The Source Of Self Regard Quotes

Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.

A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.

We become "ads" for ourselves under the pressure of the spectacle that flattens our experience of the public/private dichotomy.

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another,

Like many of us left here, I thought I knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know. That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: you gave us ourselves to think about, to cherish.

Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we”.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

Not being at home in one's homeland; [...] being exiled in the place one belongs.

In your rainbow journey toward the realization of personal goals, don’t make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. That is not to say that anything ever was, or that anything worth achieving ever should be. Things of value seldom are. It is not safe to have a child. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop you.

It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).

In plainer terms", Baumeister and Bushman write, "it is not so much the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most dangerous but, rather those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings....People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.

Oh teach the mind t' aetherial heights to rise, And view familiar, in its native skies, Thy source of good; thy splendor to descry, And on thy self, undazled, fix her eye. Oh quicken this dull mass of mortal clay; Shine through the soul, and drive its clouds away! For thou art Light. In thee the righteous find Calm rest, and soft serenity of mind; Thee they regard alone; to thee they tend; At once our great original and end, At once our means, our end, our guide, our way, Our utmost bound, and our eternal stay!

Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets.

Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.

...since goodness is not only better and good for you, but it is also more interesting, more complicated, more demanding, less predictable, more adventuresome than its opposite. Evil really is boring. Sensational, perhaps, but not interesting. A low-level activity that needs masses or singularity or screams or screeching headlines to even get attention for itself, while goodness needs nothing.

We might think that the deeper we dig into our own being, the further we travel from God; that’s one way Christianity has regarded the inner self, as a source of sin and separation from God. Quakers, however—and other holistic mystics through the ages—believe that at the deepest level of our beings lies Kelly’s Last Rock, the preexistent Word of John’s Gospel (John 1:1–5). Mental and emotional commotion obscure this bedrock, but someone practiced in disciplined silence spends more and more time absorbed in this Ground of Our Being.

The day that the wrong knowledge regarding the world is eliminated by virtue of the Sadguru's advice, one becomes convinced that this entire world is only a temporary appearance. When this happens, one becomes able to look at the world and appreciate it as if it were a cinema, or a source of entertainment, and with the detachment that has been achieved, one remains unaffected.

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis’s cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.

We can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what it is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.

We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.

Children happen to be more attached to the female narcissist due to the way our society is still structured and to the fact that women are the ones to give birth and to serve as primary caretakers. It is much easier for a woman to think of her children as her extensions because they once indeed were her physical extensions and because her on-going interaction with them is both more intensive and more extensive. [The] male narcissist is more likely to regard his children as a nuisance than as a Source of Narcissistic Supply - especially as they grow older and become autonomous. With less alternatives than men, the narcissistic woman fights to maintain her most reliable Source of Supply: her children. Through insidious indoctrination, guilt-formation, emotional sanctions and blackmail, deprivation and other psychological mechanisms, she tries to induce in her offspring dependence which cannot easily be unraveled.

I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women’s worlds.

You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.

When I was younger, I studied the men I was involved with so carefully that I saw or thought I saw what pain or limitation lay behind their sometimes crummy behavior. I found it too easy to forgive them, or rather to regard them with sympathy at my own expense. It was as though I saw the depths but not the surface, the causes but not the effect. Or them and not myself. I think we call that overidentification, and it's common among women. But gods and saints and boddhisattvas must see the sources of all beings' actions and see their consequences, so that there is no self, no separation, just a grand circulatory system of being and becoming and extinguishing. To understand deeply enough is a kind of forgiveness or love that is not the same as whitewashing, if you apply it to everyone, and not just the parade through your bed.

Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation the mid-19th century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes. The mid-20th century civil rights movement yielded women’s liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men no white men so distinguished themselves. But both abandoned Black Civil Rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem as an inevitable and necessary development. An opportunity to concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took place, it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of splinter groups and self-sabotage.

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.

Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.

Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. Because the dead are free, absolute; they cannot be seduced by blitz.

Inviting compassion into the bloodstream of an institution’s agenda or a scholar’s purpose is more than productive, more than civilizing, more than ethical, more than humane; it’s humanizing.

Art is not mere entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning – not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities.

Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on.

How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fiece, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and pollitically unresolved.

This is what I do.” I had written three books. It was only after I finished Song of Solomon that I thought, “Maybe this is what I do only.” Because before that I always said that I was an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I never said I was a writer. Never. And it’s not only because of all the things you might think. It’s also because most writers really and truly have to give themselves permission to win. That’s very difficult, particularly for women. You have to give yourself permission, even when you’re doing it. Writing every day, sending books off, you still have to give yourself permission. I know writers whose mothers are writers, who still had to go through a long process with somebody else—a man or editor or friend or something—to finally reach a point where they could say, “It’s all right. It’s okay.” The community says it’s okay. Your husband says it’s okay. Your children say it’s okay. Your mother says it’s okay. Eventually everybody says it’s okay, and then you have all the okays. It happened to me: even I found a moment after I’d written the third book when I could actually say it. So you go through passport and customs and somebody asks, “What do you do?” And you print it out: WRITE.

Both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native of a country and an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer, and I’d like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense of separatedeness from the culture that pervades the country I live in.

My puzzlement used to be 'why is the Lone Ranger' called 'lone' if he is always with Tonto. Now, I see that given the racial and metaphorical nature of the relationship, he is able to be understood as 'alone' precisely because of Tonto. Without him, he would be, I suppose, simply 'Ranger'.

Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongation of those feelings into the consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious. As regards the latter, analysis shows that they invariably go back to erotic sources. And we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious

Rage has limited uses and serious flaws. It cuts off reason and displaces constructive action with mindless theater. Besides, absorbing the lies, untruths, both transparent and nuanced, of governments, their hypocrisy so polished it does not even care if it is revealed, can lead to a wearied and raveled mind.

There is real danger in the world. And that is precisely why a correction is in order – new curricula containing some meaningful visionary thinking about the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to its health. But if scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade”, where might we look for humanity’s own future?

racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight. The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.

So much of what seems to lie about in discourses about race concerns legitimacy, authenticity, community, belonging – is, in fact, about home. An intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home; forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; the dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; the creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on globalism, diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body, the body as home. In virtually all of these formations, whatever the terrain, race magnifies the matter that matters.

I suspect that a nonracist, nonsexist, educating press is as profitable as one that is not. I suspect that clarification of difficult issues is just as entertaining as obscuring and reducing them is. But it will take more than an effort of the will to make such a press profitable; it will take imagination, invention, and a strong sense of responsibility and accountability.

To weigh the future of future thoughts requires some powerfully visionary thinking about how the life of the mind can operate in a moral context increasingly dangerous to its health. It will require thinking about the generations to come as life forms at least as important as cathedral-like forests and glistening seals. It will require thinking about generations to come as more than a century or so of one’s own family line, group stability, gender, sex, race, religion. Thinking about how we might respond if certain that our own line would last two thousand, twelve thousand more earthly years. It will require thinking about the quality of human life, not just its length. The quality of intelligent life, not just its strategizing abilities. The obligations of moral life, not just its ad hoc capacity for pity.

But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed and the ungovernable; all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil--wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister; whether born of a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of hyperbole, of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness; ranking them, calculating their higher or lower status among others of its kind. Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. ... I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say--no words stronger than steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become. And I have nothing to give either--except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot out of its box of flesh to understand as you have done, the wit of eternity; it's gift of unhinged release through the darkness of its knell.

I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.

The topic of disinterested, non-calculating, and purposeless love for the sake of love is central to mysticism as such. To love God, not because of powerful institutions, or even because God commands it, but to do so in an act of unencumbered freedom, is the very source of mystical relation. To love God is all the reason there needs to be . . . The orthodoxies that have been handed down to us in the monotheistic religions called for obedience to the commanding God. They threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards - images of hell and heaven resting on that authority. In technologically advanced centers of the world, authoritarian religious systems are in sharp decline. Mystical perceptions and approaches to God, however, are entirely different: "God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty" (Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy). Mysticism may he regarded as the anti-authoritarian religion per se. In it, the commanding lord becomes the beloved; what is to come later becomes the now; and naked or even enlightened self-interest that is oriented by reward and punishment becomes mystical freedom.

[B]eyond hiding our need and neurotically pursuing self-esteem, there is a third way our neurotic anxiety about death interferes with love. And this is the darkest manifestation of all, as it makes us violent. Because our worldview is the source of our significance and self-esteem, we want to defend it from the criticisms of out-group members. Those who are different from us implicitly or explicitly call into question the things we hold most dear, the cultural values that ground and shape the contours of our identity and self-esteem in the face of death. In this, out-group members become a source of anxiety, an existential threat. To cope with the anxiety, we rush to defend our worldview and become dogmatic, fundamentalist, and ideological in regard to our values, culture, and way of life. We embrace our worldview as unique and exceptional, as superior to other worldviews, which we deem inferior, mistaken, and even dangerous. This mindset begins the process in which out-group members are denigrated and eventually demonized, sowing the seeds of violence. The point to note here is how this violence is fueled by an underlying neurotic fear that the cultural projects that we’ve invested in and sacrificed for are not actually immortal, eternal, timeless, or immune to death.

In pursuing your highest ambitions, don’t let your personal safety diminish the safety of your stepsister. In wielding the power that is deservedly yours, don’t permit it to enslave your stepsisters. Let your might and your power emanate from that place in you that is nurturing and caring. Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about “us”; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject – advertisement. The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy.

That is why the second coming of the Lord is not only salvation, not only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment. Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the talk of judgment. It means precisely this, that the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom. This must be regarded as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at the end men are judged "by their works" and that no one can escape giving an account of the way he has lived his life. There is a freedom that is not cancelled out even by grace and, indeed, is brought by it face to face with itself: man's final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the decisions he has made in his life. This assertion is in any case also necessary in order to draw the line between faith and false dogmatism or a false Christian self-confidence. This line alone confirms the equality of men by confirming the identity of their responsibility. ... Perhaps in the last analysis it is impossible to escape a paradox whose logic is completely disclosed only to the experience of a life based on faith. Anyone who entrusts himself to a life of faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of grace that frees helpless man and,no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day. Both together mean that the Christian enjoys, on the one hand, the liberating, detached tranquility of him who lives on that excess of divine justice known as Jesus Christ. ... This is the source of a profound freedom, a knowledge of God's unrepentant love; he sees through all our errors and remains well disposed to us. ... At the same time, the Christian knows, however, that he is not free to do whatever he pleases, that his activity is not a game that God allows him and does not take seriously. He knows that he must answer for his actions, that he owes an account as a steward of what has been entrusted to him. There can only be responsibility where there is someone to be responsible to, someone to put the questions. Faith in the Last Judgment holds this questioning of our life over our heads so that we cannot forget it for a moment. Nothing and no one empowers us to trivialize the tremendous seriousness involved in such knowledge; it shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doing so gives it its dignity.

I am convinced that clarity about who one is and what one’s work is, is inextricably bound up with one’s place in a tribe – or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture. I am not suggesting a collection of warring cultures, just clear ones, for it is out of the clarity of one’s own culture that life within another, near another, in juxtaposition to another is healthily possible.

The uncertain notion of individual autonomy that McClay refers to would seem to be one that regards autonomy as the simple opposite of heteronomy. From the Jacksonian to the Beat era, other people have often appeared to the American as a disfiguring source of heteronomy. In a culture predicated on this autonomy-heteronomy distinction, it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world—because everything located outside your head is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom, and therefore a threat to the self. This makes education a tricky matter.

Let me begin with globalization. [...] Narrowly defined, it is meant to mean instant movement of capital and the rapid distribution of data and products operating within a politically neutral environment shaped by multinational corporate demands. Its larger connotations, however, are less innocent, encompassing as they do not only the demonization of embargoed states or the trivialization cum negotiation with warlords, but also the colapse of nation-sates under the weight of transnational economies, capital, and labor; the preeminence of Western culture and economy; the Amerizanization of the developed and developing world through the penetration of US culture into others as well as the marketing of third-world cultures to the West as fashion, film setting, and cuisine.

There is a light adversarial relationship between publishers and authors that I think probably works effectively. But that’s why I was very quiet about writing. I don’t know what made me write it. I think I just wanted to finish the story so that I could have a good time reading it. But the process was what made me think that I should do it again, and I knew that that was the way I wanted to live. I felt very coherent when I was writing that book. But I still didn’t call myself a writer. And it was only with my third book, Song of Solomon, that I finally said—not at my own initiative I’m embarrassed to tell you but at somebody else’s initiative—“This is what I do.” I had written three books. It was only after I finished Song of Solomon that I thought, “Maybe this is what I do only.” Because before that I always said that I was an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I never said I was a writer. Never. And it’s not only because of all the things you might think. It’s also because most writers really and truly have to give themselves permission to win. That’s very difficult, particularly for women. You have to give yourself permission, even when you’re doing it. Writing every day, sending books off, you still have to give yourself permission. I know writers whose mothers are writers, who still had to go through a long process with somebody else—a man or editor or friend or something—to finally reach a point where they could say, “It’s all right. It’s okay.” The community says it’s okay. Your husband says it’s okay. Your children say it’s okay. Your mother says it’s okay. Eventually everybody says it’s okay, and then you have all the okays. It happened to me: even I found a moment after I’d written the third book when I could actually say it. So you go through passport and customs and somebody asks, “What do you do?” And you print it out: WRITE.

Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion. Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolades: you are characterized as courageous, you are outspoken and passionate, and on and on. The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. · Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's destructive results. We Arabs and Mus­lims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted. A number of things stand out about these kinds of performance. In the first place, there is no universalism here at all. Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side: this was as true when you were a Trotskyist as it i's now when you are a recanting former Trotskyist. You do not think of politics in terms of interrelationships or of common histories such as, for instance, the long and complicated dynamic that has bound the Arabs and Muslims to the West and vice versa. Real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is, where cultures are at issue, highly problematic, since most cultures aren't watertight little packages, all homogenous, and all either good or evil. But if your eye is on your patron, you cannot think as an intellectual, but only as a disciple or acolyte. In the back of your mind there is the thought that you must please and not displease.

We say that the body is a temple, because we know that it’s nothing but mortal architecture without the self-regard of consciousness and conscience. The contemplative moment draws us to our sources; we see inside. We close our eyes, in fact, in order to see with clarity. Indeed, the imagination asks us to see with our eyes closed. So we make connections in the dark and thus we imagine what our bodies can do and be, how the breath of the spirit can come and go with perfection, how the ladder gravity of the spine can soar. Poets speak of rhythm and breath as the lifeline of the poetic line; they speak of form as the embodiment of the poem’s energy, the bodying forth of its meaning and being. To expire is to breathe out, to inspire is to breath in. To aspire is to breathe with the mind, to give purpose to the heart’s rhythm. The spine is an aspiration too, since it lifts us from foundations. To imagine what the body can achieve is to invest it with awareness-to begin to make it twice alive: first as a body, then as an embodiment.

Minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do with the way black people really were; it was a purely white construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces. The form worked literally as, and only as, a black façade for whites: whites in blackface. The black mask permitted whites to say illegal, unorthodox, seditious, and sexually illicit things in public. In short, it was a kind of public pornography, the main theme of which was sexual rebellion, sexual license, poverty, and criminality. In short, all of the fears and ambivalences whites had that were otherwise hidden from public discourse could be articulated through the mouth of a black who was understood to be already outside the law and therefore serviceable. In this fashion, the black mask permitted freedom of speech and created a place for public, national dialogue. For whites that is. On the other hand, the mask hid more ligence, and most importantly, it hid the true causes of social conflict by transferring that conflict to a black population.

Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eternity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own animal dharma, or immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives nostalgically, apprehensively and hopefully in the past and future as well as in the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on personal cleverness, rather than on inspiration from the divine Nature of Things; finds himself in a condition of chronic civil war between passion and prudence and, on a higher level of awareness and ethical sensibility, between egotism and dawning spirituality. But this "wearisome condition of humanity" is the indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and deliverance. Man must live in time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on the spiritual level; he must be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he must do battle with the lower self in older that he may become identified with that higher Self within him, which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth, the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Reason and its works "are not and cannot be a proximate means of union with God." The proximate means is "intellect," in the scholastic sense of the word, or spirit. In the last analysis the use and purpose of reason is to create the internal and external conditions favourable to its own transfiguration by and into spirit. It is the lamp by which it finds the way to go beyond itself. We see, then, that as a means to a proximate means to an End, discursive reasoning is of enormous value. But if, in our pride and madness, we treat it as a proximate means to the divine End (as so many religious people have done and still do), or if, denying the existence of an eternal End, we regard it as at once the means to Progress and its ever-receding goal in time, cleverness becomes the enemy, a source of spiritual blindness, moral evil and social disaster. At no period in history has cleverness been so highly valued or, in certain directions, so widely and efficiently trained as at the present time. And at no time have intellectual vision and spirituality been less esteemed, or the End to which they are proximate means less widely and less earnestly sought for. Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line; because we have considerable power over inanimate nature, we are convinced that we are the self-sufficient masters of our fate and captains of our souls; and because cleverness has given us technology and power, we believe, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that we have only to go on being yet cleverer in a yet more systematic way to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.

Is there any religious fact more remarkable than the one that the “God” worshipped by billions of people has, throughout history, been regarded as the Devil by the more thoughtful human beings? Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong if there’s genuine debate over whether “God” is the source of good or the source of evil? No such debate would exist if “God” were self-evidently God, and self-evidently doing the things that would be expected of a perfect moral being, a being of peace, love, compassion and forgiveness

This current state of affairs may prevent otherwise thoughtful people from seeing the value of what has traditionally been regarded as the best of “common sense” about life and of what has been preserved in the wisdom traditions of most cultures—especially in two of the greatest world sources of wisdom about the human self, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek, the biblical and the classical.

Self-control is healthier and actually leads to more enjoyment than self-indulgence, particularly with regard to the most common sources of pleasure in daily life.

For researchers who seek to get around society’s prejudices, the biggest obstacle is the social sciences’ reliance on questionnaires. Especially regarding a sensitive topic such as sex, self-reports are hard to take seriously. No one wants to come across as a pervert or a jerk, so certain kinds of behavior are automatically underreported. Other kinds are overreported. Sometimes the data are plainly implausible. Thus, it is well known that men have more sex partners than women. And not just a few more, but more by a wide margin. One American study, for example, put the average number of lifetime partners of men at 12.3 and that of women at 3.3. Other countries report similar numbers. How is this even possible? Within a closed population that has a 1:1 sex ratio, there is no way. Where do men find all those partners? Many scientists have broken their heads trying to solve this riddle, but the most innovative approach tackled the likely source of the problem: lack of candor.20 At a midwestern university, Michele Alexander and Terri Fisher connected students to the tubes of a bogus lie-detector apparatus and asked them about their sex lives. Under the illusion that the truth would come out, the students gave very different answers than they had given before. All of a sudden, the women remembered more masturbation and more sex partners. On the first measure, they still scored below the men, but not on the second. Now we understand why the number of reported sex partners differs between the sexes. Men don’t mind talking about them, whereas women keep the information to themselves.

The silence of the biblical writings about the Edomite deity provides circumstantial evidence for its identification with Yahweh. Further indications strengthen this claim. First, Edom is qualified as 'the land of wisdom' in Jer. 49.7 and Obadiah 8. In a monotheistic context, it is difficult to assume that wisdom would have a source other than Yahweh. Furthermore, it seems that the book of Job, the main 'wisdom book' of the Bible, has an Edomite origin, thus strengthening the linkage between Edom and Yahweh. Second, the worship of Yahweh in Edom is explicitly mentioned in Isa. 21.11 ('One is calling to me [Yahweh] from Seir'), and the duty of Yahweh in regard to his Edomite worshippers is stressed by Jer. 49.11 ('Leave [Edom] your orphans, I [Yahweh] will keep them alive; and let your widows trust in me'). Third, according to the book of Exodus, Esau-Edom and not Jacob-Israel had to inherit Yahweh's benediction from Isaac (Exod. 27.2-4). This suggests that, before emergence of the Israelites alliance, Esau was the 'legitimate trustee' of the Yahwistic traditions. [Fourth]: The Israelite nazirim (the men self-consecrated to Yahweh in Israel) are compared by Jeremiah to the Edomites: 'For thus says the LORD: If those [the Israelite nazirim] who do not deserve to drink the cup still have to drink it, shall you [Edom] be the one to go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished; you must drink it.' Such a parallel between the elite of the Israelite worshippers (nazirim) and the Edomite people as a whole also suggests that Edom was the first 'land of Yahweh'. [Fifth]: The primacy of Edom did not disappear quickly from the Israelite collective memory. This point is clearly stressed by Amos (9.11-12): 'On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old; in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom...' Together, these five points suggest the conclusion that Yahweh was truly the main (if not the only) deity worshipped in Edom. In this case, it is likely that (1) the name of Yahweh was not used publicly in Edom, and (2) 'Qos' was an Edomite epithet for Yahweh rather than an autonomous deity. (pp. 391-392) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404

By exercising restraint, we learn to only eat when genuinely hungry, drink when thirsty, and so on. Appetite and thirst are the natural ‘sauce’ of life and the secret to making even coarse bread and plain water seem delicious. Self-control is healthier and actually leads to more enjoyment than self-indulgence, particularly with regard to the most common sources of pleasure in daily life. By contrast, Socrates said that anything that impels us to eat when not hungry or drink when not thirsty ‘ruined stomachs and heads and characters’. Hopefully, this seems more like common sense than self-mortification, although it flies in the face of modern attitudes towards food and drink – we’re constantly bombarded with advertising for more convenient and enticing, but often unhealthy, things to consume.

The essence of his psychoanalytic therapy was the restoration of harmony between the biological self and the moral self, and he would have regarded it as a bad therapy indeed if the moral side of man were not strengthened in this process. Never did Freud subscribe to the theory attributed to him that liberation of forbidden impulses would cure man of his mental ills. The permission of analytic therapy is the permission to speak of the dangerous and forbidden thoughts; it is not the permission to act them. The process enables the patient to bring the forbidden impulses under the control of the higher mental processes of reason and judgment, a process which automatically strengthens the moral side of man by partially freeing it from its primitive and irrational sources. The

Reaching his destination in a relatively short period of time, Everett was forced to stop in his tracks when Davis suddenly stepped in front him. His footman was not looking his normal affable self but was glaring at Everett, and . . . the man’s fists were clenched. “Is something the matter?” he asked slowly. “I would say so, sir, but since you are my employer, it wouldn’t be proper of me to tell you what that something is, or tell you where I think you should go at the moment.” “I was intending to go to Mrs. Hart’s house.” “You’re not done misleading Miss Millie?” Everett stepped closer to Davis, stopping when the man actually raised one of his clenched fists. “Were you, by chance, present when Miss Dixon spoke to Millie?” “I was, and good thing too, sir, since I was able to fetch Miss Millie a buggy straightaway so she could get away from . . . you.” “Miss Dixon lied, Davis. She admitted to me she told Millie we were still going through with our engagement plans this evening, but I had no intention of asking Caroline to marry me tonight. And as odd as this may sound, Caroline is now happily engaged to Mr. Codman.” “I beg your pardon?” “I wish I could explain more sufficiently, but now is not the time. I need to find Millie.” “Miss Dixon told Miss Millie you only see her as an amusement.” Temper began to boil directly underneath Everett’s skin. “I swear to you, I’ve never looked at Millie as a source of amusement. Granted, I do find her amusing almost all the time, but that’s completely different.” “What are your intentions toward her, sir, if I may be so bold to ask?” “I think it would probably be better for me to discuss those intentions with Millie first, although I can assure you, they are completely honorable.” Davis regarded him for a long moment before he nodded. “Well, that’s all right, then, but I do think you need to find Miss Millie straightaway. She was close to tears when I summoned a buggy for her, and I don’t believe Miss Millie is a lady who is normally prone to tears.” “You’re

Belief is ever its own tempter to believe differently. You cannot believe freedom into existence, but can you free yourself from belief ? You cannot believe the ‘Truth’ into existence either, but you need not compromise yourself. The Way of Life is not by ‘means’, not even of my own doctrines, though they may allow the self-appointed to emulate my own realisation – may I never cease to be embarrassed by this! How ironic it is that the Man of Sorrows is here the teacher! I have taught – would I choose to teach myself or yourself again? No – not even for a gift from heaven! Mastership equals learning and constant unlearning! Almighty is he who has not learned – and Almighty also is the baby, who only assimilates! The most uncouth of fools now asks: ‘But how can we escape the inevitable evolutions of conception, since all is forever conceiving?’ My answer is true for all situations: listen, you who are God already, yet still want to be God. When the mind is confused to the point that it comes to a standstill,it is then that the capability of attempting the apparently impossible becomes known: by that simple state of ‘Neither-Neither’ the Ego becomes the ‘Silent Watcher’ or ‘Observer’ and understands it all!29 The ‘Why’and ‘How’of desire are contained within the mystic state of ‘Neither-Neither’, and it is such a source of nutrition to life that it may be called the ‘milk state’. Although I am but a clownish fool, all my ideas and yours have come out of it, and although I myself am lazy, regard me as an old sinner who would see others exalted before himself.

Relinquishing reproductive control to God is, in fact, relinquishing it to men. Demanding reproductive control is to usurp male sovereignty and acquire what masculinity takes for granted—dominion.

Muslims in the United States issue fatwas left and right without any regard to conditions, rules, traditions, sources, or anything else for that matter. There are hundreds of self-declared muftis who, after reading a couple of books on hadith, become the viceroys of fiqh on this earth.

...for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. . . There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.

At stage 1, the relationship begins with passion. You hold your partner in high regard, praise them, give them all your attention and hope or expect them to do the same. You probably,and without realising it, inflate the positives and might feel like they are “the one.” As the relationship progresses to stage 2, you become more sensitive to words and actions that could possibly hold even the slightest hint of negativity. You may fixate on the smallest of things like a late reply to their text or a missed call, and begin to question their motives and interest. This comes from a place of anxiety, a fear of abandonment and low self-worth. The symptoms of BPD will start to flare up and interfere. At stage 3, the relationship can take on a different tone again. You might start testing out your partner,deliberately push them away or behave unacceptably .You might cause arguments for no reason just to see how willing they are to fight for the relationship. Stage 4 rolls around and you will start to distance yourself from the love of your life, letting the relationship spiral downward because at that point, you are convinced that they are going to leave you. This is really painful for you. You don’t want them to leave, and they don’t want to leave you either. When they express confusion, you will hide away your real feelings and pretend that everything is fine. Stage 5 may be where the relationship ends, especially if your partner isn't aware yet that you are Borderline or just what that means ie this is the playing out of symptoms and not what you really want. Borderlines experience intense mood swings, ranging from sadness at the loss of the relationship to anger against the other person. The fear of abandonment becomes a reality and it fuels your emotional lability. There may be attempts by them to resolve things but if the relationship is really over, then we’re at stage 6, where the Borderline might spiral downward and experience a bout of severe depression. They may give into their thoughts of low self-worth and even resort to reckless behaviors and self-harming to seek distraction and relief. If the relationship hasn’t ended, the cycle may start all over again. The occurrence of this cycle and its intensity depends on whether or not you are managing your illness by seeking professional help, and if you have other sources of emotional support. The BPD cycle is not a sure thing to happen for people that have or know someone with BPD, nor is it an official symptom of the condition. However it is really very common and even if not officially a symptom ,it is symptomatic. The idea that people with BPD cannot ‘hold down’ relationships, however, is a misconception and as a matter of fact, many people with BPD do have healthy and successful relationships, especially if they have been in, or are going through therapy. Because of the intensity of their emotions ,Borderlines can be the most loving, caring empathic and fun partners. 6 “SOMEONE…HELP ME, PLEASE.” - DIALECTICAL BEHAVIOR THERAPY “I just got diagnosed.

Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.

I just have the hunger for a permanent place.

the claustrophobia one feels in the sheltering arms of the press often seems permanent and conspiratorial. Notwithstanding the promise of more choices and more channels—targeted and consumer-designed magazines, barely limited numbers of cable channels—the fear of being suffocated by eternal and eternally replenished ephemera is real; so is the fear of the complete inability of a public to engage in public discourse. This latter fear—the closing off of public debate—is palpable because there is no way to answer the systemic distortions of the press in a timely, effective fashion and because the definition of “public” is already so radically changed.

Homelessness and crime have been recharacterized and redeployed so that “public space” is increasingly seen as a protected preserve open only to the law-abiding and the

the dishonor that accompanies enslavement. Its modern formation is the residue, the assumption of criminality flash-signaled by skin color. People who say this is not so, that there is a disproportionate percentage of crime committed by blacks, miss something: the unconscionable, immoral, and dangerous treatment of blacks by the justice system and the press. It is unconscionable because it is racist disinformation. Unless, for example, you can intelligently use the phrase “white on white crime,” you cannot use the phrase “black on black crime.

But, irrespective of the internet’s CompuServes, nodes, bulletin boards, Lexus—whatever makes the information highway work—there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You’ve done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

War Against Error” is a phrase originated to describe the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century efforts on the part of institutional religions to correct those whose beliefs were different. In a time when and place where state religion is the norm, apostasy is literally treason. Our modern world has “inherited a fully fledged apparatus of persecution and an intellectual tradition that justified killing in the name of God.

Enron, Halliburton, and WorldCom.

We are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of the world’s wholly human race. The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.

Unaligned, nobly interventionist, unbrooked by nations and political parties, private interests or public exhaustion, Amnesty International declares states, walls, borders irrelevant to its humanitarian goals, detrimental to its tasks, by summoning responsibility and refusing to accept a myopic government’s own narrative of its behavior.

the security of every other nation in the world be subordinate to the comfort of the United States

Consider another consequence of the blatant, violent uses to which foreignness is put—ethnic cleansing. We would be not merely remiss but irrelevant if we did not address the doom currently faced by millions of people reduced to animal, insect, or polluted status by nations with unmitigated, unrepentant power to decide who is a stranger and whether they live or die at, or far from, home.

Marin hesitated. He was not disposed to pursue this discussion, which he regarded as fruitless. But he was recalling the period when he was first adjusting to Trask’s body. The dreamlike memories—that scene where what was evidently a dying man was asking for help. The incident could well be a clue to the mystery of Trask’s past associations. He described the scene to Trask briefly and said, “I gathered that he could have the help only if he could tell why he was ill. What happened to him?” Trask said, “One of my early experiments in self-sufficiency.” “What did the experiment prove?” The other man was scowling. “This is a lame-duck world, David. A large percentage of people are so deeply involved in the need for someone to tell them what to do, think, feel and believe that they will die rather than become aware of their own responsibility for illness, failure and other disabilities. We’ve got to change that. We’ve got to set up a system where people are interdependent, and where an authority on some subject is merely a source of information for his equals.” “This man died?” “No.” Trask shrugged. “After he fell into a coma, we fulfilled our role of father or mother substitute and saved him.

Nevertheless, the possibility that the evolved order in which we live provides us with opportunities for happiness that equal or exceed those provided by primitive orders to far fewer people should not be dismissed (which is not to say that such matters can be calculated). Much of the ‘alienation’ or unhappiness of modern life stems from two sources, one of which affects primarily intellectuals, the other, all beneficiaries of material abundance. The first is a self-fulfilling prophecy of unhappiness for those within any ‘system’ that does not satisfy rationalistic criteria of conscious control. Thus intellectuals from Rousseau to such recent figures in French and German thought as Foucault and Habermas regard alienation as rampant in any system in which an order is ‘imposed’ on individuals without their conscious consent; consequently, their followers tend to find civilisation unbearable – by definition, as it were. Secondly, the persistence of instinctual feelings of altruism and solidarity subject those who follow the impersonal rules of the extended order to what is now fashionably called ‘bad conscience’; similarly, the acquisition of material success is supposed to be attended with feelings of guilt (or ‘social conscience’). In the midst of plenty, then, there is unhappiness not only born of peripheral poverty, but also of the incompatibility, on the part of instinct and of a hubristic reason, with an order that is of a decidedly non-instinctive and extra-rational character.

There are of course several ways of looking at grace. We could, for instance, see it as a function of our own stock of good karma. According to the age-old teaching of karma—the moral law of causation—we reap what we sow. Thus our good thoughts, our positive emotions or dispositions, and our morally sound actions create good karma for us. In other words, we are our own source of grace. I believe that most of the experiences we attribute to “grace” are simply good karma manifesting for us, without the involvement of any other agent. However, I also believe that there are occasions when an apparently objective agency—residing in the subtle or even the transcendental dimensions of existence—favors us in some way. Tradition, moreover, speaks of the guru’s grace and reminds us that the true teacher (sad-guru) is never far from the ultimate Reality. In other words, his or her grace is divine grace. Sincere Yoga practitioners, especially those resorting to prayer, are likely to encounter graceful interventions more frequently than others. To quote Swami Niranjanananda again, “In order to be the recipient [of grace] one has to go through self effort.”3 This very recognition lies behind Patanjali’s recommendation to practice īshvara-pranidhāna, which broadly can be translated as a “positive regard for a higher principle.” More narrowly, we can understand it as devotion to the Lord (īshvara), whom Patanjali considers to be a special kind of purusha, or transcendental Spirit. However we may conceptualize the ultimate Being, there is always room in our practice for opening to grace. As part of this, Western Yoga practitioners, instead of relying exclusively on postures, breath control, and meditation, might also want to include the beneficial traditional practice of prayer (prārthanā).

The collective hope of this kind of group is that through strength and triumph, vengeance will replace shame and humiliation. The leader and nation engage together in a kind of frenzy. Anyone who questions the leader who symbolizes this hope of restitution of self-esteem and power is cast as a traitor to the nation. Hence the amassing of power over the whole world and the destruction of the Jews, cast (mythically) as the source of the humiliation, became ends in themselves. This alliance of nation and leader for power itself, in order to overcome psychic humiliation, Kohut regards as the source of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. He comments, “The most malignant human propensities are mobilized in support of nationalistic narcissistic rage. Nothing satisfies its fury, neither the achievement of limited advantages nor the negotiation of compromises, however favorable—not even victory itself is enough.”43

As the modern era came into being, the avarice of the usurer was supplanted by interest in the broader and more abstract sense of a share or stake. This new concept of interest was ethically wide-ranging: it ‘came to cover virtually the entire range of human actions, from the narrowly self-centered to the sacrificially altruistic, and from the prudently calculated to the passionately compulsive’.49 The seventeenth-century English statesman and philosopher Lord Shaftesbury summed up the new thinking with his comment that ‘Interest governs the World.’50 In his Fable of the Bees (1714), Bernard Mandeville exposed the paradox at the heart of the modern world, namely that private vices brought public benefits. Adam Smith incorporated Mandeville’s wicked insights into his political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes the individual as one who ‘By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.’51 A similar thought is expressed in another famous line, in which Smith writes that ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ The spirit of capitalism was transmitted across networks of credit that connected lenders and borrowers through bonds of mutual self-interest.52 Daniel Defoe described credit as a ‘stock’, synonymous with capital, while the French in Defoe’s day referred to capital as ‘interest’, in the sense of taking a stake.fn6 From a technical viewpoint, capital consists of a stream of future income discounted to its present value. Without interest, there can be no capital. Without capital, no capitalism. Turgot, a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, understood this very well: ‘the capitalist lender of money,’ he wrote, ‘ought to be considered as a dealer in a commodity which is absolutely necessary for the production of wealth, and which cannot be at too low a price.’53 (Turgot exaggerated. As we shall see, interest at ‘too low a price’ is the source of many evils.)

When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas "marketplaced," our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

Unleashing Reliable Insights from Generative AI by Disentangling Language Fluency and Knowledge Acquisition Generative AI carries immense potential but also comes with significant risks. One of these risks of Generative AI lies in its limited ability to identify misinformation and inaccuracies within the contextual framework. This deficiency can lead to mistakenly associating correlation with causation, reliance on incomplete or inaccurate data, and a lack of awareness regarding sensitive dependencies between information sets. With society’s increasing fascination with and dependence on Generative AI, there is a concern that the unintended consequence that it will have an unhealthy influence on shaping societal views on politics, culture, and science. Humans acquire language and communication skills from a diverse range of sources, including raw, unfiltered, and unstructured content. However, when it comes to knowledge acquisition, humans typically rely on transparent, trusted, and structured sources. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT draw from an array of opaque, unattested sources of raw, unfiltered, and unstructured content for language and communication training. LLMs treat this information as the absolute source of truth used in their responses. While this approach has demonstrated effectiveness in generating natural language, it also introduces inconsistencies and deficiencies in response integrity. While Generative AI can provide information it does not inherently yield knowledge. To unlock the true value of generative AI, it is crucial to disaggregate the process of language fluency training from the acquisition of knowledge used in responses. This disaggregation enables LLMs to not only generate coherent and fluent language but also deliver accurate and reliable information. However, in a culture that obsesses over information from self-proclaimed influencers and prioritizes virality over transparency and accuracy, distinguishing reliable information from misinformation and knowledge from ignorance has become increasingly challenging. This presents a significant obstacle for AI algorithms striving to provide accurate and trustworthy responses. Generative AI shows great promise, but addressing the issue of ensuring information integrity is crucial for ensuring accurate and reliable responses. By disaggregating language fluency training from knowledge acquisition, large language models can offer valuable insights. However, overcoming the prevailing challenges of identifying reliable information and distinguishing knowledge from ignorance remains a critical endeavour for advancing AI algorithms. It is essential to acknowledge that resolving this is an immediate challenge that needs open dialogue that includes a broad set of disciplines, not just technologists Technology alone cannot provide a complete solution.

Third, in our addiction to the rational consciousness and its countless props we believe the myth that we are really powerless to do anything about it. Addicts typically feel disempowered. The object to which they are addicted seems to them bigger and more powerful than their will. Similarly, stuck as we are in the lopsided worldview spawned by the rational consciousness, which tends to discredit other forms and states of consciousness, we do not believe that there is anything we can do about our situation. As addicts of the rational consciousness we do not believe in a universe that is inherently benign. We refuse to consider that the world we live in is actually comprised of the kinds of dimensions of reality that religions and spiritual traditions talk about. We disallow ourselves the possibility of inner or spiritual growth, because our view of human potential is limited to the capacities of the rational mind, which is viewed as the finest product of evolution. Fourth, like the typical addict, we tend to weave all kinds of explanatory tales to justify our present condition to ourselves and to each other. In this category belongs the “everybody thinks so” attitude, which is modeled not on the few exceptional men and women who can see farther than the rest, but on the lowest common denominator of understanding and living: a flagrant perversion of the democratic ideal. In other words, through word magic we engage in an act of massive repression by which we deny ourselves the opportunity to grow; we deny ourselves access to those forms and states of consciousness that our rational consciousness forces us to deny and belittle. Thus our experiential repertoire remains limited, even truncated. Fifth, addicts tend to be inflexible, dogmatic, and arrogant about defending their position, and we addicts of the rational consciousness are subject to the same mood. Because we have entrenched ourselves in an untenable position, in which the rational ego rules supreme, we meet any challenge to our unviable approach to life with haughty intransigence. We need to be right, because our entire worldview and life-style are at stake. And yet, sixth, like true addicts, those of us who are transfixed in the rational consciousness are deeply suffering our mood of separation, self-centeredness, and self-fragmentation. All life, observed Gautama the Buddha, is suffering. But there is suffering and then there is suffering. It appears that whenever we take the presumed independence of the human personality too seriously, cutting ourselves off from other beings and regarding the world as an enemy to be conquered, we become our own source of suffering. This suffering is superimposed on any adversity and pain we may experience as part of our human adventure on this planet. It is a psychological malaise from which we can recover only when we stop pinching ourselves. Our addiction to the “normal” rational consciousness is so potent that we cannot easily shake this habit even when we have realized that our habit of egoic self-encapsulation is artificial and self-inflicted and resting on a denial of the essential interconnectedness and interdependence of everything.

We live in the Age of Spectacle. Spectacle promises to engage us, to mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways. Very like the promise of nuclear energy: to be safe, clean, and cheap, but turned out to be dangerous, dirty (contaminated), and expensive. The promise made by the spectacle has been forfeited. Not only are we not engaged, we are profoundly distanced—unable to discriminate, edit, or measure shock or empathy. The “regime of visual authority [is a] coercive organization of images according to a stopwatch” and passes its organization off to us as a simulacrum of the real.

...there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You've done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

If scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade,” where might we look for humanity’s own future?

I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You are moving toward self-fulfillment, and the consequences of that fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as important as you are.