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
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
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
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
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
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
