“
If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.
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Criss Jami (Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality)
“
Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tragedy of language my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
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”
Orson Scott Card (Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3))
“
A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
“
The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males and females are separate species with completely different needs and desires, forced to come together only to reproduce
Of course you feel that way. Your mates are nothing but mindless drones, extensions of yourself, without their own identity.
We know out lovers with perfect understanding. Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed.
That is the tradegy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong,
This is the source of their misery.
And some of their strength, I think. Your people and mine, each for their own evolutionary reasons, mate with vastly unequal partners. Our mates are always, hopelessly, our intellectual inferiors. Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremcy. They have conflicts between mates, not because their communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all.
”
”
Orson Scott Card (Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3))
“
Ultimately, the greatest mystery cannot be seen or spoken, it is beyond the grasp of the intellect and all symbolic representation.
”
”
James Wasserman
“
This wilderwoman is the prototypical woman ... no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change. Her cycles change, her symbolic representations change, but in essence, she does not change. She is what she is and she is whole.
”
”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype)
“
The ruby is meant to represent a drop of blood. It is the symbolic representation of the way of the primary edict. It means only one thing and everything. Cut. Once committed to the fight, cut. Everything else is secondary. Cut. That is your duty, your purpose, your hunger. There is no rule more important, no commitment that overrides that one. Cut. The lines are a portrayal of the dance. Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly as possible. Cut with certainty. Cut decisively, resolutely. Cut into his strength. Flow through the gap in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don’t allow him a breath. Crush him. Cut him without mercy to the depths of his spirit. It’s the balance of life: death. It is the dance with death.
”
”
Terry Goodkind (Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth, #6))
“
The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
”
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Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
“
The individual artist is a medium for making representational and deeply meaningful symbols of the community’s collective consciousness, whether they are symbols of the community’s religion, love, hurt, power, hate, hope, dream, fables, foibles or on and on and on.
”
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Inga Muscio (Cunt: A Declaration of Independence)
“
A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.
”
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Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
“
Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself - Reality. One must be satisfied with symbols. Make it the object of imitation to reach and release the high qualities. Make peace therefore with intermediacy and representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.
”
”
Saul Bellow (Mr. Sammler's Planet)
“
There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things.
And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right?
But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you deal with that." And the answer is yeah, there is in fact. And that's what a lot of religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you, is the solution to that. One is, approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore, instead. You expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge.
And you wouldn't have a cortex which, you know, is ridiculously disproportionate, if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. We explore. That can make you the master of a situation, so you can be the master of something like fire without being terrified of it.
One of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kali, is offer sacrifices. So you can say, well why would you offer sacrifices to something you're afraid of. And it's because that is what you do, that's always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you.
One example is that you're worried about your future. Maybe you're worried about your job, or who you're going to marry, or your family, there's a whole category of things to be worried about, so you're worried about your future. SO what're you doing in university? And the answer is you're sacrificing your free time in the present, to the cosmos so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile upon you. And that's one of the fundamental discoveries of the human race. And it's a big deal, that discovery: by changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson
“
Like art, sex is fraught with symbols. Family romance (Freud) means that adult sex is always representation, ritualistic acting out of vanished realities.
”
”
Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale Nota Bene))
“
By today’s sensibilities, it’s more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
“
That is the tragedy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
”
”
Orson Scott Card (Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3))
“
Because our Savior lives, we do not use the symbol of His death as the symbol of our faith. But what shall we use? No sign, no work of art, no representation of form is adequate to express the glory and the wonder of the Living Christ. He told us what that symbol should be when He said, ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ (John 14:15). As His followers, we cannot do a mean or shoddy or ungracious thing without tarnishing His image. Nor can we do a good and gracious and generous act without burnishing more brightly the symbol of Him whose name we have taken upon ourselves. And so our lives must become a meaningful expression, the symbol of our declaration of our testimony of the Living Christ, the Eternal Son of the Living God.
”
”
Gordon B. Hinckley
“
The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The early Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
“
Incapable of communicating himself to others, incapable of breaking out of his isolation, doomed to remain the mere actor of his life, the deputy of his own ego—all that any human being can know of another is a mere symbol, a symbol of an ego that remains beyond our grasp, possessing no more value than that of a symbol; and all that can be told is the symbol of a symbol, a symbol at a second, third, nth remove, asking for representation in the true double sense of the word.
”
”
Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers (The Sleepwalkers, #1-3))
“
Symbolic representation makes it possible for instinctual impulses to find disguised, socially acceptable forms of gratification, not as satisfying as direct physical pleasure, but a reasonable compromise with necessary social constraints. Thus
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Stephen A. Mitchell (Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought)
“
A child is a part of the self, and of the loved partner; a representation of generations past; the genes of the forebears; the hope of the future; a source of love, pleasure, even narcissistic delight; a tie or a burden; and sometimes a symbol of the worst parts of the self and others.
”
”
Beverly Raphael (Anatomy Of Bereavemt)
“
Cat knew she'd arrived in Gaia's realm once she saw the Tree of Life, the foundation for all that was above and below.... The Tree of Life, no matter what religion one embraced, was a symbol of consanguinity. It was the universal representation of all that exists. Its network of connections matched that of a forest of aspen trees. Everything was interconnected and all of the roots led back to one source - the creators of all life.
”
”
Brynn Myers (The Echoed Life of Jorja Graham (Jorja Graham #2))
“
In other words, our conscious representations are sometimes ordered (or arranged in a pattern) before they have become conscious to us. The 18th-century German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss gives an example of an experience of such an unconscious order of ideas: He says that he found a certain rule in the theory of numbers "not by painstaking research, but by the Grace of God, so to speak. The riddle solved itself as lightning strikes, and I myself could not tell or show the connection between what I knew before, what I last used to experiment with, and what produced the final success." The French scientist Henri Poincare is even more explicit about this phenomenon; he describes how during a sleepless night he actually watched his mathematical representations colliding in him until some of them "found a more stable connection. One feels as if one could watch one's own unconscious at work, the unconscious activity partially becoming manifest to consciousness without losing its own character. At such moments one has an intuition of the difference between the mechanisms of the two egos.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
“
We receive no message in the strict sense of the word when a friend enters a room and says "good morning." The word has no function to select from an ensemble of possible states, though situations are conceivable in which it would have.
The most interesting consequence of this way of looking at communication is the general conclusion that the greater the probability of a symbol's occurrence in any given situation, the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate we need not listen. It is in this context that projection will do for perception.
”
”
E.H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation)
“
At some point after awakening—sometimes very soon, sometimes not for quite a while—you reach a stage that I call “trials and tribulations.” In the Jesus story, this is symbolized by Jesus’ forty days in the desert and his encounter with Satan in the desert immediately following his baptism. In Buddhism, this stage is mythically portrayed by the image of Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, assaulted by Maya, the force of illusion. Maya is an impersonal force of illusion, while Satan is a personification of what we think of as evil, but the source of evil is actually illusion, so these are really two different mythic representations of the same experience.
”
”
Adyashanti (Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic)
“
And this happened all over, in every working group, idiosyncratic professors from two dozen academic departments all fighting for explicit mission-statement representation. So, in the end, it was pretty easy to understand why the mission statement came out looking the way it did: a compound-complex, multi-semicoloned, many-branching grammatical nightmare that forced the English department to stage a collective symbolic walkout when the faculty senate approved it. Since
”
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Nathan Hill (Wellness)
“
Traditionally, the burning of a cross, or a ‘cross-lighting ceremony,’ is considered a religious celebration. The burning of a religious symbol has never been seen by Klan members as a sign of desecration; it has always been considered an honorable representation of their Christian faith and beliefs. But they historically used it to strike terror in those who feared the force and wrath of the Klan. In other words, from its very beginning the Ku Klux Klan and it’s members were dedicated to the cause of domestic terrorism.
”
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Ron Stallworth (Black Klansman: A Memoir)
“
The brain responds quickly even to purely symbolic threats. Emotionally loaded words quickly attract attention, and bad words (war, crime) attract attention faster than do happy words (peace, love). There is no real threat, but the mere reminder of a bad event is treated in System 1 as threatening. As we saw earlier with the word vomit, the symbolic representation associatively evokes in attenuated form many of the reactions to the real thing, including physiological indices of emotion and even fractional tendencies to avoid
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
Already at the turn of the twentieth century one analyst fretted in the Atlantic Monthly that images would eventually replace words and that visual symbols would become the primary form of discourse. Boorstin’s own concern was that the Graphic Revolution encouraged what he called image-thinking—thinking in terms of an “artificial imitation or representation of the external form of any object, especially of a person.” This came at the expense of what he called ideal-thinking—thinking in terms of some idea or value toward which one could strive.
”
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Neal Gabler (Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality)
“
egg-sac, Ben thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. Whatever It is beyond what we see, this representation is at least symbolically correct: It’s female, and It’s pregnant. . . . It was pregnant then and none of us knew except Stan, oh Jesus Christ YES, it was Stan, Stan, not Mike, Stan who understood, Stan who told us. . . . That’s why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, It’s pregnant with some unimaginable spawn . . . and Its time has drawn close. Incredibly, Bill Denbrough was stepping forward to meet It.
”
”
Stephen King (It)
“
That was the way it worked. Hard to define, this stalking, this predation, because it was piecemeal. A bit here, a bit there, maybe, maybe not, perhaps, don’t know. It was constant hints, symbolisms, representations, metaphors. He could have meant what I thought he’d meant, but equally, he might not have meant anything. Taken on their own, or to describe each incident separately, particularly while in the middle of it, might not seem, once relayed, to be all that much at all. If I’d said, ‘He offered me a lift as I was walking along the interface road reading Ivanhoe,’ it would have been, ‘Why were you walking along that dangerous interface road and why were you reading Ivanhoe?
”
”
Anna Burns (Milkman)
“
A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.
Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
“
Interestingly, forced feminization fantasies are also symbolic representations of
our actual life experiences. Because we fi nd the prospect of becoming women so
shameful and humiliating, we really do have to be forced into it. We are forced by
our unremitting gender dysphoria, by our powerful erotic desires, by our love and
admiration for women’s bodies and our wishes to turn our bodies into facsimiles of
them, and by our need to honor our strongly held cross-gender identities in order to
give meaning and vitality to our lives. If we are prudent, we autogynephilic transsexuals undergo sex reassignment only if we feel we have no other viable alternative: We transition because we feel forced to do so. Forced feminization is, in a very
real sense, the story of our lives.
”
”
Anne A. Lawrence (Men Trapped in Men's Bodies (Focus on Sexuality Research))
“
The last is the worship of God in innumerable forms. Each is a symbol that points to something beyond; and as none exhausts God’s actual nature, the entire array is needed to complete the picture of God’s aspects and manifestations. But though the representations point equally to God, it s advisable for each devotee to form a lifelong attachment to one, so only then can its meaning deepen and its full power become accessible. The ideal form for most people will be one of God’s incarnations, for God can be loved most readily in human form because our hearts are already attuned to loving people. Many Hindus readily acknowledge Christ as an incarnation as well as Rama, Krishna, and the Buddha. Whenever the stability of the world is seriously threatened, God descends to address the imbalance.
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Huston Smith (The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions)
“
The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It is the symbolic expression which first creates the possibility of looking backward and looking forward... What occurred in the past, now separated out from the totality of representations, no longer passes away, once the sounds of language have placed their seals on it and given it a certain stamp.
”
”
Ernst Cassirer
“
Taoism, on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.
”
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Alan W. Watts (The Way of Zen)
“
When I was little, my sister had a pretty jewellery box. Inside was a ballerina that denoted one idea of feminine beauty with her dainty waist, pink tulle skirt and gold hair. This was a representation of femininity that I felt I would never achieve, but one that I sought. Years later I had a ballerina tattooed on my right arm as a symbol of the femininity I now feel. It illustrates the journey I have undertaken and the trans femme/woman I have become.
”
”
Rhyannon Styles (The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is)
“
When such an invasion happens, we are often faced with a situation in which the unconscious overtakes or “takes over” the conscious mind. The latter has somehow got stuck, with the result that the unconscious takes over the forward-striving function, the process of transformation in time, and breaks the deadlock. The contents then pouring into consciousness are archetypal representations of what the conscious mind should have experienced if deadlock was to be avoided.
”
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C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
As we have seen with reference to the experiences of Gauss and Poincare, the mathematicians also discovered the fact that our representations are "ordered" before we become aware of them. B.L. van der Waerden, who cites many examples of essential mathematical insights arising from the unconscious, concludes: "...the unconscious is not only able to associate and combine, but even to judge. The judgment of the unconscious is an intuitive one, but it is under favorable circumstances completely sure.
”
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C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
“
The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli’s Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evidently both the ancestor and the descendant of the Virgins of Fra Filippo Lippi: the ancestor in her pre-Christian meaning, the descendant in absorbing all that had been achieved through the artistic representation of the Virgin Mary as the symbol of untainted flesh. The post-Renaissance rehabilitation of sexual desire laid the foundations for a genuinely erotic art, an art that would display the human being as both subject and object of desire, but also as a free individual whose desire is a favour consciously bestowed. But this rehabilitation of sex leads us to raise what has become one of the most important questions confronting art and the criticism of art in our time: that of the difference, if there is one, between erotic art and pornography. Art can be erotic and also beautiful, like a Titian Venus. But it cannot be beautiful and also pornographic—so we believe, at least. And it is important to see why. In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible. (See the discussion in Chapter 2.) Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.
”
”
Roger Scruton (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction)
“
A = A is a simplification, one so radical that it sometimes utterly distorts reality. It skins reality alive. Is A = A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A = A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are just that - very, very simplified representations. Symbolic systems with massive powers. But symbolic systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to the richness of that which they attempt to represent. Symbol systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to science's greatest mystery, cosmic creativity.
”
”
Howard Bloom (The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates)
“
Jung suggests taking a bad mood, and focusing on it, making it as conscious as possible. This crystallizes it into a symbol, fantasy image, or some other representation, achieving an “enrichment and clarification of the affect [emotion].”25 The unconscious seeks consciousness and Jung discovered that “as soon as the image was there, the unrest or sense of oppression vanished.” “The whole energy of these emotions,” Jung says, “was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image [my italics].”26 With no exaggeration, focusing on his dark moods and transforming them into inner images saved Jung from madness.
”
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Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
“
Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy? Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action. Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some
”
”
Kim Stanley Robinson (Aurora)
“
What distinguishes language from isolated gestures and signs, no matter how numerous, is that it forms a complex ramifying structure, which in its conceptual entirety presents a Wiltbild or comprehensive symbolic framework capable of embracing many aspects of reality: not a static representation like a picture or a sculpture, but a moving picture of things, events, processes, ideas, purposes, in which every word is surrounded by a rich penumbra of original concrete experiences, and every sentence brings with it some degree of novelty, if only because time and place, intention and recipient, change its meaning. Contrary to Bergson, language is the least geometric, the least static; of all the arts.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
“
[The Self is] expressed by certain typical symbolic images called mandalas. All images that emphasize a circle with a center and usually with the additional feature of a square, cross, or some other representation of quaternity, fall into this category…There are also a number of other associated themes and images that refer to the Self. Such themes as wholeness, totality, the union of opposites, the central generative point, the world naval, the axis of the universe. . .the elixir of life – all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God. Indeed, the richest sources of the phenomenological study of the Self are in the innumerable representations that man has made of the deity.
”
”
Edward F. Edinger (Ego e Arquétipo: Uma síntese fascinante dos conceitos psicológicos fundamentais de Jung)
“
If I had to characterize my work in two words, that is, as is the fashion these days, to label it, I would speak of constructivist structuralism or of structuralist constructivism, taking the word structuralism in a sense very different from the one it has acquired in the Saussurean or Lévi-Straussian tradition. By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist, within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.), objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representation. By constructivism, I mean that there is a twofold social genesis, on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought, and action which are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures and particularly of what I call fields and of groups, notable those we ordinarily call social classes.
”
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Pierre Bourdieu (In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology)
“
Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history. As Wagner expressed the point:‘It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.’ Even for the unbeliever, therefore the ‘real presence’ of the sacred is now one of the highest gifts of art.
”
”
Roger Scruton
“
Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
“
All forms of dogmatic thought create certain problems to the intellect, confining it to very narrow limits. The thought that is impossible to be criticized is going sooner or later to manipulate your own thought. The critical thinking area of the brain would immediately be blocked, if a person is convinced to blindly believe in the existence of some sacred texts or fundamental canons, which are allegedly representation of God's will or some 'perfect' human mind. As soon as emerges such an inevitable belief, the brain automatically begins to set some limits to its function, trying to give the dogmatic thought some rational sense with the help of science and logic, if it is possible, or merely to adjust blind imitation of them without any rational explanation and understanding, if it is impossible. It is very obvious fact that no intelligence can develop in that condition. Whatever rational and logical meaning you can find there, it is because of the brain activity, which gives dogmatism some reasonable sense. Without the brain activity, it is just a symbolism or merely absurdism. If this is so, why should any intelligence need the existence of any dogmatism, regardless of whether it is a religion or some kind of ideological doctrine?
”
”
Elmar Hussein
“
Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.
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Jean Piaget (The Psychology of Intelligence)
“
Interpretation in terms of the parents is, however, simply a façon de parler. In reality the whole drama takes place in the individual’s own psyche, where the “parents” are not the parents at all but only their imagos: they are representations which have arisen from the conjunction of parental peculiarities with the individual disposition of the child.39 The imagos are activated and varied in every possible manner by an energy which likewise pertains to the individual; it derives from the sphere of instinct and expresses itself as instinctuality. This dynamism is represented in dreams by theriomorphic symbols. All the lions, bulls, dogs, and snakes that populate our dreams represent an undifferentiated and as yet untamed libido, which at the same time forms part of the human personality and can therefore fittingly be described as the anthropoid psyche. Like energy, the libido never manifests itself as such, but only in the form of a “force,” that is to say, in the form of something in a definite energic state, be it moving bodies, chemical or electrical tension, etc. Libido is therefore tied to definite forms or states. It appears as the intensity of impulses, affects, activities, and so on. But these phenomena are never impersonal; they manifest themselves like parts of the personality. The same is true of complexes: they too behave like parts of the personality.
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C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
Dear Circle of Life,
The impression of you is so unique in the most exquisite ways. With you, there is a beginning and an end. You are the representation of birth and life. The in-between is survival, and the ending is death. The idea of life is just what it is when we arrive on the earth—our life is a circle, if you will, a 360. Once our wheels stop spinning, it rolls slowly until it completely stops. I believe there is a limitation to the circle of life—if there wasn’t, life would continue without end. Things are never certain, for there are always uncertain changes in the circle of life. In this universal symbol, there is repurpose in another life. You are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How can that be? I guess because you are energetic. We are wholeness in another world, but here on earth, we are here to play the game from the cards that we are dealt until our time runs out. A world without end—that is interesting. I guess it is true because when we go to a new dimension, there is no such thing as an ending. Once we pass over, we originate into our infinite perfection. The self sees and feels no more back- biting, hurt, pain, depression, despair, and all the bullshit that follows. The circle of life has no blame, solitude, or default. Everything is what it is ... because it is perfect!
I am aligned with the frequency and vibration of the moon and the stars.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
“
All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view from which are noted a corresponding number of contacts between the new object under consideration and others believed to be already known. In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is condemned to turn, analysis multiplies endlessly the points of view in order to complete the ever incomplete representation, varies interminably the symbols with the hope of perfecting the always imperfect translation. It is analysis ad infinitum. But intuition, if it is possible, is a simple act. This being granted, it would be easy to see that for positive science analysis is its habitual function. It works above all with symbols. Even the most concrete of the sciences of nature, the sciences of life, confine themselves to the visible form of living beings, their organs, their anatomical elements. They compare these forms with one another, reduce the more complex to the more simple, in fact they study the functioning of life in what is, so to speak, its visual symbol. If there exists a means of possessing a reality absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view toward it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above all expression, translation or symbolical representation, metaphysics is that very means. Metaphysics is therefore the science which claims to dispense with symbols.
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Henri Bergson (The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics)
“
There is no need, I think, of further examples to show that the concept of rta is a libido-symbol like sun, wind, etc. Only, rta is less concretistic and contains the abstract element of fixed direction and regularity, the idea of a predetermined, ordered path or process. It is, therefore, a kind of philosophical libido symbol that can be directly compared with the Stoic concept of heimarmene. For the Stoics heimarmene had the significance of creative, primal heat, and at the same time it was a predetermined, regular process (hence its other meaning: “compulsion of the stars”).104 Libido as psychic energy naturally has these attributes too; the concept of energy necessarily includes the idea of a regulated process, since a process always flows from a higher potential to a lower. It is the same with the libido concept, which signifies nothing more than the energy of the life process. Its laws are the laws of vital energy. Libido as an energy concept is a quantitative formula for the phenomena of life, which are naturally of varying intensity. Like physical energy, libido passes through every conceivable transformation; we find ample evidence of this in the fantasies of the unconscious and in myths. These fantasies are primarily self-representations of energic transformation processes, which follow their specific laws and keep to a definite “path.” This path is the line or curve representing the optimal discharge of energy and the corresponding result in work. Hence it is simply the expression of flowing and self-manifesting energy. The path is rta, the right way, the flow of vital energy or libido, the predetermined course along which a constantly self-renewing current is directed. This path is also fate, in so far as a man’s fate depends on his psychology. It is the path of our destiny and of the law of our being.
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C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us the plainest parable.
How divinely do vault and arch here contrast in the struggle: how with light and shade they strive against each other, the divinely striving ones. —
This is a clear description of the Gothic cathedral where you really feel that life itself has become congealed-one could say it was congealed life. It is often compared to a wood or to the branches of a tree; all sorts of animals run up and down those columns and spires. It is wood that has become stone, or spirit that has become incorruptible matter, and the architecture symbolizes the struggle from which it arose. One sees the struggle itself represented in Norman art, in those manifold representations of the fight between man and monsters, particularly. In the Gothic cathedral this conflict is fully developed and fully represented in the enormous height and depth, in the light and the shadow, and in the extraordinary complication of all those architectural forms melting into each other, or fighting one another. It is also expressed in the peculiar arches built outside the church to support the walls inside; it gives one the idea of tremendous tension, of a thing that is almost bursting. When you look, for instance, in Notre Dame in Paris, at the tension of the walls inside supported by the arches, you realize how daring the whole enterprise was-to catch so much spirit in matterand what they had to do in order to secure it. There is no such thing in the Norman cathedrals; they are really made of stone, while in the Gothic cathedrals one begins to doubt the weight of the stone. And a little later one sees the same peculiarity in sculpture. In the cinquecento sculpture of Michelangelo and the later men, they seemed to deny the immobility of the stone; up to that time, stone had been practically immovable, even Greek sculpture, but with Michelangelo, the stone began to move with a surplus of life which is hardly believable. It seems as if it either were not stone or as if something wrong had happened. There is too much life, the stone seems to walk away. It begins to move till the whole thing falls asunder. You see, that is what Nietzsche is describing here. He calls them the divinely striving ones that are no longer striving; they have congealed, they have come to rest.
Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1109-1110)
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C.G. Jung (Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung)
“
We must not say that our body is in space, nor for that matter in time. It inhabits space and time...I am not in space and in time, nor do I think space and time; rather, I am of space and of time; my body fits itself to them and embraces them. The scope of this hold measures the scope of y existence; however, it can never be total. The space and time that I inhabit are always surrounded by indeterminate horizons that contain other points of view. The synthesis of time, like that of space, is always to be started over again. The motor experience of our body is not a particular case of knowledge; rather, it offers us a manner of reaching the world and the object, a 'praktognosia,' that must be recognized as original, and perhaps originary. My body has its world, or understands its world without having to go through 'representations,' or without being subordinated to a 'symbolic' or 'objectifying function.
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”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception)
“
The theoretical concepts of Freudianism are corrected and affirmed once they are understood, as suggested in the work of Melanie Klein, in terms of corporeality taken as itself the search of the external in the internal and of the internal in the external, that is, as a global and universal power of incorporation... A philosophy of the flesh finds itself in opposition to any interpretation of the unconscious in terms of "unconscious representations," a tribute paid by Freud to the psychology of bis day. The unconscious is feeling itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of "what" is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it...The double formula of the unconscious ( "I did not know" and "I have not always known it'') corresponds to two aspects of the flesh, its poetic and its oneiric powers. When Freud presents the concept of repression in all its operational richness, it comprises a double movement of progress and regression, of openness toward the adult universe and of a relapse to the pregenital life, but henceforth called by its name, having become unconscious "homosexuality." Thus the repressed unconsciousness would be a secondary formation, contemporary with the formation of a system of perception-consciousness -- and the primordial unconsciousness would be a permissive being, the initial yes, the undividedness of feeling.
The preceding leads to the idea of the human body as a natural symbolism...We may ask what could be the relation between this tacit symbolism, or undividedness, and the artificial or conventional symbolism, which seems to be privileged, to open us toward ideal being and to truth.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Éloge de la philosophie (Collection Folio / Essais))
“
Like all knowledge, knowledge of God is mediated to us through our senses, through speech and symbol, mediated to us by parents and others. If this were not the case, we would be unable to account for the great diversity of representations of God. If knowledge of God, of the moral order, of the beautiful—if these were all innate, they would be universally identical and acknowledged as such.
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Herman Bavinck (Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume)
“
Contrary to what a narrowly positivist conception of human sciences would like, these are not only about the real world, but also about two other dimensions, just as important: the imaginary dimension, which governs representations and fictions; and the symbolic dimension, which governs meanings and interpretations, more or less conscious. These three dimensions of reality — the reality of lived situations, the imagination as conveyed by discursive or iconic forms, the symbolism of productions of meaning — cannot be reduced to each other, because they possess their own necessity and coherence.
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Nathalie Heinich (Wat onze identiteit niet is)
“
There were at least 32 attacks by suffragettes on art on public display between 14 January 1913 and 17 July 1914.[6] There is dispute about whether or not the targets of attacks were all specifically chosen for their symbolic value or whether some were random. Whilst attacks on representations of beautiful mythological women seem to be planned defacements of conventional images of femininity,[7] others seem haphazard choices directed by impulse and opportunity.
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Alexander Adams (Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History (Societas Book 72))
“
In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere along the way from earlier primates to ourselves.
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Douglas R. Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop)
“
Much of Buddhist cosmology seems fantastical. The physical layout of the cosmos has a logic mostly unrelated to what we know of the universe, and the mathematical calculations consist of apparently arbitrary numbers which, however, are strangely precise. Naturally, ideas such as the centrality of the Indian experience to the cosmology and the existence of hells inside the earth do not hold true today. All the same, we do not necessarily gain by interpreting Buddhist cosmology purely in terms of geography and revealing all its deficiencies, for to a certain extent it was constructed as a symbolic representation. For example, we may infer that the authors of the cosmology depicted it symbolically from the first, given the overly schematic description of the universe and the too-artificial numbers of the worlds' dimensions. Of course those authors did not come out and say that their cosmology was symbolic. Because of the boldness of expression though, both speakers and hearers must have understood it as being so. If we comprehend it in this way, we can appreciate the sophistication of ancient Buddhist cosmology. It explained graphically, in a way that is easy to memorize, the entire picture of the world and the universe. In this sense it is of little import the the individual numbers and configurations do not match reality.
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Akira Sadakata (Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins)
“
he law is a blunt tool and though it makes tall claims of being
objective and neutral, in itself, the law is fragile and will not smash patriarchy. Rather, The courts have always favored the power structure and shielded those who are resourceful. The courtrooms, themselves as a symbol of authority, defend the values of supremacy and protect the oppressive
and regressive system. However, those on the margins with their conviction and belief in the values of democracy, justice, and the rule of law, need to shake the system. With individual or through collective action the marginalized are challenging the power structure and are compelling the state and the society to make social and political transformation at a larger level. Angela Davis said that “in a racist society it is not enough to be a non-racist. We must be anti-racist”. Similarly, here it may be derived that `in a patriarchal society, it is not enough to be a non-patriarchal. We must be anti-patriarchy’. The women with their sheer will and conviction are marching ahead to smash
patriarchy using law as an instrument of change. However, what is required is the radical interpretation of constitutional values by the courts and this should be strengthened by assuring the equal representation of women within the judiciary at all levels to open up the possibility of nondiscrimination within the patriarchal hostile settings.
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Shalu Nigam
“
But deep as this glorious truth (that of the Lord's Supper) may be, it is not the bottom of the cup. Our vicarious burial into Christ's death is deeper still, plunging us ever deeper and deeper into the Savior's precious wounds. Our vicarious participation in Christ's death, our drinking of His cup, is no mere abstract and distant imputation of our sins to Him at the cross. Do we not believe that the cup which Jesus drank, and which we by grace drink with Him, is a cup filled with “wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation” against our sins? Do we not believe in that eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe, and blood for blood, God perfectly measured His unbearable wrath with exactitude, precisely meted out hell's fury against us, and poured the full measure of His indignation into the cup of our Savior's suffering? Do we not believe that the sufferings of Christ transcend His mere physical sufferings in Pilate's hall or upon Golgotha's hill? Do we not believe that in the hour and power of darkness, when the moon turned to blood and the sun to blackness as sackcloth of hair, that there beneath the ebony sun and crimson moon, a great transaction between the Godhead, a holy transaction too terrible for human eyes to gaze upon, and too wonderful for the minds of men and angels to comprehend? And it is in this moment of Christ's submersion into the dark and scarlet billows of Divine wrath that we see deeply, not only to the bottom of the cup, but also into the deepest meaning of immersion as the only accurate symbolic representation of Christ's horrific burial in the sea of God's wrath.
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Stuart L Brogden (Captive to the Word of God: A Particular Baptist Perspective on Reformed and Covenant Theology)
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The dove, the chosen symbol of this deified queen, is commonly represented with an olive branch in her mouth, as she herself in her human form also is seen bearing the olive branch in her hand; and from this form of representing her, it is highly probably that she has derived the name by which she is commonly known, for "Z'emir-amit' means "The branch-bearer." When the goddess was thus represented as the Dove with the olive branch, there can be no doubt that the symbol had partly reference to the story of the flood; but there was much more in the symbol than a mere memorial of that great event. "A branch," as had been already proved, was the symbol of the deified son, and when the deified mother was represented as a Dove, what could the meaning of this representation be but just to identify her with the Spirit of all grace, that brooded, dove-like, over the deep at the creation; for in the sculptures at Nineveh, as we have seen, the wings and tail of the dove represented the third member of the idolatrous Assyrian trinity.
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Alexander Hislop (The Two Babylons)
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Said introduces the notion of a “plurality of vision” as an effect of being an exile (Said 1984). In very simple terms, this means that the monologic surface of representation—so quiet and understandable when you belong to a certain culture—is broken, and this break calls for a different “way of seeing” (Berger 2008) that must be plural and that gives rise to “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (Said 1984, 148). Being a contrapuntal human being is a complex condition. It means renouncing the stability of one’s own land (geographically and symbolically) to enter a territory that resembles more an archipelago of small islands than a continent, and constantly moving, by sea, through stormy weather and dead calm, from one landing to another.
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Simona Bertacco (The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders (Literatures, Cultures, Translation))
“
Money is a metaphor for the foreigner because money is used in the exchange between the known and the unknown. It is the sign that becomes emancipated from representation. If money is a symbol, it is one that mediates relationships between the familiar and the foreign—the imagined and the unimaginable. Money is a theater.
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Alice Sparkly Kat (Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor)
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The leaders of the hunt can be viewed as fertility spirits, representations of unrestrained sexuality. In earlier times, the Wild Hunt was associated with fertility cults, but in Christian times it became a symbol of the devil at work, which perhaps highlights the differing sexual attitudes of pagans and Christians. To the former, the sexual urge is wild, chaotic, and celebrated, while to the Christians it is fearsome, demonic, and strange.
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Adams Media (The Book of Celtic Myths: From the Mystic Might of the Celtic Warriors to the Magic of the Fey Folk, the Storied History and Folklore of Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, and Wales)
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Blood has always been an important part of my creation process, whether it's my own or a symbolic representation of the heart of this old Voudan. Blood is always a part of birth, and what do writers do if we don't invoke the spirit upon the page? We capture souls & release them.
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Lioness DeWinter
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was deeply congenial to the man who was already brooding on the idea that all things have their compensations.3 Cousin was on a path parallel to Emerson’s in several respects. Lecture 10 of the Cours is an extensive treatment of great men, understood by Cousin as by Emerson, not as individuals but as representative or symbolic figures. Great persons are “representations of nations, epochs, of humanity, of nature, and of universal order.” Cousin was farther down this road than Emerson at the moment, but Emerson would return to this theme in the 1840s.4 From Emerson’s excited reading of
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Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
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The idea of the terrible Beast follows the apocalyptical tradition of animals being representations of people. The number 666 is a Gematria, a numeric code meant to help people to calculate and identify whom John is really writing about. The “mark of the beast” (whatever form or shape it was to take) was to be placed on the head and on the hand, according to Revelation. To a Jewish audience, such placement sounds very familiar and would make perfect symbolic sense.
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Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg (Hebrew Insights from Revelation (All Books by Dr. Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg Book 1))
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Thomas Edison described himself as being “not at the head of my class, but the foot.” Einstein graduated fourth in his class of five physicists in 1900.54 Steve Jobs had a high school GPA of 2.65; Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (the Chinese equivalent of Amazon), took the gaokao (the Chinese national educational exam) and scored 19 out of 120 on a math section on his second try;55 and Beethoven had trouble adding figures and never learned to multiply or divide. Walt Disney was a below-average student and often fell asleep in class.56 Finally, Picasso could not remember the sequence of the letters in the alphabet and saw symbolic numbers as literal representations: a 2 as the wing of a bird or a 0 as a body.57
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Craig Wright (The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness)
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A vision from the time when the energies of the Water Bearer are working with full power shows me that the great teacher of this epoch abolishes all the boundaries between the three dominant religions. With his own person he proves that the inner core of all religions is one and the same truth, one and the same God. The boundary between religion and science disappears too, as people discover that everything, even matter, is a wave movement. They learn that the only differences between manifestations of the spirit and those of matter are differences of frequency, while in its essence everything is only the manifestation of the one, single, prime source of all forces, God. Everything is a wave, just as the symbolic representation of the Water Bearer constellation shows: a supernal being pouring waves out of his pitcher.
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Elisabeth Haich (Initiation)
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Hon sha ze sho nen: The distance symbol. The definition of hon sha ze sho nen is a little harder to grasp than some of the other representations in Reiki, but not so enormously. The sense of hon sha ze sho nen is "no current, past, or future," and it is used to transfer Reiki energies through time and space. For examples, while hon sha ze sho nen cannot change the past, it can help heal old wounds by reframing the memory and making it into a learning experience rather than just a devastating event that has no rhyme or reason.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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The medicine bag is such a tool, both literally and metaphorically. In a literal sense, a medicine bag is usually a small pouch, about the size of your hand, which is often worn around the neck and can also be carried in your pocket or handbag. It can vary in size, material, and contents; the idea to remember is that a bag like this has been used by thousands of people before you as they progressed on their own journeys of awakening. It may carry written prayers, sticks, bones, rocks, feathers, or seashells. It may contain an object that is the symbol of a vision, a piece of nature from a meaningful place, a talisman of an animal totem. The contents of the medicine bag are physical representations that guide the inner journey of the wearer. In the next chapter, I'll go into detail about how to make or choose your own medicine bag, and the remaining chapters in this book will explain how to begin creating or choosing items to carry inside to help you on your own journey.
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Jose Ruiz (The Medicine Bag: Shamanic Rituals & Ceremonies for Personal Transformation (Shamanic Wisdom))
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In the absence of contradicting evidence, I opted to maintain some representation of each event as the Crafts’ described it—first, because this is how they chose to tell their story, and then because, whether or not the episodes unfolded exactly as described (a question that may be asked of any autobiography or historical source), they are emblematic of larger, or what scholars have called “symbolic,” truths. In every case, the episode either depicted or typified real dangers particular to that stage of their travel.
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Ilyon Woo (Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom)
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All of this information is taken from long-term memory and mapped onto, or worked on, by a dedicated representational medium capable of dealing with logical reasoning based in symbols or elements not reducible to logical symbols, such as visual imagery. Conscious and unconscious thought occur in this medium.
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Arthur I. Miller (Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc)
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With each surge of westward movement a new community came into being. These communities devoted themselves not to marching onward but to cultivating the earth. They plowed the virgin land and put in crops, and the great Interior Valley was transformed into a garden for the imagination, the Garden of the World. The vision of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society - a collective representation, a poetic idea (as [Alexis de] Tocqueville [1805-59] noted in the early 1830s) that defined the promise of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase and blissful labor in the earth, all centring about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow.
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Henry Nash Smith (Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth)
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Readers' Favorite
Book Reviews and Book Awards
Review Rating: 5 Stars - Congratulations on your 5-star review!
Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
The Magnificence of the 3 by Timeout A Taumua begins by looking at the connections between neuroscience, atomic structure, and biblical narratives. In it, Taumua draws parallels between the trees of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and the neurons in the human brain, speaking on the function of mirror neurons in memory and learning. Taumua discusses the significance of rhythmic radio signals from space as signs of design and the symbolic importance of the numbers three, six, and nine. He presents atomic structure as a metaphor for moral duality, with stable atoms representing balance and unstable atoms reflecting decay. He also talks at length on subjects like the interconnectedness of emotional dynamics, spiritual beliefs, and genetic factors, suggesting that desire acts as a stabilizing force in existence, guiding behavior and promoting community cohesion through practices like forgiveness and the evolution of the Sabbath. There's a huge amount of information to absorb in The Magnificence of the 3 by Timeout A Taumua, which is delivered in a thoughtful mix of scientific study with spiritual analysis. Taumua's writing style is academic, but I found it also to be accessible and was able to understand the representations of identities of the Tree of Knowledge, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life, and the Ark of the Covenant. It was fitting that Taumua would say, "One does not need a scientific degree to see the similarities of both the trees of knowledge and the trees of earth." As the idea of blind faith loses popularity, writers like Taumua become critically important in filling the vacuum that was once exclusively the domain of churches. Overall, this book is more than a philosophical treatise; it challenges readers to reconsider the links between knowledge, morality, and existence, making it an enlightening read for anyone interested in the fusion of science and spirituality. Very highly recommended.
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Timeout Taumua
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Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, the Pantheon in Rome and the villa at Tivoli represent three central themes of imperial rule: military domination, a broad and tolerant religious observance, and a cultured and extravagant private life. All three buildings are emblematic of Hadrian’s peaceful and transforming ambitions for the empire which, when he first came to power, was still defined and subdued by military aggression. Hadrian’s Wall was a clear declaration of what the empire was and where its limits might be reached; the Pantheon, too, defined known limits in its architectural experimentation; and the villa was an imaginative symbolic representation of the empire in its entirety.
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Elizabeth Speller (Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey through the Roman Empire)
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Yet, in spite of the overt omission of black representation and racial issues in SF cinema, I have found that both are present in numerous SF films. Albeit implicit-as structured absence, repressed or symbolic-blackness and race are often present in SF films as narrative subtext or implicit allegorical subject.
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Adilifu Nama (Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film)
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Despite the honor of being remembered as the first colonist to set foot on Deanna, he was also credited with discovering crabby-grass, the aforementioned life-form that disliked being stepped on. However, this also led to the unintended consequence that Mr Lupini also set the record for being the first person to actually swear on Deanna. He still lived on Deanna, and attended the Founder’s Day Ceremony every year, in safety boots. Not surprisingly, the bronze Lupini didn’t look very amused. Beside the representation of Lupini, stood Deanna’s national bird. It was supposed to be a symbol of the early colonists’ determination to stay and make a success of the colony, but its expression only made it look slightly constipated.
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Christina Engela (Dead Man's Hammer)
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Some roles have no functions other than this symbolic representation of the institutional order as an integrated totality, others take on this function from time to time in addition to the less exalted functions they routinely perform. The judge, for instance, may, on occasion, in some particularly important case, represent the total integration of society in this way. The monarch does so all the time and, indeed, in a constitutional monarchy, may have no other function than as a “living symbol” for all levels of the society, down to the man in the street. Historically, roles that symbolically represent the total institutional order have been most commonly located in political and religious institutions.40
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Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
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When we become an autonomous organization, we will be one of the largest unadulterated digital security organizations on the planet,” he told the annual Intel Security Focus meeting in Las Vegas.
“Not only will we be one of the greatest, however, we will not rest until we achieve our goal of being the best,” said Young.
This is the main focus since Intel reported on agreements to deactivate its security business as a free organization in association with the venture company TPG, five years after the acquisition of McAfee.
Young focused on his vision of the new company, his roadmap to achieve that, the need for rapid innovation and the importance of collaboration between industries.
“One of the things I love about this conference is that we all come together to find ways to win, to work together,” he said.
First, Young highlighted the publication of the book The Second Economy: the race for trust, treasure and time in the war of cybersecurity.
The main objective of the book is to help the information security officers (CISO) to communicate the battles that everyone faces in front of others in the c-suite.
“So we can recruit them into our fight, we need to recruit others on our journey if we want to be successful,” he said.
Challenging assumptions
The book is also aimed at encouraging information security professionals to challenge their own assumptions.
“I plan to send two copies of this book to the winner of the US presidential election, because cybersecurity is going to be one of the most important issues they could face,” said Young.
“The book is about giving more people a vision of the dynamism of what we face in cybersecurity, which is why we have to continually challenge our assumptions,” he said. “That’s why we challenge our assumptions in the book, as well as our assumptions about what we do every day.”
Young said Intel Security had asked thousands of customers to challenge the company’s assumptions in the last 18 months so that it could improve.
“This week, we are going to bring many of those comments to life in delivering a lot of innovation throughout our portfolio,” he said.
Then, Young used a video to underscore the message that the McAfee brand is based on the belief that there is power to work together, and that no person, product or organization can provide total security.
By allowing protection, detection and correction to work together, the company believes it can react to cyber threats more quickly.
By linking products from different suppliers to work together, the company believes that network security improves. By bringing together companies to share intelligence on threats, you can find better ways to protect each other.
The company said that cyber crime is the biggest challenge of the digital era, and this can only be overcome by working together. Revealed a new slogan: “Together is power”.
The video also revealed the logo of the new independent company, which Young called a symbol of its new beginning and a visual representation of what is essential to the company’s strategy.
“The shield means defense, and the two intertwined components are a symbol of the union that we are in the industry,” he said. “The color red is a callback to our legacy in the industry.”
Three main reasons for independence
According to Young, there are three main reasons behind the decision to become an independent company.
First of all, it should focus entirely on enterprise-level cybersecurity, solve customers ‘cybersecurity problems and address clients’ cybersecurity challenges.
The second is innovation. “Because we are committed and dedicated to cybersecurity only at the company level, our innovation is focused on that,” said Young.
Third is growth. “Our industry is moving faster than any other IT sub-segment, we have t
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Arslan Wani
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Even after human beings have reached adulthood and developmental maturity, there remain hindrances in human nature that make it difficult for them to act from moral principle. One of most fundamental challenges is the fact that the developmentally mature human mind is still a finite intelligence rather than an infinite intelligence. The adult human mind is equipped only with ‘a discursive, image-dependent understanding’ (CU V 408): in order to think abstractly, we need images. The finitude of the human condition thus poses a permanent challenge to the task of grasping ideas of pure reason such as a priori moral norms or the concept of a morally perfect will.
Kant’s basic response to this challenge of human finitude is to articulate various strategies for representing moral concepts analogically and symbolically through images. As he remarks in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ‘for the human being the invisible needs to be represented through something visible (sensible)’ (Religion VI 192).
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Robert B. Louden
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Any string of symbols that can be given an abbreviated representation is called algorithmically compressible.
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John D. Barrow (Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation)
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There it is, forming behind us: The Fat Blue Phalanx. All the smug self-satisfied maleness you can drink, and free refills at the station house. It's all I can see in cops, that patriarchal bullshit that will never yield to a contract of mutual respect. That grunting fuck-obsessed inability to deobjectify you and treat you as a person, it’s a subclass of male that will never, ever change, no matter what. There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they’d whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides you’re not supposed to let it get to you. You’re supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren’t allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don’t like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don’t) who if you’re lucky will offer to go beat them up knowing you won’t take him up on it because you know perfectly well he’d probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they’ve been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and the grime of uneducated testosterone. its thanx to our weak boyfriends that we have cops at all, surrogate cock and balls to maintain ‘order’, whatever that is. Or was. And where does it really leave you as a prisoner of the suburbs? Fuming over some tiny incident that the aggressors have already forgotten about, but you have the sinking feeling you've just sniffed the true underbelly and the aroma was not what you get in Calvin Klein ads. Scratch 'n' sniff, scratch 'n' sniff, peel the onion... will you ever get down to the reality of what this place is about? And I know I shouldn't brand individual cops with the big blue brush but in my mind these guys are a symbol of the whole iron-cage Boy system that makes me always a victim, no matter what I do, it's a cage I can't escape. I'm the little princess. They dominate, they aggress, they protect.
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Tricia Sullivan (Maul)
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Political representation occurs when political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and act on the behalf of others in the political arena. In short, political representation is a kind of political assistance.
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Anonymous
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A brand is… A promise. The way we differentiate this from that. Whatever the customer believes about a company. A feeling created. The tangible representation of personal or company values. A set of expectations met. The way a person or company communicates what they do and why they do it. Trust built between a customer and a business. A company asset. Your word. A set of unique benefits. Reasons to buy, or buy into, something. A story we tell ourselves. Communication with and without words. A symbol of belonging. Signals sent. A waymarker. The experience a customer has. A complete field guide to a business. The impression that’s left at the last interaction.
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Bernadette Jiwa (Make Your Idea Matter: Stand out with a better story)
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say v. (says; past and past part.said) 1 [reporting verb] utter words so as to convey information, an opinion, a feeling or intention, or an instruction: [with direct speech] “Thank you,” he said | [with clause] he said the fund stood at $100,000 | [trans.] our parents wouldn't believe a word we said | [with infinitive] he said to come early. (of a text or a symbolic representation) convey specified information or instructions: [with clause] the law says such behavior is an offense. [trans.] enable a listener or reader to learn or understand something by conveying or revealing (information or ideas): I don't want to say too much | FIGURATIVEthe movie's title says it all. [trans.] (of a clock or watch) indicate (a specified time): the clock says ten past two. (be said) be asserted or reported (often used to avoid committing the speaker or writer to the truth of the assertion): [with infinitive] they were said to be training freedom fighters | [with clause] it is said that she lived to be over a hundred. [trans.] (say something for) present a consideration in favor of or excusing (someone or something): all I can say for him is that he's
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Oxford University Press (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
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This view of sin as corruption, vileness, and filth is symbolically portrayed in Zechariah 3:1-4: Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right side to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire?” Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes.” Then he said to Joshua, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you.” Note who is described here. It is not a portrayal of the prodigal son, but of Joshua the high priest — the person holding the highest religious office in all Israel. Yet he is shown dressed in filthy clothes, a pictorial representation of both his sins and the sins of the people he represented as high priest. The filthiness of his garments depicts not the guilt of his sin but its pollution. Like Joshua, all of us are, in a spiritual sense, dressed in filthy clothes. We are not just guilty before God; we are also corrupted in our natures, polluted and vile before Him. We need forgiveness and cleansing.
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Jerry Bridges (Transforming Grace)
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not only that symbolic hybridity can signal perspective—both the language facet of perspective and, indirectly, the perception facet of perspective—but also that symbolic hybridity can only feature in specific discourse categories, namely those categories that can contain elements of the character’s discourse and thus have a mimetic quality. TT shifts in linguistic hybridity can therefore lead to TT shifts in discourse category and these discourse-category shifts in turn can trigger TT shifts in the language facet of perspective. The following discussion will illustrate this in more detail. For this, I will draw on Leech and Short’s (2007) as well as Brian McHale’s (1978) classification of speech and thought presentation. Leech and Short (2007:255ff.) distinguish the following five speech-presentation categories: Narrative Report of Speech Act (NRSA) Indirect Speech (IS) Free Indirect Speech (FIS) Direct Speech (DS) Free Direct Speech (FDS) For a detailed discussion of these five speech-presentation categories see Leech and Short 2007:255–270. McHale (1978:258–259) further subdivides indirect discourse into (i) “indirect content paraphrase” and (ii) “indirect discourse, mimetic to some degree”. Building on McHale, I will therefore distinguish between (i) indirect speech (IS) and (ii) mimetic indirect speech (MIS). Short (1996:293) refers to NRSA as “Narrative Representation of Speech Acts” rather than “Narrative Report of Speech Act” and adds another category, that of “Narrator’s Representation of Speech (NRS)”. NRS is the most minimalist form of speech presentation, as it “merely tells us that speech occurred” without “specify[ing] the speech act(s) involved
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Susanne Klinger (Translation and Linguistic Hybridity: Constructing World-View (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies Book 7))
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Christians don't think that Dawkins thinks that they think that God really has a beard. "Old man in the sky with a white beard" is a figure of speech – shorthand – which neatly encapsulates various errors which lazy atheists and naive theists sometimes make, for example:
1: They imagine that Christians think that God is a human being of some kind and therefore ask questions like: "What does he eat?"; "If he made the world, what did he stand on?"; "If he doesn't have a beard, how does he shave?" and "How did he evolve?" (Three guesses which of those questions troubles Professor Dawkins.) Christians don't think that God is an old man. They don't even think he is a man. They probably don't even think he's made of atoms.
2: They confuse symbols with representations: they think that when Michelangelo painted God on the Pope's ceiling, he was making an informed guess about what someone would have seen with their eyes if they bumped into God on the Roman metro – as opposed to using pictures to put across theological ideas.
3: They imagine that Christians think that God lives in some particular place in space and time. They may not think that we think that he lives in the sky, but I think that they think that we think that if you had a fast enough spaceship you could eventually track him down. Dawkins doesn't commit himself on the question of God's facial hair; but it is pretty clear that he thinks that God lives in the sky – or at any rate, in some place in the empirical universe.
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Andrew Rilstone
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Off-line aspects of embodied cognition, in contrast, include any cognitive activities in which sensory and motor resources are brought to bear on mental tasks whose referents are distant in time and space or are altogether imaginary. These include symbolic off-loading, where external resources are used to assist in the mental representation and manipulation of things that are not
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Anonymous
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Language skills. Even though approximate estimations of the quantity seems to be possible to make without language (i.e. , ANS), exact representations of number are reliant on language system (Vukovic & Lesaux, 2013a). Many early mathematics tasks require using and understanding language. For instance, to count proficiently, a child needs to know number words (Cowan, Donlan, Newton, & Lloyd, 2005). For transcoding between quantities, number words and number symbols, a child has to understand the meaning of the number word and the rules that govern the structure for number words (Cowan et al. , 2005
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Anonymous
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This explains, I believe, why many people feel connections with butterflies, doves, or feathers. All three of these things share the same symbolic representation: transcendence, taking flight, and boundless freedom. If you see and attribute these symbols to your loved one, it’s likely that within that sign lies a reminder they want you to have: they’re okay and “above it all.” Our loved ones don’t give us signs unless there’s a message behind that sign, and sometimes people are so desperately searching for a message that they lose sight of the one right in front of them. Even if we don’t fully understand the signs we receive, our loved ones are communicating the importance of feeling their continued presence in our lives.
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Tyler Henry (Here & Hereafter: How Wisdom from the Departed Can Transform Your Life Now)
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All dramas, and more comprehensively, all works of art, necessarily contain a surface, namely, the explicit action, poetical discourse, or symbolic representation of spiritual states, and a deeper interior consisting equally of the artist’s fuller intentions as well as the responses of the audience. It is intrinsic to the nature of things that the surface conceals the depths, not because of the insincerity or duplicitousness of the artist, but because depths reveal themselves only through the specificities of surfaces.
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Stanley Rosen
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The Buryats and other Mongols believe that representation contains the power of the represented. Representation can ignite an object’s influence and must therefore be controlled in its extent and frequency… [T]hey describe their oppressors’ institutions of power soberly while fetishizing their shamanic deities, such as Hoimorin Högshin, through layers of material and verbal representations: figurines, accessories, clothing, poetic evocations, and actions of swaddling and cradling—and, specific to this discussion, by attributing to her the power to punish. As Taussig (1993:105) discusses… to represent something in detail is to display its power and authority… It is through a detailed representation of their own spiritual world that the Buryats have resisted their oppressors. The harsher the Buryats’ experience of oppression, the greater they seem to have made their supernatural entities. This makes sense if we stick to a rational calculation that the Buryats took the powers of their oppressors and attributed them to their own deities, making the latter correspondingly powerful. By attributing the characteristic of a dominant figure to Hoimorin Högshin, they shifted the power of the oppressor to their own supernatural world… By transferring the specific power of the colonial into their own deity, the Buryats also transform their own relationship with the colonial power. Hoimorin Högshin takes over the role of a brutal punisher, as if she were on the side of the oppressors, albeit temporarily. This temporarily renders the oppressors obsolete… [T]he Buryats fold Russian colonial power into Hoimorin Högshin and symbolically transform the Russians’ oppressive powers into their own. The Russian colonial power is limited to jails and police; it is not a part of the supernatural… By keeping the representation of their colonizers at a minimum, the Buryats prevent their “legitimation and hegemony in the form of a fetish” (Mbembe 1992:4), which protects them from internalizing the oppression and making it deeper, more subconscious, and more naturalized.
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Manduhai Buyandelger (Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia)
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Current scripts—form: Individuals differ in the symbol systems, formats, or intelligences in which they habitually encode their mental representations. To the extent possible, it is desirable to determine which “forms of representation” are favored by an individual and to embed new concerns in those familiar forms. So, for example, if a person favors graphic demonstrations, these means should be employed when feasible. If, on the other hand, the person is influenced by the human embodiment of a desired perspective, the mind changer should try to model or embody the desired changes.
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Howard Gardner (Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other Peoples Minds (Leadership for the Common Good))
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What distinguishes democratic politicians from populists is that the former make representative claims in the form of something like hypotheses that can be empirically disproven on the basis of the actual results of regular procedures and institutions like elections.67 Or, as Paulina Ochoa Espejo has argued, democrats make claims about the people that are self-limiting and are conceived of as fallible.68 In some sense, they’d have to subscribe to Beckett’s famous words in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of a moral and symbolic—not an empirical—nature, it cannot be disproven. When in opposition, populists are bound to cast doubt on the institutions that produce the “morally wrong” outcomes. Hence they can accurately be described as “enemies of institutions”—although not of institutions in general. They are merely the enemies of mechanisms of representation that fail to vindicate their claim to excusive moral representation.
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Jan-Werner Müller (What Is Populism?)
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populist parties are particularly prone to internal authoritarianism. If there is only one common good and only one way to represent it faithfully (as opposed to a self-consciously partisan but also self-consciously fallible interpretation of what the common good might be), then disagreement within the party that claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the common good obviously cannot be permissible.61 And if there is only one “symbolically correct” representation of the real people—the understanding on which populists always fall back, as we have seen—then there’s also not much point in debating that.
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Jan-Werner Müller (What Is Populism?)