Vicious Circle Of Life Quotes

Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.

Birth. Study. Job. House. Car. Love. Marry. Child. Retirement. Solitude. Death.

Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our instituitions. And so it goes, on and on.

In life you have to avoid three geometric figures - vicious circles, love triangles and square minds

There is, indeed, a viewpoint from which this “rationalization” of life is not rational. The brain is clever enough to see the vicious circle which it has made for itself. But it can do nothing about it. Seeing that it is unreasonable to worry does not stop worrying; rather, you worry the more at being unreasonable.

Do you know why the world is moving? Or why things are the way they are? It’s because the vast majority of people don’t ask themselves one simple question. ‘And then what?’ I want to crack this exam. ‘And then what?’ I want to elope with her. ‘And then what?’ I want that luxury car. ‘And then what?’ I want to be famous. ‘And then what?’ Do you understand what I want to expound? We all progress, taking one step at a time. We all progress with one goal under consideration. But no matter how many steps we take, there still remains a deep yearning for something that we can’t explain. A nihilist knows that it is a vicious circle. A nihilist knows that it is all ‘pointless.’ (Yes, true nihilism is spirituality inverted). But thank God, nihilists don’t rule this world. And thank God, nor do the spiritualists. Else the whole world would be asking, ‘And then what?

Don’t try to hurry,” he said. “You’ll know in due time and then you will be on your own, by yourself.” “Do you mean that I won’t see you any more, don Juan?” “Not ever again,” he said. “Genaro and I will be then what we always have been, dust on the road.” I had a jolt in the pit of my stomach. “What are you saying, don Juan?” “I’m saying that we all are unfathomable beings, luminous and boundless. You, Genaro and I are stuck together by a purpose that is not our decision.” “What purpose are you talking about?” “Learning the warrior’s way. You can’t get out of it, but neither can we. As long as our achievement is pending you will find me or Genaro, but once it is accomplished, you will fly freely and no one knows where the force of your life will take you.” “What is don Genaro doing in this?” “That subject is not in your realm yet,” he said. “Today I have to pound the nail that Genaro put in, the fact that we are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.

Hard to think of others when you’re feeling trapped, feeling you’re spinning in a vicious circle.

The circles of shame are vicious. Painful feelings of shame help cause people to be depressed and suicidal, these in turn become shameful aspects of the self. Being angry does not necessarily cause more anger, being envious does not necessarily cause more envy (though once we envy, we can also envy someone's lack of envy), but, in our culture at least, shame (and envy and self-pity) are things to be ashamed about. The two common feelings of suicide are hopelessness and powerlessness; each is shameful, and this additional experience of shame adds pain on pain. A man who despairs because he feels his prospects of having a family are hopeless also feels he will never lose the feeling of shame over being wifeless and childless. To be powerless to change one's life in ways that others can is cause to feel ashamed of one's powerlessness.

What a vicious circle we can put ourselves in: we have come to accept the notion of "fix me first," when part of the essential fixing we all need is to be compassionately involved with others.

Frequently avoidance of the present leads to idealization of the future... When an event does not live up to your expectations you can get out of the depression by idealizing again. Do not let this vicious circle become your life-style. Interrupt it now with some strategic present-moment fulfillment.

A lot of corpses woke up every morning from their graves. Stood in front of the mirror and wore the masks which made them look alive. Stuck in the vicious circle of death. Scared to break out and scared of falling into the infinite pit of darkness, they beat down their souls that were fighting for an escape, mercilessly every day. They walked out into the world with pain, only to return back to the home, which did not feel like a home anymore, again in the night. They removed their masks in front of the mirror, stared into those empty eyes and walked back to their graves silently, with the fear of waking up again next day and with nothing to celebrate in their heart.

For when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake, who tries to eat his own tail. Ouroboros is the perennial symbol of all vicious circles, of every attempt to split our being asunder and make one part conquer the other.

Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller.

We’re in the same position as any scientist. All we have to go on is experiential evidence. And sooner or later we have to trust our own experience, because that’s all we really have. Otherwise it’s a vicious circle. If I fundamentally distrust my experience, then I must distrust even my capacity to distrust, since that is also an experience. So sooner or later I have no choice but to trust, trust my experience, trust that the universe is not fundamentally and persistently going to lie to me. Of course we can be mistaken, and sometimes experiences are misleading, but on balance we have no choice but to follow them. It’s a type of phenomenological imperative. And especially mystical experiences—if anything, as you say, they are more real, not less real, than other experiences.” I

Sometimes life was a vicious circle. The things we love can draw us nearer to the things we hate.

There is a great need to be needed. Remember, you feel good whenever you are needed. Sometimes, even if it brings misery to you, even then you love to be needed.

Never say never or it becomes a vice, and there you have it, you just did it twice.

You’ve got to love life to have life, and you’ve got to have life to love life. . . . It’s what they call a vicious circle.

ANGUISH EMERGES FROM craving for life to be other than it is. In the face of a changing world, such craving seeks consolation in something permanent and reliable, in a self that is in control of things, in a God who is in charge of destiny. The irony of this strategy is that it turns out to be the cause of what it seeks to dispel. In yearning for anguish to be assuaged in such ways, we reinforce what creates anguish in the first place: the craving for life to be other than it is. We find ourselves spinning in a vicious circle. The more acute the anguish, the more we want to be rid of it, but the more we want to be rid of it, the more acute it gets. Such

And because the transformation is going to be from the self toward a state of no-self, agony is very deep. But you cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If the gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire. Love is fire. It is because of the pain of love that millions of people live a loveless life. They, too, suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative; it takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste; it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle. The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself.

A given symptom is responded to by a phobia, the phobia triggers the symptom, and the symptom, in turn, reinforces the phobia. A similar chain of events, however, can be observed in obsessive-compulsive cases in which the patient fights the ideas which haunt him. Thereby, however, he increases their power to disturb him, since pressure precipitates counter-pressure. Again the symptom is reinforced! On the other hand, as soon as the patient stops fighting his obsessions and instead tries to ridicule them by dealing with them in an ironical way-by applying paradoxical intention-the vicious circle is cut, the symptom diminishes and finally atrophies. In the fortunate case where there is no existential vacuum which invites and elicits the symptom, the patient will not only succeed in ridiculing his neurotic fear but finally will succeed in completely ignoring it. As we see, anticipatory anxiety has to be counteracted by paradoxical intention; hyper-intention as well as hyper-reflection have to be counteracted by dereflection; dereflection, however, ultimately is not possible except by the patient's orientation toward his specific vocation and mission in life. It is not the neurotic's self-concern, whether pity or contempt, which breaks the circle formation; the cue to cure is self-transcendence.

The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed: fear of life and people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally “into the mother“.

I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean. Me feeling alienated, bummed-out, drinking a lot. And I never should have let that happen. I missed, like, some really important years in your life. I’m the one that has to live with that.

I sat and asked God a question, never before now had I felt he was truly listening; Or was it i, that disrupted his appearance... Why God, must the treasures of our world be hard done by and the enemies of life become greater in their scheme of manipulation? Oh dear one, I chose the strong ones to hand the deepest lessons, because I know they can handle it and soon enough they will too. The ones that twiddle their thumbs and become ignorant to what's their truth; will attract what they are and continue in the circle of vicious greed. They'll eventually grow, like you did too. It may just take time, and your time now is bettering your existence from the struggle you've faced.

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!” It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course – for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Vulnerability--not hunger, not anger, and certainly not spite--is the key to predator-prey relationships. The skill and viciousness of the hunter matters less than the size, speed, strength, health, and ferocity of the hunted. Vulnerability explains why large predators tend to kill the old, young, and sick members of prey populations. Predators eat the mild and weak because those are the animals they can catch and kill.

pitfall. The root of the problem lies in the fact that people often store the same type of item in more than one place. When we tidy each place separately, we fail to see that we’re repeating the same work in many locations and become locked into a vicious circle of tidying. To avoid this, I recommend tidying by category. For example, instead of deciding that today you’ll tidy a particular room, set goals like “clothes today, books tomorrow.

Even if I lead the most stunted, lethargic life, I still have the feeling of being caught up in an unprecedented whirlwind that has to be slowed before I can do anything else. Trying to escape the busyness that arises from the emptiness of life by resorting to still more emptiness, that is the vicious circle that threatens us. Whereas in our colorless lives we need tranquility less than authentic activities, important and meaningful events, dazzling moments that prostrate us or transport us. Time, that great thief, is constantly stealing from us; but it is one thing to be robbed magnificently and to grow old in the awareness that one has lived a full and rich life, and it is another to be cheaply gnawed away, hour by hour, for things that we have not even known. Our contemporaries' hell is called platitude. The paradise they seek is called plenitude. Some have lived; the others have simply endured.

It is the sheer weight of the robot that makes us feel we are living in a ‘wooden world’. We can see for example that the moment Ouspensky or Ward returned from the mystical realm of perfect freedom and found themselves ‘back in the body’ they once again found themselves saddled with all their boring old habits and worries and neuroses, all their old sense of identity built up from the reactions of other people, and above all the dreary old heaviness, as if consciousness has turned into a leaden weight. This is the sensation that made the romantics feel that life is a kind of hell — or at the very least, purgatory. Yet we know enough about the robot to know that this feeling is as untrustworthy as the depression induced by a hangover. The trouble with living ‘on the robot’ is that he is a dead weight. He takes over only when our energies are low. So when I do something robotically I get no feedback of sudden delight. This in turn makes me feel that it was not worth doing. ‘Stan’ reacts by failing to send up energy and ‘Ollie’ experiences a sinking feeling. Living becomes even more robotic and the vicious circle effect is reinforced. Beyond a certain point we feel as if we are cut off from reality by a kind of glass wall: suddenly it seems self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun, that all human effort is vanity, that man is a useless passion and that life is a horrible joke devised by some demonic creator. This is the state I have decribed as ‘upside-downness’, the tendency to allow negative emotional judgements to usurp the place of objective rational judgements. Moreover this depressing state masquerades as the ‘voice of experience’, since it seems obvious that you ‘know’ more about an experience when you’ve had it a hundred times. This is the real cause of death in most human beings: they mistake the vicious circle effects of ‘upside-downness’ for the wisdom of age, and give up the struggle.

Looking carefully at the professional lives of those who do not follow the Qur’an’s morality, we can see that, for them, working has become a trouble and a vicious circle. To reach their jobs on time, they have to get up early, which means that they must sleep early. And then there is all the time that they have to spend to get to work, bathing, eating, cleaning, running errands, and meeting all of the countless needs of daily life. Seeing that they have at most maybe a couple of hours each day to really enjoy themselves, they become angry and depressed.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

opting to complain, life gives you things to complain about this vicious circle ensures your happiness drought life responds to us according to our actions and belief thus reinforcing those beliefs to no relief there is no first cause—still, break the cycle abide in peaceful Silence or experience an inner hell “others” are often a reflecting mirror shining back revealing to us what loads are left to unstack what are friends for but a means to practice kindness and for fortifying the ego’s belief in disconnectedness people cater to me according to my own nature so they are me—there is no individual self, rest assured tweak your thoughts about her and she then treats you thus all minds are one, and all is illusory, as priorly discussed she is you, and you, her the shroud of separateness shall now henceforth wither look back at your life’s recurring patterns and themes and the façade of the ego will start to crack at the seams untranscended mindsets follow wherever we go the common denominator is what your mind has sown that which supports life is automatically supported the get-gain-obtain mentality can be safely aborted

the voluntary evil we do one another can be profoundly and permanently damaging, even to the strong. And what is it, precisely, that motivates such evil? It doesn’t make itself manifest merely in consequence of the hard lot of life. It doesn’t even emerge, simply, because of failure itself, or because of the disappointment and bitterness that failure often and understandably engenders. But the hard lot of life, magnified by the consequence of continually rejected sacrifices (however poorly conceptualized; however half-heartedly executed)? That will bend and twist people into the truly monstrous forms who then begin, consciously, to work evil; who then begin to generate for themselves and others little besides pain and suffering (and who do it for the sake of that pain and suffering). In that manner, a truly vicious circle takes hold: begrudging sacrifice, half-heartedly undertaken; rejection of that sacrifice by God or by reality (take your pick); angry resentment, generated by that rejection; descent into bitterness and the desire for revenge; sacrifice undertaken even more begrudgingly, or refused altogether. And it’s Hell itself that serves as the destination place of that downward spiral.

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

To break through this vicious circle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims, it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one's own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.

Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis.

Dottie: I miss being across the hall from you. Jason: Words I never thought you’d say. Dottie: I know, I surprised myself, but despite your annoying tendencies and non-stop chattering, I miss it. Jason: You’re making my heart soar like a fucking falcon. A goddamn FALCON, Dottie. Dottie: Falcon. That’s pretty serious. Do you know what would have been more serious? An albatross. Jason: Pfft, no way. They might have a ten-foot wingspan, but they’re seabirds, so they shit in the ocean. Where’s the fun in that? Dottie: As opposed to . . . Jason: Shitting on people’s heads, of course. If I was a bird, that would be my main purpose in life, shitting on unsuspecting people’s heads. Think about it, being targeted by a bird bowel movement is detrimental as a human being. You’re just going about your normal business when all of a sudden, WHACK, white goop drips from your forehead down your cheek. What is that, you think? You carefully touch it, your fingers immediately wet with semi-warm liquid. And when you realize it’s an anal secretion from a flying vertebrate, all hell breaks loose. The horror! The disgust! The SHAME OF BEING SHIT ON. There’s no coming back from that. #DayRuined And as the maniacal bird, there you are, floating around in the peaceful skies, watching idiot humans running around in circles, trying to get rid of the poo-poo. With one flip of the feather—or the bird, hey-o—you’re off to the bird feeder, filling up so you can drop turd once again. A vicious cycle of humans feeding birds only to get shit on unsuspectedly, I AM HERE FOR THAT! Dottie: I was wrong. I don’t have to be across the hall to be annoyed by you.

Blindness and forgiveness are essential to survival. But at the same time they lead to repetition and they perpetuate cycles of cruelty. To break through this vicious circle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims, it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism. He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment. This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life.

healthy eating go-to scripts God has given me power over my food choices. I’m supposed to consume food. Food isn’t supposed to consume me. He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9–10) I was made for more than to be stuck in a vicious cycle of defeat. You have circled this mountain long enough. Now turn north. (Deuteronomy 2:3 NASB) When I’m considering a compromise, I will think past this moment and ask myself, How will I feel about this choice tomorrow morning? Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20) When tempted, I either remove the temptation or remove myself from the situation. If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. Therefore, my dear friends, flee. (1 Corinthians 10:12–14) When there’s a special event, I can find other ways to celebrate rather than blowing my healthy eating plan. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. (Revelation 3:8) Struggling with my weight isn’t God’s mean curse on me, but an outside indication that internal changes are needed for me to function and feel well. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! . . . I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18–19) I have these boundaries in place not for restriction but to define the parameters of my freedom. I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. (Romans 6:19)

The practice of faith and courage begins with the small details of daily life. The first step is to notice where and when one loses faith, to look through the rationalizations which are used to cover up this loss of faith, to recognize where one acts in a cowardly way, and again how one rationalizes it. To recognize how every betrayal of faith weakens one, and how increased weakness leads to new betrayal, and so on, in a vicious circle. Then one will also recognize that while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. Can one say more about the practice of faith? Someone else might; if I were a poet or a preacher, I might try. But since I am not either of these, I cannot even try to say more about the practice of faith, but am sure that anyone who is really concerned can learn to have faith as a child learns to walk.

The meaning of this symbolism becomes clear in the light of what we said earlier: the forward-striving libido which rules the conscious mind of the son demands separation from the mother, but his childish longing for her prevents this by setting up a psychic resistance that manifests itself in all kinds of neurotic fears—that is to say, in a general fear of life. The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed: fear of life and people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally “into the mother.” The reasons for this are generally projected outside oneself: the fault lies with external circumstances, or else the parents are made responsible. And indeed, it remains to be found out how much the mother is to blame for not letting the son go. The son will naturally try to explain everything by the wrong attitude of the mother, but he would do better to refrain from all such futile attempts to excuse his own ineptitude by laying the blame on his parents.

Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis.

Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis. Let me explain why I have employed the term “logotherapy” as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes “meaning.” Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term “striving for superiority,” is focused.

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, going about his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

The same taboos against genuine feeling that were in place in his childhood will clamp down around him all over again and he’ll become what we might call emotionally illiterate. He won’t put words to his feelings, much less talk them over. So the more frustrated his wife becomes, the more he’ll withdraw or blow up or freeze. In this vicious circle, a past issue comes to life in the present.

The Primecrat, when asked in his turn to demonstrate his ouroborism, cupped his hands and shouted through the trap door to his followers: “Take up military sports! For the sportsman of today is the soldier of tomorrow. The soldier of tomorrow will repel the invader and at the same time open up new markets for the industries of his country. The industries will prosper, the country will become rich, and thus it will be able to support associations which encourage military preparations and from these will emerge the soldiers of the day after tomorrow, who will repel the invader and at the same time open up new markets …” The mechanical repeater was brought in. In somber mood, I recalled my whole life up to this day, and my head spun with the buzzing of a hundred and one ouroboristic worms. I remembered the drinking parties that made us thirsty and the thirst that made us drink; I thought back to Sidonius recounting his endless dream; to the people who worked to be able to eat and who ate to have the strength to work; to the black thoughts I drowned with such sadness in the cask and which were reborn in different hues. Between the vicious circles of the drinking party and those of the delusory paradises, I would never again be able to choose, I could no longer be part of their revolutions, I was from that moment no more than a wasteland.

You hung up clothes that would eventually grace the bedroom floor. You fell in love only to mourn a broken heart. That was the vicious, joyful circle of life.

The object of cognitive behavioral therapy is to break the vicious circle, thus transforming a wretched mouselike creature who barely dares leave his mouse hole into a go-getter who wins friends and influences people. It is not difficult to see the connection between these ideas and the modern pedagogic tendency to praise children for their efforts, however desultory. In case people think I am exaggerating, let me here remark that an eminent professor at one of Britain’s foremost institutions of higher learning, at which many Nobel Prize winners both studied and taught, informed me recently that he was not permitted to use red ink in marking his students’ essays (they still wrote them by hand, apparently, to cheat by computer being too easy for them) because red ink is deemed by those in charge of the students’ well-being to be too intimidating. The sight of red ink on the pages of their immortal prose might cause the little ones to lose their self-esteem, traumatize them, and mean a blighted life for ever after. Does one laugh? Does one cry? Does one despair? Does one leap for joy at such delectable absurdity? Or all or none of the above?

All reaction is unconscious. If you are conscious you never react. You act. Action is conscious, reaction is unconscious. Reaction means that that man became the master of the situation: he pushed the button and you became angry. You became a puppet in his hands. But if you remain patient, if you smile, suddenly you are out of the vicious circle of unconsciousness.

Decrease stress and release negative energy to boost your immunity and live the healthy life you deserve.’ That’s what Kali was talking about.

Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.

MY LOVE, The day Prometheus breathed life into the new me, was the day you arrived in a little box. A shiny, futuristic black box, Pandora's box, despite my doubts I couldn't help but open it to finally meet you. Doubts, because I was happy with who I was, with who I saw looking at me through the eyes of others I presented myself to in everyday life. But I was seduced by the worlds that were promised to me if I let you into my life, who I would be with you in my pocket. As soon as the lid came off and I swiped my fingers over your radiant surface for the first time, the world and I were bursting at the seams. What a creation we were together, to what sized we grew! My brain an encyclopedia, my body an unerring compass, my eyes and ears reaching infinitely with you as an extension of myself. Through you, I, the cyborg, could enter bewilderingly virtual spaces in which I was presently absent, meanwhile absently present in the material world of boring train rides, waiting lines, and mindless chit chats with others. I felt invincible, transformed into a citizen of the world because of you, an intellectual of unimaginable proportions for the vast sea of knowledge you allowed me to surf on, a public speaker and influencer of significance because my words and visual snippets of my days could be launched into the world with the flick of a finger, likes enticing and confirming me. How intoxicating! How wonderfully, pleasantly, intoxicating! But I can't help but sometimes lie awake at night, my internal clock slowing down with your seductive blue light illuminating my face with 2, 457, 600 (1920×1080) LED suns. In those moments, as my eyes are captivated by your glow, I can't help thinking about the time before you arrived, and how I sometimes miss my low definition self. You were always there, sometimes it feels like we are in fact one — finally reunited with my other Plato's half, fused into not a circle but a perfect black rectangle. Through your eyes I see the world and myself in Ultra-HD, my pixel density has never been so high. But you are sometimes vicious, my dear — a viper, a temptress, when then again with sweet codes you reflect my most beautiful self, and I cannot help but love me through your gaze, then again with suffocating algorithms you fragment my self and blow it up to grotesque self-distortions, hurling me into an endless me-loop, that eventually disgusts and alienates me. In those moments you are a distorting mirror, a frightening black box, a black hole that swallows my attention in ways I can't see through. I see my old self disappearing in the vague, dark reflection of myself, with double chin and dull eyes, which I sometimes catch in your black glass when your suns stop dazzling me for a split second. And I can't help but wonder if my 'self' in times of its digital recombination, in which the 'I' is a fragmented multitude of pixels that never fully touch at their sides, a simulacrum, maybe has lost some of its aura. But in the morning all is forgotten, my love, all is well. As soon as we merge back into one, as soon as I, panicked, reach for my pocket on the train, only to discover with a glow of relief that you were there after all, I can't imagine an "I" without you. Artificial by nature my self resides within your screen, I would be lost without you.

Circles Circles, small, large and many circles, That is what our lives are like, Always moving and pacing in circles, Circles of love, circles of desire, circles of passion , too many circles, but none alike. Situations, circumstances presenting themselves in circles, With infinite loops, where we always end up where we began, With the only difference that we change circles, but never can we leave these circles, Even if we tried hard and we desperately ran. We always end up in a circle within many circles, But be assured these loops have been created on purpose by someone, Who enjoys watching us going in circles because for him/her life is a circus of circles, There is no regard for emotions, sentiments and human sensitivities, because this entity seems to care for no one. And casts us mercilessly and relentlessly in these vicious circles, Where the race begins never to end, because in a circle the end is unmarked, And ah the agony of living in ceaseless pain and its ever extending circles, Who shall we accuse, our fate or our destiny that we always get marked. To be a part of circles, in relentless motion and desperation, only to create new circles, And be cast in them remorselessly by this unknown entity, It has nothing to offer us, no joys, no celebrations, just the ceaseless circles, Where we always lie in the centre like a loathed deity! And if ever our circle intersects with a cluster of happy circles, We are cast away and shunned like a managed dog, Till there are no more happy circles left in our constellation of endless circles, And we get recast by fate once again , in the infinite circle of life where we belong. We, our circle, our lives, our pain, a little blend of joy, and our live’s moments going in circles, Often question us in our wakeful state, “What are we and who are we without these circles?” And the answer, “ a motion within a circle seeking its eternal kinetic state !” To love in a circle, to feel joy in a circle, to confront life within circles, And tread in a state of constantly moving inertia, Where the quantum of everything is defined by these ceaselessly evolving circles, With the purpose to attain panacea! And I have loved you even in these circles, Where the feelings of my mind and heart are these constantly geminating circles, Your circles, my circles, our circles, life’s circles, circles within circles, To be a part of that final circle, we call “life’s circles!” So, I have plucked this rose with infinite red petals, For when we enter the circle of life together, I shall shower these scented petals, In all our circles to create that quintessential and romantic weather. where we shall enjoy our life in these circles, without feeling their drag, For being with you in the life’s endless sequence of circles, Will be a moment of joy, where I would wish that time developed a perpetual lag, So that you and I , could feel the symphony of our rhythmically moving circles!

Destiny. He, I mean Geralt, is linked to me by destiny, and I am to him. Our destinies are conjoined. So it would be better if I went away from here. Right away. Do you understand?” “I confess that I don’t quite.” “Destiny!” She took a sip. “A force which it’s better not to get in the way of. Which is why I think… No, no thank you, don’t serve me any more, please, I’ve eaten so much I think I’ll burst.” “You mentioned thinking.” “I think it was a mistake to lure me here. And force me to… Well, you know what I mean. I must get away from here, and hurry to help him… Because it’s my destiny—” “Destiny,” he interrupted, raising his glass. “Predestination. Something that is inevitable. A mechanism which means that a practically unlimited number of unforeseeable events must end with the same result and no other. Is that right?” “Certainly!” “Then whence and wherefore do you wish to go? Drink your wine, enjoy the moment, delight in life. What is to come will come, if it’s inevitable.” “Like hell. It’s not that easy.” “You’re contradicting yourself.” “No, I’m not.” “You’re contradicting your contradiction, and that’s a vicious circle.” “No!” She tossed her head. “You can’t just sit and do nothing! Nothing comes by itself!” “Sophistry.” “You can’t waste time unthinkingly! You might overlook the right moment… That one right, unique moment. For time never repeats itself.” “Permit me.” He stood up. “Look at that, over there.” On the wall he was pointing at was a protruding relief portraying an immense, scaly snake. The reptile, curled up in a figure of eight, was sinking its great teeth into its own tail. Ciri had once seen something like it, but couldn’t remember where. “There,” said the elf. “The ancient snake Ouroboros. Ouroboros symbolises eternity and is itself eternal. It is the eternal going away and the eternal return. It is something that has no beginning and no end. “Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.

Boosting your self-confidence is a key step in ridding your life of comparison as it gives you agency over your actions and ownership of your thoughts and behaviour. It allows you to leverage your own resources, no matter how plentiful or scarce they happen to be, and it ultimately allows you the impetus to use your inner power to work towards what is important to you. Without self-confidence, words go unsaid, ideas undeveloped and your time is often spent on the wrong things, with the wrong people, because we feel too scared to make a change or we hope the change will magically make itself. This naturally leads to a growing sense of discontent and in those conditions, comparison thrives, and the vicious circle continues.

..in existence everything moves eternally -- the summer comes, the rains come, the winter comes, and the summer again; everything moves like a wheel -- life is not an exception. Death is the end of one wheel and the beginning of another. Again you will be a child, and again you will be young, and again you will be old. It has been so since the beginning, and it is going to be so to the very end -- until you become so enlightened that you can jump out of the vicious circle and can enter into a totally different law. From individuality, you can jump into the universal. So there was no hurry, and there was no clinging. ..you have lived many times, and you will live many times more. Hence, live each moment as totally as possible; there is no hurry to jump to another moment. Time is not money, time is inexhaustible; it is available to the poor as much as to the rich. The rich are not richer as far as time is concerned, and the poor are not poorer. Life is an eternal incarnation. ..there is nothing to be afraid of in death. It is a beautiful sleep, a sleep that is needed for you to move into another body, silently and peacefully. It is a surgical phenomenon; it is almost like anesthesia. Death is a friend, not a foe. Once you understand death as a friend, and start living life without any fear that it is only a very small time span of seventy years -- if your perspective opens to the eternity of your life -- then everything will slow down; then there is no need to be speedy.

One is the road of Life and Death, O monks, upon the rim of the wheel of Time. For motion in a circle can never reach an end, nor ever spend itself. And every motion in the world is a motion in a circle. Shall Man, then never free himself of the vicious circle of Time? Man shall, because Man is heir to God’s holy Freedom.

theory led to Horney’s hypothesis of 10 neurotic needs, which she saw as so overwhelming and all-encompassing as to define a person. She classified the neurotic needs into three categories: those that compel us to comply (the need for affection, the need for a partner, and the need for simplifying life), those that lead us to withdraw (the need for independence and the need for perfection), and those that make us aggressive and turn us against other people (the need for power, the need to exploit, the need for prestige, and the need for personal achievement). These needs become neurotic only when they exist at dysfunctional levels or come into play too indiscriminately and too extremely in daily life. Most of us, Horney believed, can navigate these needs in healthy ways and reduce our interpersonal conflicts. And the more secure, tolerant, loving, and respectful our family life has been, the greater our chances of doing so. On the other hand, for a person who has developed neurotic needs, dysfunctional behavior can beget still more dysfunctional behavior and lead to the creation of vicious circles (or cycles). Moreover, Horney felt that healthy people see themselves as they are, while a neurotic person’s identity is split into a despised self and an ideal self. It’s the gap between these two concepts of self that continues to perpetuate anxiety and neurosis. Horney

The fact that the majority of such crimes are committed unconsciously does not, unfortunately, allay the calamitous consequences. The abused child's body will register the truth, while her consciousness refuses to acknowledge it. By repressing the pain and the accompanying situations, the infantile organism averts death—her fate, were it to consciously experience such traumatization. What remains is the vicious circle of repression: the true story, which has been suppressed in the body, produces symptoms so that it could at last be recognized and taken seriously. But our consciousness refuses to comply, just as it did in childhood—because it was then that it learned the life-saving function of repression, and because no one has subsequently explained that as grown-ups we are not condemned to die of our knowledge, that, on the contrary, such knowledge would help us in our quest for health.

The Primecrat, when asked in his turn to demonstrate his ouroborism, cupped his hands and shouted through the trap door to his followers: 'Take up military sports! For the sportsman of today is the soldier of tomorrow. The soldier of tomorrow will repel the invader and at the same time open up new markets for the industries of his country. The industries will prosper, the country will become rich, and thus it will be able to support associations which encourage military preparations and from these will emerge the soldiers of the day after tomorrow, who will repel the invader and at the same time open up new markets...' The mechanical repeater was brought in. In somber mood, I recalled my whole life up to this day, and my head spun with the buzzing of a hundred and one ouroboristic worms. I remembered the drinking parties that made us thirsty and the thirst that made us drink; I thought back to Sidonius recounting his endless dream; to the people who worked to be able to eat and who ate to have the strength to work; to the black thoughts I drowned with such sadness in the cask and which were reborn in different hues. Between the vicious circles of the drinking party and those of the delusory paradises, I would never again be able to choose, I could no longer be part of their revolutions, I was from that moment no more than a wasteland.

Doubt causes indecision.  Indecision causes inaction.  Inaction causes us to put some of the most important things in life into that place where unimportant things reside.  Inactions also causes idleness.  Idleness increases doubt.  Doubt, indecision, inaction, idleness: all work like dominos that, once falling, lead to more doubt.  It’s a vicious emotional circle.

Life resembles very violent raging thunderstorm exploding with blazing bolts of lightning crashing into the ground lighting it up in return leaving nice beautifully vibrant colorful rainbows in place. Never exactly knowing how and when or what to expect at any time spinning you into whirling’s of vicious circles in wonder meant. Life, can treat you in many wildly different ways making your head spinning into whirling tornados turning everything upside down, inside out making you feel as though you are on a major roller coaster.

Time. It takes control over us and when we realize this, it's often too late. That's again the power of time. See? It's sort of a vicious circle. Take control of your precious time and live life to the fullest.

Unbelievably, the whales continued to circle me. Eventually, I was even able to run my hands down Mama’s back several times. Her black skin felt much tougher and tired. Remnants of barnacles made her skin rough in patches. She seemed more hesitant of this human. Perhaps she had firsthand evidence of man’s horrible actions and treachery. I didn’t blame her for her concerns. I had come to trust fewer and fewer humans myself. Her giant eyes possessed wisdom only found in the passage of time and miles traveled on long journeys.

In breaking the vicious circle of virtue, it is necessary to think the virtuous (or the virtual) as use, that is, as something that stands beyond the dichotomy of being and praxis, of substance and action. The virtuous (or the virtual) is not opposed to the real: on the contrary, it exists and is in use in the mode of habituality; however, it is not immaterial, but, insofar as it never ceases to cancel and deactivate being-at-work, it continually restores energeia to potential and to materiality. Use, insofar as it neutralizes the opposition of potential and act, being and acting, material and form, being-at-work and habit, wakefulness and sleep, is always virtuous and does not need anything to be added to it in order to render it operative. Virtue does not suddenly develop into habit: it is the being always in use of habit; it is habit as form of life. Like purity, virtue is not a characteristic that belongs to someone or something on its own. For this reason, virtuous actions do not exist, just as a virtuous being does not exist: what is vir- tuous is only use, beyond—which is to say, in the middle of—being and acting.

One could argue that time is the most valuable thing we have or “own.” We even seem to have a cultural and societal agreement on this, materializing in sayings like “time flies,” “life is short,” “our children are only on loan,” etc. It therefore seems odd that time is one of the “things” that we easily give away. We sell our time for money that we spend on new consumer goods instead of limiting our consumption in order to make it possible to sell less of our time. We engage in “ought to” events and arrangements that we don’t really want to attend in order to fit in. We waste our time on insignificant series and movies that are provided to us by endless streaming services in order to feel ready for another day of selling our time. This vicious circle is unsustainable.

Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire. For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more. Despite the immense hubbub and nervous strain, we are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night. Animals spend much of their time dozing and idling pleasantly, but, because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure. It isn’t that the people who submit to this kind of thing are immoral. It isn’t that the people who provide it are wicked exploiters; most of them are of the same mind as the exploited, if only on a more expensive horse in this sorry-go-round. The real trouble is that they are all totally frustrated, for trying to please the brain is like trying to drink through your ears. Thus they are increasingly incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to the most acute and subtle joys of life which are in fact extremely common and simple.

Each of these imperatives has a tendency to degenerate into an excuse for greed and materialism in the absence of the other. Without the call to generosity, the call to productivity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives—as long as they accumulate their wealth by working productively. But without the call to productivity, the call to generosity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives—as long as they pay off God by tithing their 10 percent. The only way to root out materialism is to reorient people’s attitudes about their entire economic lives. If you only lead people to do good work (productivity), they’ll use their wealth selfishly. If you only lead them to get their use of wealth right (generosity), they won’t orient their lives to good work. The whole life of a person has to turn away from selfishness and serve God and neighbor. As someone once said, the only effective place to intervene in a vicious circle is everywhere at once.

The vicious circle of life is employment

In somber mood, I re-called my whole life up to this day, and my head spun with the buzzing of a hundred and one ouroboristic worms. I remembered the drinking parties that made us thirsty and the thirst that made us drink; I thought back to Sidonius recounting his endless dream; to the people who worked to be able to eat and who ate to have the strength to work; to the black thoughts I drowned with such sadness in the cask and which were reborn in different hues. Between the vicious circles of the drinking party and those of the delusory paradises, I would never again be able to choose, I could no longer be part of their revolutions, I was from that moment no more than a wasteland.

Violence in human relationship is so utterly destructive because it not only harms the other but also drives the self into a vicious circle asking for more and more when less and less is received.

We cannot step beyond the everyday. The marvellous can only continue to exist in fiction and the illusions that people share. There is no escape. And yet we wish to have the illusion of escape as near to hand as possible. An illusion not entirely illusory, but constituting a 'world' both apparent and real (the reality of appearances and the apparently real) quite different from the everyday world yet as open-ended and as closely dovetailed into the everyday as possible. So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. A vicious circle. “Thus is established a complex of activities and passivities, of forms of sociability and communication which the sociologist can study. Although he cannot describe or analyse them without criticizing them as being (partially) illusory, he must nevertheless start from the fact that they contain within themselves their own spontaneous critique of the everyday. They are that critique in so far as they are other than everyday life, and yet they are in everyday life, they are alienation. They can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance. (62)

When you are with certain people, do you invariably feel like “less?” Do you spend all of your energy worrying about pleasing someone else? Is his or her happiness more important than yours? Are their shifting moods a constant concern to you, because you never know when to expect a storm? It may seem that when you spend time together, you need to work hard to keep them upbeat and happy, as if it were your responsibility. It can seem like a constant struggle, with you never certain just where you’re going to end up. A toxic relationship has lots of negativity. Nothing is ever right. It can be you, your family, your job, your friends, the weather, the food, the news – anything. There’s always something wrong; something to complain about. In a toxic relationship, you can’t ever do anything right. If you get a promotion, you’ll be accused of seeing work as too important. If you don’t get promoted, you’ll be accused of not being competent enough. If you buy a new outfit, you’re a spendthrift. If you wear something old, you’re frumpy. The truth is, you’re caught in a vicious circle where you can no longer win. Toxic relationships can become familiar and almost comfortable, if that is what we are used to. It may become difficult or impossible for you to acknowledge a positive relationship because it lacks the drama that you are used

Time does not really exist without unrest, wrote Kierkegaard; it does not exist for dumb animals, who are absolutely without anxiety. The basic problem is that our grasping at the future rejects the present; we reach for what could be because we feel something lacking in what is. Brown summarizes the matter brilliantly: Time is “a schema for the expiation of guilt,”65 which in Buddhist terms becomes: time originates from our sense of lack and our projects to fill in that lack. Pascal put it most bluntly: we are not; we hope to be. This tends to develop into a vicious circle. Uncomfortable with our sense of lack today, we look forward to that day in the future when we will feel truly alive.

Tidying up by location is a fatal mistake. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me three years to see this. Many people are surprised to hear that such a seemingly viable approach is actually a common pitfall. The root of the problem lies in the fact that people often store the same type of item in more than one place. When we tidy each place separately, we fail to see that we’re repeating the same work in many locations and become locked into a vicious circle of tidying. To avoid this, I recommend tidying by category. For example, instead of deciding that today you’ll tidy a particular room, set goals like “clothes today, books tomorrow.” One reason so many of us never succeed at tidying is because we have too much stuff. This excess is caused by our ignorance of how much we actually own. When we disperse storage of a particular item throughout the house and tidy one place at a time, we can never grasp the overall volume and therefore can never finish. To escape this negative spiral, tidy by category, not by place.

Life is a vicious circle.... the pain doesn't end here or there.

The good news is that there’s a solution: get enough sleep without sleeping aids, and there’s no need for all the Red Bulls and Adderalls in the daytime. It’s hard to quit only one half of the perfect circle of burnout without quitting the other. Admittedly, getting out of the vicious cycle isn’t easy. There are endless flashing lights and signposts telling us we have a medical problem—after all, there are billions of dollars to be made by getting us to believe that sleeping pills are the answer to our sleep deprivation. Yet what we really have is not a medical problem but a lifestyle problem.

This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. [...] [T]he root of this frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only for the brain. The "primary consciousness," the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more that what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., "everyone will die") that the future assumes a high degree of reality - so high that the present loses its value.

Joint pain was like grief. The more you thought about it, the more it hurt, but you couldn’t not think about it because it bloody hurt. Vicious circle.

The essence of life is this, what you want, it doesn't give you. There is only one way to get out of this endless cycle - I will use what I am given, accumulate to a certain extent, and then exchange what I can. Keep trying to use the power of the mind to identify those dead circles and vicious circles, and then jump out when it seems impossible. Those who come out survive, and those who are trapped die.