Simple Capacity Quotes

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Dare to dream! If you did not have the capability to make your wildest wishes come true, your mind would not have the capacity to conjure such ideas in the first place. There is no limitation on what you can potentially achieve, except for the limitation you choose to impose on your own imagination. What you believe to be possible will always come to pass - to the extent that you deem it possible. It really is as simple as that.

We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Somos capaces de tomar decisiones muy estúpidas por el simple hecho de sentirnos momentáneamente felices.

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression.

Why does Homer give us descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets. Because he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally simple: if someone simply possesses the capacity to see a living game going on continually and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then the man is a poet; if someone simply feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge…it would not be the source of necessary truths…

Two bodies attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance.' It sounds like a rule for simple physical facts, does it not? Yet it is nothing of the sort; it was the poetical way the old ones had of expressing the rule of propinquity which governs the emotion of love. The bodies referred to are human bodies, mass is their capacity for love. Young people have a greater capacity for love than the elderly; when thy are thrown together they fall in love, yet when they are separated they soon get over it. 'Out of sight, out of mind.' It's as simple as that. But you were seeking some deep meaning for it.

I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.

Money is nothing more than a reflection of your creativity, your capacity to focus, and your ability to add value and receive back.

The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things.

Your soul has a resiliency and a capacity to endure suffering that is beyond anything you can imagine.

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." - Socrates

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,' Kynes said. 'You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. It's aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.

He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical, without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into simple charlatanism.

My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.

Here’s another. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You’ve destroyed architecture. Build Lois Cook and you’ve destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you’ve destroyed the theatre. Glorify Lancelot Clankey and you’ve destroyed the press. Don’t set out to raze all shrines – you’ll frighten men, Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed. Then there’s another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humour is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul – and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set no limits to obedience – anything goes – nothing is too serious.

At the end of the day, developing goodness comes down to a simple question: Will this emotion, thought or action, increase or decrease my capacity for goodness?

When you’re serving just because you can, the work is useful and beneficial and good. But you’ll stay committed to it only as long as it stays convenient. By contrast, when you’re serving in a capacity where you feel called, you’ll move heaven and earth if you have to, to see it through.

It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn’t destroy us, if it doesn’t burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.

They made a simple enough mistake. The same one we’re making. They founded their society on resource extraction, and in doing so, inflated their population beyond the carrying capacity of the land.

The hoodlum-occultist is “sociopathic” enough to, see through the conventional charade, the social mythology of his species. “They’re all sheep,” he thinks. “Marks. Suckers. Waiting to be fleeced.” He has enough contact with some more-or-less genuine occult tradition to know a few of the gimmicks by which “social consciousness,” normally conditioned consciousness, can be suspended. He is thus able to utilize mental brutality in place of the simple physical brutality of the ordinary hooligan. He is quite powerless against those who realize that he is actually a stupid liar. He is stupid because spending your life terrorizing and exploiting your inferiors is a dumb and boring existence for anyone with more than five billion brain cells. Can you imagine Beethoven ignoring the heavenly choirs his right lobe could hear just to pound on the wall and annoy the neighbors? Gödel pushing aside his sublime mathematics to go out and cheat at cards? Van Gogh deserting his easel to scrawl nasty caricatures in the men’s toilet? Mental evil is always the stupidest evil because the mind itself is not a weapon but a potential paradise. Every kind of malice is a stupidity, but occult malice is stupidest of all. To the extent that the mindwarper is not 100 percent charlatan through-and-through (and most of them are), to the extent that he has picked up some real occult lore somewhere, his use of it for malicious purposes is like using Shakespeare’s sonnets for toilet tissue or picking up a Picasso miniature to drive nails. Everybody who has advanced beyond the barbarian stage of evolution can see how pre-human such acts are, except the person doing them. Genuine occult initiation confers “the philosopher’s stone,” “the gold of the wise” and “the elixir of life,” all of which are metaphors for the capacity to greet life with the bravery and love and gusto that it deserves. By throwing this away to indulge in spite, malice and the small pleasure of bullying the credulous, the mindwarper proves himself a fool and a dolt. And the psychic terrorist, besides being a jerk, is always a liar and a fraud. Healing is easier (and more fun) than cursing, to begin with, and cursing usually backfires or misfires. The mindwarper doesn’t want you to know that. He wants you to think he’s omnipotent.

I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.

You are rich if you have enough money to satisfy all your desires. So there are two ways to be rich: You earn, inherit, borrow, beg, or steal enough money to meet all your desires; or, you cultivate a simple lifestyle of few desires; that way you always have enough money. “A peaceful warrior has the insight and discipline to choose the simple way — to know the difference between needs and wants. We have few basic needs but endless wants. Full attention to every moment is my pleasure. Attention costs no money; your only investment is training. That’s another advantage of being a warrior, Dan — it’s cheaper! The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” I

Even death is a power, a capacity. It is not a simple event that will happen to me, an objective and observable fact; here my power to be will cease, here I will no longer be able to be here. But death, insofar as it belongs to me and belongs to me alone, since no one can die my death in my stead or in my place, makes of this non-possibility, this impending future of mine, this relation to myself always open until my end, yet another power. Dying, I can still die, this is our sign as man.

The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.

But dignity is also corroded by poverty no matter how poetically we invest the humble with simple graces and charm. No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society. The

He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species--sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain.

But this was how I'd always been... finite in my capacity for tolerating simple day-to-day contact. I could handle it just fine, all the way up to the point that I couldn't anymore, as if I existed on a tether, and not a particularly long one, finding myself able to wonder only so far into the territory of another human being before snapping back into myself.

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore--a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.

Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market? On one level the difference between an obligation and a debt is simple and obvious. A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal-which, in turn, allows them to be transferable. If one owes a favor, or one’s life, to another human being-it is owed to that person specifically. But if one owes forty thousand dollars at 12-percent interest, it doesn’t really matter who the creditor is; neither does either of the two parties have to think much about what the other party needs, wants, is capable of doing-as they certainly would if what was owed was a favor, or respect, or gratitude. One does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only calculate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest. If you end up having to abandon your home and wander in other provinces, if your daughter ends up in a mining camp working as a prostitute, well, that’s unfortunate, but incidental to the creditor. Money is money, and a deal’s a deal. From this perspective, the crucial factor, and a topic that will be explored at length in these pages, is money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic-and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The factor of violence, which I have been emphasizing up until now, may appear secondary. The difference between a “debt” and a mere moral obligation is not the presence or absence of men with weapons who can enforce that obligation by seizing the debtor’s possessions or threatening to break his legs. It is simply that a creditor has the means to specify, numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes.

Allow me to share one simple and very frightening truth with you: your real enemy is someone who knows you. And the better they know you, and the closer they are to you, the greater is their capacity to do you harm. Total strangers who get a little angry and lose control at sporting events are no real threat, if the proper caution is used. Protective fathers of pretty fourteen-year-old girls will shout and sputter, get loud and use strong language, but in the end they will retreat into their warm houses and leave you alone. But a person who shares a part of your life, who lives with you and knows all your habits and has a keen insight into what you value most in all the world - this is the person to fear.

Willpower is what separates us from the animals. It’s the capacity to restrain our impulses, resist temptation — do what’s right and good for us in the long run, not what we want to do right now. It’s central, in fact, to civilization. —Roy Baumeister

This limits, or even eliminates, their capacity to be empathic and remorseful. You may have heard the term “narcissistic injury.” This refers to the dynamic wherein, for a narcissist, saying a simple “I’m sorry” is like saying, “I am the worst human being on earth.

Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we with our capacity to love that fives meaning to the indifferent universe, and yet most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy from simple things.

She communicated in what ways she could – sweet whines of happiness and wet kisses. She knew him. She knew him. He knelt in the grass, still pouring his attention onto her. She received every ounce of it in a way only a dog can, its unconditional love contained in every breath and every heartbeat. And Luke was struck precisely at that moment at his capacity to feel so moved by the simple act of affection for this sweet animal. He swallowed hard. It wasn’t easy to let himself feel it, the gentle tug from a place deeply buried. And in the grass on his knees, he found himself releasing the sadness long held hostage in that deep place. Tears spilled over, finally uncontained. The dog stretched its snout through the rails and found his wet cheeks with its tongue. He did not retreat, but let her clean the tears from his face.

But the subordination must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited, of all the toilers, i.e., to the proletariat. Measures must be taken at once, overnight, to substitute for the specific methods of "official administration" by state officials the simple functions of "workmen and managers," functions which are already fully within the capacity of the average city dweller and can well be performed for "workmen's wages.

It’s really simple. People what to be where they feel valued and where they have the full capacity to provide value. When people have that, they stay. When they don’t, they leave. Companies that provide this to employees experience retention. Companies that don’t, experience attrition.

Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin. The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that’s part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather’s time, committed great evil. In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

Al fin y al cabo, la vida empieza y termina en la inconsciencia, de modo que las acciones que llevamos a cabo en plena consciencia no son sino islotes en un archipiélago de sueños. Sería tan absurdo reducir la vida a la vigilia como considerar que la realidad está hecha de bloques lisos y perceptibles en lugar de ser un enjambre cambiante de partículas de energía y materia vibrátil, por el mero hecho de que no somos capaces de observarlas a simple vista.

...each day I sit down in purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it takes, the difficulty of this act. It requires an almost perfect concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no way to learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it but I have a sense that it's completely simply, on the order of being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain't boredom, it's fear of what's possible, how much you can know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I move around, my mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and roll them through my brain, move with them into their interiors, feel their colors, touch what's under them, where they come from long ago and way back. I get frightened seeing what's in my own mind if words get put to it. There's a light there, it's bright, it's wide, it could make you blind if you look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened and I run and the only way to run is to abandon the process altogether or compromise it beyond recognition. I think about Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don't know why he didn't run, he should've. It's a quality you have to have of being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably break things with the power in your mind. You got to be able to stand it, because it's a powerful and disturbing light, not something easy and kind, it comes through your head to make its way onto the page and you get fucking scared so your mind runs away, it wanders, it gets distracted, it buckles, it deserts, it takes a Goddamn freight train if it can find one, it wants calming agents and sporifics, and you mask that you are betraying the brightest and the best light you will ever see, you are betraying the mind that can be host to it... ...Your mind does stupid tricks to mask that you are betraying something of grave importance. It wanders so you won't notice that you are deserting your own life, abandoning it to triviality and garbage, how you are too fucking afraid to use your own brain for what it's for, which is to be a host to the light, to use it, to focus it; let it shine and carry the burden of what is illuminated, everything buried there; the light's scarier than anything it shows, the pure, direct experience of it in you as if your mind ain't the vegetable thing it's generally conceived to be or the nightmare thing you know it to be but a capacity you barely imagined, real; overwhelming and real, pushing you out to the edge of ecstasy and knowing and then do you fall or do you jump or do you fly?

The holy scriptures and the spoken word of the living prophets give emphasis to the fundamental principles and doctrines of the gospel. The reason we return to these foundational principles, to the pure doctrines, is because they are the gateway to truths of profound meaning. They are the door to experiences of sublime importance that would otherwise be beyond our capacity to comprehend. These simple, basic principles are the key to living in harmony with God and man. They are the keys to opening the windows of heaven. They lead us to the peace, joy, and understanding that Heavenly Father has promised to His children who hear and obey Him.

None of the neighbouring ladies would stand as godmother, for they were secretly dubious as to the children's origin; so he had asked good Mrs. Spaniel to act in that capacity. She, a simple kindly creature, was much flattered, though certainly she can have understood very little of the symbolical rite. Gissing, filling out the form that Mr. Poodle had given him, had put down the names of an entirely imaginary brother and sister-in-law of his, "deceased," whom he asserted as the parents.

In our own day anonymity has acquired a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized: it has an almost epigrammatic significance. People not only write anonymously, they sign their anonymous works: they even talk anonymously...Nowadays one can talk with any one, and it must be admitted that people's opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity. The same person will say the most contradictory things and, with the utmost calm, make a remark, which coming from him is a bitter satire on his own life. The remark itself may be sensible enough, and of the kind that sounds well at a meeting, and may serve in a discussion preliminary to coming to a decision, in much the same way that paper is made out of rags. But all these opinions put together do not make one human, personal opinion such as you may hear from quite a simple man who talks about very little but really does talk. People's remarks are so objective, so all all-inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses them, and where human speech is concerned that is the same as acting 'on principle'. And so our talk becomes like the public, a pure abstraction. There is no longer any one who knows how to talk, and instead, objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous, just as machinery makes man superfluous. In Germany they even have phrase-books for the use of lovers, and it will end with lovers sitting together talking anonymously. In fact there are hand-books for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.

These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity—a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination. This just means that people make up their values, that they aren’t handed down from the past or from on high. This humanist ideal is what intersects and animates liberalism with moral energy. The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

People often ask me: What are your goals and hopes and dreams for Benj? And the answer is so simple: That he be seen whole against the sky. That he not suffer beyond his and my capacity to bear it. That he be allowed to enjoy the pleasures of "his own private nook" and come out of that nook for joyful engagement with others. That he always hold on to his visionary gleam, his bright radiance.

In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

In the end, it is not the power of the mind nor the strengths of the body but the instincts of the human heart that save the world. It is the simple human capacity for mercy that finally allows evil to be overthrown.

This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.

The important human quest should not be to promote cooperation. That goal is relatively simple and firmly founded on our self-domestication and moral senses. The harder challenge is reducing our capacity for organized violence.

You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax. —Nicholas Kristof

I love a man who tickles me awake with reality, and kisses me goodnight with fiction Braids my hair with simplicity to compliment my contradiction And calms the waging wars inside with a simple boyish look For he is as much a mystery as he is an open book When I am at my worst, I am beautiful by his side He draws me in yet keeps me free, the moon to my tide He relishes my quirks and antics just as much I love to keep him frantic And if I ever fall, he doesn’t catch me right away Because he knows I’ll glide And even more so, knows how much I enjoy the ride… With the strength I lack, he holds my insecurity safe in-between his fingers And if there is ever a doubt while I am out running about His steady grip lingers He drives me crazy just as much as he keeps me sane And has the wisdom to keep me wild knowing I’ll die if ever tame So when I am far, he frets not, because he knows he’s my favorite destination If ever I am down, he joins me on the ground and points out my favorite constellations He catches my sighs and lackluster replies With ageless humor and tenacity I draw blanks at his capacity And challenge his audacity But He wins because despite my stubbornness he is persistent Yet forever fails because he belongs to nonexistent

For my part, I ignored her jibes, as I had long ago formed the opinion that it is best never to notice children at all in any capacity lest they take a simple greeting as an overture for discussion -- or worse yet, touching by grubby, sweet-sticky fingers.

Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood. There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone. Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.

Greed subsumes love and compassion; living simply makes room for them. Living simply is the primary way everyone can resist greed every day. All over the world people are becoming more aware of the importance of living simply and sharing resources. While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter. We can all resist the temptation of greed. We can work to change public policy, electing leaders who are honest and progressive. We can turn off the television set. We can show respect for love. To save our planet we can stop thoughtless waste. We can recycle and support ecologically advanced survival strategies. We can celebrate and honor communalism and interdependency by sharing resources. All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life. When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love. It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community.

Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my everlasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there's nothing learned, nothing gained. It's simple, but it's cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

Since it has pleased God to endue us with some capacity of reason, to the end we may not, like brutes, be servilely subject and enslaved to the laws common to both, but that we should by judgment and a voluntary liberty apply ourselves to them, we ought, indeed, something to yield to the simple authority of nature, but not suffer ourselves to be tyrannically hurried away and transported by her; reason alone should have the conduct of our inclinations. I, for my part, have a strange disgust for those propensions that are started in us without the mediation and direction of the judgment.

There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,” Kynes said. “You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system’s capacity to sustain life. Life—all life—is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.” This

What is the most helpful thing we can do for the earth and her people, Kuan Yin?” “Kuan Yin is changing shape in response to your question, Hope. I’m not sure what this particular shape-shifting means, if it is an answer in itself or if she is adjusting to the question” Lena contemplates. “I’ll just watch for a moment and try to understand.” “Loving people is the most helpful thing anyone can do,” Kuan Yin answers after a short while. “Your society has the resources, at this very moment, to fashion industries and lifestyles conducive to a non-harmful environment. There is a popular belief that over-population is the threat to the earth’s environment. However, for many places upon the earth it is also very much a question of resource availability and distribution. There is a real need for creating a holistic infrastructure that can support everyone. A helpful mindset is simple-living and high-thinking”, continues Kuan Yin. “Science is constantly evolving. There are now recyclable batteries, ink cartridges, etc. Keep up to date on the latest technologies. Be aware, set examples and create trends that will positively influence people’s lives and the environment. As I said earlier, however, this is also a discussion about love and developing a greater capacity to love. It can help everyone. We’re all one huge family, a great continuum. Don’t underestimate the power of the love created in your homes and families. This love has an immense potency, the power to influence others lives in a positive way.

She did not like bigots or brilliant bores or academicians who wore their honors, or scholars who wore their doctorates, like dogtags. But she had an infinite capacity to love peasants and children and great but simple causes across the board and a grace in giving that was itself gratitude and she had a body like sculpture in the thinnest of wire and a face made of a million mosaics in a gauze-web of cubes lighter than air and a piñata of a heart in the center of a mobile at fiesta time with bits of her soul swirling in the breeze in honor of life and love and Good Morning to you, Bon Jour, Muy Buenos, Muy Buenos! Muy Buenos! On Nancy Cunard

Things I've Learned in 18 Years of Life   1) True love is not something found, rather [sic] something encountered. You can’t go out and look for it. The person you marry and the person you love could easily be two different people. So have a beautiful life while waiting for God to bring along your once-in-a-lifetime love. Don't allow yourself to settle for anything less than them. Stop worrying about who you're going to marry because God's already on the front porch watching your grandchildren play.   2) God WILL give you more than you can handle, so you can learn to lean on him in times of need. He won't tempt you more than you can handle, though. So don't lose hope. Hope anchors the soul.   3) Remember who you are and where you came from. Remember that you are not from this earth. You are a child of heaven, you're invaluable, you are beautiful. Carry yourself that way.   4) Don't put your faith in humanity, humanity is inherently flawed. We are all imperfect people created and loved by a perfect God. Perfect. So put your faith in Him.   5) I fail daily, and that is why I succeed.   6) Time passes, and nothing and everything changes. Don't live life half asleep. Don't drag your soul through the days. Feel everything you do. Be there physically and mentally. Do things that make you feel this way as well.   7) Live for beauty. We all need beauty, get it where you can find it. Clothing, paintings, sculptures, music, tattoos, nature, literature, makeup. It's all art and it's what makes us human. Same as feeling the things we do. Stay human.   8) If someone makes you think, keep them. If someone makes you feel, keep them.   9) There is nothing the human brain cannot do. You can change anything about yourself that you want to. Fight for it. It's all a mental game.   10) God didn’t break our chains for us to be bound again. Alcohol, drugs, depression, addiction, toxic relationships, monotony and repetition, they bind us. Break those chains. Destroy your past and give yourself new life like God has given you.   11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's.   12) There is no wrong way to feel.   13) Knowledge is everywhere, keep your eyes open. Look at how diverse and wonderful this world is. Are you going to miss out on beautiful people, places, experiences, and ideas because you are close-minded? I sure hope not.   14) Selfless actions always benefit you more than the recipient.   15) There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on.   16) There is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional well-being.   17) If the question is ‘Am I strong enough for this?’ The answer is always, ‘Yes, but not on your own.’   18) Mental health and sanity above all.   19) We love because He first loved us. The capacity to love is the ultimate gift, the ultimate passion, euphoria, and satisfaction. We have all of that because He first loved us. If you think about it in those terms, it is easy to love Him. Just by thinking of how much He loves us.   20) From destruction comes creation. Beauty will rise from the ashes.   21) Many things can cause depression. Such as knowing you aren't becoming the person you have the potential to become. Choose happiness and change. The sooner the better, and the easier.   22) Half of happiness is as simple as eating right and exercising. You are one big chemical reaction. So are your emotions. Give your body the right reactants to work with and you'll be satisfied with the products.

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

The principal reason for this limited mastery of materials was the energy constraint: for millennia our abilities to extract, process, and transport biomaterials and minerals were limited by the capacities of animate prime movers (human and animal muscles) aided by simple mechanical devices and by only slowly improving capabilities of the three ancient mechanical prime movers: sails, water wheels, and wind mills. Only the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuels to the inexpensive and universally deployable kinetic energy of mechanical prime movers (first by external combustion of coal to power steam engines, later by internal combustion of liquids and gases to energize gasoline and Diesel engines and, later still, gas turbines) brought a fundamental change and ushered in the second, rapidly ascending, phase of material consumption, an era further accelerated by generation of electricity and by the rise of commercial chemical syntheses producing an enormous variety of compounds ranging from fertilizers to plastics and drugs.

Es raro que nosotros, capaces de tanto sufrimiento, tengamos que infligir tanto sufrimiento. Es raro que la cara de una persona, a la que no conozco aun cuando creo que en cierta ocasión coincidimos en la pasarela de un buque que iba a zarpar rumbo al África -una simple aglomeración de ojos, mejillas y aletas de nariz-, tenga el poder de injuriarnos. Tú miras, comes, sonríes, te aburres, te deleitas, te irritas... Esto es cuanto sé. Sin embargo, esta sombra que se ha sentado junto a mí durante una o dos horas, esta máscara a cuyo través dos ojos miran, tiene el poder de hacerme regresar, de fijarme entre esas otras caras, de encerrarme dentro de una ardiente cámara, de mandarme volando, como una polilla, de vela en vela.

To get rid of a few problems in general health, to increase one's capacity for work, to make one's character gentler and stronger, to free oneself of various complexes, to create in oneself a whole atmosphere of calm and silence, and to do this by exercises in a gymnastic of repose and by a simple but careful method of breath-control - such aims may appear humble enough, rather down to earth, and a far cry form the goal of even the most modest of yogis. Yet I am certain that they will be able to work real miracles here in the West; to change lives and temperaments completely, making them healthier, more open; to increase their degree of engagement; and to render them more receptive to impulses and promptings from heaven.

Ace is right to select this simple yet special film, for it reminds Porter that what most matters is not those things for which either politics or materialism tells us to strive, that what matters is fulfilling those four capacities with which we’re born—love, hope, faith, and respect for the truth—while holding fast to the humility of the very young, which too often we leave behind with childhood.

Balancing so many things at once means that too often we only skim across the surface of an issue. As our concentration span shrinks, we risk losing the capacity to think about things carefully, to consider their complexity, to examine their long-term implications. We can become drawn to the elevator pitch, to the simple explanation, to the quick fix. At the same time, we become less capable of genuinely listening to one another, as

No less dispiriting to FDR than the actual defeat on the World Court treaty was the manner of its accomplishment. As Coughlin moved to consolidate and wield his political influence, he exhibited a wicked genius for unsealing some of the dankest chambers of the national soul. He played guilefully on his followers' worst instincts: their suspicious provincialism, their unworldly ignorance, their yearning for simple explanations and extravagant remedies for their undeniable problems, their readiness to believe in conspiracies, their sulky resentments, and their all too human capacity for hatred. The National Union for Social Justice remained an inchoate entity in early 1935, and Coughlin's sustainable political strength was still a matter of conjecture. But if the Radio Priest could succeed in shepherding his followers into an alliance with some of the other dissident protest movements

Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people? Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Knowing the hard limits to our cognitive capacity and the huge cost of working long hours should not be an intractable problem to address. We have a century of data and a roll call of the disastrous consequences that follow those who insist that heroic hours are a proof of commitment to an employer. Companies that measure work by hours could make themselves smarter by the simple act of measuring contribution by output and rewarding those who go home.

Once, before I had you, I saw you. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. I was pregnant and standing alone outside a party, and when you kicked, I shut my eyes and saw you on a beach we would arrive at almost five years later. You were facing the water and wearing your blue swimsuit and I knew, from the curve in your spine and the nut brown of your skin, that you were mine to protect like nothing else ever will be. So when you first started asking me hard questions, the ones about America and your place here, I wanted to find you the right answers - the kind that would make you feel good, welcome, and loved. I thought if I could just remember the country I'd been raised to believe in, the one I was sure I would eventually get to, I'd be able to get us back there. Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything. I can't protect you from becoming a brown man in America. I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't. Even now, just writing that down, I want to say something that will make it okay, or even make it make sense, but I can't. Will they ever really understand it themselves? Will they ever change? I have no idea. Our burden is how much we might love them anyway. And this is maybe the part I worry about the most, how the weight of that will twist you into someone you don't want to be, or worse, make you ashamed of your own heart. I hope you will remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. I hope you will remember that your heart is a good one, and that your capacity to feel love, in all its complexity, is a gift.

As for 'abstract analysis in search of the ‘simple’ and elemental', that is a more important matter. To begin with, 'simple' must not be taken in an absolute sense; 'simpler' would be a better word. Of course, I should be glad to reach the absolutely simple, but I do not believe that that is within human capacity. What I do maintain is that, whenever anything is complex, out knowledge is advanced by discovering constituents of it, even if these constituents themselves are still complex.

Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm... a one; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure..." Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insights endurance, and our capacity or attention. In difficult beauty, one often encourages intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness - the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle - that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.

The more we understand what reading is for us, the more we can enjoy intimate relationships with a few works only. Our libraries can be simple. Instead of always broaching new material, re-reading might become crucial, the reinforcement of what we already know but tend so often to forget. The truly well-read person isn’t the one who has read a gargantuan number of books, it’s someone who has let themselves be shaped – deeply shaped in their capacity to live and die well – by a very few well-chosen ones.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter desperation of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?” It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts. It’s such a simple thing, but we all know the power of gratitude to incite a cycle of reciprocity. If my girls run out the door with lunch in hand without a “Thanks, Mama!” I confess I get to feeling a tad miserly with my time and energy. But when I get a hug of appreciation, I want to stay up late to bake cookies for tomorrow’s lunch bag. We know that appreciation begets abundance. Why should it not be so for Mother Earth, who packs us a lunch every single day?

So on 6 February 1685, the new king, James II, ascended the throne in the face of sustained and organized opposition from Shaftesbury and the Whigs. He was fifty-two years of age and in vigorous health. He had already proved himself to be determined and decisive; he had remained faithful to his Catholic beliefs despite every attempt to persuade him otherwise. He was more resolute and more trustworthy than his brother, but he lacked Charles’s geniality and perceptiveness. He seemed to have no great capacity for compromise and viewed the world about him in the simple terms of light and darkness; there was the monarchy and authority on on side, with republicanism and disorder on the other. His manner was stiff and restrained, his temper short.

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The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy down town streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results. The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.

Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). ... The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills. The literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable with ambiguity; ... . The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls "integrative complexity". In one study, conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head. ... Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance.

Even seemingly simple scenarios of genetic screening force us to enter arenas of unnerving moral hazard. Take Friedman’s example of using a blood test to screen soldiers for genes that predispose to PTSD. At first glance, such a strategy would seem to mitigate the trauma of war: soldiers incapable of “fear extinction” might be screened and treated with intensive psychiatric therapies or medical therapies to return them to normalcy. But what if, extending the logic, we screen soldiers for PTSD risk before deployment? Would that really be desirable? Do we truly want to select soldiers incapable of registering trauma, or genetically “augmented” with the capacity to extinguish the psychic anguish of violence? Such a form of screening would seem to me to be precisely undesirable: a mind incapable of “fear extinction” is exactly the dangerous sort of mind to be avoided in war.

To become a Compassionate One is to become the likeness of the Compassionate God experiencing infinite sadness over undisclosed virtualities; it is to embrace, in a total religious sympathy, the theophanies of these divine Names in all faiths. But this sympathy, precisely, does not signify acceptance of their limits; it signifies rather that in opening ourselves to them we open them to the expansion that the primordial divine sym- pathesis demands of them; that we increase their divine light to the maximum; that we "emancipate" them-as the divine Compassion did in pre-eternity-that is, emancipate them from the virtuality and the ignorance which still confine them in their narrow intransigence. By thus taking them in hand, religious sympathy enables them to escape from the impasse, that is, the sin of metaphysical idolatry. For this sympathy alone renders a being accessible to the light of theophanies. Mankind discloses the refusal of the divine Names in many forms, ranging from atheism pure and simple to fanaticism with all its variants. All come from the same ignorance of the infinite divine Sadness, yearning to find a compassionate servant for His divine Names. The Gnostic's apprenticeship consists in learning to practice fidelity to his own Lord, that is, to the divine Name with which he, in his essential being, is invested, but at the same time to hear the precept of Ibn •Arabi: "Let thy soul be as matter for all forms of all beliefs. " One who has risen to that capacity is an • arif, an initiate, "one who through God sees in God with the eye of God. "Those who accept and those who decline are subject to the same authority: the God in function of whom you live is He for whom you bear witness, and your testimony is also the judgment you pronounce on yourself.

Burke was not a sentimentalist, however.43 “Leave a man to his passions,” he wrote, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.”44 Rather, he argued that while politics does answer to reason, human reason does not interact directly with the world but is always mediated by our imagination, which helps us to give order and shape to the data we derive from our senses. One way or another, reason applies through the sentiments and passions, so it is crucial to tend to what he calls our “moral imagination” because left untended, it will direct our reason toward violence and disorder.45 The dark side of our sentiments is mitigated not by pure reason, but by more beneficent sentiments. We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country. And part of the statesman’s difficult charge is keeping this balance together, acting rationally on this understanding of the limits of reason. “The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a statesman,” Burke asserts.46 It is for Burke another reason why politics can never be reduced to a simple application of logical axioms. As Burke’s contemporary William Hazlitt put it: “[Burke] knew that man had affections and passions and powers of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and cold. . . . He knew that the rules that form the basis of private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.

Sadhana The body responds the moment it is in touch with the earth. That is why spiritual people in India walked barefoot and always sat on the ground in a posture that allowed for maximum area of contact with the earth. In this way, the body is given a strong experiential reminder that it is just a part of this earth. Never is the body allowed to forget its origins. When it is allowed to forget, it often starts making fanciful demands; when it is constantly reminded, it knows its place. This contact with the earth is a vital reconnection of the body with its physical source. This restores stability to the system and enhances the human capacity for rejuvenation greatly. This explains why there are so many people who claim that their lives have been magically transformed just by taking up a simple outdoor activity like gardening. Today, the many artificial ways in which we distance ourselves from the earth—in the form of pavements and multi-storied structures, or even the widespread trend of wearing high heels—involves an alienation of the part from the whole and suffocates the fundamental life process. This alienation manifests in large-scale autoimmune disorders and chronic allergic conditions. If you tend to fall sick very easily, you could just try sleeping on the floor (or with minimal organic separation between yourself and the floor). You will see it will make a big difference. Also, try sitting closer to the ground. Additionally, if you can find a tree that looks lively to you, in terms of an abundance of fresh leaves or flowers, go spend some time around it. If possible, have your breakfast or lunch under that tree. As you sit under the tree, remind yourself: “This very earth is my body. I take this body from the earth and give it back to the earth. I consciously ask Mother Earth now to sustain me, hold me, keep me well.” You will find your body’s ability to recover is greatly enhanced. Or if you have turned all your trees into furniture, collect some fresh soil and cover your feet and hands with it. Stay that way for twenty to thirty minutes. This could help your recovery significantly.

The general public, however intelligent, are struck only by that which it takes little trouble to understand. They have been told that the interior of the body is something more or less like the contents of a vessel filled with wine, and that this interior is not injured — that we do not become ill, except when germs, originally created morbid, penetrate into it from without, and then become microbes. “The public do not know whether this is true; they do not even know what a microbe is, but they take it on the word of the master; they believe it because it is simple and easy to understand; they believe and they repeat that the microbe makes us ill without inquiring further, because they have not the leisure — nor, perhaps, the capacity — to probe to the depths that which they are asked to believe. –Preface to La Théorie du Microzyma, as quoted in Béchamp or Pasteur?: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology By Ethel D. Hume on page 304 [prefaced by Pasteur: Plagiarist, Imposter: The Germ Theory Exploded By R. B. Pearson], ISBN# 978-1-46790-012-6, 2011

Heracles was the strongest man who ever lived. No human, and almost no immortal creature, ever subdued him physically. With uncomplaining patience he bore the trials and catastrophes that were heaped upon him in his turbulent lifetime. With his strength came, as we have seen, a clumsiness which, allied to his apocalyptic bursts of temper, could cause death or injury to anyone who got in the way. Where others were cunning and clever, he was direct and simple. Where they planned ahead he blundered in, swinging his club and roaring like a bull. Mostly these shortcomings were more endearing than alienating. He was not, as the duping Atlas and the manipulation of Hades showed, entirely without that quality of sense, gumption and practical imagination that the Greeks called 'nous'. He possessed saving graces that more than made up for his exasperating faults. His sympathy for others and willingness to help those in distress was bottomless, as were the sorrow and shame that overcame him when he made mistakes and people got hurt. He proved himself prepared to sacrifice his own happiness for years at a stretch in order to make amends for the (usually unintentional) harm he caused. His childishness, therefore, was offset by a childlike lack of guile or pretence as well as a quality that is often overlooked when we catalogue the virtues: fortitude -the capacity to endure without complaint. For all his life he was persecuted, plagued and tormented by a cruel, malicious and remorseless deity pursuing a vendetta which punished him for a crime for which he could be in no way held responsible- his birth. No labour was more Heraclean than the labour of being Heracles. In his uncomplaining life of pain and persistence, in his compassion and desire to do the right thing, he showed, as the American classicist and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it, 'greatness of soul'. Heracles may not have possessed the pert agility and charm of Perseus and Bellerophon, the intellect of Oedipus, the talent for leadership of Jason or the wit and imagination of Theseus, but he had a feeling heart that was stronger and warmer than any of theirs.

In June, twenty-five of the country’s senior doctors signed a letter to The Times expressing their support for women doctors after Henry Maudsley published an article in the Fortnightly Review saying that it is well known among doctors that women become hysterical unless they have rest and seclusion during menstruation and therefore that simple biology prevents them following any kind of profession. Any kind except the oldest, May had said when Ally showed her this missive, and washing his clothes and cooking his meals. Even the most reasonable woman, he wrote and Fortnightly Review printed, is not sane for one week in every four, and in any case recent research has established once and for all that women’s brains are smaller than men’s, their intellectual capacities confined in the most elementary way. (And the gorilla, Miss Johnson wrote to the editor, has brains bigger than Dr Maudsley’s, not to speak of the elephant and the whale; in any case it is not widely observed that the men with the most capacious skulls are the cleverest. But her letter was not published.)

Obviously the most enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage. Yet because sexual liberals deny the differences between the sexes, their explanations of why there are marriages and why marriage is needed and desired ignore the central truth of marriage: that it is built on sex roles. Pressed to explain the institution, they respond vaguely that human beings want "structure" or desire "intimacy." But however desirable in marriage, these values are not essential causes or explanations of it. In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few one-to-one intimacies. Ties with others of the same sex--or even the opposite sex--often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Indeed, intimacy can deter or undermine wedlock. In the kibbutz, for example, where unrelated boys and girls are brought up together and achieve a profound degree of companionate feeling, they never marry members of the same child-rearing group. In the many cultures where marriages are arranged, the desire for intimacy is subversive of marriage. Similarly, man's "innate need for structure" can be satisfied in hundreds of forms of organization. The need for structure may explain all of them or none of them, but it does not tell us why, of all possible arrangements, marriage is the one most prevalent. It does not tell us why, in most societies, marriage alone is consecrated in a religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment. As most anthropologists see it, however, the reason is simple. The very essence of marriage, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, is not structure and intimacy; it is "parenthood and above all maternity." The male role in marriage, as Margaret Mead maintained, "in every known human society, is to provide for women and children." In order to marry, in fact, Malinowski says that almost every human society first requires the man "to prove his capacity to maintain the woman." Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity. . . . Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution. All sorts of superficial variations--from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership--may be played on the primal themes of human life. But the themes remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child; the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter desperation of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

You need more than just "positive thinking" to harness control of your body and your life. It is important for our health and well-being to shift our mind's energy toward positive, life generating thoughts and eliminate ever-present, energy-draining and debilitating negative thoughts. But, and I mean that in the biggest sense of "BUT", the mere thinking of positive thoughts will not necessarily have any impact on our lives at all! In fact, sometimes people who "flunk" positive thinking become more debilitated because now they think their situation is hopeless - they believe they have exhausted all mind and body remedies. What those positive-thinking dropouts haven't understood is that the seemingly "separate" subdivisions of the mind, the conscious and the subconscious, are interdependent. The conscious or spirit - is the creative mind. It can see into the future, review the past, or disconnect from the present moment as it solves problems in our head. In its creative capacity, the conscious mind holds our wishes, desires, and aspirations for our lives. It is the mind that conjures up our "positive thoughts". In contrast, the subconscious mind is primarily a repository of stimulus-response tapes derived from instincts and learned experiences. The subconscious mind is fundamentally habitual; it will play the same behavioral responses to life's signals over and over again, much to our chagrin. How many times have you found yourself going ballistic over something trivial like an open toothpaste tube? You have been trained since childhood to carefully replace the cap. When you find the tube with its cap left off, your "buttons are pushed" and you automatically fly into rage. You've just experienced the simple stimulus-response of a behavior program stored in the subconscious mind.

That the Roman Near East could be looked at, in more than a purely geographical sense, as part of Asia, or 'the Orient', cannot be denied. The mere currency there of a group of related Semitic langauges is sufficient evidence of that. But it was also an area of already long-standing Greek city-foundation and settlement. To look at the culture of any one of the sub-regions of the Near East is to see how profoundly the Greek language and Greek culture were rooted in the civilisation of this region. Any notion of a crude contrast between 'Greek' on the one hand and 'Oriental' or 'Semitic' on the other must seem wholly inadequate. Too much time had passed since Alexander's arrival in 332 BC. Yet the military history of the region itself serves to suggest that this contrast is not completely meaningless. The Roman forces here fought many successive campaigns, large and small, in contexts other than rivalry with Parthia or Persia: repeatedly in Judaea but also in Commagene, in Nabataea in 106, against Palmyra and finally, under Diocletian, against the 'Saracens'. But none of these operations was directed against a community or political formation which we would be tempted to characterise as unambiguously Greek. Nonetheless, any attempt to understand the culture or cultures of the region in terms of a simple contrast between 'Greek' and 'Oriental' would be inevitably misleading. There is little or nothing to suggest that the supposed 'Orientals' shared any sense of common identity. On the contrary, everything shows that Jewish identity, whose maintenance is beyond question, conflicted rather than cohered with the identities of other groups using Semitic languages. Nor did those others show anything like the same capacity for survival. Whether anything distinctive remained of Commagene after the end of the dynasty, of Nabataea after it was made into the province of Arabia, or of Palmyra after Aurelian's reconquest is precisely one of the crucial questions we need to answer.

Enjoy Your Friends’ Criticism A man’s capacity to receive another man’s direct criticism is a measure of his capacity to receive masculine energy. If he doesn’t have a good relationship to masculine energy (e.g., his father), then he will act like a woman and be hurt or defensive rather than make use of other men’s criticism. About once a week, you should sit down with your closest men friends and discuss what you are doing in your life and what you are afraid of doing. The conversation should be short and simple. You should state where you are at. Then, your friends should give you a behavioral experiment, something you can do that will reveal something to you, or grant more freedom in your life. “I want to have an affair with Denise, but I don’t want to hurt my wife. I’m afraid of her finding out,” you might say. “You’ve been talking about Denise now for six months. You are wasting your life energy on this fantasy. You should either have sex with her by tomorrow night, or drop the whole thing and never talk about it again,” your friends might say, challenging your hesitation and mediocrity. “OK. I know I’m not going to do it. I see now that I am too afraid of ruining my marriage to have an affair with Denise. My marriage is more important than my desire for Denise. I’ll drop it and refocus on the priorities in my life. Thanks.” Your close men friends should be willing to challenge your mediocrity by suggesting a concrete action you can perform that will pop you out of your rut, one way or the other. And you must be willing to offer them your brutal honesty, in the same way, if you are all to grow. Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another. If you are at your edge, your men friends should respect that, but not let you off the hook. They should honor your fears, and, in love, continue to goad you beyond them, without pushing you. If you merely want support from your men friends without challenge, it bespeaks an unresolved issue you may have with your father, whether he is alive or dead. The father force is the force of loving challenge and guidance. Without this masculine force in your life, your direction becomes unchecked, and you are liable to meander in the mush of your own ambiguity and indecision. Your close men friends can provide the stark light of love—uncompromised by a fearful Mr. Nice act—by which you can see the direction you really want to go. Choose men friends who themselves are living at their edge, facing their fears and living just beyond them. Men of this kind can love you without protecting you from the necessary confrontation with reality that your life involves. You should be able to trust that these friends will tell you about your life as they see it, offer you a specific action which will shed light on your own position, and give you the support necessary to live in the freedom just beyond your edge, which is not always, or even usually, comfortable.