The Animal That Therefore I Am Quotes

I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created by God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good and not a beast. I am an animal with reason. I have flesh, I *am* flesh, I am not descended from flesh. Flesh is created by God. I am God. I am God. I am God.

Descartes’ s faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.”34 Evolutionary

I say, I can not identify that thing which is called happiness, that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I had never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness, for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace -- for motionlessness -- for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore, I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here. I still go straying.

Men are made in God's image, or so I am told. Likewise that we differ from the animals in having reason. Reason, therefore, must plainly be a characteristic of the Almighty, quod erat demonstrandum. Is it reasonable, then, to create men whose very nature— clearly constructed and defined by yourself— is inimical to your own laws and must lead inevitably to destruction? Whatever would be the point of that? Does it not strike you as a most capricious notion— to say nothing of being wasteful?

An old lady had an Alderney cow, which she looked upon as a daughter. ....The whole town knew and kindly regarded Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney, therefore great was the sympathy and regret when, in an unguarded moment, the poor cow fell into a lime-pit. She moaned so loudly that she was soon heard and rescued; but meanwhile the poor beast had lost most of her hair and came out looking naked, cold and miserable, in a bare skin. Everybody pitied the animal, though a few could not restrain their smiles at her droll appearance. Miss Betsy Barker absolutely cried with sorrow and dismay; and it was said she thought of trying a bath of oil. This remedy, perhaps, was recommended by some one of the number whose advice she asked; but the proposal, if ever it was made, was knocked on the head by Captain Brown's decided "Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers, ma'am, if you wish to keep her alive, But my advice is, kill the poor creature at once." Miss Betsy Barker dried her eyes, and thanked the Captain heartily; she set to work, and by-and-by all the town turned out to see the Alderney meekly going to her pasture, clad in dark grey flannel.I have watched her myself many a time. Do you ever see cows dressed in grey flannel in London?

I think, therefore I am, but that's not all - what I think and how I think, determine what I am - an animal or a human.

I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel. “I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now—don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there—the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul—the secret, rejected, guilty soul. Mr. Trask, you said you did not kill your brother and then you remembered something. I don’t want to know what it was, but was it very far apart from Cain and Abel? And what do you think of my Oriental patter, Mr. Hamilton? You know I am no more Oriental than you are.

They are from the perspective of the Creator. The first meaning of "I am the reason you walk" is "I have created you and therefore you walk." The second meaning is "I am your motivation." The third meaning is "I am that spark inside you called love, which animates you and allows you to live by the Anishinaabe values of kiizhewaatiziwin." The fourth and final meaning is "I am the destination at the end of your life that you ware walking toward.

Being after, being alongside, being near [près] would appear as different modes of being, indeed of being-with.

To attempt to change circumstances before I change my own imaginal activity is to struggle against the very nature of my own being, for my own imaginal activity is animating my world. If I believe that I am injured or that others are against me, I have conjured them in my world, and they have to be against me. If I fully believe that all are working towards the fulfillment of my good, they have to work towards the fulfillment of my good. I don’t ask them. I don’t compel them. I simply do it only within myself, and the whole vast world exists within me. Therefore, it is myself “pushed out.” It’s objectified. I don’t have to change affairs; I only change it within myself, and then every one, though I know him or not by name, – it doesn’t really matter, – it’s myself “pushed out.

On a cosmic scale, it seems that the life of a single plant or animal is completely insignificant. Then, on the same scale, I also am insignificant; and you, too. In fact, everyone and everything is insignificant, and therefore no one and nothing is insignificant.

As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called “animal” offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.

So far, we have no good answer to this problem. Already thousands of years ago philosophers realised that there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind. Indeed, even in the case of other humans, we just assume they have consciousness – we cannot know that for certain. Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations? According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the ‘real’ world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you? For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a ‘virtual world’ game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. And it is not even, finally, meanings that I am after, but rather significances. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly— that is, thickly— described. In brief, a little thicker description is what we need in this life, and that is what, I am here to argue, ethnography, properly conceived as a thick description of particular social situations, does indeed provide. The task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to take, as it were, the native's point of view, to get inside his head and see the world the way he does, to delineate the ethos of his culture as that ethos is manifested in actual behavior.

No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of the continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire.

God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn’t yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say “I am that I am” without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. This powerful yet deprived “in order to see” that is God’s, the first stroke of time, before time, God’s exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy.

Chief among these are inappropriate value judgments: the designation as “good” or “evil” of things that in fact are neither good nor evil. For example, my impression that my house has just burned down is simply that—an impression or report conveyed to me by my senses about an event in the outside world. By contrast, my perception that my house has burned down and I have thereby suffered a terrible tragedy includes not only an impression, but also an interpretation imposed upon that initial impression by my powers of hypolepsis. It is by no means the only possible interpretation, and I am not obliged to accept it. I may be a good deal better off if I decline to do so. It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error. The second discipline, that of action, relates to our relationship with other people. Human beings, for Marcus as for the Stoics generally, are social animals, a point he makes often (e.g., 5.16, 8.59, 9.1). All human beings possess not only a share of the logos but also the ability to use it (that is what makes us human and distinguishes us from other animals). But it would perhaps be

Most people don’t “choose” fiery tempers or alcoholic binges or torturing prisoners of war or exploiting Third-World workers or dumping toxic chemicals into their community’s water supply. Most people don’t first conclude that adultery is right and then start fantasizing about their neighbor swinging from a stripper pole. Most people don’t first learn to praise gluttony and then start drizzling bacon grease over their second helping of chicken-fried steak. It happens in reverse. First, you do what you want to do, even though you “know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die,” and only then do you “give approval to those who practice them” (Rom. 1:32). You start to see yourself as either special or as hopeless, and thus the normal boundaries don’t seem to apply. It might be that you are involved in certain patterns right now and that you would, if asked, be able to tell me exactly why they are morally and ethically wrong. It’s not that you are deficient in the cognitive ability to diagnose the situation. It’s instead that you slowly grow to believe that your situation is exceptional (“I am a god”), and then you find all kinds of reasons why this technically isn’t theft or envy or hatred or fornication or abuse of power or whatever (“I am able to discern good and evil”). Or you believe you are powerless before what you want (“I am an animal”) and can therefore escape accountability (“I will not surely die”). You’ve forgotten who you are. You are a creature. You are also a king or a queen. You are not a beast, and you are not a god. That issue is where temptation begins.

Everything is estimated by the standard of its own good. The vine is valued for its productiveness and the flavour of its wine, the stag for his speed. We ask, with regard to beasts of burden, how sturdy of back they are; for their only use is to bear burdens. If a dog is to find the trail of a wild beast, keenness of scent is of first importance; if to catch his quarry, swiftness of foot; if to attack and harry it, courage. In each thing that quality should be best for which the thing is brought into being and by which it is judged. And what quality is best in man? It is reason; by virtue of reason he surpasses the animals, and is surpassed only by the gods. Perfect reason is therefore the good peculiar to man; all other qualities he shares in some degree with animals and plants. Man is strong; so is the lion. Man is comely; so is the peacock. Man is swift; so is the horse. I do not say that man is surpassed in all these qualities. I am not seeking to find that which is greatest in him, but that which is peculiarly his own. Man has body; so also have trees. Man has the power to act and to move at will; so have beasts and worms. Man has a voice; but how much louder is the voice of the dog, how much shriller that of the eagle, how much deeper that of the bull, how much sweeter and more melodious that of the nightingale! What then is peculiar to man? Reason. When this is right and has reached perfection, man's felicity is complete. Hence, if everything is praiseworthy and has arrived at the end intended by its nature, when it has brought its peculiar good to perfection, and if man's peculiar good is reason; then, if a man has brought his reason to perfection, he is praiseworthy and has readied the end suited to his nature. This perfect reason is called virtue, and is likewise that which is honourable.

My dear boys, what are you thinking about?” exclaimed Mrs. Lynn. “I cannot possibly countenance any such inconsistent proceeding,” chimed in the Dowager Ingram. “Indeed, mama, but you can—and will,” pronounced the haughty voice of Blanche, as she turned round on the piano-stool; where till now she had sat silent, apparently examining sundry sheets of music. “I have a curiosity to hear my fortune told: therefore, Sam, order the beldame forward.” “My darling Blanche! recollect—” “I do—I recollect all you can suggest; and I must have my will—quick, Sam!” “Yes—yes—yes!” cried all the juveniles, both ladies and gentlemen. “Let her come—it will be excellent sport!” The footman still lingered. “She looks such a rough one,” said he. “Go!” ejaculated Miss Ingram, and the man went. Excitement instantly seized the whole party: a running fire of raillery and jests was proceeding when Sam returned. “She won’t come now,” said he. “She says it’s not her mission to appear before the ‘vulgar herd’ (them’s her words). I must show her into a room by herself, and then those who wish to consult her must go to her one by one.” “You see now, my queenly Blanche,” began Lady Ingram, “she encroaches. Be advised, my angel girl—and—” “Show her into the library, of course,” cut in the “angel girl.” “It is not my mission to listen to her before the vulgar herd either: I mean to have her all to myself. Is there a fire in the library?” “Yes, ma’am—but she looks such a tinkler.” “Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding.” Again Sam vanished; and mystery, animation, expectation rose to full flow once more. “She’s ready now,” said the footman, as he reappeared. “She wishes to know who will be her first visitor.” “I think I had better just look in upon her before any of the ladies go,” said Colonel Dent. “Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming.” Sam went and returned. “She says, sir, that she’ll have no gentlemen; they need not trouble themselves to come near her; nor,” he added, with difficulty suppressing a titter, “any ladies either, except the young, and single.” “By Jove, she has taste!” exclaimed Henry Lynn. Miss Ingram rose solemnly: “I go first,” she said, in a tone which might have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope, mounting a breach in the van of his men.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – thus an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, ‘the word is essentially fruitful.’ He is the man who feels that ‘what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.’ And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. ‘We talk,’ he wrote in middle life, ‘far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.’ We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction. Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s. In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctrines in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary in as much as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, not any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

PRAYER OF COMMUNION We who are about to partake of each other, shall walk past all amorous sickness and deaths, for we are within the magical equinox. Amen We who proudly make unto ourselves every graven image, shall have great copulations and are allowed to love our Gods, for we know the Sacred Alignments. Amen We who do not crucify—nothing shall hurt us that is of the 'Nature'; neither our comings and goings from the womb, for we have the Key to all aesthetics. Amen In this sacred moment (here occurs the symbolic eating of flesh and blood) we forget our enemies: therefore let our dead children sleep. And let our dead loves arise, so they too may watch and enjoy our ecstasies. Let their animation be power to our memories and so resurge all ecstasy, for in this day there shall be no inhibitions. Amen Thou insatiable peripheral quadriga of sex. Amen PRAYER OF ADORATION Thou lambent spirit of Erh! Thou hast kindled the sacred fire from dead ashes, so my torch lightens all darknesses. Thou hast become the fulcrum of my will. Everlastingly in Thee I know not respite: Except in the sensuous impact of flesh, there are no meanings. Thou hast awakened me into eternities. Thou makest all things beautiful unto the grotesque. Whom thou succour hath no sterility. I am reborn and reborn into desirous becomings: I have recreated my Soul by birthing pleasure. Through Thee my will, desire, belief and word become the law That carries me into the Catastrophic beyond becoming: Thou the emissary of Neither-Neither! Ever Silent Watcher! Thou hast shown me the new sexualities And all the mysteries of the Threshold! Only Thee I adore in my Soul and my everlasting body. Alpha-Omega—Amen!

The first step of good democracy is to choose a good leader, or more importantly, to not choose an animal as a leader - yet we made that ghastly mistake in 2016 by electing the most non-presidential creature on earth as the leader of our United States of America. There are good presidents, there are not so good presidents, but the unique problem with the president that we chose in the previous election was that it was not even a civilized human to begin with - it was an "it" not a he or she or they, and even after being handed over the very lives of the people that savage beast showed no sign of accountability whatsoever. Thus, we broke our democracy in 2016, but with sheer determination and conscientious persistence we have succeeded in fixing that mistake. Yes, I am filled with joy unspeakable to say out loud, that we have corrected our mistake and fixed the democracy into its usual imperfect but functional state. I say imperfect because democracy by nature is not perfect, but the problem we created last time was that we took things too far, and in the process turned a somewhat functional democracy into an absolutely dysfunctional one - in short, we broke it. And had the leader we chose been a smart one, that is, if that idiot had been not an idiot, but an actual cunning dictator, we wouldn't be celebrating our victory as a civilized people today, instead we would be mourning the burial of democracy. Fortunately, the insane ravings of a brainless, spineless and heartless maniac will no longer have to be considered as the statements originating from the sacred office of the President of the United States of America. We have fixed the broken democracy - yes - but the problems that existed before the maniac came to power still exist today. Therefore, we may cherish the restoration of our democracy as much as we want, the real work begins now. Choosing a proper human as a President doesn't magically make the problems of our nation disappear - those problems still exist - and they'll continue to give us chills time and again, unless we as a people stand accountable, both the government and the citizenry alike, and start working on those problems. Remember, the United States of America is not the responsibility of merely the President, the Vice President and their administration, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us whose veins carry the spirit of liberty and whose nerves carry the torrents of bravery. We have won the battle of making the White House human again, but the war has just begun - the war against systemic racism, against misogyny, against homophobia, against islamophobia, against gun violence, and against post-pandemic health and economic crisis. So, though we may celebrate the victory for a short while, we mustn't lose sight of the issues - we must now actually start working as one people - as the American people to heal the wounds on the soul of our land of liberty. It's time to once again start dreaming and working towards the impossible dream - the dream of freedom not oppression, the dream of assimilation not discrimination, and above all, the dream of ascension not descension. Never forget my friend, AMERICA means Affectionate, Merciful, Egalitarian, Responsible, Inclusive, Conscientious and Accepting.

PEOPLE LIVING IN THE WEST, in societies that we describe as Western, or as the free world, may be educated in many different ways, but they will all emerge with an idea about themselves that goes something like this: I am a citizen of a free society, and that means I am an individual, making individual choices. My mind is my own, my opinions are chosen by me, I am free to do as I will, and at the worst the pressures on me are economic, that is to say I may be too poor to do as I want. This set of ideas may sound something like a caricature, but it is not so far off how we see ourselves. It is a portrait that may not have been acquired consciously, but is part of a general atmosphere or set of assumptions that influence our ideas about ourselves. People in the West therefore may go through their entire lives never thinking to analyze this very flattering picture, and as a result are helpless against all kinds of pressures on them to conform in many kinds of ways. The fact is that we all live our lives in groups—the family, work groups, social, religious and political groups. Very few people indeed are happy as solitaries, and they tend to be seen by their neighbours as peculiar or selfish or worse. Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us. When we’re in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find “like-minded” people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group. It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced—something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again—for they will have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have heard of these experiments, never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates my general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.

I am the Lord your God, who separated you from all peoples. 25You shall therefore distinguish between clean animals and unclean, between unclean birds and clean, and you shall not make your souls abominable by animals or birds, or by any kind of living thing that creeps on the ground, which I separated from you as unclean. 26You shall be holy to Me, for I, the Lord your God, who separated you from all peoples for Myself, am holy.

If … the bread be the real body of God, the partaking of it must produce in me immediate, involuntary sanctifying effects; I need to make no special preparation, to bring with me no holy disposition. If I eat an apple, the apple itself gives rise to the taste of apple. At the utmost I need nothing more than a healthy stomach to perceive that the apple is an apple. … If it is my disposition, my faith, which alone makes the divine body a means of sanctification to me, which transubstantiates the dry bread into pneumatic animal substance, why do I still need an external object? It is I myself who give rise to the effect of the body on me … ; I am acted on by myself. Where is the objective truth and power? … The specific difference of this bread from common natural bread rests therefore only on the difference between the state of mind at the table of the Lord, and the state of mind at any other table. … In the significance attached to to it lies its effect.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – thus an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, ‘the word is essentially fruitful.’ He is the man who feels that ‘what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.’ And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. ‘We talk,’ he wrote in middle life, ‘far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.’ We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction. Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.

I am not a doctor, but here is my personal definition: Anxiety is the feeling that takes away my confidence, frustrates me, and makes me physically sick. Anxiety was a wild animal in my mind that would terrorize every effort I put into creating a good, quality life. It sabotaged me until I realized that it needed attention, love, and understanding. Anxiety still exists and will continue, but I managed to domesticate it, therefore making peace with it.

The only way to ensure that our existence creates no harm in the world is…not to exist. Whoa. There was more to it than that, but that was the gist: I kill stuff (whether actively or passively), therefore I am. For the first time in twenty years of meat avoidance, I wondered: Is abstaining from meat more hypocritical than helpful? Was I pretending to help the world while denying the fact that my very existence caused, by extension, the death of animals, plants, insects, and microorganisms all the time? Another of my favorite writers, the farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin agrees: “The most inhumane perspective is the one that denies the life-death-decay-regeneration cycle. Everything is constantly eating and being eaten.”61

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. And it is not even, finally, meanings that I am after, but rather significances. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly— that is, thickly— described. In brief, a little thicker description is what we need in this life, and that is what, I am here to argue, ethnography, properly conceived as a thick description of particular social situations, does indeed provide. The Task of the ethnographer is to make the familiar strange and strangely familiar, to turn away from the generalizing language of culture and toward the particularities of social experience

Having trouble, Piglet?” “The lid on this jar is stuck,” gasped Piglet. “Yes, it . . . is, isn’t it. Here, Pooh, you open it.” (Pop.) “Thanks, Pooh,” said Piglet. “Nothing, really,” said Pooh. “How did you get that lid off?” asked Tigger. “It’s easy,” said Pooh. “You just twist on it like this, until you can’t twist any harder. Then you take a deep breath and, as you let it out, twist. That’s all.” “Let me try that!” yelled Tigger, bouncing into the kitchen. “Where’s that new jar of pickles? Ah, here it is.” “Tigger,” began Piglet nervously, “I don’t think you’d better—” “Nothing to it,” said Tigger. ‘‘Just twist, and—” CRASH! “All right, Tigger,” I said. “Get those pickles off the floor.” “Slipped out of my paw,” explained Tigger. “He tried too hard,” said Pooh. And when you try too hard, it doesn’t work. Try grabbing something quickly and precisely with a tensed-up arm; then relax and try it again. Try doing something with a tense mind. The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard—one that thinks too much. The animals in the Forest don’t think too much; they just Are. But with an overwhelming number of people, to misquote an old Western philosopher, it’s a case of “I think, therefore I am Confused.” If you compare the City with the Forest, you may begin to wonder why it’s man who goes around classifying himself as The Superior Animal.

I think this is the best known story in the world because it is everybody's story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I'm feeling it my way now, don't jump on me if I'm not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and in crime guilt - and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there - the start, the beginning. One child is refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved and a third conquers the world - and always the guild and revenge and more guilt. The woman is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul - the secret, rejected, guilty soul.

Okay, well, if we were to be created in a video game, as Martin pointed out, and there is a creator who has created us and has full control over us because we are merely holograms or animations, then giving credence to this anti-reality would actually be illogical,” I asserted. “As I mentioned earlier, I had to agree with Rene Descartes and the phrase ‘I think. Therefore, I am.’ We have the ability to think, and if we were holograms in the deterministic anti-reality, then we shouldn’t be able to feel, reason, acquire consciousness, or interpret sensory experience, but we do. Living in a deterministic anti-reality like a video game would make us have no control over how we think, but we do have control over how we think, not the creator, so we are not holograms or animations that are controlled by someone, because we have control over our thoughts.” “But what if the creator controls our thoughts?” Martin asked. “That is more proof that we are not living in a deterministic anti-reality. It really reminds me of how Rene Descartes devised the phrase ‘I think. Therefore, I am.’ He reasoned that if there was a devil who came to cause him to THINK that he exists even when he does not, then for him to be able to think that he exists, he has to henceforth exist. Likewise, if our thoughts were to be controlled by a creator, then that would mean we would exist, because for our thoughts to be controlled, we would have to have the ability to think, but since we think, we would have to have had some kind of control over our thoughts at some point of our lives. Once again, a deterministic anti-reality is where we have no control over ourselves, because we are non-real beings created by someone who lives in reality, but since there is no creator who has full control over our thoughts, then we don’t live in a deterministic anti-reality. The closest thing to our thoughts being ‘controlled’ is a change of opinion, like what might happen after being persuaded, but because we have control over our thoughts while we are thinking, our thoughts are not being controlled; WE are just changing them based on our own freewills.

Loneliness Psychology (No-Nonsense Sonnet) Being happy alone is no sign of genius, It is either narcissism or hypocrisy. You've got to be extremely selfish, To be happy without human company. If your heart is alive and human, Loneliness will cause you misery. It's only the self-absorbed animal, Who don't need people to be happy. It's okay if you are alone and miserable, It is but a healthy mind's healthy reaction. Do not romanticize it with phony philosophy, For derangement starts with self-deception. Fact of the matter is - I suffer, therefore I am. Life is but a cosmic dance between dusk and dawn.

Archaeologists who want to establish the date of a particular site have a number of techniques they can use. If they find organic material, say the bones of an animal, they can use radiocarbon dating. If they find the remains of wooden structures, a post or lintel say, they can use dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. If they find a firepit they can use archaeomagnetic dating. Radiocarbon dating works because, when alive, an organism takes in carbon from the air or through the food chain; carbon contains small amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which decays into nonradioactive standard carbon at a constant rate; when the organism dies it ceases to ingest carbon, so the proportion of carbon-14 in its remains steadily decays. Measuring the relative amount of carbon-14 content therefore establishes a fairly accurate date for the specimen. Dendrochronology works because tree rings vary in width season by season according to the rainfall received, and so trees that grow in a given climatic region and historical period show similar ring-width patterns. Comparing the ring pattern to a known and dated local ring pattern establishes exactly the years in which the wood in the structure was growing. Archaeomagnetic dating works because the earth's magnetic field changes direction over time gradually in a known way. Clays or other materials in a firepit, when fired and cooled, retain a weak magnetism that aligns with the earth's field, and this establishes a rough date for the firepit's last use. There are still other techniques: potassium-argon dating, thermoluminescence dating, hydration dating, fission-track dating. But what I want the reader to notice is that each of these relies on some particular set of natural effects. That a technology relies on some effect is general. A technology is always based on some phenomenon or truism of nature that can be exploited and used to a purpose. I say "always" for the simple reason that a technology that exploited nothing could achieve nothing. This is the third of the three principles I am putting forward, and it is just as important to my argument as the other two, combination and recursiveness. This principle says that if you examine any technology you find always at its center some effect that it uses. Oil refining is based on the phenomenon that different components or fractions of vaporized crude oil condense at different temperatures. A lowly hammer depends on the phenomenon of transmission of momentum (in this case from a moving object-the hammer-to a stationary one-the nail). Often the effect is obvious. But sometimes it is hard to see, particularly when we are very familiar with the technology. What phenomenon does a truck use? A truck does not seem to be based on any particular law of nature. Nevertheless it does use a phenomenon-or, I should say, two. A truck is in essence a platform that is self-powered and can be moved easily. Central to its self-powering is the phenomenon that certain chemical substances (diesel fuel, say) yield energy when burned; and central to its ease of motion is the "phenomenon" that objects that roll do so with extremely low friction compared with ones that slide (which is used of course in the wheels and bearings). This last "phenomenon" is hardly a law of nature; it is merely a usable-and humble-natural effect. Still it is a powerful one and is exploited everywhere wheels or rolling parts are used.

The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.

It is better to strip hides off animal carcasses than to say to other people, ‘I am a great sage, I am a priest, provide me therefore with maintenance.

Alternately and/or all at once, the Socratic pharmakon petrifies and vivifies, anesthetizes and sensitizes, appeases and anguishes.

I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery. There shall not be for you other gods besides me. ‘You shall not make for yourself a divine image of any type of form that is in the heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. ‘You shall not bow down to them, and you shall not serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, punishing the guilt of fathers upon their children and upon the third and upon the fourth generation of those hating me, but showing loyal love to thousands of those who love me and of those who keep my commandments. ‘You shall not take up the name of Yahweh your God for a worthless purpose, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished anyone who uses his name for a worthless purpose. ‘Observe the Sabbath day to make it holy, just as Yahweh your God has commanded you. Six days you shall work, and you shall do all of your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto Yahweh your God; you shall not do any work, or your son, or your daughter, or your slave, or your slave woman, or your ox, or your donkey, or any of your domestic animals, or your resident alien who is in your towns, so that your slave and your slave woman may rest as you rest. And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh your God brought you out with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm; therefore, Yahweh your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath. ‘Honor your father and your mother, as Yahweh your God commanded you, so that it will be good for you in the land that Yahweh your God is giving to you. ‘You shall not murder. ‘And you shall not commit adultery. ‘And you shall not steal. ‘And you shall not falsely bear evidence against your neighbor. ‘And you shall not covet the wife of your neighbor, and you shall not crave the house of your neighbor, his field or his slave or his slave woman or his ox and his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

5 Moses summoned all Israel and said: Hear, Israel, the decrees and laws I declare in your hearing today. Learn them and be sure to follow them. 2 The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. 3 It was not with our ancestors[a] that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today. 4 The Lord spoke to you face to face out of the fire on the mountain. 5 (At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire and did not go up the mountain.) And he said: 6 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 7 “You shall have no other gods before[b] me. 8 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 9 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 10 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. 11 “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. 12 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. 15 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. 16 “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you. 17 “You shall not murder. 18 “You shall not commit adultery. 19 “You shall not steal. 20 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. 21 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” 22 These are the commandments the Lord proclaimed in a loud voice to your whole assembly there on the mountain from out of the fire, the cloud and the deep darkness; and he added nothing more. Then he wrote them on two stone tablets and gave them to me.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.