Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
A contradiction cannot exist.
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking;
to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it
—that no substitute can do your thinking
—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another,
the acceptance of an authority over your brain,
the acceptance of his assertions as facts,
his say-so as truth,
his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence
Belief is a state of non-understanding.
People believe because they don’t know.
You don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in the trees, you don’t believe that the trees are green; you simply know.
But you believe that God exists, that heaven and hell exist.
These are beliefs, because you don’t know.
Belief is a substitute for knowing; it deceives you.
It keeps you in a state of ignorance because it helps you to pretend.
And if you have been pretending long enough, you are so deeply befooled by your own belief that you don’t suspect, you don’t doubt.
Your belief starts becoming your wisdom, and belief can never become your wisdom.
Remember one thing: believing is a wrong approach.
Don’t believe in God. Why believe in God when God can be known?
Don’t believe in love when love can be lived.
Don’t believe in me while you can experience the truth of my being present to you.
When you can commune with me, why believe in me?
Belief is a barrier, not a bridge.
If you believe in me, you will never understand me.
Drop believing and start knowing.
You were a believing Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan.
jump from your Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism.
jump from belief into a real, authentic search for the truth.
Belief simply means that others have told you, and you have believed them: maybe your parents, your teachers, priests, politicians, friends, or just the climate around you, the social conditioning.
You were born into a certain society, into a certain structure.
You have imbibed the spirit of it unknowingly.
Bring your inner being out into the open -
Sometimes we wake with anxiety.
An edgy energy.
What will happen today?
What is in store for me?
So many questions.
We want resolution, solid earth under our feet.
So, we take life into our own hands. We take action
Our solutions are temporary. They are quick fix.
They create more anxiety, more suffering.
There is no resolution to life’s questions.
It is easier to be patient once we finally accept there is no resolution.
When you’re born, you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one, giant consciousness.
You get older.
You descend back down.
You die.
You land back into the water, become one with the ocean again.
No more separated.
No more suffering.
One consciousness.
Death is a happy return,
like coming home.
Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed.
And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit:
the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think -
not blindness, but the refusal to see;
not ignorance, but the refusal to know.
It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.”
Light a fire in flinty February,
As the evening time comes down,
Welcome all the family home
With shopping bought from town.
Hear the logs crackle and roll,
And the sparks pop and hiss,
A storm roars down the chimney,
To deliver its tempestuous kiss.
Drowsiness in the living room,
As the expiring embers fade,
Up we go to those clean sheets,
And beds so neatly made.
The English term "Snow Moon" first originated in Massachusetts writer Jonathan Carver's 1778 book "Travels through the Interior parts of North America," where he claimed unspecified Native American tribes named the full moon event as such because that's the month when the most snow falls.
Traditionally, February's full moon is dubbed the "Snow Moon" due to the heavy snowfall typically experienced during this month in the Northern Hemisphere. Some Native American tribes also referred to it as the "Hunger Moon" because of the challenging hunting conditions during winter's peak.
What is the spiritual meaning of the Snow Moon? The spiritual meaning of the Snow Moon centers on patience, reflection, and quiet preparation. It invites release of what no longer serves and encourages honoring rest as the light slowly returns
February is often when people feel most emotionally drained, winter has lingered, motivation dips, and the full moon can quietly amplify that exhaustion. This is completely normal, and a sign to slow down rather than push through. The Snow Moon shines a light on what's been quietly building within.
February is a suitable month for dying.
the winter hateful, hanging on too long
Even though February was the shortest month of the year,
sometimes it seemed like the longest
I used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year.
In the winter I would choose February
The reason that God
made February short a few days
was because he knew
that by the time people came to the end of it
they would die if they had to stand
one more blasted day
called the snow moon — a nickname inspired by the heavy snowfall typically seen in February in parts of the United States,
The full moon offers an opportunity to sit in the fullness of your life. It is a time to feel deep gratitude for the many blessings you have and experience. It is also a powerful time to recommit yourself to the projects and relationships that mean the most to you.
Names for this month’s Moon have historically had a connection to animals. The Cree traditionally called this the Bald Eagle Moon or Eagle Moon. The Ojibwe Bear Moon and Tlingit Black Bear Moon refer to the time when bear cubs are born. The Dakota also call this the Raccoon Moon; certain Algonquin peoples named it the Groundhog Moon, and the Haida named it Goose Moon.
Another theme of this month’s Moon names is scarcity. The Cherokee names of Month of the Bony Moon and Hungry Moon give evidence to the fact that food was hard to come by at this time
February
I am lustration, and the sea is mine!
I wash the sands and headlands with my tide;
My brow is crowned with branches of the pine;
Before my chariot-wheels the fishes glide.
By me all things unclean are purified,
By me the souls of men washed white again;
E'en the unlovely tombs of those who died
Without a dirge, I cleanse from every stain.
Objectivism is a philosophical system named and developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute"
Objectivism's main tenets are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception (see direct and indirect realism), that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (see rational egoism), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform humans' metaphysical ideas by selective reproduction of reality into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and to which one can respond emotionally.
The name "Objectivism" derives from the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one's mind, and are not created by the thoughts one has.
Rand stated that she chose the name because her preferred term for a philosophy based on the primacy of existence—"existentialism"—had already been taken
Rand characterized Objectivism as "a philosophy for living on earth", based on reality, and intended as a method of defining human nature and the nature of the world in which we live.
Rand's philosophy begins with three axioms: existence, consciousness, and identity.[12] Rand defined an axiom as "a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it."
argued, Rand's argument for axioms "is not a proof that the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity are true. It is proof that they are axioms, that they are at the base of knowledge and thus inescapable."
Rand said that existence is the perceptually self-evident fact at the base of all other knowledge, i.e., that "existence exists". She further said that to be is to be something, that "existence is identity". That is, to be is to be "an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes". That which has no nature or attributes does not and cannot exist. The axiom of existence is conceptualized as differentiating something from nothing, while the law of identity is conceptualized as differentiating one thing from another, i.e., one's first awareness of the law of non-contradiction, another crucial base for the rest of knowledge. As Rand wrote, "A leaf ... cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time... A is A." Objectivism rejects belief in anything alleged to transcend existence
Rand argued that consciousness is "the faculty of perceiving that which exists". As she put it, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something", that is consciousness itself cannot be distinguished or conceptualized except in relation to an independent reality.[18] "It cannot be aware only of itself—there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something."[19] Thus, Objectivism posits that the mind does not create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality.[20] Expressed differently, existence has "primacy" over consciousness, which must conform to it. Any other type of argument Rand termed "the primacy of consciousness", including any variant of metaphysical subjectivism or theism.[21]
Objectivist philosophy derives its explanations of action and causation from the axiom of identity, referring to causation as "the law of identity applied to action".[22] According to Rand, it is entities that act, and every action is the action of an entity. The way entities act is caused by the specific nature (or "identity") of those entities; if they were different, they would act differently. As with the other axioms, an implicit understanding of causation is derived from one's primary observations of causal connections among entities even before it is verbally identified and serves as the basis of further knowledge
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