Seed Related Quotes

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.

Loneliness is a relative term. Is a dandelion seed lonely when its pod opens and the wind lifts it into the air? Once it lands and takes root, yes, it is solitary, but is it lonely? Of course not! It is content to know it was one of many.

FORKED BRANCHES We grew up on the same street, You and me. We went to the same schools, Rode the same bus, Had the same friends, And even shared spaghetti With each other's families. And though our roots belong to The same tree, Our branches have grown In different directions. Our tree, Now resembles a thousand Other trees In a sea of a trillion Other trees With parallel destinies And similar dreams. You cannot envy the branch That grows bigger From the same seed, And you cannot Blame it on the sun's direction. But you still compare us, As if we're still those two Kids at the park Slurping down slushies and Eating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.

Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.

Part of the process of awakening is recognizing that the realities we thought were absolute are only relative. All you have to do is shift from one reality to another once, and your attachment to what you thought was real starts to collapse. Once the seed of awakening sprouts in you, there’s no choice—there’s no turning back.

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [...] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything-each eaxchange, connection, conflict-was translated into the language of black and white. [...] Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constitute a homogenous, cohesive force. [...] Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another's cities. It was revelation, a surprise, a shock.

Nature is a living whole,' he later said, not a 'dead aggregate'. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this 'universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed' that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life - pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those 'organic powers are incessantly at work', he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important 'in their relation to the whole', he explained.

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness-an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.

We grew up on the same street, You and me. We went to the same schools, Rode the same bus, Had the same friends, And even shared spaghetti With each other's families. And though our roots belong to The same tree, Our branches have grown In different directions. Our tree, Now resembles a thousand Other trees In a sea of a trillion Other trees With parallel destinies And similar dreams. You cannot envy the branch That grows bigger From the same seed, And you cannot Blame it on the sun's direction. But you still compare us, As if we're still those two Kids at the park Slurping down slushies and Eating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing “climate-ready” crops—seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.

While it is relatively easy to recognize the perennial grasses and seed-eating sparrows as characteristic of meadows, the ecosystems exist in their fullest sense underground. What we see aboveground is only the outer margin of an ecosystem that explodes in intricacy and life below.

O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children. [...] There is no old doctrine handed down among you by ancient tradition nor any science which is hoary with age, and I will tell you the reason behind this. There have been and will be again many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes, the greatest having been brought about by earth-fire and inundation. Whatever happened either in your country or ours or in any other country of which we are informed, any action which is noble and great or in any other way remarkable which has taken place, all that has been inscribed long ago in our temple records, whereas you and other nations did not keep imperishable records. And then, after a period of time, the usual inundation visits like a pestilence and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education. And thus you have to begin over again as children and know nothing of what happened in ancient times either among us or among yourselves.' 'As for those genealogies of yours which you have related to us, they are no better than tales of children; for in the first place, you remember one deluge only, whereas there were a number of them. And in the next place there dwelt in your land, which you do not know, the fairest and noblest race of men that ever lived of which you are but a seed or remnant. And this was not known to you because for many generations the survivors of that destruction made no records.' [Spoken by a priest of Egypt]

This is one aspect of a reporter's job that never ceases to fascinate and disturb me: facts that go unreported do not exist. How many massacres, how many earthquakes happen in the world, how many ships sink, how many volcanoes erupt, and how many people are persecuted, tortured and killed. Yet if no one is there to see, to write, to take a photograph, it is as if these facts had never occurred, this suffering has no importance, no place in history. Because history exists only if someone relates it. Every little description of a thing observed one can leave a seed in the soil of memory - that keeps me tied to my profession.

How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.

I think about the pepper plant, the corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and more plants. And I've noticed that while those seeds are living within the fruit or vegetable they can not grow. It is only when those seeds have died, that they can be planted and grow. And, I can relate this same process to the human body. In order to grow and thrive in the spirit, you must die to the flesh. Meaning, You have to rid your mind and body of toxic negative worldly things in order to grow and develop more spiritually.

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.

What is meaning? Meaning means to know the fragment in relation to the whole; meaning is a relationship of the fragment to the whole.

Radiocarbon is plagued by numerous technical problems, of which two deserve mention here. One is that radiocarbon dating until the 1980s required relatively large amounts of carbon (a few grams), much more than the amount in small seeds or bones. Hence scientists instead often had to resort to dating material recovered nearby at the same site and believed to be “associated with” the food remains—that is, to have been deposited simultaneously by the people who left the food. A typical choice of “associated” material is charcoal from fires.

When a man and woman have sexual relations, who gets the most out of the deal? The man, or the woman? Since we live in a society full of tricks, the man thinks he gets more out of the encounter. But what do men really get out of it? The reality is that women have the potential to get more out of it than the man, especially if the man's seeds have accumulated a certain amount of value.

Every negative complex of emotion conceals a conflict, a problem or dilemma made up of contradictory or opposing motives or desires. Self-observation must recover these emotional seeds of the dramatization of life if real control of habits is to occur. Otherwise, mere control of habits will itself become a form of dramatized conflict or warfare with the motives of our lives. Food desires, sex desires, relational desires, desires for experience and acquisition, for rest, for release, for attention, for solitude, for life, for death, the whole pattern of desires must come under the view of consciousness, the aspects of the conflicts must be differentiated, and habits must be controlled to serve well-being or the pleasurable and effective play of Life. This whole process is truly possible only in the midst of the prolonged occasion of spiritual life in practice, since the mere mechanical and analytical attempts at self-liberation and self-healing do not undermine the principal emotion or seat of conflict, which is the intention to identify with a separate self sense and to reject and forget the prior and natural Condition of Unqualified or Divine Consciousness.

What benefit have the Hindus derived from their contact with Christian nations? The idea generally prevalent in this country about the morality and truthfulness of the Hindus evidently has been very low. Such seeds of enmity and hatred have been sown by the missionaries that it would be an almost Herculean task to establish better relations between India and America... If we examine Greek, Chinese, Persian, or Arabian writings on the Hindus, before foreigners invaded India, we find an impartial description of their national character. Megasthenes, the famous Greek ambassador, praises them for their love of truth and justice, for the absence of slavery, and for the chastity of their women. Arrian, in the second century, Hiouen-thsang, the famous Buddhist pilgrim in the seventh century, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, have written in highest terms of praise of Hindu morality. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars, except Christian missionaries.

But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root—there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. Oh, how can I put it in words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not even a profound, secret upheaval of nature—could explain it. Evidently I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence.

From autunm's profligate seedings to the great spring giveaway, nature teaches a steady lesson: if we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon. When we are obsessed with bottom lines and productivity, with efficiency of time and motion, with the rational relation of means and ends, with projecting reasonable goals and making a beeline toward them, it seems unlikely that our work will ever bear full fruit, unlikely that we will ever know the fullness of spring in our lives.

Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and the pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of their own pretensions, that the freest unions may contain the seeds of the worst exploitation.

The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health.

There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their “instincts” as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmers’ omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: “Now grow a harvest and feed us!

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

As I understand the virgin archetype, it is that aspect of the feminine, in man or in woman, that has the courage to Be and the flexibility to be always Becoming. Rooted in the instincts, the virgin has a loving relationship to the Great Earth Mother. But she is not herself the Great Mother. Men and women who can consciously relate to this archetype do not make mothering synonymous with femininity, nor are they hampered by unconscious material from their own personal mothers. They have been through the joy and the agony of the daily sorting of the seeds of their own feeling values in order to find out who they authentically are, and they continue to do so. They are strong enough and pliable enough to surrender to the penetration of the Spirit and to bring the fruit of that union into consciousness.

There are two types of purusharth (effort): one is the purusharth that arises from prarabdh (effect of past life karma), relative effort. The seeds that are sown from prarabdh give rise to relative effort. The second purusharth is the effort that arises after one attains Purush (the Self), real effort. With whatever intent one suffers the effect of past life karma, that intent is bhrant purusharth (illusory effort)!

When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited . . . but that on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and this very relation drives them beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their destruction. The finite not only alters, as anything does, but it ceases to be, and it is not merely a possibility that it ceases to be, as though it could be that it might not cease. No, the nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

When we find ourselves in a mess, we don’t have to feel guilty about it. Instead, we could reflect on the fact that how we relate to this mess will be sowing the seeds of how we will relate to whatever happens next. We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same. Right now we are creating our state of mind for tomorrow, not to mention this afternoon, next week, next year, and all the years of our lives.

Grievances and any horror in life are seeds waiting for either manifestation into the physical world or transformation into the multidimensional realm. Grievances regularly emerge in our consciousness as emotions and thoughts. They are massive collective ancestral forces that keep being recycled and fermented. They cannot be eliminated because they constitute the source of our creative energy. Yet we can prevent them from manifesting and becoming our reality if we direct them towards the reality we choose to create. This is possible if we consciously descend at the deepest level where grievances exist as seeds, experiencing them with total awareness and gaining complete access to the related thoughts and emotions. This allows us to become catalysing conduits of such grievances with the capacity to direct them consciously towards the reality we choose to create. When this is the case grievances are transformed and their separated energy fades away.

read slowly, moving his lips over the words. “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered. “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.” Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.

A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age. A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

I have seen the most beautiful families blossom from the most unlikely relational circumstances. I've also seen the most ideal circumstances yield empty families that just don't work no matter how hard they try. Nobody can try and control this. The seeds of love and the seeds of family will fall wherever they want to fall and will take root wherever they may take root. There's no telling, there's no predicting what may be best. But that's the absolute beauty of it. Let people come together and love as they wish, there are no rules to this.

How about this one?" I pointed to a graceful, feathery vine with small, delicate, star-shaped red blooms. "That's a cypress vine," he said. "Ipomoea quamoclit. It's an escapee and not native to her garden. People think it's an annual, but with a little help from nature, it's self-seeding ability means it can pop up in new places year after year and thrive far away from its original home." Something niggled at the back of my mind. If the vine could escape and start over again somewhere new, why couldn't a person? If Jack's grandmother's plants were strong enough to survive neglect, why couldn't I?

When I was a little girl, my mother took great pains to interest me in learning to know the birds and wild flowers and in the planting garden. I thought that roots and bulbs and seeds were as wonderful as flowers, and the Latin names on seed packages as full of enchantment as the counting-out rhymes that children chant in the spring. I remember the first time I planted seeds. My mother asked me if I knew the Parable of the Sower. I said I did not, and she took me into the house and read it to me. Once the relation between poetry and the soil is established in the mind, all growing things are endowed with more than material beauty. (p. 12)

Grand-Mère’s Friday-Night Chicken My mother made a version of this in the 1970s; I have updated it with ingredients that are readily available today, if not necessarily to cooks of 1947. This is the dish that came to mind when I tried to think of something that Miriam would have made, and though it is far from authentic in its origins, it is delicious and relatively easy to make. Serves 4 1 medium orange ½ teaspoon fennel seeds 8 chicken thighs, skin-on and bone-in, about 3½ to 4 pounds Salt and pepper 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 cup prunes, pitted and halved (quarter if especially large) 1 cup green olives, pitted ½ cup dry white wine or dry (white) vermouth

All time, Father once told her, is relative: because of the speed the Argos travels, the ship clock kept by Sybil runs faster than clocks back on Earth. The chronometers that run inside every human cell that tell us it’s time to get drowsy, to make a baby, to grow old—all these clocks, Father said, can be altered by speed, software, or circumstance. Some dormant seeds, he said, like the ones in the drawers in Farm 4, can stop time for centuries, slowing their metabolisms to almost zero, sleeping away the seasons, until the right combination of moisture and temperature appears, and the right wavelength of sunlight penetrates the soil. Then, as though you spoke the magic words: they open.

Life sometimes is like tossing a coin in the air calling heads or tails, but it doesn’t matter what side it lands on; life goes on. It is hard when you’ve lost the will to fight because you’ve been fighting for so long. You are smothered by the pain. Mentally, you are drained. Physically, you are weak. Emotionally, you are weighed down. Spiritually, you do not have one tiny mustard seed of faith. The common denominator is that other people’s problems have clouded your mind with all of their negativity. You cannot feel anything; you are numb. You do not have the energy to surrender, and you choose not to escape because you feel safe when you are closed in. As you move throughout the day, you do just enough to get by. Your mindset has changed from giving it your all to—well, something is better than nothing. You move in slow motion like a zombie, and there isn’t any color, just black and white, with every now and then a shade of gray. You’ve shut everyone out and crawled back into the rabbit hole. Life passes you by as you feel like you cannot go on. You look around for help; for someone to take the pain away and to share your suffering, but no one is there. You feel alone, you drift away when you glance ahead and see that there are more uphill battles ahead of you. You do not have the option to turn around because all of the roads are blocked. You stand exactly where you are without making a step. You try to think of something, but you are emotionally bankrupt. Where do you go from here? You do not have a clue. Standing still isn’t helping because you’ve welcomed unwanted visitors; voices are in your head, asking, “What are you waiting for? Take the leap. Jump.” They go on to say, “You’ve had enough. Your burdens are too heavy.” You walk towards the cliff; you turn your head and look at the steep hill towards the mountain. The view isn’t helping; not only do you have to climb the steep hill, but you have to climb up the mountain too. You take a step; rocks and dust fall off the cliff. You stumble and you move forward. The voices in your head call you a coward. You are beginning to second-guess yourself because you want to throw in the towel. You close your eyes; a tear falls and travels to your chin. As your eyes are closed the Great Divine’s voice is louder; yet, calmer, soothing; and you feel peace instantly. Your mind feels light, and your body feels balanced. The Great Divine whispers gently and softly in your ear: “Fallen Warrior, I know you have given everything you’ve got, and you feel like you have nothing left to give. Fallen Warrior, I know it’s been a while since you smiled. Fallen Warrior, I see that you are hurting, and I feel your pain. Fallen Warrior, this is not the end. This is the start of your new beginning. Fallen Warrior, do not doubt My or your abilities; you have more going for you than you have going against you. Fallen Warrior, keep moving, you have what it takes; perseverance is your middle name. Fallen Warrior, you are not the victim! You are the victor! You step back because you know why you are here. You know why you are alive. Sometimes you have to be your own Shero. As a fallen warrior, you are human; and you have your moments. There are days when you have more ups than downs, and some days you have more downs than ups. I most definitely can relate. I was floating through life, but I had to change my mindset. During my worst days, I felt horrible, and when I started to think negatively I felt like I was dishonoring myself. I felt sick, I felt afraid, fear began to control my every move. I felt like demons were trying to break in and take over my life.

Ka-Be is the Lager without the physical discomforts. So that, whoever still has some seeds of conscience, feels his conscience re-awaken; and in the long empty days, one speaks of other things than hunger and work and one begins to consider what they have made us become, how much they have taken away from us, what this life is. In this Ka-Be, an enclosure of relative peace, we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us 'remember that you must die', would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.

A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the eduction of forms from matter, and the relation of such forms to the higher forms which are the model of the world and have their being in the mind of God. He might well be a poet to brood on those great complementary opposites: the earthly and heavenly cities, unity and multiplicity, light and dark, equity and justice, continuity--as triumphantly exhibited in his own Empress--and ends--as sadly exhibited in his own Empress. Like St. Augustine he will see mutability as the condition of all created things, which are immersed in time. Time, he knows, will have a stop--perhaps, on some of the evidence, quite soon. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that this is not so. It will seem to him, at any rate, that his poem should in part rest on some poetic generalization-some fiction--which reconciles these opposites, and helps to make sense of the discords, ethical, political, legal, and so forth, which, in its completeness, it had to contain. This may stand as a rough account of Spenser's mood when he worked out the sections of his poem which treat of the Garden of Adonis and the trial of Mutability, the first dealing with the sempiternity of earthly forms, and the second with the dilation of being in these forms under the shadow of a final end. Perhaps the refinements upon, and the substitutes for, Augustine's explanations of the first matter and its potentialities, do not directly concern him; as an allegorist he may think most readily of these potentialities in a quasi-Augustinian way as seeds, seminal reasons, plants tended in a seminarium. But he will distinguish, as his commentators often fail to do, these forms or formulae from the heavenly forms, and allow them the kind of immortality that is open to them, that of athanasia rather than of aei einai. And an obvious place to talk about them would be in the discussion of love, since without the agency represented by Venus there would be no eduction of forms from the prime matter. Elsewhere he would have to confront the problem of Plato's two kinds of eternity; the answer to Mutability is that the creation is deathless, but the last stanzas explain that this is not to grant them the condition of being-for-ever.

When we speak of the human animal's spontaneous interchange with the animate landscape, we acknowledge a felt relation to the mysterious that was active long before any formal or priestly religions. The instinctive rapport with an enigmatic cosmos at once both nourishing and dangerous lies at the ancient heart of all we have come to call "the sacred". Temporarily forgotten, paved over yet never eradicated, this old reciprocity with the breathing earth was here long before all our formal religions, and it will likely outlast all our formal religions. For it has always been operative underneath our various religions, nourishing them from below like a subterranean river. There is no disdain for religion in such a statement. We can honor the awesome eloquence of each religion while acknowledging the precarious nature of church-based faiths in today's crowded and crisis-ridden world, where people of divergent scriptures must somehow learn to get along. Our greatest hope for the future rests not in the triumph of any single set of beliefs, but in the acknowledgment of a felt mystery that underlies all our doctrines. It rests in the remembering of that corporeal faith that flows underneath all mere beliefs: the human body's implicit faith in the steady sustenance of the air and the renewal of light every dawn, its faith in mountains and rivers and the enduring support of the ground, in the silent germination of seeds and the cyclical return of the salmon. There are no priests needed in such a faith, no intermediaries or experts necessary to effect our contact with the sacred, since - carnally immersed as we are in the thick of this breathing planet - we each have our own intimate access to the big mystery.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellin and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura--the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close.

You wouldn’t recognize this land back then. Over thousands of years, the plants and animals worked with wind and fire until the land was covered in a sea of grass that was home to many relatives. The bison gave us everything, from thadó, our meat, to our clothing and thípi hides. His dung fertilized the soil. The prairie dogs opened up tunnels that brought air and water deep into the earth. Grasses that were as tall as a man set long roots that could withstand drought. When my grandfather was a boy, he woke each morning to the song of the meadowlark. The prairie showed us for many generations how to live and work together as one family. “And then the settlers came with their plows and destroyed the prairie in a single lifetime,” my father said. What I remember most, now, is his voice shaking with rage, his tobacco-stained fingers trembling as they held a hand-rolled cigarette, the way he drew smoke deep into his lungs.

It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500–1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goosefoot). But four seed crops and a container fall far short of a complete food production package. For 2,000 years those founder crops served only as minor dietary supplements while eastern U.S. Native Americans continued to depend mainly on wild foods, especially wild mammals and waterbirds, fish, shellfish, and nuts. Farming did not supply a major part of their diet until the period 500–200 B.C., after three more seed crops (knotweed, maygrass, and little barley) had been brought into cultivation. A

A good question is worth a million good answers. A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age. A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

Cam awakened slowly as he felt his wife’s voluptuous body snuggling close to his. She always slept in a nightgown made of modest white cambric, with infinite numbers of tucks and tiny ruffles. It never failed to stir him, knowing what splendid curves were concealed beneath the demure garment. The nightgown had ridden up to her knees during the night. One of her bare legs was hooked over his, her knee resting near his groin. The slight roundness of her stomach pressed against his side. Pregnancy had made her feminine form more ample and delicious. There was a glow about her these days, a burgeoning vulnerability that filled him with an overwhelming urge to protect her. And knowing that the changes in her were caused by his seed, a part of him growing inside her … that was undeniably arousing. He wouldn’t have expected to be this enthralled by Amelia’s condition. In the eyes of the Rom, childbirth and all related issues were considered mahrime, polluting events. And since the Irish were notoriously suspicious and prudish when it came to matters of reproduction, there wasn’t much on either side of his lineage to justify his delight in his wife’s pregnancy. But he couldn’t help it. She was the most beautiful and fascinating creature he had ever encountered.

How do you commit the perfect crime in science? We’re handicapped from the start because it’s a question we never ask. For more than thirty years, Frank taught me and many others to record our data accurately, compare them with collaborators around the world, discard the outliers, and come to a consensus. We understand there are variations, but if the bulk of the evidence goes in a certain direction, we are confident we have a better understanding of human biological processes. If only that were what happened in the real world. In the real world there are corporations, be they pharmaceutical, agricultural, petroleum, or chemical companies, that have billions of dollars at stake in the work of scientists. If one has billions of dollars, he can use the dark arts of persuasion to hire public relations firms to tout your products, sow the seeds of doubt about those who question your products, buy advertising on news networks so they don’t publicize negative stories unless they have no other choice, and donate to politicians of all ideologies. Then, once those politicians have been elected, they can write laws for the benefit of their generous donors. As it was put so eloquently in the seventeenth century by a prominent member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, “If it prospers, none dare call it treason.

It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments, that if, by chance, they are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the ideaof trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturist some seed and corner of his field, to make trial of an idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artifical production of the legislator's genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country. To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the potter.

THOUGHTS WHICH ARE MIXED WITH ANY OF THE FEELINGS OF EMOTIONS, CONSTITUTE A "MAGNETIC" FORCE WHICH ATTRACTS, FROM THE VIBRATIONS OF THE ETHER, OTHER SIMILAR, OR RELATED THOUGHTS. A thought thus "magnetized" with emotion may be compared to a seed which, when planted in fertile soil, germinates, grows, and multiplies itself over and over again, until that which was originally one small seed, becomes countless millions of seeds of the SAME BRAND! The ether is a great cosmic mass of eternal forces of vibration. It is made up of both destructive vibrations and constructive vibrations. It carries, at all times, vibrations of fear, poverty, disease, failure, misery; and vibrations of prosperity, health, success, and happiness, just as surely as it carries the sound of hundreds of orchestrations of music, and hundreds of human voices, all of which maintain their own individuality, and means of identification, through the medium of radio. From the great storehouse of the ether, the human mind is constantly attracting vibrations which harmonize with that which DOMINATES the human mind. Any thought, idea, plan, or purpose which one holds in one's mind attracts, from the vibrations of the ether, a host of its relatives, adds these "relatives" to its own force, and grows until it becomes the dominating, MOTIVATING MASTER of the individual in whose mind it has been housed.

I thought about the aftermath of the 1862 war, when thirty-eight hastily condemned warriors had been hung in Mankato, in the country's largest-ever mass execution. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves and then dug up for study by local doctors, including Dr. Mayo, who kept the body of Cut Nose for his personal examination. I thought about my father losing his teaching job, about his struggle with depression and drinking. About how angry he was that our history was not taught in schools. Instead, we had to battle sports mascots and stereotypes. Movie actors in brownface. Tourists with cameras. Welfare lines. Alcoholism. 'After stealing everything,' he would rage, 'now they want to blame us for it, too.' Social services broke up Native families, sending children like me to white foster parents. Every week, the newspapers ran stories about Indians who rolled their cars while drunk or the rise of crack cocaine on the reservations or somebody's arrest for gang-related crimes. No wonder so many Native kids were committing suicide. But there was so much more to the story of the run. What people didn't see because they chose never to look. Unlike the stone monument in New Ulm, built to memorialize the settlers' loss with angry pride, the Dakhota had created a living, breathing memorial that found healing in prayer and ceremony. What the two monuments shared, however, was remembering. We were all trying to find a way through grief.

What do human beings contribute, Suwelo was thinking morosely, as he waited one afternoon for Miss Lissie to appear. Her story about the animal cousins had moved him and each day he found himself more conscious of his own nonhuman “relatives” in the world. The bees contributed honey, but not really—it was taken from them. What, he now wondered, did the bees eat themselves; surely they didn’t make honey for human beings. It was the flowers that contributed honey to both bees and people, the flowers that were always giving something: beauty, cheerfulness, pollen, and seeds. They did not care who saw them, who, they gave to. And on his feet, Suwelo also realized, with disgust, he was wearing moccasins made of leather. What a euphemism, “leather.” A real nonword. Nowhere in it was concealed the truth of what leather was. Something’s skin. And his tortoiseshell glasses. He took them off and peered shortsightedly at them, holding them at arm’s length. But they were imitation tortoiseshell. Plastic, probably. But this made him even gloomier, for he knew the only reason for imitation anything was that the source of the real thing had dried up. There were probably no more tortoises left to kill. And what, anyway, of plastic? It was plentiful, cheap. But even it came from somewhere. Of what was plastic made? What died? He knew it was a product of petroleum, of oil, and so he assumed plastic was made out of the very lifeblood of the planet. When all the oil was drained, he imagined the planet quaking and shrinking in on itself, like an orange that has been sucked to death.

Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.

Gradually I came to learn what every great philosophy has been up to now, namely, the self-confession of its originator and a form of unintentional and unrecorded memoir, and also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy made up the essential living seed from which on every occasion the entire plant has grown. In fact, when we explain how the most remote metaphysical claims in a philosophy really arose, it's good (and shrewd) for us always to ask first: What moral is it (is he -) aiming at? Consequently, I don't believe that a "drive to knowledge" is the father of philosophy but that knowledge (and misunderstanding) have functioned only as a tool for another drive, here as elsewhere. But whoever explores the basic drives of human beings, in order to see in this very place how far they may have carried their game as inspiring geniuses (or demons and goblins), will find that all drives have already practised philosophy at some time or another - and that every single one of them has all too gladly liked to present itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive seeks mastery and, as such, tries to practise philosophy. Of course, with scholars, men of real scientific knowledge, things may be different -"better" if you will - where there may really be something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clock mechanism or other which, when well wound up, bravely goes on working, without all the other drives of the scholar playing any essential role. The essential "interests" of scholars thus commonly lie entirely elsewhere, for example, in the family or in earning a living or in politics. Indeed, it is almost a matter of indifference whether his small machine is placed on this or on that point in science and whether the "promising" young worker makes a good philologist or expert in fungus or chemist - whether he becomes this or that does not define who he is.5 By contrast, with a philosopher nothing is at all impersonal. And his morality, in particular, bears a decisive and crucial witness to who he is - that is, to the rank ordering in which the innermost drives of his nature are placed relative to each other.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

As the prisoners saw Lucy, they reached their hands out piteously to her, some begging her for food, others merely mouthing their pain, not even realizing that their lips no longer made sounds. When one of them grabbed her arm as she passed, Matthews raised his baron and swiftly brought it down on the prisoner's head. Lucy winced as the prisoner fell back to the floor, blood gushing from his brow. Even as Lucy turned her head from the horror of human misery, another sight caused bile to rise in her throat. She vomited right there in the corridor. Two corpses, beheaded and dismembered, lay strewn about the floor of a small room that led from the corridor. The stench of human flesh and something else violated her nose. She dimly wondered what the sickly, spicy smell could be, and she began to sway. Dimly, she recollected John telling her once how the hangman would boil the heads of men who had been drawn and quartered in a mixture of bay-salt and cumin seed, to keep them from putrefying before their relatives could claim their bodies for burial. Why had he told her that? she wondered dully. Why had she wanted to know?

Compare it to its contemporary, the space program. The latter focused on a single mind-blowing goal, a moon landing, which was successfully met. And then the enterprise fizzled, becoming decreasingly relevant to the general public. The main benefits of the whole enterprise seem to have been Teflon, Tang, and a stack of very cool photographs. ARPA—by using its relatively meager bankroll (millions, not billions) to seed an entire culture devoted to transforming computers into instruments of communications and mental augmentation—bootstrapped a revolution that would change the way all of us worked, created, and thought.

Sculpting the very earth. That boast stuck in a corner of my mind, though I wasn’t sure why, at the time. Perhaps in retrospect what I can only call my revelation was already stirring, like a seed in the watered ground. As I will relate in its place.

God in His Trinity of subsistent relations infinitely transcends every shadow of selfishness. For the One God does not subsist apart and alone in His Nature; He subsists as Father and as Son and as Holy Ghost. These Three Persons are one, but apart from them God does not subsist also as One. He is not Three Persons plus one nature, therefore four! He is Three Persons, but One God. He is at once infinite solitude (one nature) and perfect society (Three Persons). One Infinite Love in three subsistent relations.

Groups were relatively easy to manipulate. Assess the synergies, conduct a few probing questions to test the water, and it was likely you could prod a mob into doing just about anything you wanted it to do. But put your figurative thumb on a single individual and it was like pressing down on a watermelon seed. They could go shooting off anywhere.

This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact. Erasmus Darwin was outrageously close to the mark: 'One and the same kind of living filaments has been the cause of all organic life.

Just as almonds may be sweet or bitter—the bitter varieties containing high levels of amygdalin, which turns into cyanide in the gut—apricot pits are also classified as sweet or bitter. Most varieties grown in the United States are cultivated for their fruit, and their pits are the bitter variety. But in the Mediterranean, it is easier to find so-called sweet pit or sweet kernel varieties. Split open the hard pit of a sweet variety and the kernel inside—the seed—looks and tastes much like the closely related sweet almond.

The relations of Peter Waldo with the Waldenses were so intimate that many called him the founder of a sect of that name, though others derive the name from the Alpine valleys, Vallenses, in which so many of those believers lived. It is true that Waldo was highly esteemed among them, but not possible that he should have been their founder, since they founded their faith and practice on the Scriptures and were followers of those who from the earliest times had done the same. For outsiders to give them the name of a man prominent among them was only to follow the usual habit of their opponents, who did not like to admit their right to call themselves, as they did, “Christians” or “brethren”. Peter Waldo continued his travels and eventually reached Bohemia, where he died (1217), having laboured there for years and sown much seed, the fruit of which was seen in the spiritual harvest in that country at the time of Huss and later.

Save perhaps for the inventing and scriptwriting of Armitage, for the comics publication Judge Dredd the Megazine, in which he delineated and developed the city of London in that futuristic and somewhat casually violent shared world. And possibly his novels in the Judge Dredd line from Virgin Books, being Deathmasques, The Medusa Seed and Wetworks. And possibly any amount of other comics-related material to boot. And his work for Virgin Books’ New Adventure and Missing Adventure lines, come to think of it, including Sky Pirates!, Death and Diplomacy, Burning Heart, and for their continuation (starring one-time companion Bernice Summerfield), Ship of Fools, Oblivion, The Mary-Sue Extrusion and Return to the Fractured Planet. Each and every one a fine and puissant piece of literature, so all in all it is a bit unfortunate that at least half of them are no longer in print. For the BBC he has written the novel Heart of TARDIS, the short story Moon Graffiti, subsequently released as one half of a BBC Radio Collection audio disc, and the very volume you currently hold, quite lovingly, in your hands. His work on Bernice, incidentally, continues more-or-less simultaneously with the release of the Big Finish novel The Infernal Nexus. Mr.

The Buddha grew up in a relatively well-to-do family. although there were some fucked up moments, his childhood was filled with lots of play. As he grew up, he adopted many archetypes which helped him develop his god-like nature. however, he grew dissatisfied due to his sheltered upbringing once he he laid his eyes on suffering he became utterly disgusted with the state of humanity he locked himself away for ten years in oblivion floating in the void to accumulate wisdom. awakened, he then set out to share his experiences and sew new seeds.

It seems therefore more advisable, and more becoming both the faith and piety of Adam, and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, who accurately relates those things, to understand by all living, both the Lord Christ, who is the fountain of life, and the elect, who, being united to him, are quickened by his Spirit. The woman was constituted the mother of these living, by the word of promise, by which she was expressly appointed to have that seed, who was to bruise the serpent’s head. Wherefore Adam, who by sin became the father of all who die, 1 Cor. 15:22, called his wife Eve, from his faith in God’s promise, believing, according to the word of God, that no man should have true life, but what would be derived from her. However, the original of this was not in the woman herself, but in the principal seed that was to descend from her.

A woman was not considered related to her own child by the bizarre laws of England. The man’s seed contained the whole of the baby, so they said, who nestled inside the woman for most of a year before she bore it. This made the child the father’s, not the mother’s.

Oil Is Not a Whole, Natural Food and Does Not Grow on Trees Although vegetable oils (such as olive, sesame, soybean, and canola oils) are relatively low in saturated fat and higher in unsaturated fats, you should use these processed foods minimally or not at all. Oils lack the beneficial factors that whole nuts and seeds contain. Nuts and seeds contain fiber, minerals, antioxidants, and other phytochemicals in addition to healthy fats that contribute to cardiovascular health.60 Most of these nutrients are missing in refined oils.

Buckwheat: Buckwheat is not related to wheat, so it is a favorable grain for wheat-sensitive people. It is also rich in protein and fiber and has been shown to lower cholesterol. Buckwheat groats can be soaked in advance and then used to make porridge, a seasoned side dish, or crackers. Kasha is toasted buckwheat. Millet: This versatile, gluten-free grain is a staple crop in India and Africa. Mildly sweet and nutty, it can be used in both main dishes and desserts. Depending on the length of time it is cooked, it can be slightly crunchy or soft and creamy. Serve it with stir-fried dishes, add it to salads, or make a breakfast porridge with cooked millet, nuts, seeds, and fruit. Quinoa: Although quinoa is usually considered a whole grain, it is actually a seed. It is a good protein source and cooks in just ten to fifteen minutes. Rinse quinoa before cooking because it is coated with a bitter compound called saponin. Quinoa tastes great by itself, or for a substantial salad, toss it with veggies, nuts, and a flavored vinegar or light dressing. It makes a great addition to veggie burgers and even works well in breakfast or dessert puddings.

Singh then experimented on a vast number of species, such as com­ mon asters, petunias, cosmos, and white spider lilies, along with such economic plants as onions, sesame, radishes, sweet potatoes, and tapioca. Each of these species Singh entertained for several weeks just before sunrise with more than half a dozen separate ragas, one per experiment, played on the flute, violin, harmonium, and veena; the music lasted a half hour daily, scaled at a high pitch, with frequencies between one hundred and six hundred cycles per second. From all this experimenta­tion Singh was able to state, in the magazine of the Bihar Agricultural College at Sabour, that he had "proven beyond any shadow of doubt that harmonic sound waves affect the growth, flowering, fruiting, and seed-yields of plants.

Revelation has been within us since the origin of the World. Let us not, indeed, be mistaken: since the origin of the world, all possibilities and all future ideas have been in existence, as seeds of potential. It is, therefore, not to the future that it is necessary to look for revelation but the power of our memory. The poet of the enlightened land who conceived in very ancient times the symbol of the Earthly Paradise: God saying, after Adam had touched the Tree of Science, “He has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”—which is to say, the for and the against, the androgynous idea—“now we must make sure that he does not touch the Tree of Life and live forever”, thus condemning man to material labor; was several thousand years ahead, not only of his own time, but of ours. Humankind, as a whole, cannot follow the fulgurant course of an Idea; its progress is slower and “forward thinkers”—precursors—have to have the patience to wait until everyone else’s ideas have caught up with theirs: a patience often difficult for the thinker who, after being madly elevated, must return to his point of departure and, estranged by what he has seen, feels like a foreigner visiting his own world. The usefulness of precursors. Is it necessary to conclude that these forward thinkers, these bold recognitions, are useless? Quite the contrary, for it is in bringing superhuman heroes to life, imagining the reality of facts whose prototypes remain latent in the world of ideas, that poets and researchers construct the frame of the world. Their exceptional follies of today will become the banality of tomorrow, and the crowd will eventually hasten to take the presently-accessible steps which they are carving out in the clouds—and that crowd, in its blind course, will have been upraised without knowing it. Without changing position, the opposition of yesterday becomes the reaction of tomorrow, the exception becomes the law in its turn; only the Idea is immutable through its successive incarnations, its changes of material form: the relativities, in a word, that we call Life. It is for us to extract the substance from the shadow and seize the eternal element of things.

I was making black films, but they were one dimensional. I pull my hand away and say, “Exactly! Why don’t you make a film about someone like me? Why did you pick a white boy?” “I have black LGBTQ scripts in development. But this one is just the first step for me. My financiers just wouldn’t go for a black LGBTQ story until I’ve seeded the ground with one they can relate to.

For the new covenant apostles, Jew-Gentile unity is pivotal to the early church. It is about more than human relational harmony. Instead, it acknowledges that God’s kingdom purposes are in Christ. He is the last man and the true Israel, the bearer of the Spirit. A Jewish person who clings to the tribal markings of the old covenant acts as though the eschaton has not arrived, as though one were still waiting for the promised seed. Both Jews and Gentiles must instead see their identities not in themselves or in the flesh but in Jesus Christ and in him alone. Jesus is the descendant of Abraham, the one who deserves the throne of David. He is the obedient Israel who inherits the blessings of the Mosaic covenant. He is the propitiation of God’s wrath. He is the firstborn from the dead, the resurrection and the life. Those who are in Christ – whether Jew or Gentile – receive with him all the eschatological blessings that are due to him. In him, they are all, whether Jew or Gentile, sons of God – not only in terms of relationship with the Father but also in terms of promised inheritance (Rom 8:12-17). In Christ, they all – whether Jew or Gentile – are sons of Abraham, the true circumcision, the holy nation, and the household and commonwealth of God (Gal 3:23-4:7; Eph 2-3; Col 2:6-15; 3:3-11; 1 Pet 2:9-10).…

Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.

Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern [89] natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the [90] seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.

[Work] is rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish. This pattern is found in all kinds of work. Farming takes the physical material of soil and seed and produces food. Music takes the physics of sound and rearranges it into something beautiful and thrilling that brings meaning to life. When we take fabric and make a piece of clothing, when we push a broom and clean up a room, when we use technology to harness the forces of electricity, when we take an unformed, naive human mind and teach it a subject, when we teach a couple how to resolve their relational disputes, when we take simple materials and turn them into a poignant work of art—we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development.

themselves in material things appropriate unto their nature. A positive mental attitude is the habit of looking upon all unpleasant circumstances with which one meets as merely opportunities for one to test one’s capacity to rise above them by searching for that “seed of an equivalent benefit” and putting it to work. A positive mental attitude is the habit of evaluating all problems, and distinguishing the difference between those one can master and those one cannot control. The person with a positive mental attitude endeavors to solve the problems he can control, and so relates himself to those he cannot control that they do not influence his mental attitude from positive to negative.

It already is. In March 2022, South Korea elected Yoon Suk-yeol as its new president. The conservative politician campaigned, in part, by seeding the internet with a deepfake version of himself, known as AI Yoon. This version, created by his younger campaign team, was funnier and more charming than the real Yoon. The Wall Street Journal reported that for some voters the fake politician—whose fakeness was not hidden—felt more authentic and appealing than the real one: “Lee Seong-yoon, a 23-year-old college student, first thought AI Yoon was real after viewing a video online. Watching Mr. Yoon talk at debates or on the campaign trail can be dull, he said. But he now finds himself consuming AI Yoon videos in his spare time, finding the digital version of the candidate more likable and relatable, in part because he speaks like someone his own age. He said he is voting for Mr. Yoon.”17 Yoon’s digital doppelganger was created by a Korean company called DeepBrain AI Inc.; John Son, one of its executives, remarked that their work is “a bit creepy, but the best way to explain it is we clone the person.

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it. “If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. “My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral, I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. My personal experience with Nazi monkey business was limited. There were some vile and lively native American Fascists in my home town of Indianapolis during the thirties, and somebody slipped me a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I remember, which was supposed to be the Jews' secret plan for taking over the world. And I remember some laughs about my aunt, too, who married a German German, and who had to write to Indianapolis for proofs that she had no Jewish blood. The Indianapolis mayor knew her from high school and dancing school, so he had fun putting ribbons and official seals all over the documents the Germans required, which made them look like eighteenth-century peace treaties. After a while the war came, and I was in it, and I was captured, so I got to see a little of Germany from the inside while the war was still going on. I was a private, a battalion scout, and, under the terms of the Geneva Convention, I had to work for my keep, which was good, not bad. I didn't have to stay in prison all the time, somewhere out in the countryside. I got to go to a city, which was Dresden, and to see the people and the things they did. There were about a hundred of us in our particular work group, and we were put out as contract labor to a factory that was making a vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. It tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke. It was good. I wish I had some right now. And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an 'open' city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then hundreds of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, and became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what? We didn't get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artefacts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long - ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will. The malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse miners, breaking into shelters, bringing bodies out. And I got to see many German types of all ages as death had found them, usually with valuables in their laps. Sometimes relatives would come to watch us dig. They were interesting, too. So much for Nazis and me. If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes. There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're dead. And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.

Beginning at dawn— with faint pink streaks across the sky— may the days be long…. Bright-white and blazing, breaking waves gild the sea at sunrise: from our bed on the bedrock I rise up singing: this the song of confidence— I am a husband…. Boys and girls splash at the sun all-dazzling on the water to catch the sun and clutch it— and flowers oftentimes possess a floating transparency you can see but cannot touch... tempered by cliffs and the inhumanness of rock I’ll stay, she promises, to watch your flower set beyond and go out, shining, of my own horizon…. A pair of butterflies in sunlight leap in breezy flutters of flight high above the seed-heads: sun-bright morning she heralds the people with fountains of melody gurgling from her voice in youth gathering siblings and elders together —to fly away with tears…. Grappling in the sweat of the ring you fall down on the net— a white-light kind of dying… to be on the bottom in a world full of others and to choose it for my place: until your window-frame be palace-clouds and glassy: I’ll wear the ring…. Then, when all was silence between us and we were to one another only a presence in the room— still I knew she was my wife: for I could recognize a relation there of age more than just the day I was born... and now here we are standing a pair meeting face to face….

O pious of the heart, I am lost in a love, so great O pain the hidden secrets will become open debate. Shipwrecked we just float, O favorable wind arise, May we one more time gaze upon that familiar trait. Passage of time and the stars, are but what we fantasize For compassion and kindness, it is never too late. In the circle of wine and roses, nightingale’s song is prize With the aroma and the wine your senses satiate. O Thou compassionate one, life giver and the wise One day bestow thy grace upon this mendicant’s state. For peace of this world and the next, understand what I advise Magnanimity the lot of friends, and with foes try to relate. In the land of repute, our passage they will dispute If this will not suit, don’t stay mute, and transmute dictates of fate. When destitute and in need, let your love and passion breed Life’s alchemy, essence and seed, unimagined wealth shall create. If unruly with pride, with a candle’s zeal your flame will rise Beloved turns stone to lava, and molten wax manipulate. The Grail contains but wine, if only you realize Then the Kingdom of the world, at your feet prostrate. The good and wise Magi, forgivers of lives and lies Bearer bring good news, drunkards’ wine consecrate. With this wine stained robe, Hafiz would never disguise O untainted pure Master, exempt us from this fate

The most important point for us here, however, is the relation of child activity to one of the basic elements of character; the habit of industry, with all that it means for success and happiness, springs directly from the restless activity of the child, as the plant springs from the seed. The tramp and the lazy man are persons in whom the precious shoot of activity has somehow been marred or broken beyond repair; the early activity has been wasted or repressed, and the vital habit that should have sprung from it is lost.

The Buddhist sage Shantideva says that every uncompassionate action is like planting a dead tree, but anything related to compassion is like planting a living tree. It grows and grows endlessly and never dies. Even if it seems to die, it always leaves behind a seed from which another grows. Compassion is organic; it continues on and on and on.

Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The

The urge to impose a single classification on SF ignores the generic hybridity of many novels: incorporation of the Gothic in The Island of Dr Moreau, of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Forbidden Planet, and so on. The rise of film coincides with the emergence of science fiction. The relation between SF fiction and film has included an ongoing fascination with spectacle and extraordinary special effects like those pioneered in Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).

One of the most recurrent themes in science fiction is its examination of humanity’s relation to its own material constructions, sometimes to celebrate progress, sometimes in a more negative spirit of what Isaac Asimov has repeatedly described as technophobia, through fictions articulating fears of human displacement.

In God's economy, you may even harvest a crop in places where you didn't plant seed. When you're generous, you will be blessed, whether it comes to you materially, spiritually, emotionally, relationally, or some other way. God obviously cares much more about what happens in our hearts than what happens in our bank accounts, more about our attitudes than our credit scores. Giving generously changes you. It frees you up, undermines the power that money and possessions can have over you, and it makes you more like Him.

Further out of regard to all other so-called rules, theory cannot banish the moral forces beyond its frontier, because the effects of the physical forces and the moral are completely fused, and are not to be decomposed like a metal alloy by a chemical process. In every rule relating to the physical forces, theory must present to the mind at the same time the share which the moral powers will have in it, if it would not be led to categorical propositions, at one time too timid and contracted, at another too dogmatical and wide. Even the most matter-of-fact theories have, without knowing it, strayed over into this moral kingdom; for, as an example, the effects of a victory cannot in any way be explained without taking into consideration the moral impressions. And therefore the most of the subjects which we shall go through in this book are composed half of physical, half of moral causes and effects, and we might say the physical are almost no more than the wooden handle, whilst the moral are the noble metal, the real bright-polished weapon. The value of the moral powers, and their frequently incredible influence, are best exemplified by history, and this is the most generous and the purest nourishment which the mind of the General can extract from it.—At the same time it is to be observed, that it is less demonstrations, critical examinations, and learned treatises, than sentiments, general impressions, and single flashing sparks of truth, which yield the seeds of knowledge that are to fertilise the mind.

Seed your opponent the angle you want them to play, because then the only way they'll sway is relative to giving them enough rope.

Realistic philosophy sees chaos as the earliest state of disorganized creation, blindly impelled towards the creation of a new order of phenomena of hidden meanings. Blavatsky, for example, asks: ‘What is primordial chaos but the ether containing within itself all forms and all beings, all the seeds of universal creation?’ Plato and the Pythagoreans maintained that this ‘primordial substance’ was the soul of the world, called protohyle by the alchemists. Thus, chaos is seen as that which embraces all opposing forces in a state of undifferentiated dissolution. In primordial chaos, according to Hindu tradition, one also meets Amrita—immortality—and Visha—evil and death (9). In alchemy, chaos was identified with prime matter and thought to be a massa confusa from which the lapis would arise; it was related to the colour black. It has also been identified with the unconscious.

The work of a revolutionary is more like that of a gardener than a builder. The new world will not be brought about overnight - its seeds have to be planted, nurtured, and protected. As we have seen, there already exist plenty of spaces in which people are working to build alternatives to the current system - despite resistance from those who benefit from the status quo. Even though both failed, the Lucas Plan and Project Cybersyn were two of the most ambitious examples of such work. Both took place during a period when it had begun to seem as though capitalist social relations might not last forever - when working people began to realize that the only thing standing between them and self-governance, between them and real freedom, was capital itself. It is up to us to continue the legacy of those projects, to peer through the fissures that exist within the current system and work together to prize them open, to let the light in. For us, the rewards are less concrete than those won by the early capitalists. They are rewards that accrue to all, not just to a privileged few: the protection of the planet we rely on to survive, an end to the psychic trauma of living in a world marked by such deep and pervasive suffering and alienation, and a world in which every human being has the chance to flourish into their fullest selves.

Is it enough to live in a universe whose laws spontaneously create life? Or do you prefer ... God?” She paused, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, after all we’ve been through tonight, I know that’s a strange question.” “Well,” Langdon said with a laugh, “I think my answer would benefit from a decent night’s sleep. But no, it’s not strange. People ask me all the time if I believe in God.” “And how do you reply?” “I reply with the truth,” he said. “I tell them that, for me, the question of God lies in understanding the difference between codes and patterns.” Ambra glanced over. “I’m not sure I follow you.” “Codes and patterns are very different from each other,” Langdon said. “And a lot of people confuse the two. In my field, it’s crucial to understand their fundamental difference.” “That being?” Langdon stopped walking and turned to her. “A pattern is any distinctly organized sequence. Patterns occur everywhere in nature—the spiraling seeds of a sunflower, the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb, the circular ripples on a pond when a fish jumps, et cetera.” “Okay. And codes?” “Codes are special,” Langdon said, his tone rising. “Codes, by definition, must carry information. They must do more than simply form a pattern—codes must transmit data and convey meaning. Examples of codes include written language, musical notation, mathematical equations, computer language, and even simple symbols like the crucifix. All of these examples can transmit meaning or information in a way that spiraling sunflowers cannot.” Ambra grasped the concept, but not how it related to God. “The other difference between codes and patterns,” Langdon continued, “is that codes do not occur naturally in the world. Musical notation does not sprout from trees, and symbols do not draw themselves in the sand. Codes are the deliberate inventions of intelligent consciousnesses.” Ambra nodded. “So codes always have an intention or awareness behind them.” “Exactly. Codes don’t appear organically; they must be created.” Ambra studied him a long moment. “What about DNA?” A professorial smile appeared on Langdon’s lips. “Bingo,” he said. “The genetic code. That’s the paradox.” Ambra felt a rush of excitement. The genetic code obviously carried data — specific instructions on how to build organisms. By Langdon’s logic, that could mean only one thing. “You think DNA was created by an intelligence!” Langdon held up a hand in mock self-defense. “Easy, tiger!” he said, laughing. “You’re treading on dangerous ground. Let me just say this. Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the gut sense that there’s a consciousness behind the universe. When I witness the precision of mathematics, the reliability of physics, and the symmetries of the cosmos, I don’t feel like I’m observing cold science; I feel as if I’m seeing a living footprint ... the shadow of some greater force that is just beyond our grasp.