure life without any great protest, and believe, to this extent, in the value of existence, but that is because each individual decides and determines alone, and never comes out of his own personality like these exceptions: everything outside of the personal has no existence for them or at the utmost is observed as but a faint shadow. Consequently the value of life for the generality of mankind consists simply in the fact that the individual attaches more importance to himself than he does to the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers is responsible for his inability to enter into the feelings of beings other than himself, and hence his sympathy with their fate and suffering is of the slightest possible description. On the other hand, whosoever really could sympathise, necessarily doubts the value of life; were it possible for him to sum up and to feel in himself the total consciousness of mankind, he would collapse with a malediction against existence,—for mankind is, in the mass, without a goal, and hence man cannot find, in the contemplation of his whole course, anything to serve him as a mainstay and a comfort, but rather a reason to despair. If he looks beyond the things that immediately engage him to the final aimlessness of humanity, his own conduct assumes in his eyes the character of a frittering away. To feel oneself, however, as humanity (not alone as an individual) frittered away exactly as we see the stray leaves frittered away by nature, is a feeling transcending all feeling. But who is capable of it? Only a poet, certainly: and poets always know how to console themselves.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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She wondered if he was a neighbor, started to smile and introduce herself when his deep voice cut through the cool morning air.
“All right, what the hell is going on?”
Ignoring the anger in his voice, Charity set her hammer on top of the dresser and climbed down from the porch.
“Good morning. I’m Charity Sinclair. I’m the new--”
“I don’t care who you are, lady, I want to know what you’re doing on this property.”
She fixed a smile on her face, though it took a good bit of effort. “I’m here because I’m the owner. I bought the Lily Rose from a man named Moses Flanagan.”
He narrowed those striking blue eyes at her. “Bullshit. Old man Flanagan may not live here anymore but he’d die before he’d sell the Lily Rose. I don’t know who you think you’re kidding, sweetheart, but if you’re planning to squat on his property you can forget it.”
It was getting harder by the moment to hang on to her temper. “You’re wrong, Mr…?”
He made no effort to answer, just continued to glare down the length of his nicely shaped nose.
“Mr. Flanagan decided to move in with his son in Calgary. He listed the property for sale several weeks ago with Smith Real Estate in Dawson. I’m the person who bought it.”
His features looked even harder than they had before. “That’s impossible. I tried to buy this place from Mose Flanagan every other month for the last four years. He refused to even consider it.”
Her irritation inched up a notch. “Well, apparently he changed his mind. The transaction officially closed yesterday morning. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you the property was for sale.” When his black scowl deepened, she couldn’t resist adding, “Maybe he just didn’t like you.”
He opened his mouth to argue, clamped down on his jaw instead, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. Apparently her goading had hit on a portion of the truth.
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Kat Martin (Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters Trilogy, #1))
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Like the spinal cord, many of the brain stem’s interconnections are “hard-wired,” and their stimulation initiates obligatory responses that are not unlike those of the spinal reflex arcs. It is these relatively fixed pathways and responses which control the range of behavior and style of movement that are so characteristic of each species; a cat and a small dog have pretty much the same skeletal and muscular structure, yet each moves this structure about in ways which clearly identify it as canine or feline. These distinctly different styles of moving similar physical frames are the result of different patterns of integrating sensory information and of organizing motor commands, primarily in the spinal cord and in the older, “reptilian” portion of the brain—that is, the centers of gamma motor control.
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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One interesting aspect of his book is that it argued that the more specialized a species is, the less likely it is to continue to recognize appropriate habitats as
conditions change. Species displaying a less plastic/diverse inventory of behavioral choices, such as those focusing on a single type of food, are the most susceptible. For instance, parasites often have a single host species, which does not present any
problems for them as long as the host species does not become extinct. That is why, according to Eldredge, ecologically specialized species become extinct at much higher rates than do ecologically generalized species in the fossil record. The concept that specialization often leads to an evolutionary dead end was first proposed by Cope as the “law of the unspecialized” and has continued to be key for evolutionary biology since then. In Eldredge’s view, the balance of life will tend to produce ecologically specialized organisms because they often flourish
more than generalists in the short run, but extinction then normally affects more the ranks of the specialists. In the long run, the generalists thus hang on—‘living fossils’ often being generalists—whereas the ranks of specialists are quickly refilled by the continuous evolution of new taxa. For him, taxa that descend from species that are already somewhat specialized tend to have a greater chance of focusing on a specific portion of the resources not completely exploited by the parental taxa. He designated this as a “ratchet-like mechanism” of the quick accumulation of evolutionary change as lineages keep splitting and new taxa are formed from old ones within specialized lineages. Thus, he directly connects behavioral/ecological specializations to cladogenesis and the rapid evolutionary events predicted in punctuated equilibrium. In turn, he argues that stasis is often related to generalist lineages because without a comparable degree of successful speciation, these lineages tend to have far fewer extant species at any one time than their specialized counterparts. That is, generalists are not really evolving at slower morphological rates: they are simply not generating so many new species. As a result, the gradual fluctuation of form among the members of the generalized taxa is not being fixed by cladogenesis, thus leading to new species.
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Rui Diogo (Evolution Driven by Organismal Behavior: A Unifying View of Life, Function, Form, Mismatches and Trends)
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Blake’s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all, ‘body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses’; body has its place in imagination.
And the function of imagination was to look inward. In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake avowed his intention:
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity.
Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge.
But what must be grasped about Blake’s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect.
Los is only a half of Blake’s picture of man’s inner states. The other half is the strange being called ‘the Spectre’:
Each man is in his spectre’s power
Until the arrival of that hour
When his humanity awakes
And casts his spectre into the lake...
The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness.
Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits, the identity. ‘Man is not of fixed or enduring form’ Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in ‘the Spectre’s power’ (and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of ‘fixed and enduring form’.
Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal.
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Colin Wilson (The Outsider)