The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 283-292 |
If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word “activity.” By “activity,” in the modern usage of the word, is usually meant an action which brings about a change in an existing situation by means of an expenditure of energy. Thus a man is considered active if he does business, studies medicine, works on an endless belt, builds a table, or is engaged in sports. Common to all these activities is that they are directed toward an outside goal to be achieved. What is not taken into account is the motivation of activity. Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand, a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive,” because he is not “doing” anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 211-222 |
In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means “sameness,” rather than “oneness.” It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas. In this respect one must also look with some skepticism at some achievements which are usually praised as signs of our progress, such as the equality of women. Needless to say I am not speaking against the equality of women; but the positive aspects of this tendency for equality must not deceive one. It is part of the trend toward the elimination of differences. Equality is bought at this very price: women are equal because they are not different any more. The proposition of Enlightenment philosophy, l’âme n’a pas de sexe, the soul has no sex, has become the general practice. The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it erotic love, which is based on this polarity. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles. Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.”
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 764-765 |
The kind of “division of labor,” as William James calls it, by which one loves one’s family but is without feeling for the “stranger,” is a sign of a basic inability to love.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 773-774 |
He can see nothing but himself; he judges everyone and everything from its usefulness to him; he is basically unable to love.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 769-770 |
If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 840-841 |
(The development of patriarchal society goes together with the development of private property.) As a consequence, patriarchal society is hierarchical;
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1016-1017 |
Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here, but it is not to be so. God and I: we are one. By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him.”
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1161-1162 |
“We play according to the rules of the game to preserve our prestige and feeling of superiority and merit.”
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1169-1170 |
Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as “teamwork” and as a haven from aloneness, are the two “normal” forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society, the socially patterned pathology of love.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1352-1353 |
Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1493-1513 |
What is faith? Is faith necessarily a matter of belief in God, or in religious doctrines? Is faith by necessity in contrast to, or divorced from, reason and rational thinking? Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith. By irrational faith I understand the belief (in a person or an idea) which is based on one’s submission to irrational authority. In contrast, rational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one’s own experience of thought or feeling. Rational faith is not primarily belief in something, but the quality of certainty and firmness which our convictions have. Faith is a character trait pervading the whole personality, rather than a specific belief. Rational faith is rooted in productive intellectual and emotional activity. In rational thinking, in which faith is supposed to have no place, rational faith is an important component. How does the scientist, for instance, arrive at a new discovery? Does he start with making experiment after experiment, gathering fact after fact, without having a vision of what he expects to find? Rarely has a truly important discovery in any field been made in this way. Nor have people arrived at important conclusions when they were merely chasing a phantasy. The process of creative thinking in any field of human endeavor often starts with what may be called a “rational vision,” itself a result of considerable previous study, reflective thinking, and observation. When the scientist succeeds in gathering enough data, or in working out a mathematical formulation to make his original vision highly plausible, he may be said to have arrived at a tentative hypothesis. A careful analysis of the hypothesis in order to discern its implications, and the amassing of data which support it, lead to a more adequate hypothesis and eventually perhaps to its inclusion in a wide—ranging theory. The history of science is replete with instances of faith in reason and visions of truth. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were all imbued with an unshakable faith in reason. For this Bruno was burned at the stake and Spinoza suffered excommunication. At every step from the conception of a rational vision to the formulation of a theory, faith is necessary: faith in the vision as a rationally valid aim to pursue, faith in the hypothesis as a likely and plausible proposition, and faith in the final theory, at least until a general consensus about its validity has been reached. This faith is rooted in one’s own experience, in the confidence in one’s power of thought, observation, and judgment. While irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority say so, rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one’s own productive observing and thinking, in spite of the majority’s opinion.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1520-1521 |
Unless we have faith in the persistence of our self, our feeling of identity is threatened and we become dependent on other people whose approval then becomes the basis for our feeling of identity.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1521-1525 |
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others, because only he can be sure that he will be the same at a future time as he is today and, therefore, that he will feel and act as he now expects to. Faith in oneself is a condition of our ability to promise, and since, as Nietzsche said, man can be defined by his capacity to promise, faith is one of the conditions of human existence. What matters in relation to love is the faith in one’s own love; in its ability to produce love in others, and in its reliability.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1531-1535 |
One of the most important of these conditions is that. the significant person in a child’s life have faith in these potentialities. The presence of this faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities.[32] The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities, and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. There is no need of faith in the robot, since there is no life in it either.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1553-1557 |
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and stake everything on these values.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 1580-1582 |
The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep. To be fully awake is the condition for not being bored, or being boring—and indeed, not to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving.
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The Art of Loving (Fromm, Erich)
– Your Highlight at location 211-222 |
In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means “sameness,” rather than “oneness.” It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas. In this respect one must also look with some skepticism at some achievements which are usually praised as signs of our progress, such as the equality of women. Needless to say I am not speaking against the equality of women; but the positive aspects of this tendency for equality must not deceive one. It is part of the trend toward the elimination of differences. Equality is bought at this very price: women are equal because they are not different any more. The proposition of Enlightenment philosophy, l’âme n’a pas de sexe, the soul has no sex, has become the general practice. The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it erotic love, which is based on this polarity. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles. Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.”
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Integral Buddhism (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight on page 67 | location 1017-1020 |
All other intelligences interact only with relative truth; spiritual intelligence interacts with absolute truth. It ought to be leading the other intelligences by a stage or two, acting as a guiding beacon for all of them. As it is, stuck at mythic, it generally lags a stage or two behind most other intelligences, so that our growth and evolution is being hampered by our very View of Spirit itself, an infinitely heavy lead albatross hanging around our developmental necks.
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Integral Buddhism (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight on page 67 | location 1020-1021 |
God itself is slowing our evolution (when in reality, God is creating it!). No wonder it’s so easy for the “new atheists” to make so much fun of religion.
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Integral Buddhism (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight on page 68 | location 1037-1042 |
But the upper limit of spiritual development at any point in history and evolution includes the sum total of all structures and all states that have emerged at that point in time. This realizes that a fully mature spirituality is not only one where we have largely experienced a complete Enlightenment or WAKING UP in our state development, but that such an Enlightenment is experienced, not in childish or adolescent ways or Views, but in a profoundly GROWN UP fashion or View, significantly matured into the wiser, more-perspective-containing, more inclusive and tolerant and integral structures that have recently emerged and been discovered by humankind.
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Integral Buddhism (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight on page 69 | location 1054-1060 |
Buddhism began as a Rational system, one of the few world religions to do so. And remember how we are using “rational”—it doesn’t mean dry, abstract, analytic, and alienated. It means capable of at least a 3rd-person perspective; it can therefore introspect and reflect on its own awareness and experience, adopt a critical and self-critical stance, understand “what if” and “as if” worlds, step back from the self and take a detached, nonattached view. The book title Buddhism: The Rational Religion says it all. And I think it is this rational core that continues to make Buddhism so appealing to the modern West. As many have pointed out, Buddhism is closer to a psychology than a typical religion. Of course most schools of Buddhism put a central emphasis on states, but when it comes to their interpretation, it is rational, objective, and evidence-based.
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Integral Buddhism (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight on page 69 | location 1054-1060 |
Buddhism began as a Rational system, one of the few world religions to do so. And remember how we are using “rational”—it doesn’t mean dry, abstract, analytic, and alienated. It means capable of at least a 3rd-person perspective; it can therefore introspect and reflect on its own awareness and experience, adopt a critical and self-critical stance, understand “what if” and “as if” worlds, step back from the self and take a detached, nonattached view. The book title Buddhism: The Rational Religion says it all. And I think it is this rational core that continues to make Buddhism so appealing to the modern West. As many have pointed out, Buddhism is closer to a psychology than a typical religion. Of course most schools of Buddhism put a central emphasis on states, but when it comes to their interpretation, it is rational, objective, and evidence-based.
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Integral Buddhism (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight on page 74 | location 1131-1145 |
It should be remembered that a person can be at virtually any 1st- or 2nd-tier rung—mythic or rational or pluralistic, for example—and, from that rung, meditatively develop through the entire sequence of state-stages—for example, from pluralistic gross to pluralistic subtle to pluralistic causal/witnessing to pluralistic nondual. Or from rational gross to rational subtle to rational causal/witnessing to rational nondual. A person at, say, rational nondual, will indeed discover a pure union with his or her world—a nonduality of Emptiness and Form—but that person’s world of Form only includes all phenomena up to rational. There are still “over his head” and not available in his awareness the entire pluralistic world, holistic world, integral world, and super-integral world. The individual will NOT be one with those worlds because they are completely beyond the reach of his awareness. You can’t be one with that which doesn’t exist in any way for you. And so over the head of this individual—who is one with the entire physical world, one with the entire biological world, and one with the mental world from sensorimotor to emotional-sexual to conceptual to concrete operational to formal operational—are the entire worlds of the pluralistic realm, the holistic realm, the vision-logic realm, and super-integral realm. If objects from any of those realms enter his awareness, he simply won’t recognize them, or they will appear puzzling and nonsensical, or in other ways they just won’t register. So this person having a nondual unity experience—but at mythic, rational, pluralistic, and so forth—is not actually one with the entire world (and is thus not having a complete unity), because there are over his head entire structure-worlds of which he is completely unaware, even though otherwise he is in a genuine nondual state of the unity of Emptiness and Form—with the caveat, “one with all of the Form that is actually in his world.”
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Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Jens Zimmermann)
– Your Highlight at location 469-471 |
One of the questions we will try to answer in this introduction to hermeneutics is why art, poetry, and rhetoric were regarded as important sources of knowledge in determining the human condition well into the 17th century, while many modern thinkers tend to exclude them.
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Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Jens Zimmermann)
– Your Highlight at location 491-495 |
We understand an object, word, or fact when it makes sense within our own life context and thus speaks to us meaningfully. When we understand objects, texts, or situations in this way, they become part of our inner mental world so that we can express them again in our own terms. We have not understood a poem, for example, when we can merely repeat the words by heart; rather we demonstrate understanding when we intone the words meaningfully and are able to express the poem’s ideas in our own words.
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Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Jens Zimmermann)
– Your Highlight at location 495-499 |
Hermeneutic thinkers believe that in most cases understanding as this kind of integration happens unconsciously, because we already move in a familiar cultural environment within which we perceive words and objects in a pre-established context of meaning. Our modern culture tends to think that real knowledge consists in quantification, that is, in the scientific numerical description of things in the world. On this account, objective truth requires an impersonal, theoretical stance toward things. Hermeneutic philosophers contend, on the contrary, that our primary mode of perception is not theoretical but practical, and
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Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Jens Zimmermann)
– Your Highlight at location 507-509 |
If hermeneutic philosophers are right in believing that this practical understanding is our primary mode of perception, then the way we perceive the world as meaningful is closer to our experience of art than to a science experiment.
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Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Jens Zimmermann)
– Your Highlight at location 617-617 |
Language, as Martin Heidegger famously put it, is ‘the house of being’.
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Order Out of Chaos (Ilya Prigogine;Isabelle Stengers)
– Your Highlight at location 112-113 |
Born in Russia in 1917 and raised in Belgium since the age of ten, Prigogine is a compact man with gray hair, cleanly chiseled features, and a laserlike intensity. Deeply interested in archaeology, art, and history, he brings to science a remarkable polymathic mind. He lives with his engineer-wife, Marina, and his son, Pascal, in Brussels, where a cross-disciplinary team is busy exploring the implications of his ideas in fields as disparate as the social behavior of ant colonies, diffusion reactions in chemical systems and dissipative processes in quantum field theory.
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Trump and a Post-Truth World (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight at location 1018-1019 |
To simply see intentional “oppressors” and their “victims” everywhere is to catastrophically mis-diagnose (and thus mis-treat) the illness.
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Trump and a Post-Truth World (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight at location 1151-1154 |
They can and will still love their own kind; but their capacity for love has grown enormously, and there are now an extraordinary number of human beings who are genuinely cared about. And so at this point they will deeply and genuinely feel, paraphrasing Kant, that when somebody anywhere suffers, I suffer. And they can’t help but feel that—it’s not a choice. Thus the emergence of the worldcentric and cosmopolitan stages.
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Trump and a Post-Truth World (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight at location 1215-1219 |
Green has a correct (and very high) goal of all-inclusiveness, but it doesn’t have a single path that actually works to get us there, nor can it truly address the real barriers to its fervently desired ideals. And as it increasingly turned its aperspectival madness on more and more areas—deconstructing more and more aspects of reality—it eventually turned its deconstructive laser on its own existence, deconstructed its own tenets, dissolved any reason to believe anything it had to say, and hence thoroughly collapsed as a functioning leading-edge of evolution.
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Trump and a Post-Truth World (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight at location 1377-1378 |
So as we look at human history and see all the earlier ideas and beliefs that were so often held by our ancestors, instead of making them all merely chaotic, random, happenstance occasions of “nothing but history,” we can indeed trace their genealogy—actually look at history and look for any repeating patterns. When this is done carefully, as by, for example, somebody like the genius Jean Gebser, we find things like an unfolding sequence of genealogical patterns that remain as habits to this day—namely, the stages Gebser called archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral. Indeed, these are the repeating stages that developmental psychologists have empirically found in some cases, operating in over 40 different cultures, including Amazon rain forest tribes, Aboriginal Australians, Indianapolis housewives, and Harvard professors—with no major exceptions in all of these.
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Trump and a Post-Truth World (Ken Wilber)
– Your Highlight at location 2052-2060 |
In the deepest parts of our own being, each of us is directly one with this evolutionary current, this Eros, this Spirit-in-action, radiant to infinity and luminous to eternity, radically full in its overflowing superabundance and excessive in its good graces, wildly crashing off the heavens and irreverently irrupting from the underworlds, unconditionally embracing each and all in its limitless love and care. And the only ones who should be allowed to work politically for a greater tomorrow—and who should indeed thus work—are those who truly understand that it is not necessary to do so, who see the utter fullness of the Great Perfection in each and every moment of existence, and who nonetheless work to trim-tab (or adjust through leadership) the manifestation of more and more and more of the Good and the True and the Beautiful—right here and right now in this gloriously manifest universe, moment to moment to ever-present moment—knowing full well that this entire world is nothing but the dream of an infinite Spirit, yet each and every one of us directly being, in reality, this very Spirit itself, dreaming the world of our own amazement.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 654-659 |
A successor was needed who would allow Yeltsin’s family (in both the normal sense of his relatives and in the Russian sense of friendly oligarchs) to stay alive and maintain their wealth. “Operation Successor,” as the challenge was known in the Kremlin, had two stages: finding a new man who was not a known associate of Yeltsin, and then inventing a fake problem that he could then appear to solve. To find his successor, Yeltsin’s entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 673-674 |
The ink of political fiction is blood.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 980-983 |
In 2013, Russia began to seduce or bully its European neighbors into abandoning their own institutions and histories. If Russia could not become the West, let the West become Russia. If the flaws of American democracy could be exploited to elect a Russian client, then Putin could prove that the world outside is no better than Russia. Were the European Union or the United States to disintegrate during Putin’s lifetime, he could cultivate an illusion of eternity.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1095-1100 |
The result by 2013 was a formidable if vulnerable creation. The EU’s economy was larger than that of the United States, larger than that of China, and about eight times larger than that of Russia. With its democratic procedures, welfare states, and environmental protection, the EU offered an alternative model to American, Russian, and Chinese inequality. It included most of the states regarded as the world’s least corrupt. Lacking unified armed forces and convincing institutions of foreign policy, the EU depended upon law and economics for diplomacy as well as internal functioning. Its implicit foreign policy was to persuade leaders and societies who wished for access to European markets to embrace the rule of law and democracy.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1102-1105 |
The EU’s vulnerability was the European politics of inevitability: the fable of the wise nation. Citizens of west European member states thought that their nations had long existed and had made better choices as they learned from history, in particular learning from war in Europe that peace was a good thing. As European empires were forced to abandon colonies and joined the process of integration, this fable of the wise nation smoothed the process, allowing Europeans to look away from both defeat in colonial wars and the atrocities they committed as they lost.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1109-1112 |
It is true that citizens of these countries unreflectively believe that their country has a history as a nation-state: generally, after a moment of reflection, they realize that this is not the case. Such reflection does not usually take place, because history education throughout Europe is national. Lacking serious education in their own imperial pasts, and lacking the comparative knowledge that would allow them to see patterns, Europeans settled for a falsehood.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1136-1137 |
Because failure had to be presented as success, Russia had to present itself as a model for Europe, rather than the other way around.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1184-1186 |
Writing in the newspaper Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced the grand project of Eurasia. Russia would bring together states that had not proven to be plausible members of the European Union (and implicitly, in the future, states that exited a collapsing European Union).
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1238-1238 |
Gumilev saw the inspirational possibilities in repression, and believed that the basic biological truths of life were revealed in extreme settings.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1247-1250 |
Gumilev’s contribution to Eurasianism was his theory of ethnogenesis: an explanation of how nations arise. It began from a specific understanding of astrophysics and human biology. Gumilev maintained that human sociability was generated by cosmic rays. Some human organisms were more capable than others of absorbing space energy and retransmitting it to others. These special leaders, in possession of the “passionarity” Putin mentioned in his 2012 speech, were the founders of ethnic groups.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1298-1299 |
The West, Dugin continued, “is the matrix of rotten cultural perversion and wickedness, deceit and cynicism, violence and hypocrisy.”
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1411-1412 |
The Tu-95 “Izborsk” would be used to bomb Syria in 2015, creating refugees who would flee to Europe.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1427-1432 |
Glazyev did not discuss the preferences of the people who lived in the European Union. Did Europeans really need to discover firsthand the profundity of a Russian system where life expectancy in 2012 was 111th in the world, where the police could not be trusted, bribes and blackmail were the stuff of everyday life, and prison was a middle-class experience? In its distribution of wealth, Russia was the most unequal country in the world; the EU’s far greater wealth was also far more evenly shared among its citizens. Glazyev helped his master maintain Russian kleptocracy by changing the subject from prosperity to values, to what Putin called “civilization.”
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1446-1446 |
Because the EU is a consensual organization, it was vulnerable to campaigns that raised emotions.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1558-1559 |
Under the mistaken impression that they had a history as a nation-state, the British (the English, mainly) voted themselves into an abyss where Russia awaited.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1609-1613 |
Nations are new things that refer to old things. It matters how they do so. It is possible, as Russian leaders have done, to issue ritual incantations designed to reinforce the status quo at home and justify empire abroad. To say that “Rus” is “Russia,” or that Volodymyr/Valdemar of Rus in the 980s is Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation in the 2010s, is to remove the centuries of interpretable material that permits historical thought and political judgment.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1638-1639 |
In the early seventeenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest state in Europe, and even briefly took Moscow.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1704-1705 |
This was an early example of the Soviet politics of eternity: legitimating rule not by present achievement or future promise but by the nostalgic loop of a round number.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1869-1870 |
“Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 1959-1961 |
In the newspaper Kommersant, Lavrov repeated Ilyin’s idea that “society is a living organism” that had to be protected from Europe’s hedonistic “refusal of traditional values.” Lavrov presented the Ukrainians who were struggling, and by that point dying, for European ideas of law as the prey of European sexual politics.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 2164-2165 |
Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 2238-2238 |
The Russian invasion of Ukraine coincided with a spike in popularity of the literature of the “accidental time traveler,” a Russian genre of science fiction. In these stories, individuals, groups, weapons, and armies loop back and forth through time in order to correct the overall picture. As in the politics of eternity, facts and continuities disappear, replaced by jumps from point to point. At the crucial junctures, an innocent Russia is always repelling a sinful West. Thus Stalin contacts Putin to help him declare martial law in Russia and war on the United States. Or Russians travel back to 1941 to help the Soviet Union defeat the German invasion.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 2249-2250 |
In 2014, Russian law made it a criminal act to suggest that the Soviet Union had invaded Poland, occupied the Baltic States, or committed war crimes between 1939 and 1941.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 2288-2288 |
Ivan Ilyin’s ideas gave form to the politics of eternity. A Russian nation bathed in the untruth of its own innocence could learn total self-love. Vladimir Surkov showed how eternity could animate modern media. While working for Putin, he wrote and published a novel, Almost Zero (2009), that was a kind of political confession. In the story, the only truth was our need for lies, the only freedom our acceptance of this verdict. In a story within the larger plot, the hero was troubled by a flatmate who only slept. An expert issued a report: “We will all be gone,” the expert confided, “as soon as he opens his eyes. Society’s duty, and yours in particular, is to continue his dream.” The perpetuation of the dream state was Surkov’s job description. If the only truth was the absence of truth, the liars were honorable servants of Russia.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 2297-2298 |
“Knowledge only gives knowledge, but uncertainty gives hope.”
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 2662-2663 |
All of this gave the Russian band 13 Sozvezdie time to prepare its nationalist ska favorite “Why Do Ukrainians Kill Other Ukrainians?” The lyrics asked why Rus had been sold to Europe: an odd question, since Rus was a medieval European realm. As 13 Sozvezdie showed, popular culture could invoke the politics of eternity.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 3161-3163 |
“Donald Trump, successful businessman” was not a person. It was a fantasy born in the strange climate where the downdraft of the American politics of eternity, its unfettered capitalism, met the rising hydrocarbon fumes of the Russian politics of eternity, its kleptocratic authoritarianism.
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The Road to Unfreedom (Timothy Snyder)
– Your Highlight at location 3171-3173 |
From an American point of view, Trump Tower is a garish building on Fifth Avenue in New York City. From a Russian point of view, Trump Tower is an inviting site for international crime.
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The Game Of Life (Timothy Leary;Robert Anton Wilson)
– Your Highlight on page 6 | location 85-87 |
The science of exo-psychology, which analyzes human affairs from an extraterrestrial (future) viewpoint, here links up with ancient, pre-scientific psychologies which were so futique that they all but disappeared into the occult (meaning “hidden”) traditions, and have suffered distortions and loss to the scientific community until now.
Before you read how Dr. Leary relates the 22 trumps of the Medieval Tarot deck, the 12 “sun signs” of astrology and the 8 trigrams of the Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching) to the evolving periodic table (here spiral) of elements, the ethological concept of castes, and, most important, to the next quantum leap in human consciousness (as well as the next several down the line), I want to back up a bit and reiterate two basic principles of exo-psychology.
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Complete Works of Polybius (Polybius)
– Your Highlight at location 186-187 |
Men are apt to turn their eyes upon the past, as holding all that is worthy of contemplation, while they fail to take note of history “in the making,” or to grasp the importance of the transactions of their own day.
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Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Jens Zimmermann)
– Your Highlight at location 947-950 |
Heidegger’s hammer illustrates his deepening of the hermeneutic circle to the universal existential dimensions of life: the common human project we all seek to complete is life with its future possibilities. The ‘in-order-to’ structure of our life projects is ‘care’. Our being in the world and our relation to things are united into a meaningful whole through our will and desire to realize our future possibilities in accomplishing our life as a task.
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Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
– Your Highlight on page 15 | location 227-228 |
An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.
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Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
– Your Highlight on page 21 | location 315-315 |
“progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.
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Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
– Your Highlight on page 22 | location 324-325 |
Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters. The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one. Cruel punishments, whether or not they are in some sense “deserved,” are no more effective at deterring harm than moderate but surer punishments, and they desensitize spectators and brutalize the society that implements them.
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Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
– Your Highlight on page 21 | location 322-325 |
Among the powers of government is meting out punishment, and writers such as Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and the American founders thought afresh about the government’s license to harm its citizens.17 Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters.
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Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
– Your Highlight on page 30 | location 448-450 |
With the exception of fruit, everything we call “food” is the body part or energy store of some other organism, which would just as soon keep that treasure for itself.
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Iron John: A Book about Men (Robert Bly)
– Your Highlight on page 14 | location 212-213 |
Freud said: “What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
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Empire of Illusion (Chris Hedges)
– Your Highlight on page 32 | location 486-487 |
Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.
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Empire of Illusion (Chris Hedges)
– Your Highlight on page 32 | location 489-491 |
Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality and who grasp the hollowness of celebrity culture are shunned and condemned for their pessimism.
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How to Change Your Mind (Michael Pollan)
– Your Highlight at location 1006-1006 |
The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.
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The Meaning of It All (Richard P. Feynman)
– Your Highlight on page 11 | location 154-155 |
there is nothing more exciting than the truth,
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Beyond the Chains of Illusion (Erich Fromm)
– Your Highlight at location 154-155 |
Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. (I believe nothing human to be alien to me –Terentius)
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Beyond the Chains of Illusion (Erich Fromm)
– Your Highlight at location 482-482 |
Montesquieu had expressed the same idea in terms of “institutions form men”; Robert Owen expressed it in similar ways.
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21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari)
– Your Highlight on page 4 | location 58-60 |
In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. Frequently, we don’t even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Billions of us can hardly afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do:
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The End of Life as We Know It (Michael Guillen)
– Your Highlight on page 270 | location 4133-4136 |
One day we will stop, look back, and realize that in our mad dash toward an overhyped, self-centered scientific utopia, we left ourselves behind, by abandoning the unique soul and spirit of our species.
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The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Alan Watts)
– Your Highlight on page 6 | location 91-91 |
Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature,
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The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Alan Watts)
– Your Highlight on page 8 | location 114-115 |
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness—an act of trust in the unknown.
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The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Alan Watts)
– Your Highlight on page 16 | location 234-235 |
You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic,
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Become What You Are (Alan Watts)
– Your Highlight on page 31 | location 463-464 |
The unenlightened man attains to any degree of responsibility; he develops a heaviness of touch, a lack of abandon, a stiffness which indicates that he is using his dignity as stilts to keep his head above adversity.
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Enlightenment Is Your Nature (Osho)
– Your Highlight on page 18 | location 276-277 |
People who are bewildered and frightened by too much change find relief in monotony.
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Sacred Messengers of Shamanic Africa (Carley Mattimore)
– Your Highlight on page 25 | location 382-386 |
My spiritual life had been a mere blip on my radar. Raising five daughters in a blended family, in addition to working as a psychotherapist in private practice, took every ounce of my psychic energy. Don’t get me wrong. This was a pattern that, as the oldest of six children, I had grown up with. I was quite familiar with caretaking.
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Sacred Messengers of Shamanic Africa (Carley Mattimore)
– Your Highlight on page 34 | location 520-523 |
This includes humans, animals, the green nations (the plants and trees), the mineral kingdom, the sacred waters, and the lands across our planet. I also feel a deep honoring of the sun, moon, and great star nations, including our galaxy and the entire cosmos, which encompasses the world of Spirit. I bow in gratitude to the Great Mystery and marvel at how we came to be here on Earth.
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The Strong Eye of Shamanism (Robert E. Ryan)
– Your Highlight on page 122 | location 1867-1869 |
A. P. Elkin, in the first half of this century, was able to gather and discuss many of the characteristics of Aboriginal shamanism in a book he first published in 1945, Aboriginal Men of High Degree: Initiation and Sorcery in the World’s Oldest Tradition.
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The Anatomy of a Calling: A Doctor’s Journey from the Head to the Heart and a Prescription for Finding Your Life’s Purpose (Lissa Rankin)
– Your Highlight at location 614-616 |
Your painful emotions are fingers pointing at everything in need of healing in your life, and when you’re brave enough to move through them, they pass like clouds in the sky and leave you feeling lighter.
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The Anatomy of a Calling: A Doctor’s Journey from the Head to the Heart and a Prescription for Finding Your Life’s Purpose (Lissa Rankin)
– Your Highlight at location 1290-1292 |
“Dissolving isn’t something you do; it’s something that happens to you. The closest you’ll come to controlling it is relaxing and trusting the process.” This is easier to do in the company of compassionate loved ones who can just be present with your process without judging you or trying to fix you.
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Homecoming (John Bradshaw)
– Your Highlight on page 46 | location 696-696 |
Children naturally believe the world is friendly;
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Homecoming (John Bradshaw)
– Your Highlight on page 47 | location 706-707 |
Optimism and trust are the soul of intimacy. We must risk being vulnerable if we want to be intimate.
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Homecoming (John Bradshaw)
– Your Highlight on page 72 | location 1100-1102 |
The most important first step is to help your wounded child grieve its unmet developmental dependency needs. Most of the contaminations I described in the first part of this book result from unmet needs that are unresolved because they have never been grieved. The emotions that needed to be expressed were never expressed.
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Homecoming (John Bradshaw)
– Your Highlight on page 77 | location 1174-1175 |
“All our neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering.” Grief work, which has been called original pain
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Healing Your Aloneness (Margaret Paul)
– Your Highlight on page 14 | location 200-202 |
They are actually being controlled by their resistance, even though their resistance is intended to protect them from being controlled by others.
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The Essene Gospels of Peace (Edmond Bordeaux Szekely)
– Your Highlight on page 12 | location 169-170 |
And your true brothers are all those who do the will of your Heavenly Father and of your Earthly Mother, and not your brothers by blood.
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America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization: A new investigation into the mysteries of the human past by the bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods (Graham Hancock)
– Your Highlight at location 4988-4991 |
The connection of the constellation of Orion to the land of the dead was a fundamental aspect of the ancient Egyptian religion and it felt weirdly like coming home—that comfortable intimacy of familiar territory—to find it here in a Native North American religion.
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America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization: A new investigation into the mysteries of the human past by the bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods (Graham Hancock)
– Your Highlight at location 6685-6686 |
Science in the twenty-first century does NOT encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of “the facts”—particularly
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America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization: A new investigation into the mysteries of the human past by the bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods (Graham Hancock)
– Your Highlight at location 7349-7351 |
In the 1940s and 1950s conventional wisdom held that the population of the entire hemisphere in 1492 was little more than 8 million—with fewer than 1 million people living in the region north of present-day Mexico.
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America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization: A new investigation into the mysteries of the human past by the bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods (Graham Hancock)
– Your Highlight at location 7870-7879 |
If the good person, who has a strong momentum of good evolutionary action, is unprepared for the Between, he or she can lose an enormous amount of evolutionary progress in the twinkling of an eye by becoming frightened and hiding in darkness. Similarly, a bad person, who has a great weight of negative evolution, if well prepared for the Between, can overcome immense eons of wretched lives by bravely shooting for the light. After all, a tiny achievement on the subtle plane can have a powerful impact on the gross. The soul in the Between can directly modify, just with creative imagination, what the Buddhists call “the spiritual genes” it carries with it. The Between voyager has temporarily an immensely heightened intelligence, extraordinary powers of concentration, special abilities of clairvoyance and teleportation, flexibility to become whatever can be imagined and the openness to be radically transformed by a thought or a vision or an instruction. This is indeed why the Between traveler can become instantly liberated just by understanding where he or she is in the Between, what the reality is, where the allies are, and where the dangers.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 76 | location 1164-1165 |
Long-term training in one perspective or the other actually creates a long-term template that automatically gates incoming sensory data. It becomes increasingly more difficult, with age, to alter the settings.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 88 | location 1349-1349 |
The conscious mind is too gross a tool, too slow, too focused on parts rather than wholes.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 95 | location 1455-1456 |
“Our intolerant slogans continually denigrate the nonhuman life with which we share this planet.”
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 131 | location 1997-2000 |
Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 132 | location 2015-2021 |
It is actually a kind of dreaming And not the kind of dreaming you are thinking about either But a different kind of dreaming entirely (It’s like the dreaming you do when you are reading this book) That dreaming is the central core of what this book is about It is the kind of dreaming that Goethe was engaged in When he learned about plant metamorphosis And Luther Burbank when he looked deep into the plant And saw every environment its ancestors had ever lived in And the same kind that Barbara McClintock did When she watched individual chromosomes in corn shift their structure It is the same state of mind that writers enter when they create worlds It is also how Gaia dreams the world into being And it is the kind of dreaming you can do, too, if you wish, If you decide to walk through the doors of perception And find out what is on the other side
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 139 | location 2120-2121 |
“we still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 141 | location 2157-2159 |
Jagadis Bose, who developed some of the earliest work on plant neurobiology in the early 1900s, treated plants with a wide variety of chemicals to see what would happen. In one instance, he covered large, mature trees with a tent then chloroformed them. (The plants breathed in the chloroform through their stomata, just as they would normally breathe in air.) Once anesthetized, the trees could be uprooted and moved without going into shock. He found that morphine had the same effects on plants as that of humans, reducing the plant pulse proportionally to the dose given. Too much took the plant to the point of death, but the administration of atropine, as it would in humans, revived it. Alcohol, he found, did indeed get a plant drunk. It, as in us, induced a state of high excitation early on but as intake progressed the plant began to get depressed, and with too much it passed out.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 145 | location 2210-2211 |
If plants in the system detect that another plant in the mycelial network is ill, unique compounds are generated by the plants most able to do so and sent through the mycelial network to where they are needed. The medicinal compounds in plants have been used for millennia to heal the individual plant, other plants in the ecorange network, and the insects and other animals that make that ecorange home.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 145 | location 2217-2218 |
To be convinced that all behavior on the part of others, without distinction, is hostile, is a form of mental illness.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 146 | location 2231-2233 |
Older plants send out volatiles to younger plants that contain within them information about chemical responses to predation. A bean plant, being fed upon by a spider mite, can analyze from its saliva just what type of spider mite is feeding on it. It then will craft a specific pheromone, releasing it from its leaf stomata as a volatile chemical into the air.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 148 | location 2268-2269 |
Albert Einstein once observed, “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 160 | location 2446-2448 |
It would be amusing really, when scientists, with a life span of 80 years, look at the Earth and pronounce it not alive because it does not fit into their preconceptions if it weren’t so dangerous.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 162 | location 2475-2477 |
We contain within ourselves the DNA of plants, insects, and bacteria, and viruses. We are, in fact, the “other” that we have been trying to kill. There isn’t, ultimately, any truly separate species; there isn’t, ultimately, any pure bloodline of any sort any place on this planet.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 174 | location 2655-2655 |
nearly everything of importance that we do happens at the unconscious level
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 195 | location 2976-2977 |
Goethe once said, “It makes a wonderful difference if you find in the body an ally or an adversary.” Distrust of the body damages the core of us.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 197 | location 3012-3014 |
These alternative behaviors, normally outside the habituated parameters of daily life, allow adaptive responses to changed conditions. Upon those adaptive responses rests the capacity of the species—and the Gaian system—to survive, the self-organized systems to remain intact.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 210 | location 3219-3221 |
Antidepressants, irrespective of which life-form is exposed to them, “cause neuronal damage and mature neurons to revert to an immature state, both of which may explain why antidepressants also cause neurons to undergo apoptosis (programmed death).” As Andrews et al.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 221 | location 3388-3389 |
Most grassland ecosystems are, in fact, dependent on the presence of the psilocybe species for their health.
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A Way of Self-Knowledge (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 104 | location 1591-1593 |
Finally, just as you are unaware of your eye when looking at the world of color, you cease to feel your body when the suprasensory world appears before you. Before the soul can see into the suprasensory world, the body must become invisible, imperceptible.
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A Way of Self-Knowledge (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 109 | location 1659-1660 |
Such insights into oneself are painful and crushing. But those who wish to gain the capacity to experience outside the body cannot avoid them. They have to happen, because those who walk this path must assume a special relationship with their own souls. Such self-understanding of universal human nature requires the greatest strength of soul.
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A Way of Self-Knowledge (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 120 | location 1827-1829 |
Therefore, to the question, What will become of all that I am now when I die? the clairvoyant researcher replies, You will be what you can retain of yourself by the strength of your existence as a spiritual being among other spiritual beings.
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A Way of Self-Knowledge (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 125 | location 1906-1907 |
Such a thought will always be rejected when one realizes that we human beings, by nature, must help ourselves and that, if we fail in our duty and do nothing about the forces waiting to unfold in our souls, those forces will spoil.
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A Way of Self-Knowledge (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 126 | location 1929-1931 |
What is important is that you live intensively with and in the thoughts or feelings, drawing together all the powers of your soul in them. During the time of inner absorption, your chosen thought or feeling should wholly fill your consciousness.
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Theosophy (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 93 | location 1415-1416 |
The sensations and feelings of all beings are a common world, enclosing and surrounding everything else, just as the physical atmosphere surrounds the earth.
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Theosophy (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 97 | location 1483-1485 |
In the sixth region of the spiritland a man will fulfill in all his actions what is most in accord with the true being of the world. He cannot seek after what profits himself, but only after what ought to happen according to the right course of the world order.
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Theosophy (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 130 | location 1980-1980 |
As long as a man lives in pleasure and pain he cannot gain knowledge by means of them. When he learns how to live by means of them, when he withdraws his feeling of self from them, then they become his organs of perception and he sees by means of them, attaining through them to knowledge.
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Egyptian Myths and Mysteries (Rudolf Steiner)
– Your Highlight on page 3 | location 36-38 |
The best men in all ages have asked themselves how man can rightly bring to expression what lies within him, and to this question the most diverse answers have been given.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 329 | location 5038-5039 |
Einstein once put it, “The pursuit of beauty and truth is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 335 | location 5124-5125 |
Strong ropes connect you with everything in the universe and when it is important to know about the other end of a rope, it will tap or pull on you.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 358 | location 5486-5487 |
McClintock said, “and it tells you at every step what the next step has to be because you’re integrating with an overall brand-new pattern in mind.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 391 | location 5990-5991 |
If you fully combine the experience of aisthesis with analogical thinking so that it blends into a unique synaesthesia of perceptual cognition and feeling, the human world can sometimes be left behind entirely.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 421 | location 6455-6456 |
“Every disease is a musical problem.”
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 444 | location 6804-6805 |
Autumn Plants, in the fall, begin to set seed. They use the nutrients stored over the winter, spring, and summer to create their seeds and send them into the world so that the species can spread. They begin to look a bit ragged at the end of the growing season. Plants use stored resources to reproduce. They then go into the long winter to regenerate. In spring they begin the cycle once again.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 453 | location 6940-6941 |
Those that follow that inner urging, who find and never let go of golden threads, are the ones who change everything.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 475 | location 7278-7284 |
It is considered improper in our time for anyone seeking to understand the world to talk of their feeling response to what they experience in their explorations. And should they try to do so anyway, the words usually come out stilted, folded in uncertain ways, wrinkled, shorn of depth. The deformation comes from pressure of culture to make sure that the words used in communication are devoid of feeling, that they are rational, reasonable, unemotional. That they remain a form of dissociated mentation.
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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight on page 488 | location 7481-7482 |
The struggle that Cinderella goes through is the same one the girl in our story is struggling with. The wholeness of her nature, what you might call the 360-degree personalty that all children have when young, is under assault by the shadow side of the feminine. The tales don’t really tell us why such an assault occurs. But perhaps it is because the mother has lost touch with the healthy child in herself, perhaps after too long a time of not taking care of her own needs. And now that she has lost it in herself she can no longer bear to see it in her child.
These stories are always about the shadow side and its assault on the healthy child. And they are about how the still uncorrupted child deals with that assault.
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Sacred Plant Medicine (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight at location 426-428 |
A solution to the poverty and illness in our world lies within the ancient capacity for individuals to travel in sacred territory, to reconnect with the sacredness of the Earth, and to develop their own capacity, a birthright of being human, to evoke the holy and once again sit in the council of all life.
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Sacred Plant Medicine (Stephen Harrod Buhner)
– Your Highlight at location 500-501 |
Human beings have a deep affinity for the sacred and all its manifestations. This is especially true of Earth-centered peoples. The process of the sacred manifesting itself in an incarnate form, the tendency of the form to take on its sacred archetype, is well known to Earth-centered peoples. To them, life is a love affair with the constant expression of the sacred in all its forms.
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The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 5 | location 75-78 |
The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves. We can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more closely at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing this knowledge closer to our awareness. This path, although certainly not easy, is the only route by which we can at last leave behind the cruel, invisible prison of our childhood.
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In Search of the Miraculous (P. D. Ouspensky)
– Your Highlight on page 41 | location 628-629 |
Everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws.”
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In Search of the Miraculous (P. D. Ouspensky)
– Your Highlight on page 42 | location 643-644 |
The whole thing, all work on oneself, consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself, and actually falling under this influence. And for this it is necessary to know beforehand which influence is the more profitable.”
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 22 | location 328-329 |
We need an open door to our own past, an opportunity to take its very beginning seriously.
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 28 | location 428-428 |
Ask no questions, shoulder other people’s anxieties, tolerate contradictions, roll with the punches. And if they can find no one to guide them out of that rut, they may continue doing precisely that all their lives.
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 31 | location 461-461 |
Outwardly, nothing spectacular had occurred—no heart attack, no accident, no event enlisting the immediate compassion of the people around her. What struck Isabelle full force was the realization that she was clinging to a pattern that was poisoning her life, her health, and her relationships and that something had to be done about it. For a clearer picture of how this came about, we need to look at the preliminary stages in greater detail.
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 36 | location 539-541 |
The process of healing requires both the confrontation with childhood traumas and the uncovering of the numerous defense mechanisms that have been erected to protect the child from unbearable pain and distress. Given the right therapeutic approach, adults can achieve both those aims.
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 41 | location 625-626 |
But such anxieties cannot be dissipated if clients sense their therapists’ fear of their own childhoods.
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 46 | location 694-695 |
You can take everything you’ve suffered out on your own children and never get punished because murdering the soul of your own child can always be passed off as parenting,
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The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self (Alice Miller)
– Your Highlight on page 100 | location 1529-1531 |
Many of us leave that child within ourselves in its prison, in constant fear, isolated from the knowledge that could set it free. Once that child has shaken off its chains, been allowed to see and to judge what it sees, it can walk out of its prison on its own. The fear is gone because it has recognized the manipulations for what they are. It is not afraid to see because it is not reduced to silence, because it can say what it sees, because it is not alone with what it has seen but has its perceptions confirmed by an enlightened witness. That witness has at last given the child what its parents withheld: the confirmation that its perceptions are right, that cruelty and manipulation are precisely that and nothing else, that the child need no longer deceive itself into seeing them as a form of loving care, that this knowledge is necessary in order for the child to be genuine and capable of love, and that the fruit from the tree of knowledge is there to be eaten.
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In Search of the Miraculous (P. D. Ouspensky)
– Your Highlight on page 86 | location 1313-1313 |
What is possible for individual man is impossible for the masses.
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In Search of the Miraculous (P. D. Ouspensky)
– Your Highlight on page 89 | location 1359-1361 |
It is the tragedy of the human being that any small I has the right to sign checks and promissory notes and the man, that is, the Whole, has to meet them. People’s whole lives often consist in paying off the promissory notes of small accidental I’s.
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In Search of the Miraculous (P. D. Ouspensky)
– Your Highlight on page 90 | location 1372-1372 |
“But even the clearest understanding of his possibilities will not bring man any nearer to their realization. In order to realize these possibilities he must have a very strong desire for liberation and be willing to sacrifice everything, to risk everything, for the sake of this liberation.”
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In Search of the Miraculous (P. D. Ouspensky)
– Your Highlight on page 103 | location 1569-1571 |
“Everything in the world, from solar systems to man, and from man to atom, either rises or descends, either evolves or degenerates, either develops or decays. But nothing evolves mechanically. Only this kind of development, only this kind of growth, marks the real evolution of man. There is, and there can be, no other kind of evolution whatever.
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The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
– Your Highlight on page 20 | location 296-297 |
It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves. We should feel prepared, as Emerson once put it, to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed. The thought frightens us; we don’t know how we could do it without others—yet at bottom the basic resource is there: we could suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves as Emerson wanted. And if we don’t feel this trust emotionally, still most of us would struggle to survive with all our powers, no matter how many around us died. Our organism is ready to fill the world all alone, even if our mind shrinks at the thought. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud’s explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.
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The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
– Your Highlight on page 36 | location 537-539 |
Wahl summed up this paradox: … the socialization processes for all children are painful and frustrating, and hence no child escapes
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The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
– Your Highlight on page 62 | location 943-944 |
Love is one great key to this kind of sexuality because it allows the collapse of the individual into the animal dimension without fear and guilt, but instead with trust and assurance that his distinctive inner freedom will not be negated by an animal surrender.
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The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
– Your Highlight on page 70 | location 1069-1069 |
An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction.
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The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
– Your Highlight on page 71 | location 1084-1085 |
This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.”
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The White Castle (Orhan Pamuk)
– Your Highlight on page 23 | location 350-350 |
However, he acted as if he had access to a knowledge that transcended what was in books – he himself agreed most of them were worthless – a knowledge more natural and more profound than things that could be learned.
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The Construction of Social Reality (John Searle)
– Your Highlight on page 8 | location 121-122 |
The child is brought up in a culture where he or she simply takes social reality for granted.
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The Construction of Social Reality (John Searle)
– Your Highlight on page 20 | location 296-297 |
As far as nature is concerned intrinsically, there are no functional facts beyond causal facts. The further assignment of function is observer relative.
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Life in Relation to Death: Second Edition (Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche)
– Your Highlight on page 3 | location 46-46 |
Enlightenment is the highest attainment of the death transition, but it is not the only one. If meditative realization is incomplete yet one has developed the power of prayer, there can be liberation into an environment of perfect bliss, free of suffering, by invoking the blessings of enlightened wisdom beings.
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Life in Relation to Death: Second Edition (Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche)
– Your Highlight on page 14 | location 206-207 |
“By the virtue I have accumulated in my life, may I and every other being who passes through the door of death find rebirth in a state of pure, sacred awareness.”
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The Intelligence of the Cosmos (Ervin Laszlo)
– Your Highlight on page 17 | location 260-260 |
If you want to know the secrets of the universe, you should think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.
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Civilized to Death (Christopher Ryan)
– Your Highlight on page 7 | location 103-103 |
Our most urgent dreams may simply reflect the world as it was before we fell asleep.
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Civilized to Death (Christopher Ryan)
– Your Highlight on page 8 | location 110-110 |
Civilization often seems to be picking up speed in the dizzying way things do when they’re circling the drain.
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The Kundalini Guide: A Companion For the Inward Journey (Companions For the Inward Journey Book 1) (Bonnie Greenwell)
– Your Highlight at location 111-111 |
Some people embark on pilgrimages in search of wisdom. They may be ripened by exposure to the energy fields of sacred spaces, but ultimately the Truth can only be discovered by those who are inward bound, for we hold within us the answer to our own questions.
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The Kundalini Guide: A Companion For the Inward Journey (Companions For the Inward Journey Book 1) (Bonnie Greenwell)
– Your Highlight at location 257-257 |
Kundalini awakening usually begins with a rush of energy up the spine or from the feet, and it may flow out of the head, but more often it stops at the heart or throat. It may come in spurts, as if a water hose is turning it on and off, jerking you upward with each shot of water.
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Kundalini Rising (Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa)
– Your Highlight on page 75 | location 1145-1146 |
My perceptions had expanded to the point at which I seemed to pop through a membrane of ordinary existence into the unified field, the great hologram, which I now realize is the true nature of this creation.
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Kundalini Rising (Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa)
– Your Highlight on page 84 | location 1279-1279 |
What I discovered was that, indeed, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And every present moment offers the opportunity for spirit to act through us in the world—that’s where the real rush of life is found. This doesn’t mean that I now ignore the chakra practice that I taught in my kundalini book; it just means that I do that meditation in the context of continual present-moment awareness.
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Kundalini Rising (Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa)
– Your Highlight on page 89 | location 1360-1363 |
“I feel the air flowing in and out of my nose.” 2. “I also feel the movements in my chest and belly as I breathe.” 3. “I’m aware of my whole body here in this present moment.”
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