The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution,
but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines,
deskilling the artisan
and turning him into a cog in the factory,
stripped of judgment and dignity
and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit
and the world around him
Until the 17th century, scientists thought blood was a one-way street.
They believed blood was produced by the liver and consumed like food by the body's tissues.
Until British physician William Harvey published a treatise so explosive, it was banned in England. He posited that blood was part of a circulatory system, continuously pumped through the body and recycled by the heart.
In other words, when it comes to blood, what goes around comes around.
Breaking new ground is never easy. You have to pull the rug out from under people. Shatter their reality. Ask more questions than you answer.
It takes what Dr. Harvey called a love of truth. And a whole lot of intestinal fortitude.
But it also requires faith.
That the world won't come crashing down around you.
That you won't be burned at the stake.
And that this new reality is going to be better.
Or at least truer than the one that came before.
We always want to cast blame, something to fear and avoid.
But the only thing to blame is everything.
We often place blame because it's easier than taking responsibility.
If you always look outward, you never have to turn inward.
But progress only comes when you shine a light on yourself.
What do you think?
How do you feel?
Ask the questions and the answers might surprise you.
Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil
were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine,
because they already were.
it was always a mistake,
to believe those people were different, special,
infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman,
fundamentally other
4 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
3 The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”
4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’
5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours.”
8 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”
9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’[d]”
12 Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
Luke 4:5 describes the second temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, where the devil takes Him to a high place and displays all the kingdoms of the world in an instant to tempt Him with power and glory.
This event signifies a temptation of the "lust of the eyes"
The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.
There must always be room for coincidence,
When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia,
each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy.
And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all,
you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat,
which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect.
But which always...took for granted was there
the detective Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends, who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans and Blacks, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.
He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
Marlowe, the culminating American hero:
wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—
an innocent who knows better,
a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker.
Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape.
Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.
The fourth Sunday during Lent is Mothering Sunday.
In England in the 16th century it was an occasion to appreciate the motherly nature of the Church.
More recently it has become a time to honour all mothers.
Bother terms - Mothering Sunday and Mother's day - represent the same day
The term 'Mothering Sunday' is the more traditional name from the 16th Century.
The festival was an opportunity not only to visit home but to take a small break from fasting, traditional during the time of Lent
There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos;
yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance,
as in the strife of Nature itself,
some new principle of order,
or some new impulse of conduct,
develops itself,
and controls, and regulates,
and brings to an harmonious consequence,
passions and elements
which seem only to threaten despair and subversion
The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers;
until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim.
After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels.
For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism.
Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers.
It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future
When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks.
Later, someone forged an iron spring, set clockwork running, imagined grid-lines on a globe.
Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together.
So we’ve always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real.
It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps.
And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the lands spread out before us ― never mind.
We've always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real
Voodou
It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence.
What it’s about is getting things done.
there are many gods, spirits.
Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices.
There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation
Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met,
but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid.
, you know how this works, it’s street religion,
came out of dirt poor places a million years ago.
Voodou’s like the street.
Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you?
No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done.
You know what your trouble is?
You're the kind who
always reads the handbook.
Anything people build,
any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific
purpose.
It's for doing something that somebody already
understands.
But if it's new technology, it'll open
areas nobody's ever thought of before.
You read the manual, and you won't play around with it, not the same way.
And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do
something you never thought of
Imagine a novel from the sixties whose author had somehow fully envisioned cellular telephony circa 2004, and had worked it, exactly as we know it today, into the fabric of her imaginary future.
Such a book would have seemed highly peculiar in the sixties, even though innumerable novels had already been written in which small personal wireless communications devices were taken for granted.
A genuinely prescient cell-phone novel would have moved in a most unsettling way, its characters acting, out of an unprecedented degree of connectivity, in ways that would quickly overwhelm the narrative.
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be.
In that sense, we have no future.
Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration.
For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on.
We have no future because our present is too volatile. ...
We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition
Cyberspace.
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...
A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.
Like city lights, receding...
Man has no automatic code of survival.
His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice.
He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil,
what values his life depends on,
what course of action it requires...
Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking,
which nature will not force him to perform.
Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.
Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation?
It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality.
The only man who desires to be moral
is the man who desires to live.
Yes, this is an age of moral crisis.
Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil.
But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame.
It is your moral code that’s through, this time.
Your moral code has reached its climax,
the blind alley at the end of its course.
And if you wish to go on living,
what you now need is not to return to morality—
you who have never known any—
but to discover it.
A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behaviour.
He needs a code of values to guide his actions.
‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep,
'virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it.
‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question:
of value to whom and for what?
'Value’ presupposes a standard,
a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative.
Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.
Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner,
but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires,
so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud,
but the torture of frustration is all he will find,
unless he seeks the happiness proper to man.
The purpose of morality is to teach you,
not to suffer and die,
but to enjoy yourself and live.
No, you do not have to live as a man;
it is an act of moral choice.
But you cannot live as anything else—
and the alternative is that state of living death
which you now see within you and around you,
the state of a thing unfit for existence,
no longer human and less than animal,
a thing that knows nothing but pain
and drags itself through its span of years
in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.
Whatever the degree of your knowledge,
these two—existence and consciousness—
are axioms you cannot escape,
these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake,
in any part of your knowledge and in its sum,
from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life
to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.
There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another—
if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked,
that lies do not work,
that the unearned cannot be had,
that the undeserved cannot be given,
that the destruction of a value which is,
will not bring value to that which isn’t.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission"
It's not always possible to seek permission before making decisions
and you won't get it right every time.
In those cases, you'll need to seek forgiveness.
You hope your friend, your family member will understand you tried your best.
You hope they'll show you grace.
Asking yourself for forgiveness can be even harder.
We carry the burden of our past mistakes.
But if you let them go, you can soar.
