Don't let the expectations and opinions of other people affect your decisions. It's your life, not theirs. Do what matters most to you; do what makes you feel alive and happy. Don't let the expectations and ideas of others limit who you are. If you let others tell you who you are, you are living their reality — not yours. There is more to life than pleasing people. There is much more to life than following others' prescribed path. There is so much more to life than what you experience right now. You need to decide who you are for yourself. Become a whole being. Adventure.
Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.
Don't JustDon't just learn, experience.Don't just read, absorb.Don't just change, transform.Don't just relate, advocate.Don't just promise, prove.Don't just criticize, encourage.Don't just think, ponder.Don't just take, give.Don't just see, feel.Don’t just dream, do. Don't just hear, listen.Don't just talk, act.Don't just tell, show.Don't just exist, live.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).
Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps
Тя усети изведнъж, че все пак нещо й липсваше през този дъждовен пролетен ден, нещо, от което бе имала нужда винаги, но което прогниваше съзнателно, за да не я върне към миналото й. Тя го усети внезапно и бурно. Това вече не беше той, а само вълнението, което изпитваше към него, само сълзите и радостта, с които някога я изпълваше той.
All these bad experiences that we go through, they don't just disappear. We carry them our whole life trying to forget, escaping in habits, addictions, hate, toxic relationships. But what we don't know is that by doing so we let them stay alive. We water them like withered flowers and we hang onto them to justify our mistakes and failures.
This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Every difficulty or disappointment is a trial of your faith. Every unpleasant incident or temptation is a test of your inner strength. Therefore nil desperandum. March forward hero!
Great losses are great lessons.
He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague . . . He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightening on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.
People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the while day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: "A quiet conscience mades one strong!
Where we fall are the stepping-stones for our journey.
There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.
God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders...
...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.
Good morning," said the little prince.Good morning," said the merchant.This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"Anything you like..."As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.
We are no longer in the dispensation of age and experience. We are in the era of knowledge and information. Information leads a true leader and a true leader leads others.
Eventually, it boils down to two choices – do I wish to experience this physical reality primarily through joy or do I want to experience it through suffering? That’s all there is to it. And since each person eventually works their way toward the realization that conscious expansion can happen through joy rather than suffering – enlightenment is a natural byproduct.
The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.
Reason, Observation and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
Experience everything;Times of sorrow, times of Joy.Times of darkness, times of light.Times of lost heart, times of hope.Times of hate, times of love.Times of pain , times of peace.Times of distress, times of dancing.Times of sickness, times of recover of strength.Times of lost, times of finding the way.Times of wandering, times of wonder.Times of failure, times of success.Times of fall, times of rise.Time of sowing, times of harvesting.Times of injury , times of healing.Times of waiting, times of fulfilled wish.Times of praying, times of receiving the promise.Times of ploughing, times of planting.Times of dreaming, times of working to achieve the dream.Times of doubt, times of Faith.
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.
Being divorced does not necessarily make one’s advice on marriage useless … or useful.
Being a bad parent is a sign of not having learned from experience.
In the business people with expertise, experience and evidence will make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition and imagination.
Don't always use prudence for precaution, sometimes use it for progress.
Religion is a belief with a set of rules, regulations, and rituals created by someone with his thoughts, imaginations, experiences, and wisdom. Most religions bring about positive changes for society. Spirituality is a perception of inner truth, inner beauty, and inner reality. Spirituality involves trusting your own experiences.
... so this is for us.This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the act of doing it.Not what it can lead to.This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playingand no one is around and they will never knowbut I will forever rememberand that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,and this is for you who write or play or read or singby yourself with the light off and door closedwhen the world is asleep and the stars are alignedand maybe no one will ever hear itor read your wordsor know your thoughtsbut it doesn’t make it less glorious.It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.Infinite.For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe inand only you can decide how much it meantand meansand will forever meanand other people will experience it toothrough you.Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.Through the way you walk and love and laugh and careand I never meant to write this longbut what I want to say is:Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountainwhere no one will ever hearand your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.Make your life be your artand you will never be forgotten.
No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.
Reading the recipe of your grandma’s chicken soup will never compare to the taste. Seeing a magnificent sunset will never compare to somebody else’s description of that same sunset. Feeling the electrifying sensation of a passionate kiss will never compare to a second-hand account. Nothing replaces experience. If experience is at the heart of every religion, then theology points the way, practice gives us the vehicle, but we must take the steps if we want to personally explore our faith and reap experiences rather than rely solely on second-hand accounts.
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.
War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?
.It is asking a great deal of a man, who has learnt to regulate his everyday affairs in accordance with the rules of experience and with due regard to reality, that he should entrust precisely what affects him most nearly to the care of an authority which claims as its prerogative freedom from all the rules of rational thought.
Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
WONDERLANDIt is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonderThat sets them on their initial quest for truth.The more doors you open, the smaller you become.The more places you see and the more people you meet,The greater your curiosity grows.The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander.The more you wander, the greater the wonder.The more you quench your thirst for wonder,The more you drink from the cup of life.The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become.The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel.And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding.And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences.And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective,And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance.Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel.And the smaller you feel, the greater you become.The more you see, the more you love --The more you love, the less walls you see.The more doors you are willing to open,The less close-minded you will be.The more open-minded you are,The more open your heart.And the more open your heart,The more you will be able to Send and receive --Truth and TRUEUnconditionalLOVE.
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how should the faculty of knowledge be called into activity, if not by objects which affect our senses and which, on the one hand, produce representations by themselves or on the other, rouse the activity of our understanding to compare, connect, or separate them and thus to convert the raw material of our sensible impressions into knowledge of objects, which we call experience? With respect to time, therefore, no knowledge within us is antecedent to experience, but all knowledge begins with it.But though all our knowledge begins with experience, is does not follow that it all arises from experience. For it is quite possible that even our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we perceive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty of knowledge (incited by sense impressions) supplies from itself, a supplement which we do not distinguish from that raw material until long practice and rendered us capable of separating one from the other.It is therefore a question which deserves at least closer investigation and cannot be disposed of at first sight: Whether there is any knowledge independent of all experience and even of all impressions of the senses? Such knowledge is called 'a priori' and is distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its source 'a posteriori', that is, in experience...
There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.
Education being a change of behavior as a result of experience brings about wisdom and knowledge. While knowledge comes from what we read or study, wisdom comes from what we observe and experience.The purpose of education is not to affect negatively but to positively affect. When I see people using whatever wisdom or knowledge they have to cheat, I see an abuse of education all borne out of ignorance.
In order for knowledge to be of value, there must be an internal process of understanding how that knowledge applies to reality. Furthermore, that understanding must be translated into a corresponding change of behavior. This is the process of learning. Learning is the process of adapting knowledge and experience into a change of behavior.
We are wise when we live according to what we have come to understand. Wisdom is not altogether about the amount of understanding that we possess. Wisdom is about living according to the understanding that we have already discovered. Wisdom is doing that which we understand. Wisdom comes only in doing. It is an easy thing to gain knowledge and experience, yet harder to understand and become wise.
Liberty creates an environment where all living beings within a society have an equal opportunity to exercise freedom. An equal opportunity to exercise freedom would further infer that, in liberty, living beings have equal access to knowledge and experience. Knowledge and experience are both inseparable from freedom. Liberty is balanced societal freedom and may also be considered balanced knowledge and experience. With equal access to knowledge and experience, living beings have an equal opportunity to enhance their abilities. Liberty is perceived as true freedom because it maximizes the opportunities for most living beings within a society.
Power is the ability to bring to past a desired result. The exercise of power requires action. The key to power is in understanding how to use that which is already available to us in order to accomplish a sought after goal. The power comes from understanding and acting according to that understanding. When we live according to Truth, we thereby bring power to light. Yet we are never powerful because of ourselves, it is Truth alone that is powerful. We are, therefore, powerful only in proportion to our understanding in light of our situation. Understanding who, what, when, where, how, or why in light of our current situation is what determines the balance of power. Power is the effect of understanding. Therefore, the one who seeks to be powerful must first seek out knowledge and experience by the means of questioning and curiosity. Only through knowledge and experience may we obtain understanding. Only through understanding may we obtain power, and understanding is the power of the wise.
Using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. Ideas derived from real world experiences lead to acquisition of knowledge, and the accumulation of time-tested principles leads to wisdom.
Enjoy without injury, live without loss.
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my d
Parents like to think of themselves as Batmans, and of their children as Gotham Cities. Gotham City depends on Batman for its survival, and Batman delivers. This belief prevents parents from letting those young adults actually live their lives.
No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.
Yet I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. ... If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to… what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place. I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realise with stupor how much I was gypped.
Many people have failing relationships because they have not really fallen in love with each other, but they have fallen for the mental images they have created of one another. We assume we know our partner, we think about them nonstop, creating many different ideas of who they are, what they like, and how we will be together, then as soon as our partner does something that doesn’t fit with our mental image of them, we become sad, upset, confused, or heart broken. Our partner did not cause our suffering; we caused it, through our false perceptions and mental images.
The majority of people in modern society feel separated—from the world, each other, and themselves. This feeling of separation is a resultfrom we humans attempting to separate ourselves from nature, and consequently forgetting who we really are.
When we think of something, we create a mental image of it, and our image is then always filtered through our mental perception. We may meet someone one day when they are in a bad mood, we then make a false assumption that this person does not like us. We have created an image of this person, and now every time we meet them, we associate this person with our negative mental image of them. We don’t interact with them as they are in this moment; we interact with how we think they are.
We spend so much of our time lost in thought, trying to label everything as isolated objects and events. Though we fail to realize that our thoughts are incapable of defining anything in its totality. We can think about a situation for as long as we want to, but our thoughts will never know the situation exactly as it exists.
Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the study of failures. There are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient.
Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on.I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise.I have full confidence in myself and my abilities.I can do all things that I commit myself to.No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me.I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily.I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past.I am moving forward daily.Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.
But if you forgive someone for something they did to you, it doesn’t mean you agree with what they did or believe it was right. Forgiving that person means you have chosen not to dwell on the matter anymore; you have moved on with your life.
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people. I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously. I don’t hold grudges, it’s not productive, but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.
You may encounter many disappointments. Be strong. Tell yourself, “I am good enough, I will try again.
Reject anything advice, which does not lead to your personal progress.
People will walk in and walk out of your life, but the one whose footstep made a long lasting impression is the one you should never allow to walk out.
That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.
What I want to impart through our correspondence is that no matter what anyone may be going through, here's the thing: If you love each other, and if your relationship is worth the pain or the hardship, stay with it. The extraordinary treasure of sharing another person's life is one of the most gratifying experiences of being a human being.
Relationships may become wrecked by a quirky syndrome: the “Ain't broke, don't fix”-syndrome. When there is no interaction in the neural network and no breakthrough into the mind but only a shallow skin experience, living together might be very torturous. If a heartfelt bond has not been molded, nothing can be broken and thus nothing needs to be fixed. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)
Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.
Life teaches us invaluable lessons through our experiences and I treasure these. If I’ve been hurt, humiliated, shunned or sidelined I have grown that much stronger by learning precious lessons from them. If I’ve experienced spells of failures and disappointments, I’ve had my moments of sunshine too. But the best gift that experiences have given me is that I don’t commit the same mistake twice. They have taught me to overcome even the most difficult obstacles…
One of the salient facts of a self is that a person is constantly undergoing a series of actions in the immediacy of time that they must later reflect upon and synthesize new experiences, thoughts, feelings, and mental impression along with their latent memories into a collaborative sense of being.
Have no regrets in life because of the choices you make. Good or bad, they are a learning experience, to help you grow. The only regret in life, is to never make a choice at all.
Questions that begin ‘If I had/if I had not’ have no true answers. You can never know how your actions may have impacted Master Jason’s fate. And if you could know, that knowledge would not change the past. The only good that can come of these musings is that which you have already found: in taking the lessons of the past, such as they may be, to guide your choices in the present.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed.
Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.
Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought”, “a priori givens”, etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.
The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.
Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us. A child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame.
Because your character is always full of ambition, the news of my being locked up must have been much harder on you than it was on me. When I was arrested, it was almost a relief to know that I could now experience what you were experiencing yourself. I am so afraid that they are breaking your spirit.
Contemplate for a moment hiking up a wild and rugged mountain. The mountain itself is a challenge, as well as the experience of beauty and danger. To reach the top, a person must persevere. The higher one goes up the mountain the more one can see of the landscape around. There is, in seeing an expansive view, a natural delight and exhilaration that anyone who makes the effort feels. This natural delight corresponds to the spiritual joy of gaining a higher perception of life. Mountains correspond to heaven. The delight of gaining an elevated view on a mountain is the reflection (correspondence) of spiritually gaining wisdom in one’s soul.
Rating a book don't judge the book.It all depends upon the observation of the reader and how much he/she is free to be what he/she is in reality.Perceptions and observations will change according to what you have within and so the learning and the conclusion.The same thought you heard an year before and your conclusion in that regards may be different but after some time the same thought but totally new conclusion...How really important we are-Surprised!!Blessed!
Don’t try to fit me in a box… My life is not one dimensional. I’m the summer breeze and the hurricane… I’m the serene lake and the raging ocean… I’m the gentle poet and the rough warrior… I can build and I can destroy... I can romance and I can ravage... I can be wise and I can be silly... I can and WILL be everything that the length, depth, and breadth of life will allow... KNOW THIS! Your labels don’t limit me… they limit your experience of me. Don’t confuse the two.
Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.
The fundamental precept of Buddhism is Interdependence or the Law of Cause and Effect. This simply states that everything an individual experiences is derived from action through motivation. Motivation is thus the root of both action and experience.FREEDOM IN EXILE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE DALAI LAMA
Is it odd, my love, that I envy others who have not met you for the intoxication they have yet to experience? Is it odd that I wish to witness you with new eyes so I may have the pleasure of falling for you all over again? I am grateful, so grateful, for knowing the meaning of your various sighs. For being the cause of your ecstatic cries. But, if only for a moment, I wish to let you fall out of my hands so that I may catch you again. You, my love, are the oddity. You are my exception.
We were the only two people in the entire airport who lost total track of time, for we were consumed by space-time at that present moment. Time was irrelevant to our existence, for we didn’t want to exist outside the tight and glorious knots of each other’s arms. Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.
We start a relationship with someone not only because of how great they are but how great they make us feel. And because they have granted us this extraordinary gift—a chance to experience love, joy, compassion, and security —it is our exclusive privilege to make them feel wonderful about themselves, especially during days when they, themselves, don't feel so wonderful.
When push to the wall. You have to develop strategies to scale over the wall.
Interest in temperament as an individual difference dimension of importance in one's behavior leads to reanalysis of both theoretical and methodological considerations relating to the construct.
It has been my personal experience that the government engages in a wide range of frauds with the common people.
Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this.
For all these stars,nothing is new.They’ve seen all kinds of warsand miracles, too.They know the messengers with their holy bookswill smile and wash their hands in blood.They know the politicians with their good lookswill make the poor eat pies of mud.They’ve seen the Earth freeze and then burn with greed.They’ve seen the treesand the seas emptied.Yet, you won’t hear their sneerswhen a man arrivesand, having experienced a number of years,proclaims: 'I have lived!'Because nothing is new under these stars:the lies, the love, the memories and scars, the ruin, the revolution, the fakes and true,the families, the friends, none of it is new.All of it—even the me and you.
I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.
Dear music,I’m writing you this letter to thank you.Thank you for when you’re here, you catalyse my imagination.Thank you for this ineffable thing you bring, which makes the experience of writing so much better.Thank you for making real and palpable what is not.Thank you for being generous. Humans rarely are. You give breath to my characters. Moreover you give a mainspring to my tears, my laughs and my heart-bleedings. Actually, you give a purpose to Life, even if it’s just the one I created in my head, in the deepest abyss of my fantasies. Thank you for not judging me for that, by the way.Thank you because you make me wanna love. Life, people, nature… Everything. I can even say that sometimes, you make me fall in love of my own protagonists, my own scenes, my own jokes… I sound mad, I know, but believe me, I’m not. Well, not completely.Thank you for allowing me to travel without spending a cent. That’s pretty cool of you. I’ve even been in places never visited. Places only you and I will ever know.Thank you for your loyalty. I know I can rely on you every time, in every places. If I could live forever, I’d stay with you for a thousand year at least, until my dreams, as crazy and odd as they may be, became more authentic than my own reality. ‘Cause you know, reality sucks.Love, a girl who really likes you
But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.
It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.
And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.
You know that feeling of invincibility you sometimes get, especially when young and testing yourself - well that could be because actually know deep down that we are indeed eternal. We come into this world to live a life, to experience it, from somewhere else, some other plane, but we are programmed by all around us to deny or forget this - until one day we may remember again. That feeling of blissful reconnection with our source can be invoked through nature, beautiful writing or art or music, any detailed craft or work of discovery or personal dedication, meditation or other mentally balancing practice, or even through religious experience if there is a pure communion (not a pretence of it). But we should not yearn to return too soon, we should accept that we have come here for the duration of each life, and revel in the chance to learn and grow on this splendid planet. We can draw a deep sense of being-ness. peace, and love from this connection, which will sustain us through any trial. Once nurtured, this becomes stronger than any other connection, so of course our relationships here are most joyful when they allow us the personal freedom to spend time developing and celebrating that connection. Our deepest friendships form with those we can share such time and experiences with - discussing, meditating, immersing ourselves in nature, or creating our music, art, written or other works. Our journeys here are voyages of discovery, opening out the wonders within and all around. What better companions could we have than those who are able to fully share in such delights with us?
When national ideals are confined to insignificant issues reflective primarily of a personal choice, there lies a problem of distorted priorities.
One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred 'experience' on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main 'experience' involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency.
I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles.
What is life? Life is living in this moment, experiencing and experimenting but experience isn’t life. Life is reflecting and meditating but reflection isn’t life. Life is helping and guiding but philanthropy isn’t life. Life is eating and drinking but food isn’t life. Life is reading and dancing but art isn’t life. Life is kissing and pleasuring but sex isn’t life. Life is winning and losing but competition isn’t life. Life is loving and caring but love isn’t life. Life is birthing and nurturing but children aren’t life. Life is letting go and surrendering but death isn’t life. Life is all these things but all these things aren’t life. Life is always more.
First, create your ego. Then destroy it. This is all of life.
Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to putthings into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out ofour hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will beright. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walksaround and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And whilenone of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'llbe me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me,out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it'sfinally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times tenthousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.
The world had no beauty of its own. The beauty of the world was created in the human experience, in me. The very fact of beauty, the very idea that something could be beautiful, only existed in me. The point was not to see the world....The point was to experience the world.
The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought with us the ideas of “beauty,” “breadth of style,” “pathos” and so forth which we might at a pinch have the illusion of recognising in the banality of a conventional face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must disengage the unknown element. It hears a sharp sound, an oddly interrogative inflexion. It asks itself: “Is that good? Is what I am feeling now admiration? Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength?” And what answers it again is a sharp voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for “breadth of interpretation.” And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.
When a person sets out upon a journey - whether to hunt for food or knowledge, to make war, or even to visit the Otherworld - they are never the same when they return. Traveling changes us. Journeys shapes our memories and expand our experiences. Those things we bring back from the hunt - either food or knowledge - sustain us and keep us curious about the world. Think of your own travels and adventures out upon the land or in foreign countries: What wonderful stories do you have to tell? What experiences have you "hunted" or sought on your travels? What have you learned from the land? The stories told about journeys are as important (perhaps more important) than the destination. The journey lasts for only a fixed time, but the stories told of it, the wisdom brought back, can keep traveling forever, keep living, even after the tellers have traveled on.
As long as your work remains unwritten in your head, it has no effect on anyone. Except you. And not in a good way. Once you let your idea out of the hermetically sealed vault of your brain and out into the fresh air, it will immediately start to evolve. The minute you get it down on a piece of paper, it will change.And once you let it out of the house — once someone else gets to experience it — everything is changed.You are changed. The project is changed. The audience is changed.That’s the alchemy of art.
Make no mistake about it. We are born blind, deaf, and mute. It is neither these eyes that give us sight, nor these ears that give us sound. It is not even these lips that give us voice. It is only love. Love makes us seek beauty and truth. Love yearns to connect. To experience. To understand. So close your eyes at once. Don’t utter a word. Perk up your ears and listen to that silent sound inside you where all this is found.
Come into my world. I will show you the phenomenon that Stendhal experienced. I will help you feel the cascading arpeggios of Wagner's overture. I will dance to Doga’s waltzes with you. A day spent without appreciating the beauty surrounding us is a waste. Let me appreciate you
We cannot see Beauty till we let go our hold of it. It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander - this is untrue when stated in dry prose - oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotrie?
Beauty is dad kissing mom's hand when it cramps.Beauty is seeing a Persian woman dance.Ugly is not the absence of beauty.Uglyis the inability to identify it.The inability to be surprised by it.It is the persistent reluctance to be made a child by it.Beauty is simplythe manifestation oflove.
I guess that sometimes it just takes a long walk through the darkness, a long walk through the darkest shadows and corners of your soul to realize that those are a part of you as well, that you've created through your experiences and thoughts those parts within yourself and as much as you can choose to fear them and repress them, they will require your attention one day, they will need your care and acceptance before you can clean them away and turn the lights on. For you refuse to shine the light on something that is imperfect, because you fear judgement and rejection, but you can always choose to look towards the light as the only source of true beauty and love that can help you in the cleaning process. Healing, after a long time of struggle and mess is a complex process, but a necessary one nevertheless. We are so overwhelmed by the amount of work it requires that we so often choose to run away from the light, hide in our dark corner and hope that we will never be found, hope that we will never be seen, or desperately look outwards for that love and compassion that we can no longer find within ourselves, for our soul's light no longer shines as it used to. And sometimes we just find those people that can see the light beneath all that dust and darkness that's been pilled up, those kind of light workers that understand our broken souls and manage to pick us up and see the beauty within us, when we find it so hard to see it ourselves. Sometimes I get so tired of separation, of division, of groups and different religions and belief systems. Even if you do find the truth, once you've put it into words, books and rules it already becomes distorted by the mind into something that is no longer truth. So I no longer hope for understanding, no longer hope for the opinion of a judgemental mind, but I hope to find the words that touch the soul before the mind, I hope to find the touch that warms the heart from deep inside, and hope to find that far away abandoned part of me which I've left behind.
You ought to forgive others. Sometimes, the dark deed of others is due to inner struggles and fears. With your shining light and kind deeds, you will help them to turn to the light.
A life of faith is an enduring sacred-existence.
Even knowing that my presence brought a shadow over the lives of my loved ones, I can't regret the experiences I've had with them. They gave me life, becoming an integral part of my soul. They healed me when I was broken and somehow they recovered those parts of me, I thought lost forever.
Work. Good, honest work, whether it’s working with your hands to create an artwork, or manual labour, brings forth a sense of divinity at play. The only prerequisite is that whatever the work is, it is done sincerely and in congruence with the soul’s true origin and intent, then, without any effort, one experiences a flow, wherein one feels a part of the plan of the entire universe.
The dead are immune from our prison of Time. The distance between the living and dead may be vast, but the space of Time the dead experience when they are reunited with their loved ones is only paper-thin.
The love that I believe in is something that goes beyond the physical aspects of this world. The love that I believe is one that extends its energy and power through the beautiful souls that I encounter along the way, a love that can be seen in the eyes of a little dog or in the confusion of a cute lost cat who wants to be worshiped like a Goddess. This kind of love goes through a divine crafting of a person's inner self, through personal experience and thousands of years of tears and strength, that can only be seen in the familiar eyes of old souls, the eyes that recognize each other even after long times of separation, the eyes that find themselves familiar with places they have probably been to before, but that nevertheless bring great memories with every visit. This kind of love sees hope in the eyes of new-born children that know way much more than they are capable of putting into words and that bring with their innocence a smile on each person's face who'd wish they could start again. The love that I see when I look at you is a love which has roots deep inside each of us, but that needs care and light to grow and unfold its branches so that they can reach outside of ourselves and even further beyond the skies.
Rhetorical question: Did you get to where you are by accepting the status quo?I didn't.
These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the "technical" proportions and the "objective;" the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those "eurhythmic" adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.
No one has madethe art by which one makes the worksof art. Each one who speaks speaksas a convocation. We live as councilsof ghosts. It is not "human genius"that makes us human, but an old love,an old intelligence of the heartwe gather to us from the world,from the creatures, from the angelsof inspiration, from the dead--an intelligence merely nonexistentto those who do not have it, but --to those who have it more dear than life.
This is the essence of Rembrandt's advice to Van Hoogstraten: the authentic craft develops naturally from one's own experience.So, it seems reasonable to suggest that the search should not be for the lost secrets, but for one's own practice. This is in fact easy, you start making things. At first they might not be perfect, but the information here should provide you with a running start. And, if you are cut out for this the learning curve will not be daunting, because you will realize that you are finally headed in the right direction: towards the living craft.
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.
The idea that each of us can be directly spiritual is radical. Most religions are based not on teaching adherents to be directly spiritual, but in persuading them to trust in the intercession of ministers or priests. The problem with this approach is that we cannot gain access to spirituality except through the medium of a fallible human being. If we want to see Tao, we need only open our eyes and trust what we see.
In both pleasant experience producing karma effect (shata vedaniya) and unpleasant experience producing karma effect (ashata-vedaniya), there is indeed a constant inner burning (antardaah, inner suffering). But because one has moorcha (worldly engrossment/fascination due to deluded worldly view), one does not notice it; he remains in a state similar to being unconscious.
People lose their powers (siddhi) by nagging; therefore know ‘as it is’. Know all these relations as being worldly (laukik, of the non-Self), and do not believe them to be beyond-worldly relations (alaukik, of the Self). Discover that something whereby you experience peace amidst the puzzle. This discovery is indeed within you.
Our goal in life is to carry with us the wisdom of experience, yet treat each new day as its own unique reality, rather than comparing what currently is to what has been in the past. When we compare, we plant expectations that then become self-fulfilling prophesies through the Law of Attraction.
Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.
Angels are good not simply because they see bad as bad, but also because they see bad as corny.
No matter how knowledgeable you are, respect your parents for their experience and your children for their curiosity.
It's hard to pin down what my actual [IQ] score might be. It's silly to think that people even have one set IQ and that it's precisely measurable. My lowest scores probably reflect less than my maximum effort, and my highest scores probably grant me some extra points due to crazily high levels of diligence plus vast experience with these tests. It doesn't really matter unless we want to turn IQ testing into a reality show sport.
I believe in energies. Good energy has served me well. Being fair with others, compassionate towards them, remaining humble, and making a difference to someone are just a few of the things that I have seen create good energy. Beautiful things. Human things. I do my best to surround myself with these types of things, to generate an atmosphere thick with such energy. It has kept me safe in many situations. I have taken risks in the past, and managed to avoid harm by the protection of the good energy I have created around me. I believe that ugliness creates more ugliness. And no matter how touched by ugliness you are, you do not have to give in to it and start spreading it beyond yourself. I have seen this sickness and what it does to a person, and those around them.
If you are going to judge others it is wisest to do so individually not collectively and on your own direct experience of them personally. But first - and throughout - examine yourself closely. Blurred vision can often occur due to the lens, perspective and perceptions of the viewer projected onto the object that it sees. Be wary of taking to the judges seat. Above all meet at treat yourself and everyone else mindfully, compassionately with humanity.
Worry notif you are in darknessand the void sucks you in further.This is not the place we go to die.It’s where we are bornand our stories begin.
Missing you,I missed a part of meI shared with you that’s now gone.Missing you, when really, it was the way you made me feeland the things you made us do.Missing you I shouldn’t be.But I can’t help missing who I was with you.Missing you,I missed and missed so much of the world and wasn’t even missed in return.
I haven’t written you a poem in years it seems.How can it be my faultwhen the words to describe you have not yet been created?When the alphabet lacks the very letters?How can it be my fault when your loveliness only growsby the time I reach for pen and paper?Tell me how I am at faultwhen I am only a beginner in poemsand you are exquisite poetry?To write you in words is to put a veil upon you.Why must I writewhen I can kiss you instead?
Because even if you spend your life chasing the immaterial, listening to the most exquisite classical music and getting drunk off of stunning vistas of mountains and waterfalls, all of it isn't worth a dime if you aren’t sharing it with someone. Everything amounts to that. True, we must experience most things in solitude to grow, create, destroy and grow again, but our pleasure and joy reaches a threshold in isolation. It is the worst thing to become an island. One must become the whole world.
People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness.
When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
Name and form are simply illusions of separation. Love doesn’t make us blind; rather, it erases the illusions so we can see clearly.
THE OLD MAN IN THE CORNERThe man in the cornerIs dying with wordsHe's crying to be heardHis days are markedAnd his only ears are birdsHe knows the secret to peaceAnd his experience bleeds and hurtsSomebody stop and listenBefore he departs the earth!Somebody write his thoughtsBefore he hits the turf!His eyes are closing their shuttersAnd he just dropped hisBeads and stick.His breath is leaving us.Please!Somebody hear him out quick!A little girl rushes to him andPicks up his cane of wood.The old man then turns to herAnd faintly whispers,"The key to peace isTo always stay fairAnd be good.
In the moments of adversity, we engaged our minds on beautiful thoughts, our spirit on spirituality and our hands on inspiration writings. What a good trade of pain for peace of mind?
A blessed deed is saying hello with a smile to someone you meet on the street, in the shop, in the bus, in the office, in the church, in the holy places, in the mosque, at the park, at the school, at the university…..’ This is the greatest action of belonging to one another.
You ought to welcome troubled-souls with your peaceful-spirit.
Some pain shouldn’t be wished away so easily. It had to be dealt with, even embraced. Without the agony of the last few months, Piper never would have found her best friends, Hazel and Annabeth. She never would’ve discovered her own courage. She certainly wouldn’t have had the guts to sing show tunes to the snake people under Athens.
You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit.
Dr. Morris soon recognized that the difference between successful and unsuccessful marriages can often be traced to how well couples are able to "bond" during the courtship period. By bonding he referred to the process by which a man and woman become cemented together emotionally. It describes the chemistry that permits two previous strangers to become intensely valuable to one another. It helps them weather the storms of life and remain committed in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others until they are parted in death. It is a phenomenal experience that almost defies description.
At the end of the day, if you’re wasting your time by not investing in yourself, you’re going to waste away—and that would be the greatest waste of all.
We do not get to choose how we start out in life. We do not get to choose the day we are born or the family we are born into, what we are named at birth, what country we are born in, and we do not get to choose our ancestry. All these things are predetermined by a higher power. By the time you are old enough to start making decisions for yourself, a lot of things in your life are already in place. It’s important, therefore, that you focus on the future, the only thing that you can change.
Don’t allow the challenges to overpower you. Choose a positive attitude and persistent endurance over defeat.
Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.
Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth. You still feel warmth. Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: threw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you. Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less.Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work. Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you.Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that. Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine. You’re doing fine.I’m doing just fine.
Always being truthful gives you a certain kind of freedom. It springs forth like a fountain splashing throughout your body until it floods your soul. To be honest and to be trustworthy are great attributes. Ah, the power, Ah, the freedom
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
By assembling in our mind all the consequential facts we have lived through and by reviewing, appraising or sometimes idealizing the numerous key points of the past, authenticity may gradually mutate and actuality decay at last. At that point in time we are to experience a maimed factuality. ("Labyrinth of the mind")
You know who you are and what you are capable of, because of your own personal history and the experiences you gained throughout that history.
Om is the things, Om is the ingredient, Om is the container and the content of this universe.
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Some people spend their whole lives seeking heaven, when all they needed to do was look about them, and embrace that which was already there.
There is beauty all around us, and the light finds us when we realize, we are all part of that beauty and worth the cherishing. If we despise any, we journey to despise ourselves. See all as beautiful, even if they choose to see themselves through you, as being less than so. We have the power to see for each, and be the reflection of what they may yet see.
No matter how busy we may believe we are, we have the wonderful opportunity presently of investing time with loved ones. For those are the great investments we will be glad we made, when time begins to slow and the ability to tend turns tender.
The difference between impossible and possible is a willing heart.
Purpose drives the process by which we become what we are capable of being.
There are certain truths that occurs to us, which we cannot convey in words, but requires a personal experience to grasp more vividly.
I am Not, but the Universe is my Self.
A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children.
Sometimes in life you find love so powerful that you get tunnel vision. You only see the one you love, the one you desire. No one or no thing gets in the way of what you feel. A love so strong which makes you feel invincible in this world. And, everywhere you go, all the people can see you glow.
Can we share my eyes so you can see what I see?Can we share my ears so you can hear what I hear?Can you perch on my shouldersso you can go where I go?Always in my heart, I don’t experience anything separate from you.This shared wonderment becomes doubled.This shared love becomes infinite.
I’m not thankful for being fucked over, I’m thankful for what I took from it. What I learned. What I taught myself in that particular moment. I'm grateful someone was able to take me there and let me be in that moment - not with them, but with myself. How my emotions could surrender to someone and make me feel everything I felt. It destroyed me, but I made my way through; and I look back years from, and I still love him, I do.
Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience—like crossing the street without holding my hand—I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear—the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw—children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.
Free your mind of that which you have no control. It is not only good to do so for your mental, but your overall health. Some people must learn from experience. You can convey knowledge to them and offer to show them the way. But, that doesn't mean your wisdom will be accepted or appreciated.
Is it a weakness not being able to hate? Or is it preparation for what is inevitable, the ability only to love.
To win or lose often depends on set parameters. Expand the bounds of what is possible, and you may come out the true winner, outside the confines of its defining.
Time is an illusion, only the keepers of the illusion are real, and the reality they have spun, keeps us, until we set upon the path of the dream.
More and more obstacles seem to be other people's issues that form in the way of a hand to block one, to take notice of them? Sometimes noticing ahead of time, and taking the time to notice them, makes the hand part of an arm that embraces you. The obstacles become bridges for both to cross over, even if in opposite directions.
The most important experiences of a man are those which take him to his or her limit.To learn beyond that, one needs to accumulate all the courage and expand his limits.Sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Dreaming big is another such extreme experience.
What you envision for yourself is far more likely to become a lifelong passion than anything someone can drop into your lap. This is a reminder that pursuing my vision for my life is not a waste of time. Detours happen. They become experience. With experience, accomplishment is only a matter of time.
Nothing matures a Man like RESPONSIBILITIES,Nothing humbles him like MISSED OPPORTUNITIES,What makes him are his CHOICES,And nothing changes him like LOVE.Nothing defines a Man like his CHARACTER,Nothing teaches him like his EXPERIENCE,What drives him is his VISION,And nothing weakens him like BETRAYAL.Nothing scares a Man like losing his EGO,Nothing pursues him like his PASSION,What interests him is his GAME,And nothing intoxicates him like his DESIRES.But above all, NOTHING FAVOURS A MAN LIKE FINDING A GOOD WOMAN.
I believe in unconditional love... I believe in dangerous unselfishness... I believe in daring to achieve... I believe in making mistakes... I believe in helping others... I believe in moving on... I believe in passionate romance... I believe in living the fullness of this human experience... I believe in ME...
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.
Every encounter with the external world presents a conflict with a person’s cherished inner world. How we resolve these ongoing boarder conflicts between reality and ideas results in tectonic shifts in our mental makeup, which influx we incorporate by responding to the never-ending chaos of a worldly life.
Do whatever you want, even spend time with any one or help any one. Don't keep any expectation that the person you are helping today he will give u same manner tomorrow. This expectation is one of the big obstacle between you and your success. Be independent, limited and love yourself. Enhance your personality instead of wasting time and energy by planning to take revenge. Because best revenge for your enemies is not their defeat but they will get defeat by your success
The hope is indeed that some will experience and believe: The purpose of a number of spiritual gurus is to demonstrate to God-fearing men faux spirituality.
Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... Understanding must move with the flow of the process.
Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)"Another turning point, a fork stuck in the roadTime grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to goSo make the best of this test, and don't ask whyIt's not a question, but a lesson learned in timeIt's something unpredictable, but in the end is right,I hope you had the time of your life.So take the photographs, and still frames in your mindHang it on a shelf in good health and good timeTattoos and memories and dead skin on trialFor what it's worth, it was worth all the whileIt's something unpredictable, but in the end is right,I hope you had the time of your life.It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right,I hope you had the time of your life.It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right,I hope you had the time of your life.
...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.
One concrete way in which we all landscape our sanity is by having our experience of reality confirmed by others. When our experience of reality is disconfirmed by others, our confidence in our own sanity can be undermined. (page 125, Chapter 9, Graeme Galton)
I was not looking for HIM, he was just always there, the little BOY! I have not seen HIM, because I did not want to see, but HE was standing next to my bed every night, the little BOY! I have not heard their cry because I have forbidden HIM there to cry. But one day, when I woke up, did I knew seen, so sad and lonely! I wanted to tell HIM that it's all going to be good. But I could not because I knew that it is not so! And we both cried, I and the LITTLE BOY IN ME!
...reality is a system, completely ordered and fully intelligible, with which thought in its advance is more and more identifying itself. We may look at the growth of knowledge … as an attempt by our mind to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness…. and if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality … Its measure is the distance thought has travelled … toward that intelligible system … The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ultimately by its coherence with that further whole, all comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest.
Life is like butter - when things cool down it can be reshaped
The definition of a professional is one who does a job well even when they don't like it.
I'm not crying out for help, but I am sharing my experience in the hopes that readers will get something out of it. I'm not the one who gets to decide what that is, if anything. I'm just starting the "journey" if you will, so I can't possibly know yet what the "message" of my life really is. I only know what has happened so far, and how I've felt up until this moment. I agree that reading about the pain of others is concerning when they are still hurting and in the same situation as when they wrote about it. But what can you do? You can reach out, ask how you can help and be there to listen. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't love someone who doesn't love themselves enough to take care of themselves and stay out of bad situations. Believe me, I know this.
Once you are defiled, you can't get back your purity by any means, instead, you will only look for ways to be defiled over and over again.
As much as what I can think of life, it is more of a poetic journey with emotions & experience packed up in the form of livelihood. When it starts, it brings confirmation of a new soul entering into the world. But when it ends, it takes away not just soul, but happiness of those related to that life. It’s in the middle of this journey that the best poems get their sequence of words.
I Love You! Three words that mean nothing if not followed through with actions. It seems to be more relevant in the terms of showing verses saying. Anyone can say it, because there are different kinds of love. But, few are willing to actually show it. Saying is one thing. Living proof is another.
Dig Deep! When the task at hand seems to be very difficult. Dig Deep! Whenever you feel you're drifting away from your intended course. Dig Deep! When others doubt you and say it can't be done. Dig Deep! Whenever you feel like giving up. Dig Deep! When life throws you a curve ball. If you quit, you'll never hit that homerun
Quiet moments bring you closer to God. It's your silent time within your own private sanctuary. People have so many things to talk about, worry about, think about, without giving themselves peace within. Quiet moments give you access to areas of your brain which allows you to function proficiently.
People need to understand that not everyone is out to hurt you. There are still some great people in this world. Do not allow yourself to believe that everyone is up to no good. Just because you have encountered some rude people along the way, doesn't mean that everyone is that way. When it comes to matters of the heart, Know which bridges to cross and which ones to burn.
Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
Experience is hard to acquire. Only the wise acquire it
I don't understand this irony - valuable things like cars, gold, diamond are made up of hard materials but most valuable things like money, contracts and books are made up of soft paper.
Reading is the noblest of all the hobbies, that is why people mention it so frequently in their resume even if they don't read much.
It's easy to get carried away in the search for “experience.” I think that people boast of “experience” as if all experience is good. The whole world will tell you that all mistakes are good and all experiences are worthwhile. Nevertheless, I believe in an equilibrium. I always say “throw yourself out there” but at the same time, I want to tell you, that there are so many experiences in life that you’re better off not experiencing. Experience is not always a positive thing, it can affect a person in such a way that it is like finding a tulip trampled under foot, run over by bicycles and spit on. And then the tulip is set on a windowsill for sale with a sign that says “I have had so much experience, that’s why I’m more expensive.” But the truth is, there’s nothing wrong with being that tulip in the field, untouched and caressed by moonlight. Yes, we have the choice to make mistakes, but we also have the choice to choose what things we allow in to make marks upon our lives. It is okay to be untouched by darkness.
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.
Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and that can be the same for stories. It's just a matter of segregating comparisons between the senseless and the thoughtful. The norm and the unbiased. We are what we are. As are stories.
The Book revealed to Muhammad is one and unique of its kind. It has left indelible impression on the hearts of humanity. Nothing can overcome its majesty. The Quran has given new dimensions to human thinking - Surprising reforms, stunning success! The power that created in Muslims a ravenous appetite for knowledge sprung from the Quran.
YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH TO BE WEAKAllow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of “up” and “down,” “good” and “bad,” “weak” and “strong,” until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.
1. The troubled times that you go through are not meant to break you, instead they are meant to show you the hidden strength that lies within. It is at times like this when you thought you are broke that you suddenly discover that you have a pile of cash stashed away which you had completely forgotten about. Draw upon those hidden reserves that you never knew existed and come out stronger from the experience. It is your ability to brave the storm that is more important.
When everyone believes they are the life coaches, who are the players?
The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the breath of a living love knowing when to protect, when to release, and when to protect again. For we are the products of an active love - the Father the creator, the Son the perfecter, the Spirit the supervisor - but just like in a factory, to deny the process is to ultimately create a defect of oneself.
Only in sleep, where there's nothing but mind, can the mind clearly process all of the day's experiences/memories - without distraction. And, perhaps, only in sleep, where there's nothing but mind, can the mind truly understand the meaning of these memories, as well, and assimilate them with all the other memories you've accumulated over time, forming greater meanings - unintelligible in the light of day - building, perhaps, to some ultimate meaning at the culmination of life - unintelligible in the light of living.
Your life should consist of more than commuting, working, eating, surfing the Internet, sleeping and watching TV. Your life should be filled with purpose-driven experiences and projects that bring excitement, passion, energy, and authentic meaning and joy into your life.
I was born into a town and a family and the town ad my family happened to me. I own none of it. It is everyone's. It is shareware. I like it, I like having been a part of it, I would kill or die to protect those who are part of it, but I don not claim exclusivity. Have it Take it from me. Do with is what you will. Make it useful. This is like making electricity from dirt; it is almost too good to be believed, that we can make beauty from this stuff.
As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.
It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.
A person is not born as a finished product; we create ourselves every day. Resembling reality, no person is a fixed and unchangeable entity. Each of us is in the process of becoming. A person’s perspective on their life experiences depends upon reviewing and integrating an emotional gamut of reconciling values with applied effort.
Some people experience a life-changing sensation that transforms how they see the world after a near-death experience, but the way I see it, we’re all dying – nay, we’re all dead – and it is up to us to be our own self-necromancers to find some form of life and spirit to reanimate the corpse of a life spent wanting.
We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences – be they positive or negative – make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are, and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.
Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain-they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter. With an average life expectancy of 78.2 years in the US (subtracting eight hours a day for sleep), I have around 250,00 conscious hours remaining to me in which I could be smiling or scowling, rejoicing in my life, in this race, in this story, or moaning and complaining about my troubles. I can be giving my fingers, my back, my mind, my words, my breaths, to my wife and my children and my neighbors, or I can grasp after the vapor and the vanity for myself, dragging my feet, afraid to die and therefore afraid to live. And, like Adam, I will still die in the end.
Whether rich or poor, following the Should Life will lead to heartache and struggle. Leading your life will lead to places you never thought you'd be, people you never thought you'd meet, knowledge you never thought you'd gain, and a life of adventure and growth. Lead your life; not the Should Life.
Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.
Destiny is the established end of someone while vision remarks the photos of that predestined end, though not yet fulfilled. The insight of an unexperienced destiny can be discovered. That is through visions.
Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers
I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.
Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.
Preparation time is necessary for your growth. Trust and believe everything you're going through is preparing you for some request you put out into the Universe.
Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.
What we are at this very moment is determined by the sum total of all our experiences till this moment. And the step that you take at this moment, will determine your future. Past and future both require a functional mind to exist. Only the present prevails independent of mind – independent of life.
Past experience doesn't go away, so the secret is to accept, embrace and learn from it. However the key to the secret, is to keep it at bay and be open minded about the future from the second after the experience and never let the experience be the bar or commission of anything thereafter.
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.
Even if I say something, do not believe this nonsense, but do not disbelieve it either. Just see, "Someone is willing to sit in front of so many people and talk absolute nonsense, something that is totally absurd. Let me see what this is about." If you keep that much openness, the possibility is alive in your life. If you believe it, you will kill it. If you disbelieve it, you will kill it.
I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.
There’s a larger point to be made here than my own obtuseness, which is the fragility, beauty, and at the same time resilience of any communication. An inchoate impulse forms into a feeling that resembles but can never match the dreamy intensity of the original impulse. This feeling then articulates itself, but the words at best approximate a shadow of the feeling. I speak or write these words, and of course the person who receives them brings to that receiving his or her own connotations: Cinnamon, for example, may conjure different memories and may mean something different for you than for me. These words may then settle into feelings, leading finally, perhaps, to some impulse on your part. With so many layers of interpretation, it's no wonder we so often misunderstand each other. And this is between two people who speak the same language. How much more difficult understanding can be, then, when the people do not share a common cultural background, or native tongue? How much more than this may we misunderstand when we then hear a dog speak, or a tree or stone?
I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldn’t expect words to substitute for experience. That’s not their job, although words certainly can be misused in that way. The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be — and act — human.
Sleeping in the simple small cottage rather than hotels... and under the billion stars is one of the breathtaking experience... pause, breath, nothingness moment is what gives meaning to my busy existence, that life is felt in silence, in that moment when what you see before you can no longer be conveyed with words...
The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one’s mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts.
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
Drift me away along with the dust traveling to infinity.To another world where it feels more at home.To another world where I don’t feel alone.Trapped in the angst of my soul.Not being embraced as a whole.A state of nothingness creeps upon me.Disappearing in the darkness of the shadows.How it has clocked my life.Because that is the only place where I find peace.I call it nyctophilia.And what am I when the day turns into the night,listening to the nocturnal and the howling wind?My soul leaving my body,To be at rest.Tears strain down my cheeks,Enough for my lungs to fight for air in the peaks.The atmosphere seems to be held in place by a certain silence, waiting for a sign to move.Even the earth forgot its behoove.Taken over by this silence that I yet do not understand myself.It seems that things don’t have a meaning,At least not anymore.The demons and darkness have taken over.Making me believe that it knows better.These demons can’t be seen,But they’re far from imaginary.They live inside my mind.Their evilness prevails,About to end the fight.Then I stop and think:This is a melancholy I’ll fight one more night.
The times on the open road with all the unknown ahead were the times I was happiest and most secure, with people who knew our core and lived solely for the purpose of unmediated experiences and love, from which purpose itself is born. Not the distant idea of life, love and purpose dirtied by constructs.
Sometimes I return back to the state of mind I had as a child when I believed nothing was impossible.
Capture every moments of your life.
Book:Sharing of life and experiences with other people.This is lifetime notes for all generations.
Curiosity killed the cat, but not before teaching her that honey bees are not sweet, tweeting birds are slow to react, mice can serve as both toys and food, big dogs like to snuggle, falling isn’t flying, cream drips from lazy cows, water should be avoided at all costs, baths don’t require getting wet, kindness and cruelty often fall from the same hand, and engines remain comfortably warm long after the motor dies.
Since then I’ve come to believe you don’t always have to use things you love, and it’s not always so practical to be so practical. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize that all that delicious dilettantism pays its way as much as any degree in medicine or engineering, by making me remember every day—whenever I pick up a book or watch the Science Channel or try to read a map of Asia for no particular reason—that life is amazing and there is no end to the wonder of it.
But failure and success are labels placed upon people’s lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process.
From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.
For things I am not thankful for―experiences I would never volunteer to relive―I recognize how they have changed me. My depth of compassion and humility, the sincerity of my empathy and understanding, and the duration of my patience have all been refined by bitter suffering. I thank God for the lessons learned. I am a better person for it, but I still abhor those awful trials.
Looking back now, I would say that this was one of the first valuable lessons I learned, and one that would be useful in my future line of work. Sometimes things go wrong. It is inevitable. But it is a mistake to waste time and energy worrying about events that you cannot influence. Once they have happened, let them go.
In the School of Life events, situations, and the people you have attracted to be part of your personal experiences are synchronized perfectly in order to teach you the lessons that need to be learned. They show you exactly what is needed to be successful in your Life.
Advertising is far more than just a communications industry. It's a problem-solving industry that also teaches you about life, how it encourages you to focus your thinking and produce something of genuine value. Why? Because that will make the advertising task so much easier. You're not equipped with a unique set of insights and experiences across a broad range of markets, allowing you to bring clarity and inspiration to anything you wish to produce.
What I like about this belief is that it makes people look for a big picture, and think more about how they behave in this life and what they achieve, as it might influence their next lives. I alsolike another aspect of it: that negative experiences teach us as much as positive experiences do; sometimes they teach us more.
We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do. It’s based on input, process, and reflection. It is what changes us.
Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane," he [Ed Ricketts] said. "And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this," Ed said. "Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.
Mindfulness & Meditation help focus on the moment while at the same time knowing we cannot capture that moment, we are in a flow of moments we let flow. We can watch moments in detail without being attached to them. Non-attachment to past & future stems from this practice. Worry about past or future is wasted energy, however we can observe the past & learn from it without agonising over it & trust ourselves to handle the future better. We can celebrate the opportunity to grow as we gain understanding from observation & experience. We can watch ourselves & avoid being caught up in over-reactions. "I am loved, right now, in this moment, I love, and am part of love itself. I am aware of myself at every level - the mental slowing gracefully to sense the spiritual within & all around, and the physical being still, or moving. I tune in to the flow of life in my body & the flow of life everywhere. I circulate love with each breath - from without to within & from within to all around.
Trust what is not known to your Mind. Trust what is known to your Heart.
The Beloved is Always There, Actively Seeking You.
When we understand that Peace is a state of mind we understand true Peace.
The practice is simple. Whatever you're doing, do that with total awareness.
When you deeply love someone from that space that is beyond attachment to certain projections or desires, when you love someone just deeply, totally, completely, without any games that the mind or emotions play, then that love remains eternal in the heavens forever, and that is what pulls you back to remembering that love.
The activity of loving kindness is the bridge that allows you to slowly, slowly realise the wisdom and perfection of this moment.
Satisfaction doesn't come from needs and desires or fulfilling them, it comes from being yourself, being true.
Everything is temporary but the power of Love is Infinite because it is the space, it is Everything.
Spiritual practice is allowing the temple (your body) to be full of light and to live life as a total celebration.
The Divine has created this moment in time. It is a very powerful moment, where there is only one way and that way is that you completely let go. Completely let go of what is known, what is safe, and move into the space of beauty.
Wisdom is a true activity of compassion. And so, meditation is the act of loving kindness. It is the activity where loving kindness is applied on all levels.
Remember meditation is an active, deep remembrance, and that is discernment. Wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, remember to utilize discernment so that you can hear and sense and feel the vibration of love rather than the vibration of illusion.
The way to Bliss is through Understanding, through Wisdom.
Where ego comes in, loving kindness departs. So wherever there is ego, there is very little space for true bliss and true happiness because true bliss and true happiness isn't exclusive to the attachments the ego enjoys playing with, but rather a free state of mind that is part of loving kindness and its activities inside and outside of oneself.
The natural consequence of being connected to the depth, what I call the soul, or your essence, is the attribute of joy.
Stolen moments” create a feeling of enjoyment in our “intensive time” awareness. The glow and the intensity of those instants can guide us throughout a whole lifetime. They can expose a second or a third dimension of the daily events and shed an expounding light on all the little details we encounter. ("Stolen moments" )
Whenever you jump off a cliff at GOD's command, be sure that you will fly! Either by soaring on the palm of His hands or on the parachute of that command or you will suddenly have wings pop out and sustain you in the air. Either way, you will be flying and He'll be the one behind it all.
If kindness wins, accountability rules.
The 'dance of love' has different themes and moods, just like every relationship has its highs and lows. Enjoy the high moments and hang-on during the downtimes. The diverse range of emotions is the experience that builds you two. Your ability to perfectly switch between these moments and make the best out of the one you find yourself per time, proves that you are not only involved in the relationship like the chicken is in the business of making eggs but also very committed to it like the pig is in the business of making bacon.
Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experience the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.
A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.
I own my past, it hasn't been grande' But it's had some pretty great moments. I own my movements of now, it isn't what I've dreamt, but I'm closer than I was before.I own my future, it is going to test me, But I trust I have the strength to pull through. Life isn't what happens to us, but what we choose to become.
Feelings come and feelings go. There is no need to fear them and no need to crave them. Be open to your feelings and experience them while they are here. Then be open to the feelings that will come next. Your feelings are a part of your experience. Yet no mere feeling, however intense it may seem, is your permanent reality.
People will say,"there's heaven and hell", and they take it so serious that they look so sorrowful with penitence. I would rather ask them to show me the route that leads to heaven or hell.
Don't drive a car in the dream, else you won't drive it on earth. Don't wish to become, else you won't become. Don't associate with fools, else your ancestors will be insulted. Don't be addicted to wine, else your pocket will be empty. Don't be drunk, else you'll be attacked.
A mentor is a person, an expert in a specific area of endeavour who trains, guides and observes a less experienced person to also become an expert through support, advice, and involvement in character building opportunities.
Love in this life is expanded by our anticipation of the next life. Those who love under God are never satisfied with small love, or love bound by the flaws of human emotion. Those who love under God dream of another life where they can experience it and live it in God's perfect form, so they seek to build it in this life as much as possible.
We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life.
What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. 'The youth that was I', you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.
You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...
To care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done the same. When others heal, I could have healed too. And when others give life, I could have done the same. Then we experience that we can be present to the soldier who kills, to the guard who pesters, to the young man who plays as if life has no end, and to the old man who stopped playing out of fear for death.By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness, we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful but powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take our pain away but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community.
He had strong, steady hands, and I could tell from looking at them there was little he couldn't do. Mossy always said you could tell everything you needed to know about a man from his hands. Some hands, she told me, were leaving hands. They were the wandering sort that slipped into places they shouldn't, and they would wander right off again because those hands just couldn't stay still. Some hands were worthless hands, fit only to hold a drink or flick ash from a cigar, and some were punishing hands that hit hard and didn't leave a mark and those were the ones you never stayed to see twice.But the best hands were knowing hands, Mossy told me with a slow smile. Knowing hands were capable; they could soothe a horse or woman. They could take things apart -- including your heart -- and put them back together better than before. Knowing hands were rare, but if you found them, they were worth holding, at least for a little while.
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.
Yeah, that’s my experience. Humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like, you forgot the lesson from the last time. Because the first person you encounter kind of bitch-slaps you upside the head in the most wonderful, innocent way and you realize, God, I’m still an asshole. And this guy, by doing nothing except being broke and so incredibly polite—it takes you aback, you realize, I’m still not there yet. I still have like eight miles to go before I can even get into the parking lot of humility. I have to keep going back. It’s like going back to a chiropractor to get a readjustment. That’s me in Africa, that’s me in Southeast Asia. You come back humbled and you bring that into your life. It’s made me much more tolerant of other peoples—and I’m not saying I used to be a misogynist, or I used to be a racist, that was never my problem. But I can be extremely headstrong, impatient, rude. Like, “Hurry up, man. What’s your problem? Get out of my way.” That sentiment comes easy to me. Going to these countries, you realize none of that is necessary, none of it’s cool, it’s nothing Abraham Lincoln would do, and so why are you doing it? Those are the lessons I’ve learned.
I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.
Adventrue rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run.
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.
There is a difference between perspective and perception. Perspective is a personal idea about certain events, based on the impressions, experiences or information available to the mind, while the perception is a momentary thought about the situation, event or people, purely based on the past experience or impressions.
In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness.
As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I'd realised I'd not even be kissing myself; I'd be kissing the mirror.
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
People assume that repetition is always a static thing, but I beg to differ. Repetition is just as often the complete opposite of that: or a sign of rapid personal growth. In this repetition manifests one's ability to go on experiencing again the very same thing from a different perspective and in a brand-new light.
Ive learnt the most about myself through the people and places i no longer visit, such an ironic exprience.The greatest lessons are from those we give the keys of our hearts to & trust all too easily; realising later on, they are just apart of this grande' story and not everyone gets to make it to the end chapter & happy ever after.
It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of exceedingly slow growth. We also know that by language, man conveys to his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells and touches. We know that the language of the savage consists of a few sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt. Many centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing complex ideas. It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by a deity and put in the brain of man. These ideas must be the result of observation and experience.
Occasionally, events in one's life become clearer through the prism of experience, a phrase which simply means that things tend to be clearer as time goes on. For instance, when a person is just born, they usually have no idea what curtains are and spend a great deal of their first months wondering why on earth Mommy and Daddy have hung large pieces of cloth over each window in the nursery. But as the person grows older, the idea of curtains becomes clearer through the prism of experience. The person will learn the word "curtains" and notice that they are actually quite handy for keeping a room dark when it is time to sleep, and for decorating an otherwise boring window area. Eventually, they will entirely accept the idea of curtains of their own, or venetian blinds, and it is all due to the prism of experience.
Life was a bloody battlefield until I conquered the enemy and won the war. Now, life is a journey, and I am a warrior. Prepared for anything and weakened by nothing. There are hills and dales, mountains and plateaus, blind spots and brilliant vistas, but none of that matters. All that matters is my second chance, and the only thing capable of disrupting my path, is myself.
4 Don’t Die™ Principles:• Change your awareness and your perspective changes.• You teach what you need to learn.• You can make excuses or you can achieve your goals, but you cannot do both.• Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
Nobody ever talks about the pyramids that weren't built, the books that weren't written, the songs that weren't sung. Stop letting your fear condemn you to mediocrity. Get out of your own way. Your dreams are a poetic reflection of your soul's wishes. Be courageous enough to follow them. There is no greater time than now to experience the full power of your potential. Make this the day you take the first step in the beautiful journey of bringing your dreams to life.
Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.
The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminates the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.
The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminate the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.
The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others. There is something I am meant to see, something for which my own situation and suffering are the lens, but the cost of such seeing—I am just beginning to realize—may very well be any final clarity or perspective on my own life, my own faith. That would not be a bad fate, to burn up like the booster engine that falls away from the throttling rocket, lighting a little dark as I go.
Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes:the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness;how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour.We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible.Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful,but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with.A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased.Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too.Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.
Experience," which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I've found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; "experience," which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; "experience," which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.
The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.
For there are two reasons why human beings face danger calmly: they may have no experience of it, or they may have means to deal with it: thus when in danger at sea people may feel confident about what will happen either because they have no experience of bad weather, or because their experience gives them the means of dealing with it.
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
Experience makes good people better." She was staring at the lake. "How does it do that?" "Through their suffering." "I had enough of that," he said in disgust. "We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness All it taught me was to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered." She shrank away a little.
My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.
With great abilities come great responsibilities; great power comes with great assignments.With great age comes great reasoning; great actions come great experience.With great battles come great victories; great trees come with great tap roots.However, if a little faith can move great mountains, what then will a great faith do? Mysterious things... I guess
I felt like a disappointment. I believed I had let my family down. Clearly, I was a screw-up. I couldn’t do anything right. It seemed I hurt people without even trying. I didn’t know better, but obviously, that proved I was stupid. I was so blind to what I was saying …. These were the kinds of thoughts going through my mind. And that was my first experience with shame. Huge difference.
I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This...and this...and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home.
It’s complicated, what makes a person. I think…part of it is experience—whether you seek them out or they come to you—and your reactions to them. Even then, you may not know exactly how something affects you, and sometimes that says even more. I guess the best way to understand something is to actually go through it yourself.
Whatever good and beautiful experience you are having, if you are not writing them down, you are wasting them! Your thoughts on the paper are your real reality because the realities of the experience quickly disappear, they are already gone, they are dead, but the written thoughts of your experiences are still alive and can live thousands of years! Sit down and write them down!
Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).
If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean — wherever my imagination ranges.
I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.
This is not the time to be passive. This is the time to shape, sculpt, paint, participate… the time to get sweaty, to get dirty, to fall in love, to forgive, to forget, to hug, to kiss… this is the time to experience, participate and live your life as a verb.
Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space...All that negative stuff. All the pain...It just floted away from me, I just floated away from it...up and away...
Because I know something that you don't know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you'll move past it and you'll be fine. And helping somebody likej you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying.
He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.
The purpose of life is to watch and experience living. To enjoy living every moment of it. And to live in environments, which are calm, quiet, slow, sophisticated, elegant. Just to be. Whether you are naked or you have a golden robe on you, that doesn’t make any difference. The ideal purpose of your life is that you are grateful - great and full - that you are alive, and you enjoy it.
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
We try so hard to instruct our children in all the right things―teaching good from bad, explaining choices and consequences―when in reality most lessons are learned through observation and experience. Perhaps we'd be better off training our youth to be highly observant.
They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience—and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?""What kind of experience?”“Well—places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”“Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak—but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier—and that’s a fact.”“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”“Much, much sillier.”“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to—if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it—then it can be kind of marvelous.
...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.
A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?
We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.
I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.
Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.
When a person has swum, traveled, run a lathe, planted flowers, ridden a motorcycle, made wine, painted a picture, parachuted, he has increased the fund from which he may draw for new figural developments. In other words, as the background of his experience becomes more diversified, it also becomes potentially more harmonious with a whole range of happenings.
I've done everything. All of it. You think it, I've done it. All the things you never dared, all the things you dream about, all the things you were curious about and then forgot because you knew you never would. I did 'em, I did 'em yesterday while you were still in bed.What about you? When's it gonna be your turn?
What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense — none of which can be taught in a classroom... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.
Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.
I consider everything that happened to be precious moments of my life.The pain.The suffering.The fun…And I am here right now, because everyone was there for me.I couldn’t have accomplished anything by standing still, without anybody’s help.I treasure every moment I have spent here.Unlucky?I feel pretty lucky.This is my resolve.”-Sawada Tsunayoshi-
I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.
Start a new day with a feeling that life is bigger than achievements & non-achievements, we often worry about the desirable achievements leaving aside the experience gained by non-achievements; Always believe that every successful future achievement will rise from shadows of lessons taught by unsuccessful past experiences.
It may be expedient to take stock of all the affecting pieces that might shatter in the wake of an emotional earthquake, once red flags come up in a committed relationship and an overarching scene has to be fashioned for a recast life experience. ("Waiting for the pieces to fall into place")
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Ego said, 'I will not apologize for who I am'. Experience replied, 'unless your self-realization comes to light, your apology is worthless. And, when your self-realization does come to light, which it will, your apology will be of little or no value at all'. - Sandeep N. Tripathi
It is good," he thought, "to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don't just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!
Life gives us a flair of awareness in the breeze of our daily journey and offers a free reign to explore what we are, to experience what we are not and to find out what we may become: a free ride until everything melts down into the indistinct and indefinite, while walking up to the ultimate gate of non-existence. ("Living on probation")
He who has lived and thought can neverHelp in his soul despising men,He who has felt will be foreverHaunted by days he can’t regain.For him there are no more enchantments,Him does the serpent of remembrance,Him does repentance always gnaw.All this will frequently affordA great delight to conversations.
To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,—to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined! Yes, just as much good as it would do a man tired of sitting still in a “too easy chair” to take a long walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances, as it would be under his.
NASA has decades of experience in studying the effects of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) and their experiments show that continuous habitation of an alien environment in Space results in sickness in less than a year in astronauts and a similar environment on Earth produces ill health in humans in just two years.
What is it like to burn as the humans do? When one’s existence can be parcelled and measured in the units that the humans use, what was it? Time. Units of time. Ability to calculate, and live through countable units of time in motion. The physicality of time passing, when one’s lifespan is short enough to be able to tangibly experience the passage of time.
You," she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. "I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse.
For a merely conscious being, death is the cessation of experiences, in much the same way that birth is the beginning of experiences. Death cannot be contrary to an interest in continued life any more than birth could be in accordance with an interest in commencing life. To this extent, with merely conscious beings, birth and death cancel each other out; whereas with self-aware beings, the fact that one may desire to continue living means that death inflicts a loss for which the birth of another is insufficient compensation.
There is an opportunity cost for everything we do. This is why we must have the awareness to ensure that what we are pursuing is really what we value, because the pursuit leaves countless lost opportunities in its wake. We choose one experience at the sacrifice of all other experiences.
First impression is really Last impression..I have observed this thing that in my life. Whenever, I observed any one by their first impression at the end I got same manner which I had observed.. People pretend themselves but reality occurs from their first impression.Those people whom I thought they are not good at the end I can comment on them with these same words as I passed before on their first impression. No matter how good they were but they have shown what they are as they expressed from first impression.But the people who express their first impression very kindly and gently for them I can say they are my friends how ever those people fought but they always be with me in my trouble or difficulties.So, definitely yes first impression is last impressionReality occurs from first observation but should be the clever eye
I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.
But he was a perfect gentleman, Aunt Amelia. He did not even try to kiss me, though he wanted to. ... You always tell me I must be receptive to broadening experiences. That would have been a broadening experience. And, from what I have observed, a very enjoyable one.
In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.
I don’t want us to be ashamed anymore (we all were crying by this point) of being pregnant or gay or poor or having a crackhead dad! I want us to be fucking proud of ourselves. (...) So we have to be proud and always remember who we are and when we make it to college, who we were.
You know what's wrong with scientific power?... It's a form of inherited wealth... Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants the power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual Guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you have attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline. Now, what is interesting about this process is that, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it. But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step... There is no discipline... no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature... A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.
Consider how the sky is unharmed by the clouds that pass through it, whether they are light and fluffy-looking or dark and formidable. A mountain is not moved by the winds blowing over it, whether gentle or fierce. The ocean is not destroyed by the waves moving on its surface, whether high or low. In just that way, no matter what we experience, some aspect of ourselves remains unharmed. This is the innate happiness of awareness.
Just Go...Just GoNo need of your complimentsYour smiles are knifesYour words of swordsThey hit my soul deep insideEvery time I cut myselfDark inside...You thought I would never surviveLook, Look I'm strong than beforeI killed my pretty self for you I hadI'm change...I'm changeJust of youHere is no need to explainThat way, I'm not goingNow...Just for nowIt will bad for me if I goC'oz then I wanna kill youLike you never get killedBut you feel ever:I killed you deep insideNow I'm a little devil of yoursYou killed your little princessWith the dirty steps of yoursWanna taste me now ???Just fade...Just fadeI don't wanna destroyThe ending day of my life.Your face, Your NameMakes me fire deep insideNow listen dear Da...yIt's my time to assassinate youassassinate you deep insideNo swords, no knifesNo guns, no old tricksIn my own way, I will kill youCurious ? Wanna know ???Angry ? Just blow !!!Just wait...Just waitGenius...!You will know, one dayOn your own...C'ozIt's just a startI'm not over yetI have more to sayI have to burn each dropOf your blood, you have insideI have more to do for youC'oz, I'm your little devil...!
He who knows the past well can best explain the present and can tell the probable certainties and uncertainties of the future better
The summit of Mauna Kea was definitely a place where it was better to be a hard to replace skilled engineer than an easy to replace technician. It was my experience that once you had developed Mauna Kea Sickness that the management team would blatantly harass you out of your job using nasty inhumane human resources techniques.
Police officers are well known for their aggressive behaviors, search "Police Officer Angry Aggression Theory". I can speak from personal experience that they do cover up for each other and target individuals that they have a vendetta on. Police Internal Affairs is just an extension of the cover up machine, they uphold very few complaints.
A series of books, dilapidated and faded, sit bundled together. Most of the bindings are separating from the yellowed pages, but each is at home in its battered state. Their wrinkled pages and discolored skin tell not of old age, but of a good life. These books, unlike so many others, were not just read, but revisited, loved, and experienced.
He could see perfectly well that "it," his life, was leading nowhere, that he wss behaving like a miser who hoards gold simply for the pleasure of looking at it, except that in his case it wssn't gold but experience, which was the one thing he took from life. And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. There is no point in a man accumulating experience the way someone else might collect stamps.
It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.
...each of us has an explanatory style... And our explanation is more important than the experience itself. In the words of Aldous Huxley, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.
The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it."The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go on again and finish the story."Is that all?" asked Aglaya."All? Yes," said the prince, emerging from a momentary reverie."And why did you tell us this?""Oh, I happened to recall it, that's all! It fitted into the conversation—""You probably wish to deduce, prince," said Alexandra, "that moments of time cannot be reckoned by money value, and that sometimes five minutes are worth priceless treasures. All this is very praiseworthy; but may I ask about this friend of yours, who told you the terrible experience of his life? He was reprieved, you say; in other words, they did restore to him that 'eternity of days.' What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes?""Oh no, he didn't! I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute.""Very well, then there's an experiment, and the thing is proved; one cannot live and count each moment; say what you like, but one cannot." "That is true," said the prince, "I have thought so myself. And yet, why shouldn't one do it?""You think, then, that you could live more wisely than other people?" said Aglaya."I have had that idea.""And you have it still?""Yes — I have it still," the prince replied.
The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.
I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.
We will not read of that which hurts our pride or fears or 'feelings'. We forget, or gloss over, or excuse, an experience which injured the tentacles of our personality. We forget the pscyhiatrist's definition of a neurosis as 'refused pain'. In the same way we escape from mental pain. We refuse to believe what we do not like.
What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today’s you isn’t the same as yesterday’s you and won’t be the same as tomorrow’s you. But Walter also thinks that there’s a real perfect you that you’re always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it.
Aspiring novelists should be taught that the old adage, “Write about what you know,” isn’t limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your store of knowledge, part of what you’re prepared to write about. The same goes for stories and memories that other people share with you.
Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to be explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and that can be the same for stories. It's just a matter of segregating comparisons between the senseless and the thoughtful. The norm and the unbiased. We are what we are. As are stories.
Life is a repeated cycle of getting lost and then finding yourself again. There are many smaller cycles within that cycle where you get lost to a smaller degree and then remember yourself again. Sometimes you do it to yourself on purpose, consciously or unconsciously. Every time you get lost it is so that you can learn something or experience something from a different perspective.
Life is an extraordinary gift some people appear not to appreciate. In every breath and scent, every touch and sight we are gifted by new experience and the chance to feel the richness of experience. Every sound we hear, from the song of a bird to the harshness of an angry voice, is a miracle.
If you are present, then you can see that you give yourself presents in each moment that you can unwrap and thoroughly enjoy - the amazing world around us that we can explore, each incredible detail, the lives, and the stories we tell ourselves or experience so that we can feel what it's like to be human, the things we can learn from an interaction, about ourselves as well as everything and everyone else.Everyone is here in their own story, writing the script as they go, living the movie picture.... choosing who to meet, what to do, how to react to each new experience. We each find our own tools to help us traverse the terrain of each particular part of our journeys. It cannot be right to judge another, or yourself, for we are all at different stages, or on different stages. We do as we need to according to where and how we find ourselves, but the more you realise that you actually put yourself exactly where you are in each moment, the more your eyes will widen. You are an amazing Being playing the game of life - your attitude makes all the difference.
Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant.
The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.
Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again.
Those who read books cannot understand the teachings and, what's more, may even go astray. But those who try to observe the things going on in the mind, and always take that which is true in their own minds as their standard, never get muddled. They are able to comprehend suffering, and ultimately will understand Dharma. Then, they will understand the books they read.
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
His goal (Bezos's)was not just to make browsing for books easy, but an enjoyable experience. “People don’t just buy books because they need books,” he has said. “There are products like that. Pharmaceuticals are that way. Nobody enjoys browsing the Preparation H counter. But people will gladly spend hours in a bookstore, so you have to make the shopping experience fun and engaging.
I'm told by my young friends that experience is much more important than books. Of course Ben Franklin had something to say about experience and fools, but even Franklin thought that a fool would learn by his experience. That has proven false in the modern world. Some people are simply unwilling to learn under any circumstances, which maybe, even then, wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so damned proud of it.
To deny the truth of our own experience in the scientific study of ourselves is not only unsatisfactory; it is to render the scientific study of ourselves without a subject matter. But to suppose that science cannot contribute to an understanding of our experience may be to abandon, within the modern context, the task of self-understanding. Experience and scientific understanding are like two legs without which we cannot walk. We can phrase this very same idea in positive terms: it is only by having a sense of common ground between cognitive science and human experience that our understanding of cognition can be more complete and reach a satisfying level. We thus propose a constructive task: to enlarge the horizon of cognitive science to include the broader panorama of human, lived experience in a disciplined, transformative analysis.
There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences.
Hope, tell me how could it be possible that grief and happiness are scattered all over the world so unevenly? Why do some people get all the troubles and misfortunes while the others are intoxicated with the abundance of material belongings, fat bellies and money? Why is there such injustice? Or, maybe, we are mistaken it’s unfair!?
People! Please. Listen. Our life, our bodies are the most authentic clinical record ever! Why do you have to ask for any other one, alien, fake, distorted by illegible handwriting belonging to someone who has never been us and has never tried to understand us? Do you think that is right?
Sometimes it feels like you and I are at the movie theater, sitting next to each other and watching the same movie. People say something, argue incessantly, even fight, but this is all somewhere far away, on the other side of the screen, and we are just passive onlookers unable to affect the course of events.
And now, it turns out that our mother’s name means benevolence and generosity to people as objects of love! This is both a unique and beautiful name, Charity. “It was one of life’s cruel ironies,” I thought, “that a midwife, or whoever filled in the documents, must have known our mom’s name. I suppose she had a lot of fun naming us Hope and Faith! Or, on the contrary, she sympathized.
Oh, this tormenting concern that your neighbor’s life might be better than yours! And how great it feels when you realize that the truth is exactly the opposite; and we’re not so different after all. Nоthing brings true neighbors together like a little friendly competition.
All our life we had been dreaming to get through every little hole into this beautiful and unfamiliar world where parents and children love each other not for something but in spite of everything, to plunge into this fairy world entirely, settle down and live there. So why didn’t I feel happy when it happened for real?
People have no limits either in love or in hatred. But is it their fault? They despise us because they are afraid, for we remind them that getting crippled or sick might happen to anyone; or, perhaps, the true reason of their hatred lies much deeper inside, stemming from the hidden ugliness of their own souls?
Would he as well neglect the perishing person, wouldn’t he help to get up, would he turn away? I think I know the answer is obvious. He was flying so high above each of us that after falling down he got below everybody else. To be precise, he was simply knocked down. And we, none of us, just did nothing. Thus, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, the best of us were eliminated in order to let others decay.
What if initially they had named you Faith and me Hope, but afterwards they forgot who of us had which name and swapped them around by mistake? You always believe that everything is going to be all right, and your faith helps me.”“And you hope that it will be that way. We have this close bond between us,” and, after thinking a while, you added, “All people need hope, no one can live without it; and our hope is way stronger when it is warmed up by faith. So it isn’t really important who is Faith and who is Hope; the main thing is that we are connected together.
What is the point of living if we are going to die anyway? What difference does it make if it’s going to happen now or later? All we have to do is to take a step and jump off; that will resolve all problems, answer all questions at a time. And what if we are already flying down? We have jumped off, – perhaps, right after the birth, – not even knowing about it! The ground is already near; we just have the last moment to live and finally realize we are already dead for a long time.
Hope, what if initially they had named you Faith and me Hope, but afterwards they forgot who of us had which name and swapped them around by mistake? You always believe that everything is going to be all right, and your faith helps me.”“And you hope that it will be that way. We have this close bond between us,” and, after thinking a while, you added, “All people need hope, no one can live without it; and our hope is way stronger when it is warmed up by faith. So it isn’t really important who is Faith and who is Hope; the main thing is that we are connected together.
As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.
All sciences have their mysteries and at certain points the apparently most obvious theory will be found in contradiction with experience. Politics, for example, offers several proofs of this truth. In theory, is anything more absurd than hereditary monarchy? We judge it by experience, but if government had never been heard of and we had to choose one, whoever would deliberate between hereditary and elective monarchy would be taken for a fool. Yet we know by experience that the first is, all things considered, the best that can be imagined, while the second is the worst. What arguments could not be amassed to establish that sovereignty comes from the people? However they all amount to nothing. Sovereignty is always taken, never given, and a second more profound theory subsequently discovers why this must be so. Who would not say the best political constitution is that which has been debated and drafted by statesmen perfectly acquainted with the national character, and who have foreseen every circumstance? Nevertheless nothing is more false. The best constituted people is the one that has the fewest written constitutional laws, and every written constitution is WORTHLESS.
Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about. It doesn’t happen all the time. It only occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading.You have to be able to take yourself out of the picture, and really lose yourself in the book in order to have this authentic experience of taking on a character’s identity.
Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous activities, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep.
You see, the catch about portrait painting—I've looked into the thing a bit— is that you can't startpainting portraits till people come along and ask you to, andthey won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first.This makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.
Neither Peter in his work to include Gentiles in the church nor the abolitionists in their campaign against slavery argued that their experience should take precedence over Scripture. But they both made the case that their experience should cause Christians to reconsider long-held interpretations of Scripture. Today, we are still responsible for testing our beliefs in light of their outcomes—a duty in line with Jesus's teaching about trees and their fruit.
The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt.
Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It's expensive and hard to come by. Though it is the heir of disappointment, betrayal and frustration, it is not the inheritance that matters but what you do with it. No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen.
Most insensible, corrupt, cheap, disrespectful young girls run after bad, rude, cocky, nonsensical boys, but a mature, educated, thoughtful, virtuos lady opts for a wise, well breed, experienced, humble, modest gentleman.
Well,' said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return once more to London, 'it has been a pretty business for me! I have lost my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I gained?''Experience,' said Holmes, laughing. 'Indirectly it may be of value, you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.
Oh, Youth may listen patiently,While sad Experience tells her tale,But Doubt sits smiling in his eye,For ardent Hope will still prevail!He hears how feeble Pleasure dies,By guilt destroyed, and pain and woe;He turns to Hope—and she replies,“Believe it not-it is not so!
Only he whose bright lyrehas sounded in shadowsmay, looking onward, restorehis infinite praise. Only he who has eatenpoppies with the deadwill not lose ever againthe gentlest chord.Though the image upon the pooloften grows dim:Know and be still.Inside the Double Worldall voices becomeeternally mild.
Imagine a skilled botanist accompanied by someone like myself who is largely ignorant of botany taking part in a field trip into the Australian bush, with the objective of collecting observable facts about the native flora. It is undoubtedly the case that the botanist will be capable of collecting facts that are far more numerous and discerning than those I am able to observe and formulate, and the reason is clear. The botanist has a more elaborate conceptual scheme to exploit than myself, and that is because he or she knows more botany than I do. A knowledge of botany is a prerequisite for the formulation of the observation statements that might constitute its factual basis. Thus, the recording of observable facts requires more than the reception of the stimuli, in the form of light rays, that impinge on the eye. It requires the knowledge of the appropriate conceptual scheme and how to apply it.
Buttercup dried her tears and began to smile. She took a deep breath, heaved a sigh. It was all part of growing up. You got these little quick passions, you blinked, and they were gone. You forgave faults, found perfection, fell madly; then the next day the sun came up and it was over. Chalk it up to experience, old girl, and get on with the morning.
Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could managed the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar?Sometimes I think that I am. The beggar knows much that the king can only guess. And yet who draws up the codes for begging ordinances? Often I wonder what my experience in life--my easy life following the Desolation, and my current level of comfort--has given me of any true experience to use in making laws. If we had to rely on what we knew, kings would only be of use in creating laws regarding the proper heating of tea and the cushioning of thrones.
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. "It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. I savor bitterness--it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.
We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.
Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.
Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse.
When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy.But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.
As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
In a number of workshops, I have asked people whether they have had one or more experiences that they would identify as an experience of God and, if so, to share them in small groups. On average, 80 percent of the participants identify one or more and are eager to talk about them. They also frequently report that they had never before been asked that question in a church setting or given an opportunity to talk about it.
What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenityAnd the wisdom of age? Had they deceived usOr deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secretsUseless in the darkness into which they peeredOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceivedOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment.
Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.
Can you hold happiness? Can you drink it? Can you taste it? Can you touch it? Of course not, it is immaterial. So, stop looking for it in the material world! Happiness is experienced within; when we bridge the gap between what we want to experience and how we choose to behave.
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.
We must do business in great waters; we must be really on the deck in a storm, if we would see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. We must have stood side by side with King David; we must have gone down into the pit to slay the lion or have lifted up the spear against the eight hundred, if we would know the saving strength of God's right hand. Conflicts bring experience, and experience brings that growth in grace which is not to be attained by any other means.
Stop focusing on what you don’t want; it’s a tremendous waste of time and energy. Instead, start focusing on what you do want. This is the only way to create a plan of action which will enable you to experience the life you envision.
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference.
I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.
Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ's terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?
[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Life was never intended to consist of a glut of luxury, be an easy course, or filled only with success. There are those games which we lose, those races in which we finish last, and those promotions which never come. Such experiences provide an opportunity for us to show our determination and to rise above disappointment.
My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate.~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42
Experience teaches is such a lovely saying. However, when people try not to make the mistakes of what history and experience has taught, they are criticized for it. They are told that because they have not experienced it, they cannot appreciate it, and thus never know it. However, at the same time, people want you to learn from past mistakes and past experiences, in order to make a better choice for yourself. So let me ask you, which is the hypocrite? Is it history or is it today?
If we can widen the range of experiences beyond what we as individuals have encountered, if we can draw upon the experiences of others who've had to confront comparable situations in the past, then - although there are no guarantees - our chances of acting wisely should increase proportionately.
In AA we don’t come to God through theology but through experience, mostly of the humbling and humiliating variety, often reluctantly, and sometimes even kicking and screaming. – p. 179
I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.
...on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured.
In never-ending efforts to defeat incumbent officeholders in hard times, the public is perpetuating the source of its discontent, electing a new group of people who are even less inclined to or capable of crafting compromise or solutions to pressing problems.
Its always hard to find out that a person you once considered a great friend has completely turned their back on you. Life is full of surprises, some good and some bad. From my experience, bumping into bad ones never gets easier, but you learn to expect it, learn from it, and move on. Thats the only thing we can do... is move on.
Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.
For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading - used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like everyone about her, to accept this monstrous existence almost as though it were normal. The dazed, witless feeling that she had known on the way to the hopfields had come back upon her more strongly than before. It is the common effect of sleeplessness and still more of exposure. To live continuously in the open air, never going under a roof for more than an hour or two, blurs your perceptions like a strong light glaring in your eyes or a noise drumming in your ears. You act and plan and suffer, and yet all the while it is as though everything were a little out of focus, a little unreal. The world, inner and outer, grows dimmer till it reaches almost the vagueness of a dream.
To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to these senses – ribelli ad essi sensi – such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention. And in fact it happens that whenever reason is wanting men to cry out against one another, which does not happen with certainties. For this reason we shall say that where the cry of controversy is heard, there is no true science, because the truth has one single end and when this is published, argument is destroyed for ever.
What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?
Now, we see what we are shown. We have gotten used to being shown no matter what, within or beyond the limited range of human sight. This habituation to the monopoly of visualization-on-command strongly suggests that only those things that can in some way be visualized, recorded, and replayed at will are part of reality...The result is a strange mistrusts of our own eyes, a disposition to take as real only that which is mechanically displayed in a photograph, a statistical curve, or a table. Eyewitness testimony must be "substantiated" by records that have been acquired, and can be stored and then shown.
You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.
It is the mythic experience, the mythic imagination that opens, reveals depth and mystery, which places the human in the context of the nonhuman, and so, forces retreat, humility, and awe, in the presence of spaces beyond our will.