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The Secret of Spiritual Consistency and the Focal Point of Spiritual Power
There is no way of joining the past with the present, and there is no difference between what is a moment past and what is eternally past. There is never a past present, only a past. This is so because all objective knowledge about a human being is knowledge about one’s past, of what one has been than of what one is. If the present moment is to have genuine novelty, if it is not perfectly determined by events of the past, then it must be possible for the present to produce a break with the past in the form a knowledge of the past. Could time be reverses, and the future change places with the past, the past would cry out against us, and our future, full as loudly, as we against the ages foregone. All the Ages are his children, calling each other names. We are therefore, genuinely living in the present because we are prepared for any and every response to our address, the expected as well as the unexpected—and it is this that constitutes genuine listening. What nuisance can be so great to an individual busied with immense affairs, as to have to explain, or attempt to explain, or to attempt to explain, small details to others incapable of understanding them? #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5
The difference between a pseudo listening and a genuine listening is that while in the pseudo listening situation the listener pretends to listen, what one hears is determined by that individual’s past knowledge of the person he or she is listening to or by his or her theories concerning human nature. Genuine listening does not know ahead of time what it will hear; in the full uniqueness of the present it listens to the speech of the other without filtering what it hears through the screen of its own prejudgments. The purpose of genuine listening is therefore really to hear what the other is saying, constantly being aware that one is saying something that is new and not just a revelation of one’s nature, which the hearer has already identified and which is fixed as the others psychology. The doubts of the past may be as nothing to the dangers of the future. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5
Life is the dialogue between human and God in which each is the other’s reason for being. The extended lines of relations meet in the eternal God. Life is an endless transition from God and back to God. Sooner or later, the times comes when even the most cherished aspect recedes, when a spiritual tiredness over takes the most authentic essence of the soul turns into God. However, an individual may hate God and curse him, one may turn away from God when the suffering of human destiny becomes unbearable; but no individual can reduce God to the status of a thing who no longer addresses him and becomes one object among others in the World for God. In dealing with God, he can become abyss between the self and the Absolute in the ecstasy of mystical union. Time and again, however, many humans turn from thinking about God to addressing him, and it is then that one communicates with the living God, as distinct from merely giving intellectual assent to the God of the philosopher. This is true even when the Absolute Thou addressed is not called God. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5
However, when one, too, who abhors the name of God, and believes oneself to be godless, gives one’s whole being to addressing the Thou of one’s life as a Thou that cannot be limited by another, one address God. God never comes where knaves are present. Human folly is not needed to fill up the great design of God. There is no stature, no beauty, no proportions, nor any colours in which humans themselves can well be fashioned, that is not already done to one’s hands. When you would conceive of that great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and a resting-place in our human minds—soar out of the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surrounds these little planets, and stand erect in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere. We are overhasty to speak—as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and makes his love felt through ours. No accident happens to us without the Divine permission. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5
God Almighty is just and gracious, and gives not his assent to rash and inhuman curses. Even if the unreality of our times were no greater than that of previous eras, this in itself would be no cause for rejoicing or lack of concern. Because humans have always engaged in undesirable activities such as child abuse or family violence, this is no excuse for our acceptance of them. As we know all too well, the socially accepted problems or unchangeables of the human condition of one era, e.g, racial prejudice, slavery, have become the great social causes of another. Rather than being permanent unchanging features of the human condition, in some cases, such as slavery, they have been greatly eradicated. Above all, the one thing we have not assumed is that reality, especially its knowledge by humans, is independent of our minds, need, and social purposes. The very description of reality is shot through and through with human needs, passions, emotions. It is also strongly affected by the nature of our minds and the general culture of which we are part of. However, if we stay in contact with that center of power, the eternal Thou, its energy is released in our lives. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5
Are Not Foul Streams Often Traced to Pure Fountains?
The subtile devil is never absent from his business, but ready at all occasions to encourage his servants. No man falls like Lucifer from Heaven—the progress of evil is slow and not easily perceived. If thou hast defeated Circe, and escaped all swinish transformations then mayest thou proceed in safety and resist the sirens. All good things are perverted to evil purposes are worse than those which are naturally bad. The truth is always like a square, there is your truth, their truth, the theory the prosecution puts together, and God’s truth. Often times God puts us in situations that are far beyond our comprehension. God may allow you to be tortured and abused and for the media to totally invade your life because he knows that you can take and wants to expose to the World how corrupt certain people in positions of power are and show you that they would rather, collectively, use their power to hard an innocent person, than stand for justice and truth. In the process, God has exposed these people and show that they have no since of virtue or religion upon them. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5
There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could every bring, to the sense. Some of these people, while they practice every vice that can disgrace human nature, may imagine they are doing God service. Therefore, the truth is a square and you are just part of the regional block. Do you best to remain God and blameless and know that you will be delivered from evil. By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower. Good-nature gives pleasure without any allay; ease, confidence, and happy carelessness, without the pain of obligation, with the exertion of gratitude. Good manners are so little natural, that we ought to be composed to observe them: politenesses will not live in a storm. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 5
Good in a strong many—compounded nature is of slower growth than any other mortal thing, and must not be forced. It is strange that all people should consent in commending goodness, and no person will endeavor to deserve that commendation; whilst, on the contrary, all rail at wickedness, and all are as eager to be what they abuse. Remember, now, we are not dealing with normal people who are willing to accept some of another person’s ideas and give up some of their own. It is as if there are too many heavy towels and soaked sheets on one side of the automatic washing machine, causing it to stop its regular functioning. Many of these people are dependent and unable to take care of themselves. They want you to give them answers. These individuals want to remain eternal children—taken care of forever. Their behavior is intended to produce, elicit, and provoke from others tender, nurturing, and thoughtful instruction. Consequently, the immature individuals want to suppress others, and enforce their expansiveness and dominance. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 5
What have good men and women, engaged in a right cause to fear? Self-control is at the core of a healthy lifestyle. Self-control promotes adaptive psychological functioning because it helps to promote and regulate their emotions and behavior. People have to know how to take care of one’s own body (your body is your temple), and support psychological trains that are associated with self-control, such as humility, patience, mindfulness, and compassion. Prayer, reading, and walking can help people regulate their emotions and actions. When people are exposed to things that are relaxing, they are better able to endure discomfort, delay gratification, and follow through on challenging tasks. Whether perfect happiness would be procured by perfect goodness, this World may never afford an opportunity of deciding. History is never a trustworthy guide to the thinker. It is, at the best, only a staff, and a most unreliable one at that. Despite the adage, it never repeats itself. The butterfly of today can never again be the chrysalid (the hard outer cause of this, especially after being discarded) of yesterday. Analogies the past may furnish, but patterns for the future never. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5
Law and all forms of law are only deductions made by the intelligence from the right instincts of the people’s heart. It is only be resenting [wrongs done to me], and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together. It is in my nature to do it, and I must do it. There is nothing between doing it, and sinking into the smiling state of the poor little mad man or woman that haunts the Court. If I was to sit down under it, I should become imbecile. The child has a basis for understanding that there are great differences between people, and that therefore one has to make choices about who he or she wants to be. This basic decision, on which all later personality developments will build, is facilitated by the polarizations of the fairy tale. It would be a serious mistake to think that such raw images and projections are absent from the thoughts of adults. Be sure to cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. God makes us holy in the sense that the Lord has made us innocent before Him. And then we have to turn that innocence into holy character through the moral choices we make. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 5
HXPF GFBMCZ FUEIB: The Souls of the Celestial Spheres
Sin has really become an instrument most effective in the education of intellect and soul. The notion that magic and witchcraft have some relationship with rationality or science managed to reach some and form an advocacy of a new religion based on love, art, magic and mathesis. Some believe magic has an impact on belief, thought, and behavior. Magic takes a sort of professional pleasure in profaning holy things; in its rites, it performs the contrary of the religious ceremony. On its side, religion, when it has not condemned and prohibited magic rites, has always looked upon them with disfavor. Witches were thought to be dangerous without knowing it; their witchcraft was made active simply by feeling of resentment or grudge. The accusation attempted to regulate the situation by vindicating one and condemning the other rival. Since witches do not necessarily know that they are such, acts of witchcraft are often unwitting. Thus, in a consideration of witchcraft, the only evidence that has occurred is that an accusation is made and sustained (usually by oracle).
Many people also believed that cartoons like He-man and TV shows like Supernatural and the Vampire Diaries are used to sneak in evil and indoctrinate the population. However, some believe that TV shows, which display occult symbols and rituals are necessary because they are culturally relevant. And furthermore, not to attack reporters and the news, because some do excellent, but many people feel the news is evil and drains their energy because some reporters habitually lie and steal confidential information and illegally leak it and distort it. It is rumored that some news anchors make speeches in praise of the devil, and that they read their own beliefs and attitudes into their works. Whereas, TV shows like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries give a deep magical insight into nature and their work is illustrated with magical diagrams, representing mathesis, and they outline a movement of tolerance and general philanthropy which is to replace sectarian bitterness.
Reformation and acceptance of other cultures and religions is important because in August of 1591, Italian Philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) taught occult procedures. He was arrested in Venice and thrown into the prisons of the Inquisition. At the end of the Venetian trial, he recanted his scripts, but was sent to Rome for another trial, remined in prison for eight years, at the end of which he was sentenced as a heretic (having refused, this time, to recant) and was burned alive on the Campo de’ Fiori. Many believed the Giordano Bruno was burned alive because he was an Egyptian magician, who had been propagating throughout Europe some movement of nature of which remains mysterious, although it may be connected with the origins of Rosicrucianism and of Freemasonry. Giordano Bruno was actually Italian, but at an early age he entered the Dominican order and become an inmate of the Dominican convent in Naples. However, his philosophical views in themselves can have had little to do with the condemnation.
In reality, although many condemned Giordano Bruno and labeled him as a confused thinker, his philosophy, his magic, and his religion can all be seen as forming part of an outlook on nature and on humans which, however unusual, is nevertheless perfectly coherent within its own premises. Giordano Bruno gave public lectures that attracted King Henri III, and published two books on the art of memory, and he also appeared as the martyr for modern sciences and the Copernican theory. As a result, statues were erected in honor of Giordano Bruno by anticlericals in Italy. Many errors can be made by novice who judge things based on their limited information much like in art criticism. If we interpret a painting in light of its context, then try to interpret the context in light of the painting, we are in grave danger of finding only confirmation for our prior beliefs about the painting and the historical context.
There are two kinds of magic. The first is practiced by those who unite themselves to demons by a specific religious rite, and, relying on their help, often contrive portents. This, however, was thoroughly rejected when the Prince of this World was cast out. However, the other kind of magic is practiced by those who seasonably subject natural material to natural causes to be formed in a wondrous way. Nature gives to the bodies an appetite and tendency through which they would desire the lower places and give them, in addition, gravity and cold as means through which they can descend to the desired place [the center of the World]. It gives to the subtler ones the desire for the higher place and added lightness and warmth as means through which they would reach the desired ends. The present state of the World represents a transitory process limited at both extreme by the moments of creation and of Last Judgment.
As to the human soul, it too has faculties and movements, often expressed as appetites: the natural appetite of the human intellect and will is directed toward the infinite true and good only that is, toward God, as its ends. Again, the whole attempts of our Souls is to become God. This attempt is no less natural for men than the attempt to fly is for birds. For it is inherent in all humans always every everywhere and therefore follows, not a contingent quality of an individual, but the nature of the species itself. Therefore, witches do believe in God and if many of them have no idea that they are witches, we cannot condemn them. Last night, I had a dream that there were a series of explosions and my body started shaking and the room with filled with smoke, then my feet started to fly towards the Heavens and my head was toward Earth. So, I was vertically levitating upside down. There seems to be a parallelism between the Soul and fire, because both tend to rise to the tops of their respective spheres. Thus, the several frenzies constitute a rising series, or rather, a set of rungs on the ladder up to God.
The end of fire is the concavity of the last Heaven. Therefore, if there were no obstacle each flame would fly up to that place, and when it reached that concavity, if it had sufficient extension, it would extend itself throughout that whole concavity in order to enjoy entirely what is natural to it. The goal and the end of the mind is the true and good itself: God, there it runs by an essential instinct like fire. The technique was to assist the soul’s cleaving to God, purifying and elevating the magician toward the divine. Second, through such elevation, the magician gains powers over the angels and ministering forces, and can manipulate them to produce Worldly erect. The higher magician rises through the spheres and the divine world, the more powerful the angels which can be thus manipulated; furthermore, such manipulation binds the magician to the superior nature of the angel, aiding further ascent. No magician can control spirits whose status is higher than one’s own, therefore the manipulation of the angels is both proof of purity and an instrument for achieving the divine union. The radical promise of ceremonial magic is fulfilled: demonic magic leads the soul to God.
It appears that each form of frenzy induces the soul to rise to the appropriate sphere. The dream represents the soul being diverted to the mind, the supreme part of itself, and makes it fit and pure temple of the gods, in which the divine spirits may dwell. The divine spirits here are angels in the narrow and superior sense, such as Archangels Michael, Uriel, Raziel, and so forth; such angels sometimes speak prophecy through human mouths, and the soul is filled with felicity, wisdom, and oracles. And the ceremonies consist in observing cleanliness, and purity, of mind, then body, and those these which are about the body. And that is why some people cannot have the sex nor eat pork, nor do drugs. Some people believe that Giordano Bruno used conducive magic, and made a leap upward though the spheres in an ascent to his new Universe, on the ladders of occult sympathies running through all nature. With magic and divine rites, he ascended to the height of the divinity.
Giordano Bruno bold explorations of the inner World may become important to the historian of psychology. He was moving under laws placed in the Universe of God, who is not a magician, but a mathematician and a mechanic. Giordano Bruno used his extraordinary vision of an immensely expanded Universe, ruled by laws of magical animism. He became an outstanding figure, the old legend of the martyrdom of the advanced thinker and gravity substituted for the psychic life of nature as the principle of movement. Seeing every power and virtue is from above, from God, from the intelligences and stars, who can neither err nor do evil. You do not know, for you could never learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude, what a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest criminal, if you look at his or her conduct from their own point of view, or from any side point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all.
It is Curious to Observe how Good and Bad are Mingled in Human Institutions
Friends we are all, till God’s grace comes. The waker of sleeping souls, tamer of presumptuous and recalcitrant ignorance, proclaimer of a general philanthropy–Death does what nothing else can do; it teaches, by strengthening us in the force of the divinest example, to forgive injuries and to shut out the from the soul the remembrance of past evils. It is not so hard to die. The preparation is the difficulty. Why this gloom at the thought of the dead? And why should we not be glad? Is it that we ever think of them as departed from all joy? Is it that we believe that indeed they are dead? Death, to one in health, is a very terrible thing. We pity the person for what one suffers; and we pity ourselves for what we must some time hence in like sort suffer; and so are doubly affected. Many words of deep significance, many entire sentences, and those possibly the most important one, have flown too far on the winged breeze to recover. To be honest…Bishop, you know what hurts more than anything else…it was the death, rebirth, and subsequent heartbreak for profit and popularity. I could have bore it with a thankful art. However, the words she spoke, lambs could not forgive, nor worms forget. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 7
One heart beats with other hearts in the presence of human pain. Revelation necessarily involve the use of concepts that would cancel each other out. Thinking that someone could be so horrible and blame something horrible on someone you love so much. Although many of you are viewed as professionals and pillars of society, you all are not better than street thugs. Like a homicidal energizer bunny, you have tried to rush me to the grave. You may hide in the mountains, but the law will find you. The government and law are not of purely human origin. Only in a qualified sense, governments derive their powers from the assent of the governed. All power, however, ultimately comes from God; he alone has absolute sovereignty. We are called from beyond our own little lives to enter into the lives of others. To respond—so simple, so meaningful, so significant, so natural, so inevitable. However, what sounds so right and what seems so real, upon closer examination, turns into that which is unclear and uncertain. We are split—divided within and separated without. From the moment of birth, we enter into a condition characterized by distance and division. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 7
People seek help in their struggles with such problems as identity and alienation and look to psychotherapy to resolve their spiritual unrest or feelings that they are not getting all they should out of life. Their pain reflects the confusions of moral standards and disintegration of values in today’s World, as well as the increasing proportion of the educated and affluent who have the leisure and inclination to brood about such issues. The idea of a World of pain can be understood more accurately as human pain. Of course, there is physical pain, bodily injury, and biochemical disturbance can produce excruciating suffering. The psychological pain, with its locus in an individual’s sense of self and worth; the sociological pain with its locus in our sense of affiliation and alienation; spiritual pain, with its locus in our sense of power and meaning makes people feel like they are upside down in this life. These people have caused trouble all over the World and you welcome them into your house. The key way in which sin manifests itself in human life is in the failure of humans, both in theory and in practice, to understand themselves as persons. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 7
We are never nearer to evil than when we believe a person is incapable of wrongdoing. The ghost of what you all have done to me and my family haunts my thoughts and daily life, and it shows me that many of you continually reject your status as persons. God is the original person and humans are derivative persons, and before the Fall of men, persons were persons of God. Many people have entered a rebellion against God, and seeks continually to be their own masters. However, death, and resurrection is a love that alone can break this rebellious self-will and that alone can provide humanity with a model of goodness. Such secular ethics can at best exhibit the kind of goodness that can defeat depersonalization as a hypothetical possibility. The revelation of Christ alone makes it actual. Revelation, however, does not provide us with a code that we can then detach from its origin and live by. We must return continually to revelation for renewal. This is in part because of the character of human sin, but also in part because we must reassert the personal character of social life in new contexts. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 7
We too easily and too casually move into responding to others’ lives. We can too inadvertently and too unknowingly confuse our lives with their lives. We can too glibly and too blindly misunderstand that nature of genuine respond to human pain. When God reveals himself to you, he does so as a person. Once I contact what I have overlooked or denied or rejected, I again become creator-sustainer. Revelation is the act of a person, not the setting out of a doctrine. God is an inferred entity; and is an object. In revelation, God encounters an individual person to person; humans cannot argue their way to Go by a philosophy or discover God apart from the Biblical revelation, yet when God calls, humans at least can answer. It seems that many people have been totally corrupted by the Fall and cannot advance an inch toward God by means of their natural powers. Grace has to supply even the capacity of responding to God’s initiative. Many people are mere puppets, and have laid great stress on the natural human’s capacity for speech and for elementary rationality as a precondition of any response to God. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 7
A family is a creation that is allowed by God. An order of creation is a social institution or practice of ordinary human origin, not derived from revelation, but shown by Biblical evidence to have divine authorization. Dependency, aging, and dying have their own specific constellations of pain. Yet within these three experiences, the throb of human pain is present, touching with each of us where we are, as we are. We come into the World; we pass through the World; we depart from the World. Our coming and our going call forth response to us from others equally with response to others from us. The Earth did go round and the Heavens dis stand still. Through the centuries, the care of souls has tended to be individualistic. The cent has seen pain on the level of individuals, separated, isolated, insulated from the settings and systems in which people live and move and have their being. We have to discover I mystery means for surviving with significance. When we do not have ourselves together—when we are in many pieces—then we find ourselves constantly putting those pieces out into the World. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 7
Out there, when we expose our fragmented selves to the World, we no longer experience them as parts of us. People should not be walking around broken, or having emotional explosion. Everyone is not supposed to be going through a personal struggle. We cease to be aware that these fragments are, in truth, expressions and extensions of ourselves. Thus, they act as constant sources of difficulty and pain, as they tear us apart, so we tear at others. Your life and my life no longer limit each other. God has become all in all—the One in the many and the many in One. Therefore, in order for us to live with the pieces in other people’s lives, it is necessary for us to begin to find our peace in the various pieces of our own lives. Only as we are somehow together—centered, integrated, whole—can we stay with the shrapnel of others. We must experience the difference between tension and relaxation as we consciously and gradually let the tension go. Our bodies, the very dwelling place of the Most High, provides the foundation for getting ourselves together. Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but good, never. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 7
Thought of an American Radical—Early, Middle, and Latter Life
All power ultimately comes from God; he alone has absolute sovereignty. The American Constitution is more nearly perfect than others because it recognizes the existence of the Creator and of God-given rights of individuals, which the government is bound to respect and protect. Society is based on communication, which is itself a form of mathematical action. Why have we the power of speech, but to communicate our thoughts? What is ordinarily called communicating one’s thoughts actually amounts to influencing the actions of another, although sometimes a deeper communication of souls is approached. What is expressed is a judgment about certain human experiences, certain sensations or emotions or desires. That is a moral feeling; and a judgment is made that ascribes a property where people consider what is fitting to approve or conducive to social stability. If nobody was suffered to speak till one had something to say, what pains everybody would take to know something independent of the speaker’s opinions, desires, or feelings.
Our desire for anything is always in proportion to the difficulty which attends the attainment of it. intellect life begins with temporal perception, in which the self-separates experiences from each other and distinguishes itself from them. The falling apart of a life moment into two qualitatively different things, of which the one withdraws before the other and nonetheless is held onto memory. By assuming that a part of our psychic function is unexplainable through purposive ideas, we ignore the realms of determinism in our mental life. Do not forget one thing concerning your conduct in life. It is impossible to compose nonsense intentionally and arbitrarily. Mathematical consideration makes possible the use of means: one produces a phenomenon which will be followed in a certain repeatable series by a desired phenomenon which cannot be directly reproduced. This makes the pursuit of instinctual satisfaction more efficient. To suppose that a cause is something more than the antecedent of an invariable consequent is to suppose that we might know all the unfailing regularities of nature and yet have no conception of a causal connection.
The omnipotence of God resides simply in the fact that whenever he wills anything, his will is immediately and invariably followed by the existence of its object. Experience (coupled with a kind of negative insight) enables us to see that the causal relation is merely one of sequence; but on what authority do we import the notion of invariableness into this sequence? Perhaps some people suffer from a form of epilepsy which does not manifest itself in fits, as the general cases do, but rather in peculiar psychic actions which may last for a few minutes, hours, or perhaps for weeks, months or years. There was once a patient he had shot at someone’s car, burned a railroad station, a church, and several barns. He would run away from home, his wife, and children, and wander off, scot-free, when one of these fits of psychic epilepsy afflicted him. He was an editor of a journal and newspaper, a man of considerable intelligence and refinement. During one of his fits, he ran away from his country, and when he came to himself, he was quite surprised to find himself in American and did not have the least idea how he got here.
Previous experience told him, however, what his condition meant and upon reporting it to the physicians, he sent a cable to his wife and returned him. He gave us various details about himself, the hospital where he found himself last, his former doctor, all of which we were soon able to corroborate. He had what he called a fugue or poriomania. Causes like this have been reported where the person disappeared for as many as three years. Indeed, they are not as rare as you may suppose. Mystery vanished from the will: will is an amalgam of desire and the belief that one has it in one’s power to realize the desire; there is no further, indefinable operator in their voluntary actions. Denials of the identity of will and desire is what causes a psychic epilepsy. I went to bed disheartened and thoroughly disgusted with the whole affair. At about four o’clock in the morning, I awoke and made a supreme effort to dismiss it from my mind, but in vain. When people suffer from psychic epilepsy, they may desire what they do not will, and will what they do not desire. Everyone congratulated diagnosis me on my cleaver diagnosis, and I was greatly elated.
The superintendent assured me that I had all good reason to be proud of myself. I was simply there to see that there was no confusion, that things were carried out properly. There were often forest fires near the hospital and on many occasions, we had to go out and check them lest they reached our buildings. The particular scene was on a Friday; there was a big fire near the hospital and we had to send out as many doctors and nurses as we could possibly spare to help control it. I was chatting with a physician who was with me in the same capacity. The fire was consuming a good deal of scrub pine; and now and then, an attendant would succeed in shooting one of the rabbits that were fleeing from the brush wood. This may seem strange to you, but that is exactly the way the mind works unconsciously. When the types of situations are looked at more carefully, the opposition is seen to lie between desire and desire, and to be terminated by the desire upon which action immediately depends.
Unlawful desires are punished after the effect of enjoying; but impossible desires are punished in the desire itself. The examination of consciousness, which provides data for the philosophy of mind is not conducted by consciousness. Entities are having being multiplied beyond necessity and, in this case, beyond possibility. Consciousness is not a surveyor of the mind’s various states as they occur; rather, it is constituted by them. To suppose that the same individual mind could exist at the same time in two different states, one of them an object to the other is what produces this psychic epilepsy. Basically, a person is born with fully matured powers and a completely blank mind. Let that individual be allowed a single sensation. This will be one’s total consciousness. Let a second sensation be added and let one be made to recall the first, one will then come to a recognition of something different from either—of oneself as their common subject. The conviction that humans exist with an absolute identity through time is intuitive and irresistible; only the circumstances in which it arises afford matter for inquiry.
This identity is the prerogative of our mind; some sort of identity of the body is associated with it in our ordinary ideas about the sameness of person. We need to determine what drew this offender to the area, was it the victim or the building? His general problems were to explain how he came to know of the existence of an external, physical World and to specify the precise content of this knowledge. He was very conscious of the danger of question-begging assumptions; he maintained that at every turn he took externality for granted, and that all of his language implies it. He needed to be reminded that he had long ago passed the years of youth, he is no longer a young man no matter how much he spends on a plastic surgery face mask, and hair plugs, and that stealing the identity of a young man and trying to kill him will not allow him to recapture his youth. What the motive was that lead this man to this memory failure is strange and puzzling, but he surely suffers from psychic epilepsy. His youth has come and gone and he cannot keep harassing this young man and trying to rob him of his life and identity. Despair will drive to anything an individual whose sense of shame is stronger than that of guilt. This man expects to be sneered at and he thinks it is the fault of his elevated situation, and not of himself.
Divine Illumination Theory of Knowledge and Thought that the Mind Requires
Encouragement is the food of talent; without cheering, no one can say what an author’s faculty naturally is. There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. I have heard of a poet who remarked that feelings were the common lot of all. If he could have been a pig, and have uttered that sentiment, he would still have been immortal. We have no right to intermeddle with people’s feelings when they would not tell them themselves. There is a limit to the length of the inspection which an individual can endure, under certain circumstances. Some people have a treasure in their minds which requires nothing but the key of encouragement to unlock it, to make them shine. Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will. The creation of the World is a free act of God for which no cause can be given. God’s activity is present everywhere. Space is more or less spiritual in nature, as, indeed, an attribute of God. Space is God’s sensorium. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 6
Randolph
It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid the sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like a heathen, who does not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong another nor take advantage of anyone else. Light is the ultimate stuff of the physical World. The soul and body are distinct substances and the World has no beginning in time. God’s existence and nature cannot be proved and must be revealed. Salvation is earned. It is God’s knowledge rather than his will that is unlimited. Everything in passing time is predestinately know by God. Pleasure leads humans toward the source of harmony; pain leads them away from the source of discord. The mind is senior to the World both in the sense that there must be an infinite self-existent spirit and that the intellectual, nonempirical concepts mist play a part in our perception of things. Mind is essentially active. There must me a spiritual mover behind the evident motion of the natural World, and on the human level knowledge is not passive sensation; in knowledge mind is actively involved with its environment. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 6
It is the fate of most people who mingle with the World, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lost them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. The stranger who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with one who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends. What is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at the taper of conviviality, and the wing of friendship never moults a feather! Other things being equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment. To be totally absorbed in what you are doing and to enjoy it so much that you do not want to be doing something else, to some, is an inscrutable more law, similar in its effect to what the chemists call affinity. When we are able to confront life with such involvement and enthusiasm, we have achieved an autotelic personality. Autotelic is a word composed of two Greek roots: auto (self), and telos (goal). An autotelic activity is one we do for its own sake because to experience it is the main goal. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6
You will hear politicians and others say something like, “We have plan. We will reduce emissions 25 percent by 2020, 90 percent by 2050.” Or they will give some other numbers. However, the numbers are meaningless, as you can easily prove. Just ask them this question: “Are you going to continue to use coal, and maybe even permit another coal plant to be built?” If they say yes, then ask them how they plan to convince Russia and Saudi Arabia to leave their oil in the ground. When they tell you that they are going to solve the problem via a “goal,” “binding target,” or a “cap,” you know they are lying. Yes, lying is a harsh word, so you may instead say “kidding themselves.” However, I expect that one day your more perceptive offspring will say that you let the politicians lie to you. If I played a game of chess primarily to enjoy the game, that game would be an autotelic experience for me; whereas if I played for money, or to achieve a competitive ranking in the chess World, the same game would be primarily exotelic, that is, motivated by an outside goal. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6
The large pools of oil and gas are owned by Russia and Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia. How would we convince them to leave their oil in the ground? It is not going to happen. Besides, we would not want it to happen. We just barely have time to phase in technologies for the era beyond fossil fuels, even if we begin now with an immediate involvement or efforts of all the members of every energy sectors in an emergency strategy. We are simply not ready to suddenly stop using gas and oil. And many of us like cars that use gas an oil. What if there was an emergency situation, like the eminent failure of levees, spillways, and dams, as we are seeing in Sacramento and Oroville California, would you have time to charge your car up and flee? No. Therefore, we still need gas and oil. However, as owners of houses, you can do your part to help the environment to upgrade your houses to use solar power. By using solar power, which is going to be very important to control energy costs, own and produce your own energy. Instead of renovating your house and ripping perfectly good materials out and filling up landfills, you can buy solar panels. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 6
I talked to many dignified and responsible women who are groundbreaking thinkers at the intersection of science and communications. They were looking to save for retirement and they said it would be reasonable to pull equity out of the house and use that to for Sun technology. That way they can save money in the long run. These women hoped they might be able to influence policies by creating solar power plants so that people could have more options to power their houses, even if they did not like the idea of buying solar panels. However, it does not make sense to create moratoriums on fossil fuels when many people are having trouble paying their bills, it just makes things more expensive. A woman from a German environmental organization, GermanWatch, said that creating more options is a more responsible method than placing unrealistic goals and limits on our current industries. Then, in the final minutes of our meeting, the underlying story emerged with clarity: Fossil fuels are essential, and we can start developing solar technologies to reach our desired goals to slowly shift people in other directions and give corporations and home owners time to come up with new innovative products and technologies. We do not want to tax businesses to the point they have to shut down. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 6
Person and Reality
God maintains constant and growing, though never complete control of the given. Nature has formed our ears open; but enabled us to shut up our mouths. Truth pertains to the judgment of the person who judges correctly…hence, it pertains to the person who judges with evidence would assert. Proof must be built up stone by stone. The end crowns the work. It is not enough that Justice should be morally certain; it must be immorally certain—legally, that is. A true judgment is a judgment that cannot contradict an evident judgment. Thus, true in it is true that God exists, may be used to express apodictic rejection of evident rejectors of God. It is not both true and false that God exists may express apodictic rejection of collectives consisting of evident acceptors and evident rejectors of God. True may be used to express agreement and, at times, it is simply redundant. The assumption that there can be absolute chance is self-contradictory and indeterminism (the state of being uncertain or undecided) is incompatible with the existence of human responsibility. Divine nature is God’s will and neither created nor necessarily approves.
However, we have the freedom of will in that we are able to bring about some of the things we desire to bring about and are able to deliberate and then to decide accordingly. Moreover, we can will to will in that, at any given time, there are things we can do that will affect our volitions at some later time. Feeling does not stay to calculate with weights and a balance the importance and magnitude of every object that excites it; it flows impetuously from the heart, without consulting the cooler responses of the understanding. Since knowledge involves reference, it is always hypothetical and tentative. Coherence is not as formal as consistency, but as a principle for interpreting experience: a statement or a set of statements is true to the extent that it organizes and orders experience. Reality is a society of person: the ultimate (uncreated) Person and finite (created) persons. Reality is thus not nature, but history. While our social critics attack the highly visible and denounce them as undeserving of their tremendous salaries, power, privileged, and control over society’s opinions, what these critics really seems to be angry about is that they themselves does not control the process.
Critics of celebrity culture will never be able to control image formation. The root causes of why people want—indeed, need—celebrities are so basic as to render the critics’ complaints superfluous. The public choose to worship Ryan Phillippe and not the editor of some newspaper and that is not necessarily destructive or damaging. It is, to the contrary, often valuable and certainly worth understanding. So great is the value of visibility that the manufacturing and marketing of celebrities now reaches into business, sports, entertainment, religion, the arts, politics, academics, medicine, and the law. Visibility is what every aspiring news reporter wants, what every professional seeks. It is the crucial ingredient that can make lawyer X the most sought after in town, talk show host Y the most popular in the village, and surgeon Z the most highly paid in his or her city. This is the potential of industrialized celebrity manufacturing, the unimaginable in any other age—and compensating that individual with unimaginable rewards. Today, there is a whole industry that manages the business of transforming unknowns into celebrities, changing virtually every element of personality, appearance, and character that is possible to change. They are manufactured, just as are cars, clothes, and computers.
When There is No Hope Can Life be Life?
What a small thing it is sometimes that makes life’s kiss sweeter than death’s to us. Who lives well sees into eternity. Every house has its smoky chimney, its draughty room, its creaky door; every life its own haunting shadows; every state of life its own small troubles. When people you love do you wrong, what worries the prey most is the consequences that their action well bring on to them. While there are shimmery afternoons, there will always be something worth living for. Though long ages should elapse, and leave our wrongs unredressed, yet, shipmates and Worldmates, let us never forget, that whoever afflicts us, whatever surround, Life is a voyage that is homeward bound. This thing we call existence; is it not a something which has its roots far down below in the dark, and its branches stretching out into the immensity above, which we among the branches cannot see? Not a chance jumbling; a living thing, a One. The thought gives us intense satisfaction, we cannot tell why. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
You have to earn life, and if you are stuck in the sex and violence, you are not going anywhere. The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show people what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed, to perfection, but one step first, and then another on a ladder. Folks always listen when the tale is their own. When you wake up and see this is real, this is the truth, this is where it is at, someone will be here for you. At any rate, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life. By the analysis of dreams, we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvelous and most mysterious of instruments; it is true that this only takes us a little way, but it gives us a start which enables us, setting out from the angle of other (properly pathological) formations, to penetrate further in our disjoining of the instrument. The key to surviving is to be mentally tough and try to adapt to everything. If you do not, they have something out there for you. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
If it is being self-contradictory that degrades mere appearances, then reality must at least be not self-contradictory, but consistent and harmonious. Furthermore, reality must also be of the nature of experience, for what is not experience cannot be conceived of without self-contradiction. Finally, it is clear that reality must be comprehensive and include all that is. If reality is a consistent and harmonious and all-inclusive experience, then it cannot be a plurality of independent reals, for whatever is related to anything else must be to some extent dependent on it. Plurality and relatedness are but features and aspects of unity. Furthermore, the sort of unity that reality or the Absolute must have may be understood by analogy with feeling or immediate experience, for here there is diversity without relatedness. It hardly seems worthwhile to take up the historical significance of dreams as a separate theme. Where, for instance, a leader has been impelled by a dream to engage in a bold undertaking, the success of which has had the effect of changing history, a new problem arises only so long as the dream is regarded as a mysterious power and contrasted with other more familiar psychic forces. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
The problem disappears as soon as we regard the dream as a form of expression for impulses to which a resistance was attached during the day, whilst at night they were able to draw reinforcement from deep-lying sources of excitation. However, the great respect with which the ancient peoples regarded dreams is based on a just piece of psychological divination. To keep tearing up and complaining is not going to help anything. I know this is like being trapped. However, try to stay quiet and calm and keep mentally sane. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul, to the daemonic power which furnishes the dream-wish, and which we have found again in our unconscious. What role is now left, in our representation of things, to the phenomenon of consciousness, once so all-powerful and over-shadowing all else? None other than than of a sense-organ for the perception of psychic qualities. Never tolerate, because of sympathy for yourself or for others, any practice that is not keeping with a holy God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Holiness means absolute purity of your walk before God, the words coming from your mouth, and every thought in your mind—placing every detail of your life under the scrutiny of God Himself. Holiness is not simply what God gives me, but what God has given me that is being exhibited in my life. The grace of God as it is prevenient both in time and nature to all good works. There is an actress who played the role of a witch for years on the television, and it is alleged that she took on a cause to serve humanity out of guilt. I am not sure if the latter is true, but I can relate to her wanting to do good. Is life short? It is an evil: But render life happy, its shortness is the only evil. As we age, the idea of death becomes more real and we relaise that life is not a game and there is more coming after this. By doing things we deem as holy and right and moral, we can clear our conciseness of sins we have committed. Even responses in a negative way when people do us wrong leaves some ridden with guilt and shame. This can shed light upon such notions as prudence and justice in situations involving human choices and cooperation between individuals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
Just as a moral assertion is to be construed as an expression of an intention to act in accordance with a certain policy, so a religious assertion must be understood as a declaration of adherence to a system of moral principles governing inner life as well as external behavior. The major difference between religious and moral assertions consists in the fact that the former, being associated with empirical narratives, have a propositional element lacking in the latter. Yes, I have been a victim of crime, but after listening to these men, I understand you cannot let someone control your mind and your being. Yes, I have responded with harsh words because the things that have been done to me, but I also feel bad and understand that the choice to be a better person has to mean passing above the negativity. I cannot allow people to target me and take me outside of my character. Even words hurt and saying bad things is a sin and it does not feel Good. These people will pay for their bad actions, but I cannot allow them to suck me into their vortex of hell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
We adopt toward the object of our idea an attitude of liking or disliking, love or hate. I do not constantly want to relive the pass nor hear of bad things that have happened, I want to move forward. The only way to grasp the concept of the correct emotion is to contrast the actual cases of emotions that are qualified as correct with cases of emotions that are not. Thus, we learn that knowledge is good, joy is good (unless it is joy in what is bad), every enrichment within the realm of ideas is good, love of the good is good, love of the bad is bad, and the right end in life is to choose the best among all attainable ends. The correctness of loving and hating, like that of judging, is objective in that it is impossible for anyone to love correctly what anyone else hates incorrectly. Now, I told you I have been listening to these men, men on a show called Hard Time, and it shows one what life in prison is like and what these men and women go through. People who commit crimes and do wrong will end up in prison, and even expressing grief about the things that have happened does not feel good. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
On this show Hard Time, they show you how hard the life of an inmate is. There was a woman who plays the patriarch of her prison family and she used to make people tattoo her name on their bodies, chase them with hot irons and choke them with bras, and put Vaseline on a hanger and drag women into the shower and beat them with it. There was another woman called Mrs. Rose and she would beat people with locks in a sock behind bars, and they would put her in the hole and she did not mind, she said that the voices in her head kept her company. So, what I am taking away from watching this show is that no matter how hard your life is, avoid all conflict and stay right with God because you do not want to lose your freedom and be locked behind bars. Love and hate, being pleased and being displeased, one of them in every case is correct and the other incorrect. The distinction between judging on the basis of evidence and judging blindly is not to be described in terms of instinct, feelings, degree of conviction, or impulse to believe. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Every judgment that is evident is true, but not every judgment that is true is evident. Most judgments of outer perception (of the external World) are true, but not all of them are blind; they are not evident. And watching these shows is why I worry, I see what happens to bad people, and people we love sometimes do us wrong and will end up being in places like that. Being pretty cannot get you out of trouble. We arrive at the general concept of being evident in the same way we arrive at the concept of a correct emotion: by contemplating actual instances of the concept, in this case actual instances of evident judgments and of blind judgment. If a person is ever going to do anything worthwhile, there will be times when one must risk everything by one’s leap in the dark. Once you obey, you will immediately find that what God says is as solidly consistent as common sense. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. Once should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores, the better. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Our Lives Run in Groves
One that lives ill one year, will sorrow for it seven. I plead with you, people, become more optimistic, for others will become like you. You have done me no wrong. As you know, it was because of an interpersonal attraction that I first preached the gospel to you. This is a primary motivation for joining most college athletic teams. Joining a group because you are attracted to the group’s principal activity does not preclude the additional draw from social connection among members, and you accepted me and were kind. You welcomed me as if I were an angel of God. What happened to all of your joy? #RyanPhillippe 1 of 4
I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have sold your soul for me. Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? Logicians are not concerned with ideas as physical facts, but with ideas as meanings. As meanings, ideas do not have dates and histories, but are ideal contents and hence abstract. The real distinction between subject and predicate is not to be found in the relation of one ideal content to another but in the relation of a complex ideal content to the reality to which it is referred. Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history? #RyanPhillippe 2 of 4
In judgement, therefore, an ideal content is referred to a reality existing beyond the act of judgment. The real subject of a judgment is thus often quite different from the grammatical subject of the sentence, as can be seen in such an example as a four-cornered circle is an impossibility, where the real subject is not a four-cornered circle, for there could be no such reality, but the nature of space. There cannot be any association between particular mental occurrences since they perish as they pass, and past ones will somehow to be revived or re-created if they were to be associated with those existing in the present. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 4
Thus, similarity and reproduction presuppose Universals, just as inference itself does. Those people are zealous to win you over, but for no good. What they want is to alienate you from us so that you may be passionate for them. It is fine to be enthusiastic, provided the purpose is good, and to be so always and not just when I am with you. One Swedish study found that ambiguity tolerance is one of the most critical variables linked to higher financial performance. However, confidence has no effect whatsoever on a firm’s profitability and productivity, although it seems to increase customer satisfaction. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 4
Human Nature is Rarely Uniform
‘Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of love position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: It is the Lord’s to avenge; He will repay. If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if one is thirsty, give one something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. There is hardly a greater difference in intellect between angel and human, than there is between human and human.
The World is in conspiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us. The causes of violence, like the causes of poor health, do not usually begin in the body. They pass through it, and the marks they leave are often subtle and vague. Sometimes the illusion of knowing is more dangerous than not knowing at all. For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Many the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow God, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the Lord. Not being reconciled to the fact of sin—not recognizing it and refusing to deal with it—produces all the disasters in life. In your human relationships and friendships, have you reconciled yourself to the fact of sin? If not, just around the next corner you will find yourself trapped and you will compromise with it. However, if you will reconcile yourself to the fact of sin, you will realize the danger immediately. I have the person in whom kindness produces no responsive affection, and injustice no swell, no glow of resentment. The knowledge of all law goes but a little way to the discerning the justice of the cause.
The World, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, one cannot fail to be sustained under one’s trials, and somehow or other to come at last; in which case, though we certainly do not expect it—nobody will be better pleased than we. Whereas, the World would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering them the less endurable. Error and evil are not harmonious and hence are not real, but it is equally clear that they are not nothing. Although error and evil are discordant and hence not real, it is possible that they contribute to the harmony of the whole, and if this is possible then we must conclude that it is so even though we do not know how it is possible. For what is possible, and what a general principle compels us to say must be, that certainly is.
The Winchester Mystery House
REPLETE with secrecy and evocative of dread, The Winchester Mystery House looms large in the field the of supernatural. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
