“
Programming and using humans to enforce the program on other humans, which is a crucial part of the great spider-web design, allows the Masters to sit back and control everything indirectly, never being seen by the masses.
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
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Doctors, professors, and scientists were unknowingly assimilating incorrect or half-true information in order to regurgitate it to the populace. Because the populace held these professions in the highest regard, their disseminated information was believed as if it was coming out of the mouth of gods.
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
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Most humans will spew forth a variety of rebuttals as to why a civilization can't function without money and taxes because they've been conditioned and brainwashed so thoroughly that they're unknowingly offering up lies they were programmed to speak when a divergent human expressed ideas that differed from the programming.
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
“
In this way, humans’ creative abilities were being used against themselves to create a reality for their masters. Why go through all the hassle of creating a planetary reality when you can hijack the humans’ co-creative abilities and program them to create a reality that the Masters wanted?
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
“
I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?
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Jess C. Scott (EyeLeash: A Blog Novel)
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The populace fell for this trick every time because they didn’t believe the Masters existed, or that anyone could be that evil. The Masters made sure to assign the label of being a conspiracy theorist to those smart and observant enough to have figured it out and were trying to warn others. The populace would then disregard and ridicule the whistleblower because the Masters had programmed the populace to react harshly to individuals who this label was applied to. The population had been programmed to negatively react to many ideas and labels, but the conspiracy-theorist label was one of the most heavily programmed because it was paramount for the Masters to stay hidden behind the curtains. You can’t dethrone a king if you don’t know they exist.
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Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
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Consider the source...Don't be a fool by listening to a fool.
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Sylvester Stallone (Sly Moves: My Proven Program to Lose Weight, Build Strength, Gain Will Power, and Live your Dream)
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Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life we are offered. When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.
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Charles Eisenstein (The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism))
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Although humans rarely die from trauma, if we do not resolve it, our lives can be severely diminished by its effects. Some people have even described this situation as a “living death.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
Buddhist say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientist confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you've been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn't set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating mental circuits.
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Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory)
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Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge the United States of America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
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Robert F. Kennedy
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If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. —THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
Amazing Earth School can be a world of illusions or a world of reality. Which will it be for you?
The answer depends on your discernment, and then how you use your freedom of choice. Definitely you can give yourself a chance to pursue — and attain — Spiritual Enlightenment.
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Rose Rosetree (Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening: Your Complete Program for Spiritual Awakening and More, In Just 20 Minutes a Day)
“
She remembers what the ghost woman told her. “De-programming … They’ll come for you … Again.
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Misba (The Oldest Dance (Wisdom Revolution, #2))
“
Let’s take some extra time to talk about one: Only the number one can create all numbers with this simple equation, 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321. One, expressed nine times, multiplied by itself, produces all subsequent numbers progressively and then inversely. Zero is not a number.
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Michael Ben Zehabe (The Meaning of Hebrew Letters: A Hebrew Language Program For Christians (The Jonah Project))
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Energy sensitive people often feel special when they talk about energy. What’s missing is discernment about whether that Energy Talk helps or hinders their spiritual growth. Ironically, what’s also missing? Discernment about which type of energy is being noticed:
Often any random form of astral energy is considered superior to human wisdom, but why?
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Rose Rosetree (Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening: Your Complete Program for Spiritual Awakening and More, In Just 20 Minutes a Day)
“
The world contained in a seed, Determined by its program.
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Dejan Stojanovic (Circling: 1978-1987)
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Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.
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David Graeber
“
When you remove all these layers of programming that society has created for us — your thoughts, your emotions, your beliefs — what you are left with is your true nature, your true identity which is your infinite eternal consciousness, your awareness, pure consciousness.
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Todd Perelmuter (Spiritual Words to Live by : 81 Daily Wisdoms and Meditations to Transform Your Life)
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Adam was told to name the animals. Adam studied each kind and gave them a name based on his observations. Every animal “kind” has some behavior or characteristic that is unique to that animal type. When you know the Hebrew name for an animal, you get a peek at how a perfect man, speaking a perfect language, understood that perfect animal.
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Michael Ben Zehabe (The Meaning of Hebrew Letters: A Hebrew Language Program For Christians (The Jonah Project))
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A year of intense exercise and watching what you eat will likely change the trajectory of your life physically. You will melt away fat, tone up muscle, feel better, and change your habits, likely for life. But only ten days of that exercise program won’t move the needle on the scale. To create big-time success you have to stay focused and stay intense over an extended period of time.
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Dave Ramsey (EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches)
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It has always been difficult for Jews to take Christians serious, mostly because Christians lack the fundamentals that religious Jews learn in their youth. It remains an embarrassing fact, that modern Jews can comprehend the New Testament better than modern Christians. There is no excuse for this. Christians have dropped the ball and should be anxious to remedy that neglect. Not only would they benefit themselves, but their community too.
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Michael Ben Zehabe (The Meaning of Hebrew Letters: A Hebrew Language Program For Christians (The Jonah Project))
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Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM
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Rashedur Ryan Rahman
“
The serenity prayer—made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs—captures this idea beautifully: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself)
“
The symptoms of trauma can be stable, that is, ever-present. They can also be unstable, meaning that they can come and go and be triggered by stress. Or they can remain hidden for decades and suddenly surface. Usually, symptoms do not occur individually, but come in groups. They often grow increasingly complex over time, becoming less and less connected with the original trauma experience.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Feelings of helplessness, immobility, and freezing. If hyperarousal is the nervous system’s accelerator, a sense of overwhelming helplessness is its brake. The helplessness that is experienced at such times is not the ordinary sense of helplessness that can affect anyone from time to time. It is the sense of being collapsed, immobilized, and utterly helpless. It is not a perception, belief, or a trick of the imagination. It is real.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Could be, you’ve lived before; in which case, you might have sought Enlightenment before. This time around, you bring more than eagerness to your quest. Very likely, in this lifetime you bring along qualities that will serve you well for seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening; those qualities being your curiosity and thoughtfulness, and also your passion for truth; qualities that would have been problematic during the Age of Faith, yet will serve you very well now.
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Rose Rosetree (Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening: Your Complete Program for Spiritual Awakening and More, In Just 20 Minutes a Day)
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I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Jesus probably studied this same information, in his youth. The apostle Paul probably studied this same information. How can I make such a bold assertion? Because, without this knowledge, much of the New Testament would make no sense.
Many of the idioms used in the New Testament are the result of lessons learned from this ancient Hebrew education system. Unfortunately, what was common in their day, has become forgotten in ours. For a Hebrew, math doesn’t get in the way. It blazes the way. Other languages are disconnected from this mathematical relationship . . . and it shows.
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Michael Ben Zehabe (The Meaning of Hebrew Letters: A Hebrew Language Program For Christians (The Jonah Project))
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We can intend not to be our program.
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Lujan Matus (Awakening the Third Eye: Discovering the True Essence of Recapitulation)
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If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.
Let me explain what I mean by this. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.
Let's take this a step further. Robots do not love. God created us with the capacity to love. Love is based upon one's right to choose to love. We cannot force others to love us. We can make them serve us or obey us. But true love is founded upon one's freedom to choose to respond.
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Billy Graham (Hope for Each Day: Words of Wisdom and Faith)
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We did live in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. My mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school, and she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they control their own lives? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. Turn off the TV, let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week. And with all that spare time read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read but we didn't know that. I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends would criticize her. My mother didn't care. But after a while I actually began to enjoy reading those books. Because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. Made all the difference.
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Ben Carson
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An eternity of wisdom and life lies waiting for discovery by those who are willing to embark on the mystical adventure. All of our resources are within us. All we need is our heart, our mind and the will to be something better than we are.
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Kim Chestney (The Psychic Workshop: A Complete Program for Fulfilling Your Spiritual Potential)
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In programs, there are conditions, which the programmer must follow. Otherwise, the code won’t run. Throwing dead animals is a condition. Some may say it’s a ritual one needs to complete before the intention installs, before the will sets … But who is installing intentions?
Who wants to program the universe? Was it him?
Most importantly: Bother? Or not bother?
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Misba (The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution, #1))
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My life has taught me that true spiritual insight can come about only through direct experience, the way a severe burn can be attained only by putting your hand in the fire. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else's insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of secondhand clothing, worn-out and passed down. I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and, in modern times, computers and television programs. On the other hand, there's only one real source of wisdom - pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis.
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Damien Echols (Life After Death)
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To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.
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A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
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So many people set off in a direction in life but don’t think things completely through first.
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John Z. Sonmez (The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide: How to Learn Your Next Programming Language, Ace Your Programming Interview, and Land The Coding Job Of Your Dreams)
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Any attempt to dictate what thoughts, feelings, and sensations are proper or improper creates a breeding ground for guilt and shame.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
The Bible frequently uses symmetries and inversions. By such comparisons (parallels and contrasts) the unique aspects of reality begin to emerge. Comparing two objects makes their differences increasingly apparent. Only then can we ask, “Why does this one have that, and the other does not?” For instance: The phrase, “and it was
6
good” is present on all the days of creation—except the second day. Why? Because, “two” contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. We could not have discovered that insight, unless we contrasted God’s description of the creative days.
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Michael Ben Zehabe (The Meaning of Hebrew Letters: A Hebrew Language Program For Christians (The Jonah Project))
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What’s the main allure of folks in Extreme Spiritual Addiction? Astral flash, of course.
Picture a wannabe rock star, all decked out in garish colors and sequins. Why does that over-the-top kind of dress-up work so well in Vegas?
Because audiences in Vegas aren’t seeking Spiritual Enlightenment, nor even a refined experience. Quite the opposite, right? Fact is, multitudes anywhere prefer entertainment that’s larger-than-life. Sleazy sex sells, and so does every other kind of garishness, including astral flash.
To some spiritual seekers – and others -- astral flash can seem incredibly wonderful. Only some folks of course – you need not be one of them.
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Rose Rosetree (Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening: Your Complete Program for Spiritual Awakening and More, In Just 20 Minutes a Day)
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A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy Book 2))
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The ability to contain excitation or feeling is self-possession. It is the third stage in the therapeutic program. The first two are self-awareness and self-expression. Self-possession is the stage in which the ego functions as the standard-bearer of a self that knows who it is and what it has to do. The self possesses an ego. It is the stage in which the self experiences its being as a fully mature man or woman.
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Alexander Lowen (Fear of Life: The Wisdom of Failure)
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I had to de-program myself. From myself. Had to reinvent rituals of purification. So full of the vagrant pollutions of others. It was time to detox. Not only from alcohol, sex, and drugs, but from needy leeches who looked to swab me with their sores. Detox from my own needy lechery. Had to locate the center wound and cauterize. Undo the original sin, the origin of my sickness...Had to learn to replace Them, It, Want, Hurt, Anger, Sorrow, Loss, with Power, Healing, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Satisfaction.
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Lydia Lunch (Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary)
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Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the was of peace, decency and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.
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S. Michael Wilcox
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What I do know is that we become traumatized when our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some way overwhelmed. This inability to adequately respond can impact us in obvious ways, as well as ways that are subtle.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
As we just saw, in this learning process we assume from the start that as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or how despairing you may be feeling in a given moment. But if you hope to mobilize your inner capacities for growth and for healing and to take charge in your life on a new level, a certain kind of effort and energy on your part will be required. The way we put it is that it can be stressful to take the stress reduction program. I sometimes explain this by saying that there are times when you have to light one fire to put out another. There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain, or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing, inner peace, and well-being. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that are causing you to suffer.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness)
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When you remove all the layers of programming that society has created for us — your thoughts, your emotions, your beliefs — what you are left with is your true nature, your true identity, which is your infinite eternal consciousness, your awareness, pure consciousness.
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Todd Perelmuter
“
Your limitations are largely programming instilled by others that you choose to believe.
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Gary Hopkins
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To awake or not to awake - that is the question.
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Abhijit Naskar (Mad About Humans: World Maker's Almanac)
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Often, traumatized people either feel nothing or they feel rage, and often the rage is expressed in inappropriate ways. By beginning to get a sense of what healthy aggression feels like, the extremes of numbness and rage can begin to give way to a healthier middle ground.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
Re-enactments may be played out in intimate relationships, work situations, repetitive accidents or mishaps, and in other seemingly random events. They may also appear in the form of bodily symptoms or psychosomatic diseases. Children who have had a traumatic experience will often repeatedly recreate it in their play. As adults, we are often compelled to re-enact our early traumas in our daily lives. The mechanism is similar regardless of the individual’s age.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
When the Time Is Right: December 7 There are times when we simply do not know what to do, or where to go, next. Sometimes these periods are brief, sometimes lingering. We can get through these times. We can rely on our program and the disciplines of recovery. We can cope by using our faith, other people, and our resources. Accept uncertainty. We do not always have to know what to do or where to go next. We do not always have clear direction. Refusing to accept the inaction and limbo makes things worse. It is okay to temporarily be without direction. Say “I don’t know,” and be comfortable with that. We do not have to try to force wisdom, knowledge, or clarity when there is none. While waiting for direction, we do not have to put our life on hold. Let go of anxiety and enjoy life. Relax. Do something fun. Enjoy the love and beauty in your life. Accomplish small tasks. They may have nothing to do with solving the problem, or finding direction, but this is what we can do in the interim. Clarity will come. The next step will present itself. Indecision, inactivity, and lack of direction will not last forever. Today, I will accept my circumstances even if I lack direction and insight. I will remember to do things that make myself and others feel good during those times. I will trust that clarity will come of its own accord.
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Melody Beattie (The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency (Hazelden Meditation Series))
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Our sense of safety and stability in the world and our interpersonal relationships become undermined by childhood abuse because we carry these early thwarted—that is, deeply conflicted—survival patterns into adulthood.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Good programming is not born from mere technical competence. I've seen highly intellectual programmers who can produce intense and impressive algorithms, who know their language standard by heart, but who write the most awful code.
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Kevlin Henney (97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts)
“
You have been feeling the way your society programmed you to feel. You have been thinking the way your society programmed you to think. You have been behaving the way your society programmed you to behave. Even your desires are not your own, original desires. They are all programmed in you by your society. Have you done anything original in your life?
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Abhijit Naskar (A Push in Perception)
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I come to call you Home.
Those who resonate with my words and follow them internally, will find that place and know It's completeness, its joy and fullness.
I have come to call you away from suffering, from fear and from a life of sorrow and into your own, divine Being.
I did not come here to give you decorative stories, to excite your imagination, or sign you up for some long program but to show you how available Truth is, and to remind you that you are never separate from It.
No person on this planet is apart from the Truth in the Heart and yet the world is so vast and varied in expression.
The greatest good and greatest evil is here.
In this forest of duality and complexity you must find your way Home.
You must win your Self back. Wisdom and trust will be your compass.
Many voices came to call us but we are here today because we are freshly called by the voice of God, Love, Truth.
Do not come half way home, but fully home.
I know the voice that called you is true and Truth and that where you are being called to is also Real.
It is inside your own Heart.
It is what gives me the strength to be here.
I love to see the beings being set free from the hypnosis of conditioning; from fears, false projection and the grip of ego.
And I know that to be liberated is not difficult.
It requires only openness and the sincere desire to be free.
I don't need to hear anything about your past.
Your stories are of no interest to me.
That is not how I know you.
I know you only through your Heart.
That is my true connection with you -
the living power of God.
It is That which I respond to in you
and it is only This that I know.
I can only keep reminding you of It by pointing you again and again to the obvious in yourself.
Now you must respond to my pointing.
This will complete this yoga of seeing.
Find and be one with That which is imperishable.
Be merged in the Absolute.
Don't go to sleep.
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Mooji
“
If we look at this man’s behaviors without knowing anything about his past, we might think he was mad. However, with a little history, we can see that his actions were a brilliant attempt to resolve a deep emotional scar. His re-enactment took him to the very edge, again and again, until he was finally able to free himself from the overwhelming nightmare of war. ACCIDENTS “JUST” HAPPEN
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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If the horse hurts an owner, the animal gets the blame. The BLM also created a program in which prisoners are given the opportunity to work with captive wild horses. They gentle them and get them to the point where they are ridable. This is an excellent idea.
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Buck Brannaman (Faraway Horses: The Adventures and Wisdom of One of America's Most Renowned Horsemen)
“
People can fall into habitual programmed patterns of thinking, underpinned by long-held beliefs and blind acceptance of conventional wisdom. Lying beneath such surface thoughts are mental cues that operate on the subconscious level, compelling people to act in certain ways, yielding conclusions that fit within their pre-existing biases. Many people are unaware that these processes are even occurring.
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Mark Ireland (Messages from the Afterlife: A Bereaved Father's Journey in the World of Spirit Visitations, Psychic-Mediums, and Synchronicity)
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Principles of Liberty
1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law.
2. A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong.
3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally strong people is to elect virtuous leaders.
4. Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained.
5. All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible.
6. All men are created equal.
7. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things.
8. Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law.
10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people.
11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical.
12. The United States of America shall be a republic.
13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers.
14. Life and Liberty are secure only so long as the Igor of property is secure.
15. The highest level of securitiy occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations.
16. The government should be separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial.
17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power.
18. The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution.
19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to the government, all others being retained by the people.
20. Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority.
21. Strong human government is the keystone to preserving human freedom.
22. A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men.
23. A free society cannot survive a republic without a broad program of general education.
24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong.
25. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."
26. The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity.
27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest.
28. The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.
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Founding Fathers
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While those with the vision of the anointed emphasize the knowledge and resources available to promote the various policy programs they favor, those with the tragic vision of the human condition emphasize that these resources are taken from other uses (“there is no free lunch”) and that the knowledge and wisdom required to run ambitious social programs far exceed what any human being has ever possessed, as the unintended negative consequences of such programs repeatedly demonstrate.
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Thomas Sowell (The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy)
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We become programmed with a set of upper limits for what we believe we deserve in life. That includes how healthy, how prosperous, and how well loved we can expect to be. These beliefs operate in our subconscious, under the radar of our everyday consciousness. But they unerringly attract to us experiences that reinforce what we already believe.
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Christiane Northrup (Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical And Emotional Health And Healing)
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The Japanese have the wisdom to keep pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence—the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough.
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Evelyn Tribole (Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works)
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When you turn on the television, it may not be because there’s a fascinating program you want to see; it’s because you’re afraid of being alone with yourself.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm)
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Delusions believed by billions are still delusions and the truth of one humanity embraced by even one human is still the truth.
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Abhijit Naskar (Build Bridges not Walls: In the name of Americana)
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He needed to remember what he was really made of and return to his true nature. In
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Deepak Chopra (The Wisdom of Healing: A Natural Mind Body Program for Optimal Wellness)
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To confuse knowledge for wisdom is a mistake often made by the knowledgeable but seldom made by the wise.
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Scott Meyer (Run Program)
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I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources.
Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is:
"Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance"
I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes.
The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable.
For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes:
"True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
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Socrates
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How do you know if your inner voice or sense of guidance is your deeper-self speaking its wisdom, your unconscious childhood programming, or the voice of your Aunt Matilda? Discerning the difference between an automatic response stemming from family beliefs, childhood distortions, or culture, and guidance from our connection with our higher/deeper self, makes life, success, and relationships so much easier.
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Jennifer Howard
“
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.
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Robert F. Kennedy
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Hyperarousal. This may take the form of physical symptoms—increase in heart rate, sweating, difficulty breathing (rapid, shallow, panting, etc.), cold sweats, tingling, and muscular tension. It can also manifest as a mental process in the form of increased repetitious thoughts, racing mind, and worry. If we allow ourselves to acknowledge these thoughts and sensations, in other words let them have their natural flow, they will peak, then begin to diminish and resolve. As this process occurs, we may experience trembling, shaking, vibration, waves of warmth, fullness of breath, slowed heart rate, warmth, relaxation of the muscles, and an overall feeling of relief, comfort, and safety.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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We need to learn from one another. Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern the world in the ways of peace, decency, and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.
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S. Michael Wilcox (10 Great Souls I Want to Meet in Heaven)
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When this stuck energy is restored to the whole organism, we can begin to live more fully—to create, accomplish, communicate, collaborate, and share. Instead of being engaged merely in survival, we can then come back to our balanced place, where we’re basically social animals. The fear and paralysis and dread drop away, and we come back into the present, because we have access to all of the energy previously bound up in our freezing and immobility, in our incomplete fight and flight responses.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Does one need to deceive oneself, to understand self-deception! If not, then why do you deceive yourself, by conforming to the social labels, be it a religious label, a non-religious label, a nationalist label, an intellectual label, or a gender label.
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Abhijit Naskar (Let The Poor Be Your God)
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I feel like you can’t judge a book by its cover, that’s always been the story of my life. I can walk into any restaurant and people would be floored to learn that I know what I do about wine, let alone that I ran one of the best wine programs in the world.
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Andre Hueston Mack
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air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts . . . the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.40
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Michael J. Sandel (Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do)
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Mothers are programmed to teach the fit. They are unequipped to listen to pleas, to alter their patterns. Mothers know how to nurse and nurture those who they have hope for—they coo over babies with infections they can help heal, they give advice for things they know, they protect from the dangers they know how to fear. But once their baby becomes so hurt the mother doesn't know how to heal her, she neglects because she doesn't know better. The tricks she knows don't work, she fears, and, eventually, when she is so lost she feels hopeless, she abandons.
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Aspen Matis (Girl in the Woods: A Memoir)
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Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it...
Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.
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Peter Watts (Blindsight (Firefall, #1))
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The first truth, Buddha taught his disciples, is that suffering is part of the human condition. If we simply try to avoid confronting painful experiences, there is no way to begin the healing process. In fact, this denial creates the very conditions that promote and prolong unnecessary suffering.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.
With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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The fourth noble truth states that, once you have identified the cause of your suffering, you must find an appropriate path. I believe that the exercises I’ve developed and that you’ll be learning in the Twelve-Phase Healing Trauma Program can serve as the path to lead you out of suffering and help you recapture the simple wonders of life.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Mother Nature, truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die – just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom. And, you forgot to give us the operating manual for ourselves! … What you have made is glorious, yet deeply flawed … We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution … We do not do this lightly, carelessly, or disrespectfully, but cautiously, intelligently, and in pursuit of excellence … Over the coming decades we will pursue a series of changes to our own constitution … We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death … We will expand our perceptual range … improve on our neural organization and capacity … reshape our motivational patterns and emotional responses … take charge over our genetic programming and achieve mastery over our biological and neurological processes.
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Max More (The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future)
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if you like to spend a lot of your time at a café, it may not be because that particular café is so interesting. It may be because you’re afraid of being alone; you feel that you always have to be with other people. When you turn on the television, it may not be because there’s a fascinating program you want to see; it’s because you’re afraid of being alone with yourself.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm)
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when we look at the original Ayurvedic term for this primordial state from which the universe arose, the Sanskrit word, avyakta, simply means “unmanifest.” Contained within the unmanifest is the impulse to create, known in Ayurveda as prakruti, or nature. In essence, Ayurveda simply describes the universe as arising from a field of potentiality that has an intrinsic nature to create. Modern
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Deepak Chopra (The Wisdom of Healing: A Natural Mind Body Program for Optimal Wellness)
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The second noble truth states that we must discover why we are suffering. We must cultivate the courage to look deeply, with clarity and courage, into our own suffering. We often hold the tacit assumption that all of our suffering stems from events in the past. But, whatever the initial seed of trauma, the deeper truth is that our suffering is more closely a result of how we deal with the effect these past events have on us in the present.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and, in modern times, computers and television programs. On the other hand, there’s only one real source of wisdom—pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis.
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Damien Echols (Life After Death)
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It doesn't matter if you are not 'good' at creative activity. You do not have to be 'good' at pushups before they strengthen your arms. You have to do them to get them to strengthen your arms, and so it is with creative activities: you have to do them to exercise those parts of your brain. Those creative activities that easily integrate with daily life are best because, as with atheltic exercise programs, thoses that intrude on busy schedule are not likely to get done
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Neil Kirby
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Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientists confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you’ve been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn’t set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating new mental circuits. I
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Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory)
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There’s one more symptom we need to look at before looking at how trauma actually gets into the body and mind and causes long-term problems. This one is a little less straightforward than the others. Here’s one of the more unusual and problem-creating symptoms that can develop from unresolved trauma: the compulsion to repeat the actions that caused the problem in the first place. We are inextricably drawn into situations that replicate the original trauma in both obvious and less obvious ways.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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In virtually every spiritual tradition, suffering is seen as a doorway to awakening. In the West, this connection can be seen in the biblical story of Job, as well as the dark night of the soul in medieval mysticism. The transformative power of suffering finds perhaps its clearest expression in the Four Noble Truths espoused by the Buddha. Though suffering and trauma are not identical, the Buddha’s insight into the nature of suffering can provide a powerful mirror for examining the effects of trauma in your life.
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Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
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Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily. Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see the marvelous change that comes about in you. Once you have understood this truth and thereby stopped your computer from generating negative emotions you may take any action you deem fit. You may avoid the situation or the person; or you may try to change them; or you may insist on your rights or the rights of others being respected; you may even resort to the use of force. But only after you have got rid of your emotional upsets, for then your action will spring from peace and love, not from the neurotic desire to appease your computer or to conform to its programming or to get rid of the negative emotions it generates. Then you will understand how profound is the wisdom of the words: “If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. If a man in authority makes you go one mile, go with him two.” For it will have become evident to you that real oppression comes, not from people who fight you in court or from authority that subjects you to slave labor, but from your computer whose programming destroys your peace of mind the moment outside circumstances fail to conform to its demands. People have been known to be happy even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp! It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated.
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Anthony de Mello (The Way to Love: Meditations for Life)
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The most satisfying kind of peace is Christ's peace. That is a peace in which the cause of strife has been removed from us. Many people try to make their peace co-exist with their sins; however, it is pretty difficult to get peace by compact or negotiation or because of some dictated decree without having peace in ourselves. When some of the more influential European nations objected to Hitler's program for enslaving the weaker nations of Europe, he shouted back to them angrily, "Let us alone, we want peace." That is, he wanted peace while he enslaved the weaker nations without interference from anyone else. This is the kind of peace criminals want, the kind of peace that will enable them to carry out their own ungodly programs of crime unhampered by law and order.
All true peace must be based on righteousness.
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Sterling W. Sill (The Wealth of Wisdom)
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Twelve-step programs are rife with mottoes that people repeat solemnly as if rhyming, repetition, and puns are the equivalent of wisdom. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Come for the vanity, stay for the sanity. If you hang around the hardware store, you’re going to eventually buy a hammer. If I may, I’d like to pitch a few more twelve-step slogans to the worldwide fellowship: Hogs log, get out and jog! (IT HAS TO MAKE SENSE? Oh, okay—I thought wisdom was more about rhyming!) If I’m not calling, I’m stalling, and that leads to bawling and hauling. Drugs and ass got me here, but free coffee gave me a ride home. Booze is dumb and I’m no dummy! So how do I reconcile my atheist hypocrisy while still attending these groups? My favorite twelve-step slogan is Take what you want and leave the rest. This one slogan is how I’m able to rationalize my attendance and constant rule-breaking. And,
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Maria Bamford (Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere)
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(The carnal mind) is dead set against the wisdom and counsel of God, as revealed in his Word, and therefore is emphatically described as being at enmity against God (Rom. 8:7). It is so impertinent that it considers the practice of godliness, demanded by God in his Word, as pure madness and foolishness (2 Kings 9:11; 1 Cor. 1:18). Indeed, it regards the desire to live a holy life… as no better than prudishness, legalism, and hypocrisy. The carnal mind will never accept bending, yielding, and subjecting all things to the service of God in order to give first priority to the practice of true godliness. Anything rather than that! On the contrary, the carnal mind wants true godliness – indeed, everything – to bend, yield, and be made subject to its own plans and pursuits.
The carnal mind devises a certain way of Christian life through which it imagines that God as well as man can be satisfied. Carnal man is willing to do certain things that God requires, such as giving money to the poor, going to church, and even partaking of the Lord’s Supper. However, other things that God also requires, such as instructing one’s household in the fear of the Lord, regularly visiting the sick, and comforting the poor, are not considered necessary or important. Carnal man rejects those things, not taking the slightest interest in them. Yet the things he himself has chosen he regards as the only right and reasonable Christian way of life. Everything outside of this he calls insincerity, prudishness, narrow-mindedness, superstition, or hypocrisy. Everything that does not fit into his own self-approved program he considers lukewarm, careless, slothful, or ungodly. Truly, these people are foolish because they deceive their own hearts with false arguments, as the apostle James explains when, for those very reasons, he declares that “this man’s religion is vain” (James 1:26).
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Willem Teellinck (The Path of True Godliness (Classics of Reformed Spirituality))
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In short, trauma is about loss of connection to ourselves, to our bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This loss of connection is often hard to recognize, because it doesn't happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them. These are the hidden effects of trauma, the ones most of us keep to ourselves. We may simply sense that we do not feel quite right, without ever becoming fully aware of what is taking place; that is, the gradual undermining of our self-esteem, self-confidence, feelings of well-being, and connection to life.
Our choices become limited as we avoid certain feelings, people, situations, and places. The result of this gradual constriction of freedom is the loss of vitality and potential for the fulfillment of our dreams."
Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body, Peter Levine
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Peter Levine
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Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.”
“No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.
“Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!”
“The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!”
“Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys—“
“That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!”
“We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—“
“Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.”
“Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast.
“Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive Mossmoon and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?”
“No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over the Schwarzkommando business.”
“The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.”
They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great of bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles.
“Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast.
“What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang.”
“Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady, calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.”
They never are, in these meetings of his.
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Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
“
A beautiful example of a long-term intention was presented by A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka. For seventeen years there had been a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. At one point, the Norwegians were able to broker peace, and once the peace treaty was in effect, Ariyaratane called the followers of his Sarvodaya movement together. Sarvodaya combines Buddhist principles of right livelihood, right action, right understanding, and compassion and has organized citizens in one-third of that nation’s villages to dig wells, build schools, meditate, and collaborate as a form of spiritual practice. Over 650,000 people came to the gathering to hear how he envisioned the future of Sri Lanka. At this gathering he proposed a five-hundred-year peace plan, saying, “The Buddha teaches we must understand causes and conditions. It’s taken us five hundred years to create the suffering that we are in now.” Ari described the effects of four hundred years of colonialism, of five hundred years of struggle between Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, and of several centuries of economic disparity. He went on, “It will take us five hundred years to change these conditions.” Ariyaratane then offered solutions, proposing a plan to heal the country. The plan begins with five years of cease-fire and ten years of rebuilding roads and schools. Then it goes on for twenty-five years of programs to learn one another’s languages and cultures, and fifty years of work to right economic injustice, and to bring the islanders back together as a whole. And every hundred years there will be a grand council of elders to take stock on how the plan is going. This is a sacred intention, the long-term vision of an elder. In the same way, if we envision the fulfillment of wisdom and compassion in the United States, it becomes clear that the richest nation on earth must provide health care for its children; that the most productive nation on earth must find ways to combine trade with justice; that a creative society must find ways to grow and to protect the environment and plan sustainable development for generations ahead. A nation founded on democracy must bring enfranchisement to all citizens at home and then offer the same spirit of international cooperation and respect globally. We are all in this together.
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Jack Kornfield (Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are)
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One of the major difficulties, and one of the monumental dangers, of sex education courses in public schools is that they disregard this significant principle of teaching. They tell all before the youngster is ready, and in so doing, they often wreak havoc with the spiritual, emotional, and moral stability of the students. They open them to great jeopardy. Things should be done in the season thereof, and there is a time for all things. A wise teacher and a wise parent will be alert to that fact.
Likewise, in programming Church activities we should use great wisdom in considering the maturity and readiness of our members to be taught the basic principles of morality. If we teach the basic principles too soon, they may be meaningless to the youngsters. The matter of teaching morality may be necessary, but the framework in which it is set should recognize the degree of maturity and readiness.
For instance, when the youngster is too young to have been subjected to the urging of physical desires, he must be taught about the subject in an entirely different way than will be appropriate when he is older. There will come a time for some more mature discussion later, but this must always be with reverence.
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Boyd K. Packer (Teach Ye Diligently)
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We are still in the Age of Rationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and is now rapidly nearing its close. We are all its creatures whether we know and wish it or not. The word is familiar enough, but who knows how much it implies? It is the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock. It is the period in which everyone can read and write and therefore must have his say and always "knows better." This type of mind is obsessed by concepts - the new gods of the Age - and it exercises its wits on the world as it sees it. "It is no good," it says; "we could make it better; here goes, let us set up a program for a better world!" Nothing could be easier for persons of intelligence, and no doubt seems to be felt that this world will then materialize of itself. It is given a label, "Human Progress," and now that it has a name, it is. Those who doubt it are narrow reactionaries, heretics, and, what is worse, persons devoid of democratic virtue: away with them! In this wise the fear of reality was overcome by intellectual arrogance, the darkness that comes from ignorance of all things of life, spiritual poverty, lack of reverence, and, finally, world-alien stupidity - for there is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence.
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Oswald Spengler (The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution)
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Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In the original and primary sense of lacks or needs, wants tend to structure our vision of government's responsibilities. The quest for security - whether economic, physical, psychological, or military - brings a sense of urgency to politics and is one of the enduring sources of passion in policy controversies.
Need is probably the most fundamental political claim. Even toddlers know that need carries more weight than desire or deservingness. They learn early to counter a rejected request by pleading, "I need it." To claim need is to claim that one should be given the resources or help because they are essential. Of course, this raises the question "essential for what?" In conflicts over security, the central issues are what kind of security government should attempt to provide; what kinds of needs it should attempt to meet; and how the burdens of making security a collective responsibility should be distributed.
Just as most people are all for equity and efficiency in the abstract, most people believe that society should help individuals and families when they are in dire need. But beneath this consensus is a turbulent and intense conflict over how to distinguish need from mere desire, and how to preserve a work - or - merit based system of economic distribution in the face of distribution according to need. Defining need for purposes of public programs become much an exercise like defining equity and efficiency. People try to portray their needs as being objective, and policymakers seek to portray their program criteria as objective, in order to put programs beyond political dispute. As with equity and efficiency, there are certain recurring strategies of argument that can be used to expand or contract a needs claim.
In defense policy, relative need is far more important than absolute. Our sense of national security (and hence our need for weapons) depends entirely on comparison with the countries we perceive as enemies. And here Keynes is probably right: The need for weapons can only be satisfied by feeling superior to "them." Thus, it doesn't matter how many people our warheads can kill or how many cities they can destroy. What matters is what retaliatory capacity we have left after an attack by the other side, or whether our capacity to sustain an offense is greater than their capacity to destroy it. The paradox of nuclear weapons is that the more security we gain in terms of absolute capability (i.e., kill potential), the more insecure we make ourselves with respect to the consequences of nuclear explosions. We gain superiority only by producing weapons we ourselves are terrified to use.
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Deborah Stone (Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making)