TERMS STARTING WITH
Construction, Psychological: (In contrast to Logical) A framework devised by the common-sense, scientific or philosophical imagination for the integration of diverse empirical data. In contrast to an hypothesis, a construction is not an inference from experience but is an arbitrary scheme which, though presumably not a true picture of the actual state of affairs, satisfies the human imagination and promotes further investigation. Perceptual objects, space and time, physical atoms, electrons, etc. as well as philosophical world-views, have by certain philosophers been called logical constructs. (Cf. B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Ch. IV.) -- L.W.
constructional ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or deduced from, construction or interpretation.
constructionist ::: n. --> One who puts a certain construction upon some writing or instrument, as the Constitutions of the United States; as, a strict constructionist; a broad constructionist.
construction ::: n. --> The process or art of constructing; the act of building; erection; the act of devising and forming; fabrication; composition.
The form or manner of building or putting together the parts of anything; structure; arrangement.
The arrangement and connection of words in a sentence; syntactical arrangement.
The method of construing, interpreting, or explaining
constructions ::: things fashioned or devised systematically.
construction: The study of geometric figures which can be constructed using an idealised version of real world compasses and rulers (straight edge).
TERMS ANYWHERE
Acacia Tortilis ::: A tree prevalent in the southern wadis (valleys) of Israel and used in the construction of the Holy Temple and tabernacle.
According to an important theorem of Gödel, the functional calculus of order omega with the axiom of infinity added, if consistent, is incomplete in the sense that there are formulas A containing no free variables, such that neither A nor ∼A is a theorem. The same thing holds of any logistic system obtained by adding new primitive formulas and primitive rules of inference, provided only that the effective (recursive) character of the formal construction of the system is retained. Thus the system is not only incomplete but, in the indicated sense, incompletable. The same thing holds also of a large variety of logistic systems which could be considered as acceptable substitutes for the functional calculus of order omega with axiom of infinity; in particular the Zermelo set theory (§ 9 below) is in the same sense incomplete and incompletable.
A common construction for the ordered pair (a,b) = { a , {a,b} }
Activities conducted after a Superfund site action is completed to ensure that the action is effective. Actions taken after construction to assure that facilities constructed to treat waste water will be properly operated and maintained to achieve normative efficiency levels and prescribed effluent limitations in an optimum manner. On-going asbestos management plan in a school or other public building, including regular inspections, various methods of maintaining asbestos in place, and removal when necessary.
Ada 95 "language" A revision and extension of {Ada} (Ada 83) begun in 1988 and completed on 1994-12-01 by a team lead by Tucker Taft of {Intermetrics}. Chris Anderson was the Project Manager. The printed standard was expected to be available around 1995-02-15. Additions include {object-orientation} ({tagged types}, {abstract types} and {class-wide types}), hierarchical libraries and synchronisation with shared data (protected types) similar to {Orca}. It lacks {multiple inheritance} but supports the construction of multiple inheritance type hierarchies through the use of {generics} and {type composition}. {GNAT} aims to be a free implementation of Ada 95. You can get the standard from the {Ada Joint Program Office (http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/ada/ajpo/index.shtml)}. ["Introducing Ada 9X", J.G.P. Barnes, Feb 1993]. (1999-12-02)
Ada 95 ::: (language) A revision and extension of Ada (Ada 83) begun in 1988 and completed on 1994-12-01 by a team lead by Tucker Taft of Intermetrics. Chris Anderson was the Project Manager. The printed standard was expected to be available around 1995-02-15.Additions include object-orientation (tagged types, abstract types and class-wide types), hierarchical libraries and synchronisation with shared data the construction of multiple inheritance type hierarchies through the use of generics and type composition.GNAT aims to be a free implementation of Ada 95.You can get the standard from the .[Introducing Ada 9X, J.G.P. Barnes, Feb 1993]. (1999-12-02)
Advance - Normally refers to an amount paid before has been earned. e.g. payment ahead of actual expenditures on a construction project.
agamas. ::: Saiva scriptures that describe the rules and procedures for image worship, which include temple construction, installation and consecration of the deities, methods of performing pujas in the temples, philosophy, recitation of mantras, worship involving figures or yantras and bhakti yoga
Alan Turing ::: (person) Alan M. Turing, 1912-06-22/3? - 1954-06-07. A British mathematician, inventor of the Turing Machine. Turing also proposed the Turing test. Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science.Turing was a student and fellow of King's College Cambridge and was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938. While at Princeton Turing published On Computable Numbers, a paper in which he conceived an abstract machine, now called a Turing Machine.Turing returned to England in 1938 and during World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. He masterminded operations at Bletchley Park, UK which perform many repetitive symbolic manipulations quickly. Before the building of the Colossus computer this work was done by a roomful of women.In 1945 he joined the National Physical Laboratory in London and worked on the design and construction of a large computer, named Automatic Computing Engine Manchester where the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, the worlds largest memory computer, was being built.He also worked on theories of artificial intelligence, and on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms.Turing was gay, and died rather young under mysterious circumstances. He was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952. He died of inquest concluded that it was self-administered but it is now thought by some to have been an accident.There is an excellent biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges, subtitled The Enigma of Intelligence and a play based on it called Breaking the Code. There was also a popular summary of his work in Douglas Hofstadter's book G�del, Escher, Bach. .(2001-10-09)
Alan Turing "person" Alan M. Turing, 1912-06-22/3? - 1954-06-07. A British mathematician, inventor of the {Turing Machine}. Turing also proposed the {Turing test}. Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science. Turing was a student and fellow of {King's College Cambridge} and was a graduate student at {Princeton University} from 1936 to 1938. While at Princeton Turing published "On Computable Numbers", a paper in which he conceived an {abstract machine}, now called a {Turing Machine}. Turing returned to England in 1938 and during World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. He masterminded operations at {Bletchley Park}, UK which were highly successful in cracking the Nazis "Enigma" codes during World War II. Some of his early advances in computer design were inspired by the need to perform many repetitive symbolic manipulations quickly. Before the building of the {Colossus} computer this work was done by a roomful of women. In 1945 he joined the {National Physical Laboratory} in London and worked on the design and construction of a large computer, named {Automatic Computing Engine} (ACE). In 1949 Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at Manchester where the {Manchester Automatic Digital Machine}, the worlds largest memory computer, was being built. He also worked on theories of {artificial intelligence}, and on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms. Turing was gay, and died rather young under mysterious circumstances. He was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952. He died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but it is now thought by some to have been an accident. There is an excellent biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges, subtitled "The Enigma of Intelligence" and a play based on it called "Breaking the Code". There was also a popular summary of his work in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach". {(http://AlanTuring.net/)}. (2001-10-09)
algebra: A branch of mathematics which studies the properties and resulting structures from applying operations on mathematical objects. While the motivation originates from the study of unknown numbers, algebra in modern mathematics has evloved to deal with a variety of abstract mathematical constructions.
ALGOL Y "language" A proposed successor to {ALGOL 60}, a "radical reconstruction". Originally a language that could manipulate its own programs at {run time}, it became a collection of features that were not accepted for {ALGOL X}. (1995-05-09)
ALGOL Y ::: (language) A proposed successor to ALGOL 60, a radical reconstruction. Originally a language that could manipulate its own programs at run time, it became a collection of features that were not accepted for ALGOL X. (1995-05-09)
"All ethics is a construction of good in a Nature which has been smitten with evil by the powers of darkness born of the Ignorance, . . . .” The Life Divine
“All ethics is a construction of good in a Nature which has been smitten with evil by the powers of darkness born of the Ignorance, …” The Life Divine
altar ::: n. --> A raised structure (as a square or oblong erection of stone or wood) on which sacrifices are offered or incense burned to a deity.
In the Christian church, a construction of stone, wood, or other material for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist; the communion table.
(a) Methodological: The epistemological doctrine which considers the individual self and it states the only possible or legitimate starting point for philosophical construction. See Cogito, ergo sum; Ego-centric predicament, Subjectivism.
Amphiboly: Any fallacy arising from ambiguity of grammatical construction (as distinguished from ambiguity of single words), a premiss being accepted, or proved, on the basis of one interpretation of the grammatical construction, and then used in a way which is correct only on the basis of another interpretation of the grammatical construction. -- A.C.
anacoluthon ::: n. --> A want of grammatical sequence or coherence in a sentence; an instance of a change of construction in a sentence so that the latter part does not syntactically correspond with the first part.
An expression A introduced by contextual definition -- i.e., by a definition which construes particular kinds of expressions containing A, as abbreviations or substitutes for certain expressions not containing A, but provides no such construction for A itself -- is an incomplete symbol in this sense. In Principia Mathematica, notations for classes, and descriptions (more correctly, notations which serve some of the purposes that would be served by notations for classes and by descriptions) are introduced in this way by contextual definition. -- A. C.
ANother Tool for Language Recognition "tool" (ANTLR) The {parser generator} in the {Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set}. (1995-10-26)
ANother Tool for Language Recognition ::: (tool) (ANTLR) The parser generator in the Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set. (1995-10-26)
aporia: A key term in deconstruction theory. Aporia defines the point where contradictory meanings in a text cause 'deconstruction' or the breakdown of a/the idea(s)
arch ::: 1. An upwardly curved construction, for spanning an opening, consisting of a number of wedgelike stones, bricks, or the like, set with the narrower side toward the opening in such a way that forces on the arch are transmitted as vertical or oblique stresses on either side of the opening, either capable of bearing weight or merely ornamental; 2. Something bowed or curved; any bowlike part: the arch of the foot. 3. An arched roof, door; gateway; vault; fig. the heavens. arches.
architectonical ::: a. --> Pertaining to a master builder, or to architecture; evincing skill in designing or construction; constructive.
Relating to the systemizing of knowledge.
architecture ::: 1. The profession of designing buildings and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. 2. The character or style of building. 3. Construction or structure generally. architectures.
architecture ::: n. --> The art or science of building; especially, the art of building houses, churches, bridges, and other structures, for the purposes of civil life; -- often called civil architecture.
Construction, in a more general sense; frame or structure; workmanship.
Ardeshan Zoroastrian teacher who, according to the Christian Eutychius, was appointed by Nimrod to watch the sacred fire. A voice from the fire told him that priests of the Magians must commit incest, which Blavatsky explains as a misconstruction of the idea of uniting oneself to the earth, our mother; humanity, our sister; and science, our daughter. (BCW 3:459)
Arjuna "language" An {object-oriented programming} system developed by a team led by Professor Santosh Shrivastava at the {University of Newcastle}, implemented entirely in {C++}. Arjuna provides a set of tools for the construction of {fault-tolerant} {distributed} applications. It exploits features found in most object-oriented languages (such as {inheritance}) and only requires a limited set of system capabilities commonly found in conventional {operating systems}. Arjuna provides the programmer with {classes} that implement {atomic transactions}, {object level recovery}, {concurrency} control and {persistence}. The system is {portable}, modular and flexible; the system software has been available via FTP since 1992. {(http://arjuna.ncl.ac.uk/)}. (1995-03-06)
Ars Combinatoria: (Leibniz) An art or technique of deriving or inventing complex concepts by a combination of a relatively few simple ones taken as primitive. This technique was proposed as a valuable subject for study by Leibniz in De Arte Combinatoria (1666) but was never greatly developed by him. Leibniz's program for logic consisted of two main projects: (1) the development of a universal characteristic (characteristica universalis), and (2) the development of a universal mathematics (mathesis universalis (q.v.). The universal characteristic was to be a universal language for scientists and philosophers. With a relatively few basic symbols for the ultimately simple ideas, and a suitable technique for constructing compound ideas out of the simple ones, Leibniz thought that a language could be constructed which would be much more efficient for reasoning and for communication than the vague, complicated, and more or less parochial languages then available. This language would be completely universal in the sense that all scientific and philosophical concepts could be expressed in it, and also in that it would enable scholars m all countries to communicate over the barriers of their vernacular tongues. Leibniz's proposals in this matter, and what work he did on it, are the grand predecessors of a vast amount of research which has been done in the last hundred years on the techniques of language construction, and specifically on the invention of formal rules and procedures for introducing new terms into a language on the basis of terms already present, the general project of constructing a unified language for science and philosophy. L. Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz, Paris, 1901; C. I. Lewis, A Survey of Symbolic Logic, Berkeley, 1918. -- F.L.W.
As against the faulty ethical procedures of the past and of his own day, therefore, Kant very early conceived and developed the more critical concept of "form," -- not in the sense of a "mould" into which content is to be poured (a notion which has falselv been taken over by Kant-students from his theoretical philosophy into his ethics), but -- as a method of rational (not ratiocinative, but inductive) reflection; a method undetermined by, although not irrespective of, empirical data or considerations. This methodologically formal conception constitutes Kant's major distinctive contribution to ethical theory. It is a process of rational reflection, creative construction, and transition, and as such is held by him to be the only method capable if coping with the exigencies of the facts of hunnn experience and with the needs of moral obligation. By this method of creative construction the reflective (inductive) reason is able to create, as each new need for a next reflectively chosen step arises, a new object of "pure" -- that is to say, empirically undetermined -- "practical reason." This makes possible the transition from a present no longer adequate ethical conception or attitude to an untried and as yet "indemonstrable" object. No other method can guarantee the individual and social conditions of progress without which the notion of morality loses all assignable meaning. The newly constructed object of "pure practical reason" is assumed, in the event, to provide a type of life and conduct which, just because it is of my own construction, will be likely to be accompanied by the feeling of self-sufficiency which is the basic pre-requisite of any worthy human happiness. It is this theory which constitutes Kant's ethical formalism. See also Autonomy, Categorical Imperative, Duty, End(s), Freedom, Happiness, Law, Moral, Practical Imperative, Will. -- P. A.S.
Asbestos ::: A mineral fiber that can pollute air or water and cause cancer or asbestosis when inhaled. EPA has banned or severely restricted its use in manufacturing and construction.
ASPEN "language" A {toy language} for teaching {compiler} construction. ["ASPEN Language Specifications", T.R. Wilcox, SIGPLAN Notices 12(11):70-87, Nov 1977]. (1994-11-30)
ASPEN ::: (language) A toy language for teaching compiler construction.[ASPEN Language Specifications, T.R. Wilcox, SIGPLAN Notices 12(11):70-87, Nov 1977]. (1994-11-30)
A view of the nature of mathematics which is widely different from any of the above is held by the school of mathematical intuitionism (q. v.). According to this school, mathematics is "identical with the exact part of our thought." "No science, not even philosophy or logic, can be a presupposition for mathematics. It would be circular to apply any philosophical or logical theorem as a means of proof in mathematics, since such theorems already presuppose for their formulation the construction of mathematical concepts. If mathematics is to be in this sense presupposition-free, then there remains for it no other source than an intuition which presents mathematical concepts and inferences to us as immediately clear. . . . [This intuition] is nothing else than the ability to treat separately certain concepts and inferences which regularly occur in ordinary thinking." This is quoted in translation from Heyting, who, in the same connection, characterizes the intuitionittic doctrine as asserting the existence of mathematical objects (Gegenstände), which are immediately grasped by thought, are independent of experience, and give to mathematics more than a mere formal content. But to these mathematical objects no existence is to be ascribed independent of thought. Elsewhere Heyting speaks of a relationship to Kant in the apriority ascribed to the natural numbers, or rather to the underlying ideas of one and the process of adding one and the indefinite repetition of the latter. At least in his earlier writings, Brouwer traces the doctrine of intuitionism directly to Kant. In 1912 he speaks of "abandoning Kant's apriority of space but adhering the more resolutely to the apriority of time" and in the same paper explicitly reaffirms Kant's opinion that mathematical judgments are synthetic and a priori.
Axieros, Axiokersa, Axiokersos, (Greek) Also Aschieros, Achiosera, Achiochersus. In ancient Greek mythology, three divinities whose Mysteries and worship were mainly centered in Samothrace. With Kadmilos, often said to be their parent, they were the kabiri [cf Chaldean gibbor, Hebrew geber beings of power or might, the great ones]. Frequently Axieros, Axiokersa, and Axiokersos are stated to be the offspring of Hephaestus or Vulcan, the fiery flame of creative cosmic intellect or mahat. The kabiri are equivalent to the four kumaras of Hindu literature — Sanat-kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana. The functions of both groups was as guardians, guides, inspirers, bringers of illumination and prosperity; and, in the kosmic sense, as divinities intimately involved in the intelligent productive energies of nature. Their number is the same as that of the kosmic elements — four, occasionally five, and in reality seven or ten. The four named above are the lower quaternary of the kosmic septenary — those divinities most closely involved in the intelligent building and architectural construction and therefore government of the four lower cosmic planes.
axiom "logic" A {well-formed formula} which is taken to be true without proof in the construction of a {theory}. Compare: {lemma}. (1995-03-31)
axiom ::: (logic) A well-formed formula which is taken to be true without proof in the construction of a theory.Compare: lemma. (1995-03-31)
Axiom of Choice "logic" (AC, or "Choice") An {axiom} of {set theory}: If X is a set of sets, and S is the union of all the elements of X, then there exists a function f:X -" S such that for all non-empty x in X, f(x) is an element of x. In other words, we can always choose an element from each set in a set of sets, simultaneously. Function f is a "choice function" for X - for each x in X, it chooses an element of x. Most people's reaction to AC is: "But of course that's true! From each set, just take the element that's biggest, stupidest, closest to the North Pole, or whatever". Indeed, for any {finite} set of sets, we can simply consider each set in turn and pick an arbitrary element in some such way. We can also construct a choice function for most simple {infinite sets} of sets if they are generated in some regular way. However, there are some infinite sets for which the construction or specification of such a choice function would never end because we would have to consider an infinite number of separate cases. For example, if we express the {real number} line R as the union of many "copies" of the {rational numbers}, Q, namely Q, Q+a, Q+b, and infinitely (in fact uncountably) many more, where a, b, etc. are {irrational numbers} no two of which differ by a rational, and Q+a == {q+a : q in Q} we cannot pick an element of each of these "copies" without AC. An example of the use of AC is the theorem which states that the {countable} union of countable sets is countable. I.e. if X is countable and every element of X is countable (including the possibility that they're finite), then the sumset of X is countable. AC is required for this to be true in general. Even if one accepts the axiom, it doesn't tell you how to construct a choice function, only that one exists. Most mathematicians are quite happy to use AC if they need it, but those who are careful will, at least, draw attention to the fact that they have used it. There is something a little odd about Choice, and it has some alarming consequences, so results which actually "need" it are somehow a bit suspicious, e.g. the {Banach-Tarski paradox}. On the other side, consider {Russell's Attic}. AC is not a {theorem} of {Zermelo Fränkel set theory} (ZF). Gödel and Paul Cohen proved that AC is independent of ZF, i.e. if ZF is consistent, then so are ZFC (ZF with AC) and ZF(~C) (ZF with the negation of AC). This means that we cannot use ZF to prove or disprove AC. (2003-07-11)
Axiom of Choice ::: (mathematics) (AC, or Choice) An axiom of set theory:If X is a set of sets, and S is the union of all the elements of X, then there exists a function f:X -> S such that for all non-empty x in X, f(x) is an element of x.In other words, we can always choose an element from each set in a set of sets, simultaneously.Function f is a choice function for X - for each x in X, it chooses an element of x.Most people's reaction to AC is: But of course that's true! From each set, just take the element that's biggest, stupidest, closest to the North Pole, or construction or specification of such a choice function would never end because we would have to consider an infinite number of separate cases.For example, if we express the real number line R as the union of many copies of the rational numbers, Q, namely Q, Q+a, Q+b, and infinitely (in fact uncountably) many more, where a, b, etc. are irrational numbers no two of which differ by a rational, and Q+a == {q+a : q in Q} we cannot pick an element of each of these copies without AC.An example of the use of AC is the theorem which states that the countable union of countable sets is countable. I.e. if X is countable and every element of X is countable (including the possibility that they're finite), then the sumset of X is countable. AC is required for this to be true in general.Even if one accepts the axiom, it doesn't tell you how to construct a choice function, only that one exists. Most mathematicians are quite happy to use AC if somehow a bit suspicious, e.g. the Banach-Tarski paradox. On the other side, consider Russell's Attic.AC is not a theorem of Zermelo Fr�nkel set theory (ZF). G�del and Paul Cohen proved that AC is independent of ZF, i.e. if ZF is consistent, then so are ZFC (ZF with AC) and ZF(~C) (ZF with the negation of AC). This means that we cannot use ZF to prove or disprove AC.(2003-07-11)
babel ::: “The reference is to the mythological story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, which appears to be an attempt to explain the diversity of human languages. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and tower ‘with its top in the heavens’. God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The tower was never completed and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo’s Works
babel ::: "The reference is to the mythological story of the construction of the Tower of Babel, which appears to be an attempt to explain the diversity of human languages. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and tower ‘with its top in the heavens". God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The tower was never completed and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo"s Works Sri Aurobindo: "The legend of the Tower of Babel speaks of the diversity of tongues as a curse laid on the race; but whatever its disadvantages, and they tend more and more to be minimised by the growth of civilisation and increasing intercourse, it has been rather a blessing than a curse, a gift to mankind rather than a disability laid upon it. The purposeless exaggeration of anything is always an evil, and an excessive pullulation of varying tongues that serve no purpose in the expression of a real diversity of spirit and culture is certainly a stumbling-block rather than a help: but this excess, though it existed in the past, is hardly a possibility of the future. The tendency is rather in the opposite direction. In former times diversity of language helped to create a barrier to knowledge and sympathy, was often made the pretext even of an actual antipathy and tended to a too rigid division. The lack of sufficient interpenetration kept up both a passive want of understanding and a fruitful crop of active misunderstandings. But this was an inevitable evil of a particular stage of growth, an exaggeration of the necessity that then existed for the vigorous development of strongly individualised group-souls in the human race. These disadvantages have not yet been abolished, but with closer intercourse and the growing desire of men and nations for the knowledge of each other"s thought and spirit and personality, they have diminished and tend to diminish more and more and there is no reason why in the end they should not become inoperative.” The Human Cycle
Bar-Lev Line ::: Israeli chief of staff Him Bar-Lev conceived of and implemented a defensive system on the Suez Canal’s eastern bank. The construction began in late 1968 and comprised 30 strongholds, only a limited number of which were full operation by the time the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. The purpose of the fortifications was to protect the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. This failed in the Yom Kippur War when Egypt overran them.
Construction, Psychological: (In contrast to Logical) A framework devised by the common-sense, scientific or philosophical imagination for the integration of diverse empirical data. In contrast to an hypothesis, a construction is not an inference from experience but is an arbitrary scheme which, though presumably not a true picture of the actual state of affairs, satisfies the human imagination and promotes further investigation. Perceptual objects, space and time, physical atoms, electrons, etc. as well as philosophical world-views, have by certain philosophers been called logical constructs. (Cf. B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Ch. IV.) -- L.W.
Being composite, at the death of the physical body the personal ego disintegrates, and at the next imbodiment a new personality is brought together by the reincarnating ego, although this new personality is but a reconstruction of the old personality with only such changes as have been brought about by the working of karma over time.
Belzec ::: One of the six extermination camps in Poland. Originally established in 1940 as a camp for Jewish forced labor, the Germans began construction of an extermination camp at Belzec on November 1, 1941, as part of Aktion Reinhard. By the time the camp ceased operations in January 1943, more than 600,000 persons had been murdered there.
Bhoot-dak, Bhut-dak [from Hindi bhūt ghost (cf Sanskrit bhūta) + ḍāk mail, post] Ghost-post; an Anglo-Indian English construction for a medium, bhuta here being synonymous with preta.
bitumen ::: n. --> Mineral pitch; a black, tarry substance, burning with a bright flame; Jew&
bobbin ::: n. --> A small pin, or cylinder, formerly of bone, now most commonly of wood, used in the making of pillow lace. Each thread is wound on a separate bobbin which hangs down holding the thread at a slight tension.
A spool or reel of various material and construction, with a head at one or both ends, and sometimes with a hole bored through its length by which it may be placed on a spindle or pivot. It is used to hold yarn or thread, as in spinning or warping machines, looms, sewing
Bond - 1. a written promise by a company, government, or other institution to pay the face amount at the maturity date. Periodic interest payments are usually required. Bonds are typically stated in $1000 denominations. Bonds may be secured by collateral or unsecured (debenture). A registered bond has the class="d-title" name of the owner on the issuer's records, whereas the holder of a bearer bond presents coupons for interest payments. Sinking fund bonds require the company to make annual deposits to a trustee. At maturity, the amount in the sinking fund (principal plus interest) is sufficient to pay the face of the bond. From the company's perspective, a bond issue has several advantages over a stock issue. Interest expense is tax deductible, whereas dividend payments are not. During inflation, debt is paid back in cheaper dollars. When bonds are issued at face value, the entry is to debit cash and credit bonds payable. When bonds are issued at a discount, such as with zero-coupon bonds, the entry is to debit cash and bond discount and credit bonds payable. The entry to record the interest each period is to debit interest expense and credit cash. Or 2. the cash or property given to assure performance (i.e., contractor depositing a performance bond on a construction project to be completed by a specified date). Or 3. type of insurance compensating employer for employee dishonesty.
Bones The hard tissues that constitute the framework or skeleton of the physical body. They have an organic matrix for the inorganic mineral salts, which go through cycles of dissolution, changed location, crystallization, and reconstruction. Mineral molecules dissolving in their matrix and re-forming themselves anew occurs at that zero-point of transition between the living mineral matter and that of the live animal tissue. This transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization is “the same function, and bears the same relation to its inorganic (so-called) upadhi (or basis) as the formation of cells to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man” (SD 2:255). The bones also furnish blood cells and mineral content to the blood stream. In the embryonic resume of racial imbodiments, the process of ossification appears after the progressive stages of its protoplasmic, gelatinous, and cartilaginous frames, analogous to those forms through which nascent humanity passed in the first two and one-half root-races. With the deposit of bones in the fetal framework, and its functional relation to the blood, and with the development of the placenta and of the organs in the mesoderm, the conditions review the gradual physicalization of the gelatinous androgynes of the early third root-race into the bisexual humanity with organized functions like the present mammalian type.
box ::: (computer) 1. A computer; especially in the construction foo box where foo is some functional qualifier, like graphics, or the name of an operating boxes before handing it up to the mainframe. The plural boxen is sometimes seen.2. Without qualification in an IBM SNA site, box refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor.[Jargon File] (1994-11-29)
box "computer" 1. A computer; especially in the construction "foo box" where foo is some functional qualifier, like "graphics", or the name of an {operating system} (thus, "{Unix} box", "{MS-DOS} box", etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up to the {mainframe}." The plural "{boxen}" is sometimes seen. 2. Without qualification in an {IBM} {SNA} site, "box" refers specifically to an {IBM} {front-end processor}. [{Jargon File}] (1994-11-29)
Buddhi (.Discrimination) ::: Buddhi is a construction of conscious being which quite exceeds its beginnings in the basic chitta; it is the intelligence with its power of knowledge and will. Buddhi takes up and deals with all the rest of the action of the mind and life and body. It is in its nature thought-power and will-power of the Spirit turned into the lower form of a mental activity. We may distinguish three successive gradations of the action of this intelligence. There is first an inferior perceptive understanding which simply takes up, records, understands and responds to the communications of the sense-mind, memory, heart and sensational mentality. It creates by their means an elementary thinking mind which does not go beyond their data, but subjects itself to their mould and rings out their repetitions, runs round and round in the habitual circle of thought and will suggested by them or follows, with an obedient subservience of the reason to the suggestions of life, any fresh determinations which may be offered to its perception and conception. Beyond this elementary understanding, which we all use to an enormous extent, there is a power of arranging or selecting reason and will-force of the intelligence which has for its action and aim an attempt to arrive at a plausible, sufficient, settled ordering of knowledge and will for the use of an intellectual conception of life. In spite of its more purely intellectual character this secondary or intermediate reason is really pragmatic in its intention. It creates a certain kind of intellectual structure, frame, rule into which it tries to cast the inner and outer life so as to use it with a certain mastery and government for the purposes of some kind of rational will. It is this reason which gives to our normal intellectual being our set aesthetic and ethical standards, our structures of opinion and our established norms of idea and purpose. It is highly developed and takes the primacy in all men of an at all developed understanding. But beyond it there is a reason, a highest action of the buddhi which concerns itself disinterestedly with a pursuit of pure truth and right knowledge; it seeks to discover the real Truth behind life and things and our apparent selves and to subject its will to the law of Truth. Few, if any of us, can use this highest reason with any purity, but the attempt to do it is the topmost capacity of the inner instrument, the antahkarana.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 651-52
Buddhi is a construction of conscious being which quite exceeds its beginnings in the basic chitta; it is the intelligence with its power of knowledge and will. Buddhi takes up and deals with all the rest of the action of the mind and life and body. It is in its nature thought-power and will-power of the Spirit turned into the lower form of a mental activity. We may distinguish three successive gradations of the action of this intelligence. There is first an inferior perceptive understanding which simply takes up, records, understands and responds to the communications of the sense-mind, memory, heart and sensational mentality. It creates by their means an elementary thinking mind which does not go beyond their data, but subjects itself to their mould and rings out their repetitions, runs round and round in the habitual circle of thought and will suggested by them or follows, with an obedient subservience of the reason to the suggestions of life, any fresh determinations which may be offered to its perception and conception. Beyond this elementary understanding, which we all use to an enormous extent, there is a power of arranging or selecting reason and will-force of the intelligence which has for its action and aim an attempt to arrive at a plausible, sufficient, settled ordering of knowledge and will for the use of an intellectual conception of life. In spite of its more purely intellectual character this secondary or intermediate reason is really pragmatic in its intention It creates a certain kind of intellectual structure, frame, rule into which it tries to cast the inner and outer life so as to use it with a certain mastery and government for the purposes of some kind of rational will. It is this reason which gives to our normal intellectual being our set aesthetic and ethical standards, our structures of opinion and our established norms of idea and purpose. It is highly developed and takes the primacy in all men of an at all developed understanding. But beyond it there is a reason, a highest action of the buddhi which concerns itself disinterestedly with a pursuit of pure truth and right knowledge; it seeks to discover the real Truth behind life and things and our apparent selves and to subject its will to the law of Truth. Few, if any of us, can use this highest reason with any purity, but the attempt to do it is the topmost capacity of the inner instrument, the antahkarana.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 651-52
Bypass Road ::: Term created by the Oslo accords to refer to the new roads that Israel built in the occupied territories following the peace agreement with the Palestinians. These roads connected Israeli settlements with one another and with Israel. The costs incurred in the construction of the bypass roads were “security-related” expenses in implementing Israeli withdrawal. Therefore, they were excluded from US imposed conditions on the $10 billion loan guarantees.
caboose ::: n. --> A house on deck, where the cooking is done; -- commonly called the galley.
A car used on freight or construction trains for brakemen, workmen, etc.; a tool car.
calamistrum ::: n. --> A comblike structure on the metatarsus of the hind legs of certain spiders (Ciniflonidae), used to curl certain fibers in the construction of their webs.
Cambridge School: A term loosely applied to English philosophers who have been influenced by the teachings of Professor G. E. Moore (mainly in unpublished lectures delivered at the Cambridge University, 1911-1939). In earlier years Moore stressed the need to accept the judgments of "common sense" on such matters as the existence of other persons, of an "external world", etc. The business of the analytical philosopher was not to criticise such judgments but to display the structure of the facts to which they referred. (Cf. "A defense of common-sense in philosophy," Contemporary British Philosophy, 2 (1925) -- Moore's only discussion of the method.) Such analysis would be directional, terminating in basic or atomic facts, all of whose constituents might be known by acquaintance. The examples discussed were taken largely from the field of epistemology, turning often about the problem of the relation of material objects to sense-data, and of indirect to direct knowledge. In this earlier period problems were often suggested by Russell's discussion of descriptions and logical constructions. The inconclusiveness of such specific discussions and an increasingly critical awareness of the functions of language in philosophical analysis has in later years tended to favor more flexible interpretations of the nature of analysis. (Cf. M. Black, "Relations Between Logical Positivism and the Cambridge School of Analysis", Journal of Unified Science (Erkenntnis), 8, 24-35 for a bibliography and list of philosophers who have been most influenced by emphasis on directional analysis.) -- M.B.
canalization ::: n. --> Construction of, or furnishing with, a canal or canals.
Carnap's contributions to the study of epistemological and philosophical problems may be characterized as applications of the methods of logical analysis to the languages of everyday life and of science. His books contain applications to the fundamental problems of epistemology, expound the principles of physicalism (q.v.) which was developed by Carnap and Neurath and which offers, amongst others, a basis for a more cautious version of the ideas of older behaviorism and for the construction of one common unified language for all branches of empirical science (see Unity of Science). Main works: Logische Aufblou der Welt; Abriss der Logistik; Logische Syntax der Sprache "Testability and Meaning," Phil. of Sci. (1916). -- C.G.H.
carpentry ::: n. --> The art of cutting, framing, and joining timber, as in the construction of buildings.
An assemblage of pieces of timber connected by being framed together, as the pieces of a roof, floor, etc.; work done by a carpenter.
chantiers ::: unfinished construction sites; workshops.
charity ::: n. --> Love; universal benevolence; good will.
Liberality in judging of men and their actions; a disposition which inclines men to put the best construction on the words and actions of others.
Liberality to the poor and the suffering, to benevolent institutions, or to worthy causes; generosity.
Whatever is bestowed gratuitously on the needy or suffering for their relief; alms; any act of kindness.
chimney-piece ::: n. --> A decorative construction around the opening of a fireplace.
Ch'i wu: The equality of things and opinions, the identity of contraries. "Viewed from the standpoint of Tao, a beam and a pillar are identical. So are ugliness and beauty, greatness, wickedness, perverseness, and strangeness. Separation is the same as construction; construction is the same as destruction." Therefore the sages harmonize the systems of right and wrong, and rest in the equilibrium of nature (t'ien chun). "This is called following two courses at the same time." (Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.) -- W.T.C.
Cigale "language, tool" A {parser generator} language with extensible {syntax}. ["CIGALE: A Tool for Interactive Grammar Construction and Expression Parsing", F. Voisin, Sci Comp Prog 7:61-86, 1986]. (1999-01-14)
Cigale ::: (language, tool) A parser generator language with extensible syntax.[CIGALE: A Tool for Interactive Grammar Construction and Expression Parsing, F. Voisin, Sci Comp Prog 7:61-86, 1986]. (1999-01-14)
clause: In grammatical terminology, a clause is a word-construction containing a nominative and a predicate, i.e. a subject "doing" a verb. The term clause contrasts with the term phrase.
C. More formally, explanation is a step towards generalization or the establishment of a theory. It is the process of linking a statement of fact to its logical implications and consequences;or the process of fitting a statement of fact into a coherent system of statements extending beyond the given fact, or the construction of a logically related body of statements including the statement of fact to be justified. In the most general terms, explanation is the search for generalizations whose variables are functionally related in such a way that the value of any one variable is calculable from the value of the others, whether or not causal relations are noticeable or ultimately involved in the elements of the generalization. -- T.C.
Cocktail {GMD Toolbox for Compiler Construction}
Common Intermediate Language "language" (CIL) [Details?] ["Construction of a Transportable, Milti-Pass Compiler for Extended Pascal", G.J. Hansen et al, SIGPLAN Notices 14(8):117-126, Aug 1979]. (1994-10-24)
Common Intermediate Language ::: (language) (CIL)[Details?][Construction of a Transportable, Milti-Pass Compiler for Extended Pascal, G.J. Hansen et al, SIGPLAN Notices 14(8):117-126, Aug 1979]. (1994-10-24)
compacture ::: n. --> Close union or connection of parts; manner of joining; construction.
compile time ::: (programming) The period of time during which a program's source code is being translated into executable code, as opposed to run time when the program construction, performed by the linker, would generally also be classed as compile time but might be distinguished as link time.For example, static data in a C program is allocated at compile time whereas non-static data is allocated at run time, probably on the stack.(2004-09-28)
compile time "programming" The period of time during which a program's {source code} is being translated into {machine code}, as opposed to {run time} when the program is being executed. As well as the work done by the {compiler}, this may include macro preprocessing as done by {cpp} for example. The final stage of program construction, performed by the {linker}, would generally also be classed as compile time but might be distinguished as {link time}. For example, {static data} in a {C} program is allocated at compile time whereas non-static data is allocated at {run time}, typically on the {stack}. (2004-09-28)
Completed contract method of accounting - Profit is recognized only when a long-term construction contract is completed.
comprehend ::: v. t. --> To contain; to embrace; to include; as, the states comprehended in the Austrian Empire.
To take in or include by construction or implication; to comprise; to imply.
To take into the mind; to grasp with the understanding; to apprehend the meaning of; to understand.
conduct ::: n. --> The act or method of conducting; guidance; management.
Skillful guidance or management; generalship.
Convoy; escort; guard; guide.
That which carries or conveys anything; a channel; a conduit; an instrument.
The manner of guiding or carrying one&
consequence ::: “ Karma is nothing but the will of the Spirit in action, consequence nothing but the creation of will. What is in the will of being, expresses itself in karma and consequence. When the will is limited in mind, karma appears as a bondage and a limitation, consequence as a reaction or an imposition. But when the will of the being is infinite in the spirit, karma and consequence become instead the joy of the creative spirit, the construction of the eternal mechanist, the word and drama of the eternal poet, the harmony of the eternal musician, the play of the eternal child.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Consequent: See Antecedent. Consilience: Whewell calls "consilience of inductions" what occurs when a hypothesis gives us the "rule and reason" not only of the class of facts contemplated in its construction, but also, unexpectedly, of some class of facts altogether different. -- C.J.D.
constructed type ::: A type formed by applying some type constructor function to one or more other types. The usual constructions are functions: t1 -> t2, products: (t1, t2), sums: t1 + t2 and lifting: lift(t1).(In LaTeX, the lifted type is written with a subscript \perp).See also algebraic data type, primitive type. (1995-02-03)
constructed type "types" A {type} formed by applying some {type constructor function} to one or more other types. The usual constructions are functions: t1 -" t2, products: (t1, t2), sums: t1 + t2 and lifting: lift(t1). (In {LaTeX}, the lifted type is written with a subscript {\perp}). See also {algebraic data type}, {primitive type}. (1995-02-03)
Construct, Imaginative: (Lat. construere, to build) See Construction, Psychological. Construction: (Lat. constructio, from construere, to build) The mental process of devising imaginative constructs or the products of such constructional activities. A construction, in contrast to an ordinary hypothesis which professes to represent an actual state of affairs, is largely arbitrary and fictional. -- L.W.
constructional ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or deduced from, construction or interpretation.
constructionist ::: n. --> One who puts a certain construction upon some writing or instrument, as the Constitutions of the United States; as, a strict constructionist; a broad constructionist.
construction ::: n. --> The process or art of constructing; the act of building; erection; the act of devising and forming; fabrication; composition.
The form or manner of building or putting together the parts of anything; structure; arrangement.
The arrangement and connection of words in a sentence; syntactical arrangement.
The method of construing, interpreting, or explaining
constructions ::: things fashioned or devised systematically.
construction: The study of geometric figures which can be constructed using an idealised version of real world compasses and rulers (straight edge).
constructive ::: a. --> Having ability to construct or form; employed in construction; as, to exhibit constructive power.
Derived from, or depending on, construction or interpretation; not directly expressed, but inferred.
constructively ::: adv. --> In a constructive manner; by construction or inference.
construe ::: v. t. --> To apply the rules of syntax to (a sentence or clause) so as to exhibit the structure, arrangement, or connection of, or to discover the sense; to explain the construction of; to interpret; to translate.
To put a construction upon; to explain the sense or intention of; to interpret; to understand.
cornices ::: prominent, continuous, horizontally projecting features surmounting a wall or other construction, or dividing it horizontally for compositional purposes; i.e. to crown or complete a building.
crash and burn "jargon" A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators (compare {die horribly}). A {Sun-3} {display screen} losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on {VAX-11/780} backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. The construction "crash-and-burn machine" is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or {beta} testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e. not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced. [{Jargon File}] (1996-02-22)
crash and burn ::: (jargon) A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie Bullitt and many subsequent imitators (compare lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators.The construction crash-and-burn machine is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or beta testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e. not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if that machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.[Jargon File] (1996-02-22)
credit mobilier ::: --> A joint stock company, formed for general banking business, or for the construction of public works, by means of loans on personal estate, after the manner of the credit foncier on real estate. In practice, however, this distinction has not been strictly observed.
Dachau ::: Erected in 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Used mainly to incarcerate German political prisoners until late 1938, whereupon large numbers of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and other supposed enemies of the state and anti-social elements were sent as well. Nazi doctors and scientists used many prisoners at Dachau as guinea pigs for experiments. During the war, construction began on a gas chamber, but it never became operational. Dachau was liberated by American troops in April 1945.
Death ::: Death occurs when a general break-up of the constitution of man takes place; nor is this break-up amatter of sudden occurrence, with the exceptions of course of such cases as mortal accidents or suicides.Death is always preceded, varying in each individual case, by a certain time spent in the withdrawal ofthe monadic individuality from an incarnation, and this withdrawal of course takes place coincidentlywith a decay of the seven-principle being which man is in physical incarnation. This decay precedesphysical dissolution, and is a preparation of and by the consciousness-center for the forthcomingexistence in the invisible realms. This withdrawal actually is a preparation for the life to come ininvisible realms, and as the septenary entity on this earth so decays, it may truly be said to beapproaching rebirth in the next sphere.Death occurs, physically speaking, with the cessation of activity of the pulsating heart. There is the lastbeat, and this is followed by immediate, instantaneous unconsciousness, for nature is very merciful inthese things. But death is not yet complete, for the brain is the last organ of the physical body really todie, and for some time after the heart has ceased beating, the brain and its memory still remain activeand, although unconsciously so, the human ego for this short length of time, passes in review every eventof the preceding life. This great or small panoramic picture of the past is purely automatic, so to say; yetthe soul-consciousness of the reincarnating ego watches this wonderful review incident by incident, areview which includes the entire course of thought and action of the life just closed. The entity is, for thetime being, entirely unconscious of everything else except this. Temporarily it lives in the past, andmemory dislodges from the akasic record, so to speak, event after event, to the smallest detail: passesthem all in review, and in regular order from the beginning to the end, and thus sees all its past life as anall-inclusive panorama of picture succeeding picture.There are very definite ethical and psychological reasons inhering in this process, for this process forms areconstruction of both the good and the evil done in the past life, and imprints this strongly as a record onthe fabric of the spiritual memory of the passing being. Then the mortal and material portions sink intooblivion, while the reincarnating ego carries the best and noblest parts of these memories into thedevachan or heaven-world of postmortem rest and recuperation. Thus comes the end called death; andunconsciousness, complete and undisturbed, succeeds, until there occurs what the ancients called thesecond death.The lower triad (prana, linga-sarira, sthula-sarira) is now definitely cast off, and the remaining quaternaryis free. The physical body of the lower triad follows the course of natural decay, and its various hosts oflife-atoms proceed whither their natural attractions draw them. The linga-sarira or model-body remains inthe astral realms, and finally fades out. The life-atoms of the prana, or electrical field, fly instantly backat the moment of physical dissolution to the natural pranic reservoirs of the planet.This leaves man, therefore, no longer a heptad or septenary entity, but a quaternary consisting of theupper duad (atma-buddhi) and the intermediate duad (manas-kama). The second death then takes place.Death and the adjective dead are mere words by which the human mind seeks to express thoughts whichit gathers from a more or less consistent observation of the phenomena of the material world. Death isdissolution of a component entity or thing. The dead, therefore, are merely dissolving bodies -- entitieswhich have reached their term on this our physical plane. Dissolution is common to all things, becauseall physical things are composite: they are not absolute things. They are born; they grow; they reachmaturity; they enjoy, as the expression runs, a certain term of life in the full bloom of their powers; thenthey "die." That is the ordinary way of expressing what men call death; and the corresponding adjectiveis dead, when we say that such things or entities are dead.Do you find death per se anywhere? No. You find nothing but action; you find nothing but movement;you find nothing but change. Nothing stands still or is annihilated. What is called death itself shouts forthto us the fact of movement and change. Absolute inertia is unknown in nature or in the human mind; itdoes not exist.
decision problem: A problem whose construction only accepts a "yes or no" answer which is dependent entirely on only the parameters of the problem. (Although the answer may not be actually known, decidable or known to be decidable.)
deconstruction: The approach whereby any text is unfolded and meticulously investigated for its meaning, to the point where the base of the text is exposed as unstable. The term was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. See post-structuralism and aporia.
delicacy ::: fineness of appearance, construction or execution; elegance.
delicate ::: 1. Distinguishing subtle differences. 2. Of instruments: precise, skilled, or sensitive in action or operation. 3. Marked by sensitivity of discrimination and skillful in expression, technique, etc. 4. Exquisitely or beautifully fine in texture, construction, or finish. 5. Exquisite, fine, or subtle in quality, character, construction, etc. 6. (of colour, tone, taste, etc.) Pleasantly subtle, soft, or faint.
delta ::: 1. A quantitative change, especially a small or incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). I just doubled the speed of my program! What was the delta on program size? About 30 percent. (He doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.)2. [Unix] A diff, especially a diff stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System). See change management.3. A small quantity, but not as small as epsilon. The jargon usage of delta and epsilon stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very Common constructions include within delta of ---, within epsilon of ---: that is, close to and even closer to.[Jargon File](2000-08-02)
delta 1. A quantitative change, especially a small or incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program size?" "About 30 percent." (He doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only 30 percent.) 2. [Unix] A {diff}, especially a {diff} stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System). See {change management}. 3. A small quantity, but not as small as {epsilon}. The jargon usage of {delta} and {epsilon} stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities, particularly in "epsilon-delta" proofs in limit theory (as in the differential calculus). The term {delta} is often used, once {epsilon} has been mentioned, to mean a quantity that is slightly bigger than {epsilon} but still very small. "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Common constructions include "within delta of ---", "within epsilon of ---": that is, "close to" and "even closer to". [{Jargon File}] (2000-08-02)
demolition ::: n. --> The act of overthrowing, pulling down, or destroying a pile or structure; destruction by violence; utter overthrow; -- opposed to construction; as, the demolition of a house, of military works, of a town, or of hopes.
deosil">Deosil A clockwise movement, symbolic of life, positive energies and good. The majority of rituals, ceremonies and spells, normally call for deosil movement at some point in their construction. See also Widdershins.
Dewey, John: (1859-) Leading American philosopher. The spirit of democracy and an abiding faith in the efficacy of human intelligence run through the many pages he has presented in the diverse fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, psychology, aesthetics, religion, ethics, politics and education, in all of which he has spoken with authority. Progressive education owes its impetus to his guidance and its tenets largely to his formulation. He is the chief exponent of that branch of pragmatism known as instrumentalism. Among his main works are Psychology, 1886; Outline of Ethics, 1891; Studies in Logical Theory, 1903; Ethics (Dewey and Tufts), 1908; How We Think, 1910; Influence of Darwin on German Philosophy, 1910; Democracy and Education, 1916; Essays in Experimental Logic, 1916; Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920; Human Nature and Conduct, 1922; Experience and Nature, 1925; The Quest for Certainty, 1929; Art as Experience, 1933; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1939. Cf. J. Ratner, The Philosophy of John Dewey, 1940, M. H. Thomas, A Bibliography of John Dewey, 1882-1939, The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, 1940). Dharma: (Skr.) Right, virtue, duty, usage, law, social as well as cosmic. -- K.F.L.
Dialectic: (Gr. dia + legein, discourse) The beginning of dialectic Aristotle is said to have attributed to Zeno of Elea. But as the art of debate by question and answer, its beginning is usually associated with the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues. As conceived by Plato himself, dialectic is the science of first principles which differs from other sciences by dispensing with hypotheses and is, consequently, "the copingstone of the sciences" -- the highest, because the clearest and hence the ultimate, sort of knowledge. Aristotle distinguishes between dialectical reasoning, which proceeds syllogistically from opinions generally accepted, and demonstrative reasoning, which begins with primary and true premises; but he holds that dialectical reasoning, in contrast with eristic, is "a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries." In modern philosophy, dialectic has two special meanings. Kant uses it as the name of that part of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft which deals critically with the special difficulties (antinomies, paralogisms and Ideas) arising out of the futile attempt (transcendental illusion) to apply the categories of the Understanding beyond the only realm to which they can apply, namely, the realm of objects in space and time (Phenomena). For Hegel, dialectic is primarily the distinguishing characteristic of speculative thought -- thought, that is, which exhibits the structure of its subject-matter (the universal, system) through the construction of synthetic categories (synthesis) which resolve (sublate) the opposition between other conflicting categories (theses and antitheses) of the same subject-matter. -- G.W.C.
diction ::: n. --> Choice of words for the expression of ideas; the construction, disposition, and application of words in discourse, with regard to clearness, accuracy, variety, etc.; mode of expression; language; as, the diction of Chaucer&
DLG (DFA-based Lexical analyser Generator) The {lexical analyser} generator in the {Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set}.
DLG ::: (DFA-based Lexical analyser Generator) The lexical analyser generator in the Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set.
doc /dok/ Common spoken and written shorthand for "documentation". Often used in the plural "docs" and in the construction "doc file" (i.e. documentation available on-line). [{Jargon File}]
Dogma: The Greek term signified a public ordinance of decree, also an opinion. A present meaning: an established, or generally admitted, philosophic opinion explicitly formulated, in a depreciative sense; one accepted on authority without the support of demonstration or experience. Kant calls a directly synthetical proposition grounded on concepts a dogma which he distinguishes from a mathema, which is a similar proposition effected by a construction of concepts. In the history of Christianity dogmas have come to mean definition of revealed truths proposed by the supreme authority of the Church as articles of faith which must be accepted by all its members. -- J.J.R.
earthwork ::: n. --> Any construction, whether a temporary breastwork or permanent fortification, for attack or defense, the material of which is chiefly earth.
The operation connected with excavations and embankments of earth in preparing foundations of buildings, in constructing canals, railroads, etc.
An embankment or construction made of earth.
eat flaming death ::: A construction popularised among hackers by the infamous CPU Wars comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda media pigs; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility. Eat flaming death, EBCDIC users![Jargon File]
eat flaming death "humour, abuse" A construction popularised among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {EBCDIC} users!" [{Jargon File}] (2006-12-12)
EDI analyst "job" A person who introduces {EDI} {standards} and technology. An EDI analyst makes decisions for information construction and selects resources for EDI processing and application expansion. He coordinates processing and transmission schedules and mapping of standard data formats. He generally serves as a key contact for trading partners and value-added network consultants. (2004-03-11)
EDI analyst ::: (job) A person who introduces EDI standards and technology. An EDI analyst makes decisions for information construction and selects resources for transmission schedules and mapping of standard data formats. He generally serves as a key contact for trading partners and value-added network consultants.(2004-03-11)
Effort ::: The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender." And "rejection of the movements of the lower nature—rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions,
references, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind,—rejection of the vital nature’s desires . . .", etc.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 110
Eiffel source checker A compiler {front-end} for {Eiffel} 3 by Olaf Langmack "langmack@inf.fu-berlin.de" and Burghardt Groeber. It was generated automatically with the {Karlsruhe toolbox} for compiler construction according to the most recent public language definition. The {parser} derives an easy-to-use {abstract syntax tree}, supports elementary error recovery and provides a precise source code indication of errors. It performs a strict syntax check and analyses 4000 lines of source code per second on a {Sun} {SPARC} {workstation}. {(ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/heron/ep.tar.Z)}. (1992-12-14)
elastic constants: Parameters for the properties or behaviour of components of a system relative to other components (due to its material, construction etc.) under influence of forces.
Eli Compiler Construction System "tool" A compiler generation package which integrates off-the-shelf tools and libraries with specialised language processors to generate complete compilers quickly and reliably. It simplifies the development of new special-purpose languages, implementation of existing languages on new hardware and extension of the constructs and features of existing languages. It runs on {Sun-4} {SunOS} 4, 5, {Ultrix}/{MIPS}, {RS/6000}, {HP-UX}, {SGI}, {Linux}. {Colorado U (ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/eli/)}. {Europe (ftp://ftp.upb.de/unix/eli)}. Mailing list: "eli-request@cs.colorado.edu". E-mail: "compiler@uni-paderborn.de", Developers "elibugs@cs.colorado.edu", Users "eli@cs.colorado.edu". (2000-08-12)
Eli Compiler Construction System ::: (tool) A compiler generation package which integrates off-the-shelf tools and libraries with specialised language processors to generate complete special-purpose languages, implementation of existing languages on new hardware and extension of the constructs and features of existing languages.It runs on Sun-4 SunOS 4, 5, Ultrix/MIPS, RS/6000, HP-UX, SGI, Linux.Latest version 4.3.1, as of 2000-08-07 . .Mailing list: .E-mail: , Developers .(2000-08-12)
Enforcement ::: EPA, state, or local legal actions to obtain compliance with environmental laws, rules, regulations, or agreements and/or obtain penalties or criminal sanctions for violations. Enforcement procedures may vary, depending on the requirements of different environmental laws and related implementing regulations. Under CERCLA, for example, EPA will seek to require potentially responsible parties to clean up a Superfund site, or pay for the cleanup, whereas under the Clean Air Act the agency may invoke sanctions against cities failing to meet ambient air quality standards that could prevent certain types of construction or federal funding. In other situations, if investigations by EPA and state agencies uncover willful violations, criminal trials and penalties are sought.
EOU "character, humour" The mnemonic of a mythical {ASCII} control character (End Of User) that would make an {ASR-33} {Teletype} explode on receipt. This construction parodies the numerous obscure {delimiter} and control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g. {FS}, {GS}, {RS}, {US}, {EM}, {SUB}, {ETX}, and especially {EOT}). It is worth remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in front of a {tube} or flatscreen today. [{Jargon File}] (1996-06-29)
Esthesis: (Gr. aisthesis, sensation or feeling, from aisthanesthai, to perceive) A state of pure feeling -- sensuous, hedonic or affective -- characterized by the absence of conceptual and interpretational elements. Aesthesis at the sensory level consists of pure sense data. See Sense datum. Though the existence of pure esthesis is challenged by most psychologists and epistemologists (see C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, pp. 54-5); a state of mind approximates pure esthesis when the conceptual, interpretative and constructional elements are reduced to a minimum. -- L.W.
(e) The problem of the A PRIORI, though the especial concern of the rationalist, confronts the empiricist also since few epistemologists are prepared to exclude the a priori entirely from their accounts of knowledge. The problem is that of isolating the a priori or non-empirical elements in knowledge and accounting for them in terms of the human reason. Three principal theories of the a priori have been advanced: the theory of the intrinsic A PRIORI which asserts that the basic principles of logic, mathematics, natural sciences and philosophy are self-evident truths recognizable by such intrinsic traits as clarity and distinctness of ideas. The intrinsic theory received its definitive modern expression in the theory of "innate ideas" (q.v.) of Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes, and 17th century rationalism. The presuppositional theory of the a priori which validates a priori truths by demonstrating that they are presupposed either by their attempted denial (Leibniz) or by the very possibility of experience (Kant). The postulational theory of the A PRIORI elaborated under the influence of recent postulational techniques in mathematics, interprets a priori principles as rules or postulates arbitrarily posited in the construction of formal deductive systems. See Postulate; Posit. (f) The problem of differentiating the principal kinds of knowledge is an essential task especially for an empirical epistemology. Perhaps the most elementary epistemological distinction is between non-inferential apprehension of objects by perception, memory, etc. (see Knowledge by Acquaintance), and inferential knowledge of things with which the knowing subject has no direct apprehension. See Knowledge by Description. Acquaintance in turn assumes two principal forms: perception or acquaintance with external objects (see Perception), and introspection or the subject's acquaintance with the "self" and its cognitive, volitional and affective states. See Introspection; Reflection. Inferential knowledge includes knowledge of other selves (this is not to deny that knowledge of other minds may at times be immediate and non-inferential), historical knowledge, including not only history in the narrower sense but also astronomical, biological, anthropological and archaeological and even cosmological reconstructions of the past and finally scientific knowledge in so far as it involves inference and construction from observational data.
Eucken, Rudolf: (1846-1926) Being a writer of wide popularity, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908, Eucken defends a spiritualistic-idealistic metaphysics against materialistic naturalism, positivism and mechanism. Spiritual life, not being an oppositionless experience, is a struggle, a self-asserting action by resistance, a matter of great alternatives, either-ors between the natural and the spiritual, a matter of vital choice. Thus all significant oppositions are, within spiritual life itself, at once created and overcome. Immanence and transcendence, personalism and absolutism are the two native spiritual oppositions that agitate Eucken's system. Reconciliation between the vital dualities therefore depends not on mere intellectual insight, but on personal effort, courageous, heroic, militant and devoted action. He handles the basic oppositions of experience in harmony with the activist tenor of liberal Protestantism. Eucken sought to replace the prevailing intellectualistic idealism by an activistic idealism, founded on a comprehensive and historical consideration of culture at large. He sought to interpret the spiritual content of historical movements. He conceived of historical facts as being so many systematized wholes of life, for which he coined the term syntagma. His distinctive historical method consists of the reductive and the noological aspects. The former considers the parts directly in relation to an inward whole. The latter is an inner dialectic and immanent criticism of the inward principles of great minds, embracing the cosmologicnl and psychological ways of philosophical construction and transcending by the concept of spiritual life the opposition of the world and the individual soul. Preaching the need of a cultural renewal, not a few of his popularized ideas found their more articulated form in the philosophical sociology of his most eminent pupil, Max Scheler, in the cultural psychology of both Spranger and Spengler. His philosophy is essentially a call to arms against the deadening influences of modern life. -- H.H.
Euclidean construction: Geometric construction using only straight edges and compasses. Also known as geometric construction or simply a straightedge and compass construction..
extrapolation: Constructing new values by use of existing values whose arguments (the independent variable) are all greater or all less than (but not both) the new construction. As opposed to interpolation.
extruction ::: n. --> A building up; construction.
fabrication ::: n. --> The act of fabricating, framing, or constructing; construction; manufacture; as, the fabrication of a bridge, a church, or a government.
That which is fabricated; a falsehood; as, the story is doubtless a fabrication.
fabric ::: n. --> The structure of anything; the manner in which the parts of a thing are united; workmanship; texture; make; as cloth of a beautiful fabric.
That which is fabricated
Framework; structure; edifice; building.
Cloth of any kind that is woven or knit from fibers, either vegetable or animal; manufactured cloth; as, silks or other fabrics.
The act of constructing; construction.
feedback ::: (electronics) Part of a system output presented at its input. Feedback may be unintended. When used as a design feature, the output is usually transformed by passive components which attenuate it in some manner; the result is then presented at the system input.Feedback is positive or negative, depending on the sign with which a positive change in the original input reappears after transformation. Negative feedback largely a function of the feedback transformation and only minimally a function of factors such as transistor gain which are imperfectly known.Positive feedback can lead to instability; it finds wide application in the construction of oscillators.Feedback can be used to control a system, as in feedback control. (1996-01-02)
feedback "electronics" Part of a system output presented at its input. Feedback may be unintended. When used as a design feature, the output is usually transformed by passive components which attenuate it in some manner; the result is then presented at the system input. Feedback is positive or negative, depending on the sign with which a positive change in the original input reappears after transformation. Negative feedback was invented by Black to stabilise {vacuum tube} amplifiers. The behaviour becomes largely a function of the feedback transformation and only minimally a function of factors such as transistor gain which are imperfectly known. Positive feedback can lead to instability; it finds wide application in the construction of oscillators. Feedback can be used to control a system, as in {feedback control}. (1996-01-02)
Ferroelectric Random Access Memory "storage" (FRAM) A type of {non-volatile} read/write {random access} {semiconductor} memory. FRAM combines the advantages of {SRAM} - writing is roughly as fast as reading, and {EPROM} - non-volatility and in-circuit programmability. Current (Feb 1997) disadvantages are high cost and low density, but that may change in the future. Density is currently at most 32KB on a chip, compared with 512KB for SRAM, 1MB for EPROM and 8MB for DRAM. A ferroelectric memory cell consists of a ferroelectric {capacitor} and a {MOS} {transistor}. Its construction is similar to the storage cell of a {DRAM}. The difference is in the dielectric properties of the material between the capacitor's electrodes. This material has a high dielectric constant and can be polarized by an electric field. The polarisation remains until it gets reversed by an opposite electrical field. This makes the memory non-volatile. Note that ferroelectric material, despite its name, does not necessarily contain iron. The most well-known ferroelectric substance is BaTiO3, which does not contain iron. Data is read by applying an electric field to the capacitor. If this switches the cell into the opposite state (flipping over the electrical dipoles in the ferroelectric material) then more charge is moved than if the cell was not flipped. This can be detected and amplified by sense amplifiers. Reading destroys the contents of a cell which must therefore be written back after a read. This is similar to the {precharge} operation in DRAM, though it only needs to be done after a read rather than periodically as with DRAM {refresh}. In fact it is most like the operation of {ferrite core memory}. FRAM has similar applications to EEPROM, but can be written much faster. The simplicity of the memory cell promises high density devices which can compete with DRAM. {RAMTRON} is the company behind FRAM. (1997-02-17)
Ferroelectric Random Access Memory ::: (storage) (FRAM) A type of non-volatile read/write random access semiconductor memory. FRAM combines the advantages of SRAM - writing is roughly change in the future. Density is currently at most 32KB on a chip, compared with 512KB for SRAM, 1MB for EPROM and 8MB for DRAM.A ferroelectric memory cell consists of a ferroelectric capacitor and a MOS transistor. Its construction is similar to the storage cell of a DRAM. The ferroelectric material, despite its name, does not necessarily contain iron. The most well-known ferroelectric substance is BaTiO3, which does not contain iron.Data is read by applying an electric field to the capacitor. If this switches the cell into the opposite state (flipping over the electrical dipoles in the to be done after a read rather than periodically as with DRAM refresh. In fact it is most like the operation of ferrite core memory.FRAM has similar applications to EEPROM, but can be written much faster. The simplicity of the memory cell promises high density devices which can compete with DRAM.RAMTRON is the company behind FRAM. (1997-02-17)
Fictionism: An extreme form of pragmatism or instrumentalism according to which the basic concepts and principles of natural science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, religion and jurisprudence are pure fictions which, though lacking objective truth, are useful instruments of action. The theory is advanced under the influence of Kant, by the German philosopher H. Vaihinger in his Philosophie des Als Ob, 1911. Philosophv of the "As If." English translation by C. K. Ogden.) See Fiction, Construction. -- L. W.
FICTIONS Mental fictions include all fancies, freaks, guesses, suppositions, assumptions, etc., as well as the hypotheses and theories of science, all being mental constructions that do not have all the facts put in their correct contexts. K 2.18.3
The content even of .lite thinking is for the most part made up of fictions
(conceptions without real correspondences), due to lack of facts about existence. It is only the facts of esoterics that make it possible to think in accordance with reality. K 1.20.7
Fifth An enhanced version of FORTH. M.S. Dissertation, Cliff Click "cliff@cs.rice.edu", Texas A&M, 1985. Available from the Software Construction Co, (409)696-5432.
Fifth ::: An enhanced version of FORTH. M.S. Dissertation, Cliff Click , Texas A&M, 1985. Available from the Software Construction Co, (409)696-5432.
firewall code 1. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make sure that the users can't do any damage. Since users always want to be able to do everything but never want to suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a firewall is a question not only of defensive coding but also of interface presentation, so that users don't even get curious about those corners of a system where they can burn themselves. 2. Any sanity check inserted to catch a {can't happen} error. Wise programmers often change code to fix a bug twice: once to fix the bug, and once to insert a firewall which would have arrested the bug before it did quite as much damage. [{Jargon File}]
flooring ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Floor ::: n. --> A platform; the bottom of a room; a floor; pavement. See Floor, n.
Material for the construction of a floor or floors.
fontology ({XEROX PARC}) The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new {fonts} (e.g. for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny. Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to "files" and "folders" - ESR [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-01)
fontology ::: (XEROX PARC) The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new fonts (e.g. for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example, that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to files and folders - ESR[Jargon File] (1994-12-01)
foo "jargon" /foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and files (especially {scratch files}). First on the standard list of {metasyntactic variables} used in {syntax} examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, quux, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}. The etymology of "foo" is obscure. When used in connection with "bar" it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym {FUBAR}, later bowdlerised to {foobar}. However, the use of the word "foo" itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. "FOO" often appeared in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip by Bill Holman. This surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American comics including "Everybody's" between about 1930 and 1952. FOO was often included on licence plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew". Allegedly, "FOO" and "BAR" also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!". Oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be related to the Chinese word "fu" (sometimes transliterated "foo"), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fu dogs"). Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's "oeuvre" have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language", compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this: FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost the entire staff of what became the {MIT} {AI LAB} was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there. Another correspondant cites the nautical construction "foo-foo" (or "poo-poo"), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical thing whose name has been forgotten, e.g. "foo-foo box", "foo-foo valve". This was common on ships by the early nineteenth century. Very probably, hackish "foo" had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish "feh" and/or English "fooey". [{Jargon File}] (1998-04-16)
foo ::: (jargon) /foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and files (especially scratch files). First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.The etymology of foo is obscure. When used in connection with bar it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR, later bowdlerised to foobar.However, the use of the word foo itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons.FOO often appeared in the Smokey Stover comic strip by Bill Holman. This surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American comics including plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames such as He who foos last foos best or Many smoke but foo men chew.Allegedly, FOO and BAR also occurred in Walt Kelly's Pogo strips. In the 1938 cartoon The Daffy Doc, a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign mean happiness when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called fu dogs).Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from FOO, Lampoons and Parody, the title of a comic book first copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's oeuvre have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.An old-time member reports that in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language, compiled at TMRC there was an entry that went something like this:FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase FOO MANE PADME HUM. Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC. Almost the entire staff of what became the MIT AI LAB was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.Another correspondant cites the nautical construction foo-foo (or poo-poo), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical thing whose name has been forgotten, e.g. foo-foo box, foo-foo valve. This was common on ships by the early nineteenth century.Very probably, hackish foo had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish feh and/or English fooey.[Jargon File] (1998-04-16)
formation ::: n. --> The act of giving form or shape to anything; a forming; a shaping.
The manner in which a thing is formed; structure; construction; conformation; form; as, the peculiar formation of the heart.
A substance formed or deposited.
Mineral deposits and rock masses designated with reference to their origin; as, the siliceous formation about geysers;
“For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations,—as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve.” The Life Divine
form ::: n. --> A suffix used to denote in the form / shape of, resembling, etc.; as, valiform; oviform.
The shape and structure of anything, as distinguished from the material of which it is composed; particular disposition or arrangement of matter, giving it individuality or distinctive character; configuration; figure; external appearance.
Constitution; mode of construction, organization, etc.; system; as, a republican form of government.
For the account given by Brouwerian intuitionism of the nature of mathematics, and the asserted priority of mathematics to logic and philosophy, see the article Mathematics. This account, with its reliance on the intuition of ordinary thinking and on the immediate evidence of mathematical concepts and inferences, and with its insistence on intuitively understandable construction as the only method for mathematical existence proofs, leads to a rejection of certain methods and assumptions of classical mathematics. In consequence, certain parts of classical mathematics have to be abandoned and others have to be reconstructed in different and often more complicated fashion.
framework ::: n. --> The work of framing, or the completed work; the frame or constructional part of anything; as, the framework of society.
Work done in, or by means of, a frame or loom.
freeze To lock an evolving software distribution or document against changes so it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries the strong implication that the item in question will "unfreeze" at some future date. There are more specific constructions on this term. A "feature freeze", for example, locks out modifications intended to introduce new features but still allows bugfixes and completion of existing features; a "code freeze" connotes no more changes at all. At {Sun Microsystems} and elsewhere, one may also hear references to "code slush" - that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state. [{Jargon File}]
freeze ::: To lock an evolving software distribution or document against changes so it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries the strong implication that the item in question will unfreeze at some future date.There are more specific constructions on this term. A feature freeze, for example, locks out modifications intended to introduce new features but still more changes at all. At Sun Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear references to code slush - that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state.[Jargon File]
frobnicate ::: /frob'ni-kayt/ (Possibly from frobnitz, and usually abbreviated to frob, but frobnicate is recognised as the official full form). To manipulate or adjust, the light switch (that is, flip it), but also Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it. One also sees the construction to frob a frob.Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum. Frob connotes aimless manipulation; twiddle connotes gross manipulation, knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant frobnosticate has also been reported. (1994-12-16)
frobnicate /frob'ni-kayt/ (Possibly from {frobnitz}, and usually abbreviated to {frob}, but "frobnicate" is recognised as the official full form). To manipulate or adjust, to {tweak}. One frequently frobs bits or other 2-state devices. Thus: "Please frob the light switch" (that is, flip it), but also "Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it". One also sees the construction "to frob a frob". Usage: frob, {twiddle}, and {tweak} sometimes connote points along a continuum. "Frob" connotes aimless manipulation; "twiddle" connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; "tweak" connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant "frobnosticate" has also been reported. (1994-12-16)
From this point the notion of Ich in the German idealistic tradition passes into voluntaristic channels, with emphasis on the dynamic will, as in Schopenhiuer, Eduard von Hartmann and Nietzsche; the pragmatic-psychologic interpretation, typified by Lotze and other post-idealists; and such reconstructions of the transcendental I as are to be found in the school of Husserl and related groups.
FX-90 "language" A language with partial type and effect reconstruction and {first-class} {modules}. (1995-01-31)
FX-90 ::: (language) A language with partial type and effect reconstruction and first-class modules. (1995-01-31)
gaydiang ::: n. --> A vessel of Anam, with two or three masts, lofty triangular sails, and in construction somewhat resembling a Chinese junk.
General Recursion Theorem "mathematics" {Cantor}'s {theorem}, originally stated for {ordinals}, which extends {inductive} proof to {recursive} construction. The proof is by pasting together "attempts" (partial solutions). [Better explanation?] (1995-06-15)
General Recursion Theorem ::: (mathematics) Cantor's theorem, originally stated for ordinals, which extends inductive proof to recursive construction. The proof is by pasting together attempts (partial solutions).[Better explanation?] (1995-06-15)
geometrize ::: v. i. --> To investigate or apprehend geometrical quantities or laws; to make geometrical constructions; to proceed in accordance with the principles of geometry.
GINA Generic Interactive Application. An {application framework} based on {Common Lisp} and {OSF}/{Motif}, designed to simplify the construction of graphical interactive applications. GINA consists of {CLM} - a language binding for {OSF}/{Motif} in {Common Lisp}; the GINA application framework - a {class library} in {CLOS}; the GINA interface builder - an interactive tool implemented with GINA to design {Motif} windows. Version 2.2 requires {OSF}/{Motif} 1.1 or better, {Common Lisp} with {CLX}, {CLOS}, {PCL} and processes. It runs with {Franz Allegro}, {Lucid}, {CMU CL} and {Symbolics} {Genera}. {Germany (ftp://ftp.gmd.de/gmd/gina)}. {N. America (ftp://export.lcs.mit.edu/contrib/)}. Mailing list: gina-users-request@gmdzi.gmd.de. (1994-11-02)
GINA ::: Generic Interactive Application. An application framework based on Common Lisp and OSF/Motif, designed to simplify the construction of graphical interactive applications.GINA consists of CLM - a language binding for OSF/Motif in Common Lisp; the GINA application framework - a class library in CLOS; the GINA interface builder - an interactive tool implemented with GINA to design Motif windows.Version 2.2 requires OSF/Motif 1.1 or better, Common Lisp with CLX, CLOS, PCL and processes. It runs with Franz Allegro, Lucid, CMU CL and Symbolics Genera. . Mailing list: (1994-11-02)
Given, The: Whatever is immediately present to the mind before it has been elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction. See Datum. -- L.W.
Glücks, Richard (1889-1945) ::: In 1936 Glücks became chief aide to Theodor Eicke and eventually succeeded Eicke as the inspector of the Nazi concentration camps. Glücks was responsible for the construction of Auschwitz and the creation of the gas chambers. In 1942 he was made head of an SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltunghauptamt unit. He died in May 1945, presumably a suicide.
GMD Toolbox for Compiler Construction (Or Cocktail) A huge set of compiler building tools for {MS-DOS}, {Unix} and {OS/2}. parser generator (LALR -" C, Modula-2), documentation, parser generator (LL(1) -" C, Modula-2), tests, scanner generator (-" C, Modula-2), tests translator (Extended BNF -" BNF), translator (Modula-2 -" C), translator (BNF (yacc) -" Extended BNF), examples abstract syntax tree generator, attribute-evaluator generator, code generator The {MS-DOS} version requires DJ Delorie's DOS extender ({go32}) and the {OS/2} version requires the {emx} programming environment. {(ftp://ftp.karlsruhe.gmd.de/pub/cocktail/dos)}. {OS/2 FTP (ftp://ftp.eb.ele.tue.nl/pub/src/cocktail/dos-os2.zoo)}. Mailing list: listserv@eb.ele.tue.nl (subscribe to Cocktail). E-mail: Josef Grosch "grosch@karlsruhe.gmd.de", Willem Jan Withagen "wjw@eb.ele.tue.nl" (OS/2). (1992-01-01)
GMD Toolbox for Compiler Construction ::: (Or Cocktail) A huge set of compiler building tools for MS-DOS, Unix and OS/2.parser generator (LALR -> C, Modula-2), documentation, parser generator (LL(1) -> C, Modula-2), tests, scanner generator (-> C, Modula-2), tests translator Extended BNF), examples abstract syntax tree generator, attribute-evaluator generator, code generatorCurrent version: 9209.The MS-DOS version requires DJ Delorie's DOS extender (go32) and the OS/2 version requires the emx programming environment. .Mailing list: (subscribe to Cocktail). E-mail: Josef Grosch (1992-01-01)
gopher wood ::: --> A species of wood used in the construction of Noah&
grammarian ::: n. --> One versed in grammar, or the construction of languages; a philologist.
One who writes on, or teaches, grammar.
grammatical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to grammar; of the nature of grammar; as, a grammatical rule.
According to the rules of grammar; grammatically correct; as, the sentence is not grammatical; the construction is not grammatical.
GRASPIN ::: An Esprit project to develop a personal software engineering environment to support the construction and verification of distributed and non-sequential software systems.
GRASPIN An Esprit project to develop a personal software engineering environment to support the construction and verification of distributed and non-sequential software systems.
Green Area ::: Areas in Israel where construction is not allowed in order to preserve open land.
GSL ::: Grenoble System Language. M. Berthaud, IBM, Grenoble. GSL Language Reference Manual, M. Berthaud et al, March 1973. A MOL-Based Software Construction System, M. Berthaud et al, in Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages, W. van der Poel, N-H 1974, pp.151-157.
GSL Grenoble System Language. M. Berthaud, IBM, Grenoble. "GSL Language Reference Manual", M. Berthaud et al, March 1973. "A MOL-Based Software Construction System", M. Berthaud et al, in Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages, W. van der Poel, N-H 1974, pp.151-157.
hand hack "jargon" 1. (Or "{hand cruft}") To Translate a {hot spot} of a program in a {HLL} into {assembly language} {by hand}, as opposed to trying to coerce the {compiler} into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See {tune}, {bum}. 2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-16)
hand hack ::: (jargon) 1. (Or hand cruft) To Translate a hot spot of a program in a HLL into assembly language by hand, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon.See tune, bum.2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans.[Jargon File] (1995-02-16)
handwave [possibly from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave (alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said is wrong. Failing that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand. The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty. [{Jargon File}]
hang ::: 1. To wait for an event that will never occur. The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive. See wedged, hung.2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character. Compare block.3. To attach a peripheral device, especially in the construction hang off: We're going to hang another tape drive off the file server. Implies a device attached with cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the machine's chassis.
hang 1. To wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive". See {wedged}, {hung}. 2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character." Compare {block}. 3. To attach a peripheral device, especially in the construction "hang off": "We're going to hang another tape drive off the file server." Implies a device attached with cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the machine's chassis.
has the X nature (From Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have the Buddha-nature?") Common hacker construction for "is an X", used for humorous emphasis. "Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it truly has the {loser} nature!" See also {the X that can be Y is not the true X}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-01-11)
has the X nature ::: (From Zen Buddhist koans of the form Does an X have the Buddha-nature?) Common hacker construction for is an X, used for humorous emphasis. Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it truly has the loser nature! See also the X that can be Y is not the true X.[Jargon File] (1995-01-11)
hellenism ::: n. --> A phrase or form of speech in accordance with genius and construction or idioms of the Greek language; a Grecism.
The type of character of the ancient Greeks, who aimed at culture, grace, and amenity, as the chief elements in human well-being and perfection.
hemitrope ::: a. --> Half turned round; half inverted; (Crystallog.) having a twinned structure. ::: n. --> That which is hemitropal in construction; (Crystallog.) a twin crystal having a hemitropal structure.
Holy of Holies has a specific meaning in connection with the Jewish tabernacle, as explained in Exodus, referring to the inner part, the western division of the tabernacle. Three of the sides of the holy place were the walls of the tabernacle itself, while the fourth or eastern end of the sanctum was closed by a curtain or veil — upon which were the figures of the cherubim — suspended from four pillars of shittim wood overlaid with gold. The intention was to have this Holy of Holies in the shape of a perfect cube, the length, breath, and height being each ten cubits. In this sanctuary was placed the Ark of the Covenant or Testament, made of shittim wood overlaid with gold. Upon the Ark was the golden mercy-seat (the kapporeth), also two golden cherubim facing towards the center. Instead of being a “sarcophagus (the symbol of the matrix of Nature and resurrection) as in the Sanctum sanctorum of the pagans, they had the ark made still more realistic in its construction by the two cherubs set up on the coffer or ark of the covenant, facing each other, with their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect yoni (as now seen in India). Besides which, this generative symbol had its significance enforced by the four mystic letters of Jehovah’s name, namely hebrew text; or text meaning Jod (membrum Virile, see Kabala); text (He, the womb); text (Vau, a crook or a hook, a nail), and text again, meaning also ‘an opening’; the whole forming the perfect bisexual emblem or symbol or Y(e)H(o)V(a)H, the male and female symbol” (SD 2:460). However, “the worship of the ‘god in the ark’ dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah” (SD 2:469). See also ARK
hydrography ::: n. --> The art of measuring and describing the sea, lakes, rivers, and other waters, with their phenomena.
That branch of surveying which embraces the determination of the contour of the bottom of a harbor or other sheet of water, the depth of soundings, the position of channels and shoals, with the construction of charts exhibiting these particulars.
hydrometer ::: n. --> An instrument for determining the specific gravities of liquids, and thence the strength spirituous liquors, saline solutions, etc.
An instrument, variously constructed, used for measuring the velocity or discharge of water, as in rivers, from reservoirs, etc., and called by various specific names according to its construction or use, as tachometer, rheometer, hydrometer, pendulum, etc.; a current gauge.
hydrophobia ::: n. --> An abnormal dread of water, said to be a symptom of canine madness; hence:
The disease caused by a bite form, or inoculation with the saliva of, a rabid creature, of which the chief symptoms are, a sense of dryness and construction in the throat, causing difficulty in deglutition, and a marked heightening of reflex excitability, producing convulsions whenever the patient attempts to swallow, or is disturbed in any way, as by the sight or sound of water; rabies; canine madness.
hyperbaton ::: n. --> A figurative construction, changing or inverting the natural order of words or clauses; as, "echoed the hills" for "the hills echoed."
IDIOLOGY The constructions of life-ignorance, from idios,
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IFX ::: [Type Reconstruction with First-Class Polymorphic Values, J. O'Toole et al, SIGPLAN Notices 24(7):207-217 (Jul 1989)].
IFX ["Type Reconstruction with First-Class Polymorphic Values", J. O'Toole et al, SIGPLAN Notices 24(7):207-217 (Jul 1989)].
Immediacy: (Lat. in + medius, middle) Immediacy is used in two senses: Contrasted with representation, immediacy is the direct presence to the mind of the object of knowledge. See Presentational immediacy. Contrasted with mediation, immediacy consists in the absence or minimal and submerged presence of inference, interpretation and construction in any process of knowledge. In this sense perception and memory are relatively immediate whereas scientific and philosophical theories are mediate. -- L.W.
imply ::: v. t. --> To infold or involve; to wrap up.
To involve in substance or essence, or by fair inference, or by construction of law, when not include virtually; as, war implies fighting.
To refer, ascribe, or attribute.
In a mathematical development of the real number system or the complex number system, an appropriate set of postulates may be the starting point. Or the non-negative integers may first be introduced (by postulates or otherwise -- see arithmetic, foundations of) and from these the above outlined extensions may be provided for by successive logical constructions, in any one of several alternative ways.
INDUCTION—The scientific method that proceeds by 1, exact operation; 2, correct interpretation; 3, rational explanation; 4, scientific construction. Reasoning from the particular to the general; induction proceeds from a number of collated instances, through some attribute common to them all, to a general principle.
ingenious ::: 1. Characterised by cleverness or originality of invention or construction. 2. Cleverly inventive or resourceful. ingeniously.
In Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920, p. 156), Dewey states "When the claim or pretension or plan is acted upon it guides us truly or falsely; it leads us to our end or away from it. Its active, dynamic function is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity. The hypothesis that works is the true one, and truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that receive confirmation in their work and consequences". The needs and desires which truth must satisfy, however, are not conceived as personal and emotional (as with James) but rather as "public" in some not altogether explicit sense. Although Dewey emphasizes the functional role of propositions and laws (and even of sensations, facts and objects), and describes these materials of knowledge as means, tools, instruments or operations for the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one in the process of inquiry (Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, N. Y., 1938), he does not clearly deny that they have a strictly cognitive role as well, and he once states that "the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both knowledge and practice as means of making goods -- excellencies of all kinds -- secure in experienced existence". (The Quest for Certainty, N. Y., 1929, p. 37.) Indeed, in his Logic (p. 345), he quotes with approval Peirce's definition "truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless inquiry would tend to bring scientific belief, . . ." Here truth seems to be represented as progressive approximation to reality, but usually it is interpreted as efficacy, verification or practical expediency.
In seeking to explain the meaning of these records we are faced with the difficulty of interpreting an ancient science into terms of modern ideas. The science of those days was a comprehensive whole, which has become decomposed into sundered fragments, which seem to us, because of having lost the keys to the ancient wisdom which brought about the construction of these noble monuments, to be unrelated to each other. Were the pyramids initiation chambers, records of astronomical data, of mathematical truths, or of standard measurements? They were all of these and more. When the candidate passed through the processes of initiation he enacted in his own person the self-same processes which occur on the cosmic scale, on the principle of the master-key of analogy, the size, shape, and orientation of the passages and chambers signifying at once cosmic and human mysteries.
intercept theorem: A theorem regarding ratios in similar triangles differing in its construction by intersecting a pair of parallel lines with two lines which intersect each other.
Intermedia "hypertext" A {hypertext} system developed by a research group at {IRIS} (Brown University) to support education and research. Intermedia was a "shell" over {A/UX} 1.1, programmed using an {object-oriented} toolkit and standard {DBMS} functions. The {data model} and architecture were designed for flexibility and consistency. Intermedia consisted of several {applications} sharing an {event-driven} {gui}. These included a {text editor} (InterText), graphics editor (InterDraw), picture viewer (InterPix), timeline editor (InterVal), 3D model viewer (InterSpect), {animation} editor (InterPlay) and video editor (InterVideo). [{Yankelovich et al, "Intermedia: The Concept and the Construction of a Seamless Information Environment" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sdrucker/papers/intermedia1.pdf)}] {(http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0032.html)}. (2014-11-02)
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (I.B.R.D.) - More commonly known as the World Bank. An international financial institution owned by it's member countries responsible for channeling interest bearing loans and technical assistance to poor countries. The World Bank borrows in turn from world markets.
interpolation: Constructing new values by use of existing values where the argument of the new construction is between those of the existing values. As opposed to extrapolation.
interpretation ::: n. --> The act of interpreting; explanation of what is obscure; translation; version; construction; as, the interpretation of a foreign language, of a dream, or of an enigma.
The sense given by an interpreter; exposition or explanation given; meaning; as, commentators give various interpretations of the same passage of Scripture.
The power or explaining.
An artist&
interweave ::: v. t. --> To weave together; to intermix or unite in texture or construction; to intertwine; as, threads of silk and cotton interwoven.
To intermingle; to unite intimately; to connect closely; as, to interweave truth with falsehood.
In this impersonal and abstract manner of representation did the ancients symbolize the formative, creative, or procreative forces or energies of nature under appropriate emblems drawn from the animal kingdom, and most commonly from man himself. Thus it was that the phallus in Classical antiquity stood as the emblem of the abstract creative forces of the universe, as well as the solar system, and even of earth; precisely as the linga in India has always expressed the identic cycle of thought. Likewise the female organ has frequently been used to express the generative and maternally productive powers of nature. Modern European sophistication unwillingly recognizes this truth, and insists in giving to these symbols the most offensive of constructions. Yet even Western religious iconology has followed the same line of thought, and whether we refer to the lamb, or to the serpent or dove, we ascertain exactly the same thing.
invention ::: n. --> The act of finding out or inventing; contrivance or construction of that which has not before existed; as, the invention of logarithms; the invention of the art of printing.
That which is invented; an original contrivance or construction; a device; as, this fable was the invention of Esop; that falsehood was her own invention.
Thought; idea.
A fabrication to deceive; a fiction; a forgery; a
involution ::: n. --> The act of involving or infolding.
The state of being entangled or involved; complication; entanglement.
That in which anything is involved, folded, or wrapped; envelope.
The insertion of one or more clauses between the subject and the verb, in a way that involves or complicates the construction.
iron ::: n. 1. A silver-white metal, usually an admixture of some other substance, usually carbon, rendering it extremely hard and useful for tools, implements, machinery, constructions, and in many other applications. adj. 2. Inflexible; unyielding; firm. 3. Stern; harsh; cruel. 4. *Fig.* Resembling iron in firmness, strength, colour, etc.
Isabelle ::: (theory, tool) A generic theorem prover with support for several object-logics, developed by Lawrence C. Paulson at the Technical University of Munich.A system of type classes allows polymorphic object-logics with overloading and automatic type inference.Isabelle supports first-order logic - constructive and classical versions; higher-order logic, similar to Gordon's HOL; Zermelo Fr�nkel set theory; an sequent calculus, LK; the modal logics T, S4, and S43; and Logic for Computable Functions.An object logic's syntax and inference rules are specified declaratively allowing single-step proof construction. Proof procedures can be expressed using provers which can be applied to object-logics. Isabelle is built on top of Standard ML and uses its user interface. .Mailing list: [tactics? tacticals?] (1999-07-26)
Isabelle "theory, tool" A generic {theorem prover} with support for several {object-logics}, developed by Lawrence C. Paulson "Larry.Paulson@cl.cam.ac.uk" in collaboration with {Tobias Nipkow (http://in.tum.de/~nipkow/)} at the {Technical University of Munich}. A system of {type classes} allows {polymorphic} object-logics with {overloading} and automatic {type inference}. Isabelle supports {first-order logic} - {constructive} and classical versions; {higher-order logic}, similar to Gordon's {HOL}; {Zermelo Fränkel set theory}; an {extensional} version of {Martin Löf}'s {type theory}, the classical first-order {sequent calculus}, {LK}; the {modal logics} {T}, {S4}, and {S43}; and {Logic for Computable Functions}. An object logic's {syntax} and {inference rules} are specified {declaratively} allowing single-step proof construction. {Proof procedures} can be expressed using "tactics" and "tacticals". Isabelle provides control structures for expressing search procedures and generic tools such as simplifiers and classical theorem provers which can be applied to object-logics. Isabelle is built on top of {Standard ML} and uses its user interface. {(http://cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/HVG/Isabelle/)}. Mailing list: isabelle-users@cl.cam.ac.uk. ["tactics"? "tacticals"?] (1999-07-26)
(It is, of course, not possible to define i as "the square root of −l." The foregoing statement corresponds to taking i as a new, undefined, symbol. But there is an alternative method, of logical construction, in which the complex numbers are defined as ordered pairs (a, b) of real numbers, and i is then defined as (0, 1).)
Kaplan, Mordecai (1881-1983) ::: Founding dean of the Teachers' Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary, on whose faculty he served for more than 50 years; one of the leading thinkers of American Jewry in the 20th century and the founder of the Reconstructionist movement.
kindergarten ::: n. --> A school for young children, conducted on the theory that education should be begun by gratifying and cultivating the normal aptitude for exercise, play, observation, imitation, and construction; -- a name given by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who introduced this method of training, in rooms opening on a garden.
Labyrinth [from Greek labyrinthos probably from laura crypt] The complex prison built for King Minos of Crete by Daedalus to house the Minotaur. Theseus succeeded in finding his way out with the aid of the thread given him by the king’s daughter, Ariadne. Symbolically, it may be the celestial labyrinth, into which the souls of the departed plunge, and also its earthly counterpart, as shown in the tortuous subterranean chambers in ancient Egypt, or similar constructions under temples in various ancient lands. These labyrinths also symbolized the races of mankind, and the succession of gods, demigods, and heroes who preceded mortal kings. These underground chambers in general were used as initiation chambers in the Mysteries, where candidates were taught by actual experience various truths regarding human destiny after death; hence there was an exact analogy between the physical construction of these chambers and the truths thus symbolized. The labyrinth therefore refers both to an inner and outer mystery. One of the coins unearthed at Knossos in Crete showed a diagram of such a maze, and this identical pattern, exact to the last important detail, has been found among the Pima Indians of Arizona (cf Theosophical Path, April 1925). Clearly its real significance was common knowledge to initiates in all parts of the world.
Lasherism "jargon, algorithm" (Harvard) A program that solves a standard problem (such as the {Eight Queens Puzzle} or implementing the {life} {algorithm}) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such constructions are quite popular in exercises such as the {Obfuscated C contest}, and occasionally in {retrocomputing}. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behaviour. [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-07)
(Lat. fictio, from fingere, to devise, or form) A logical or imaginative construction framed by the mind to which nothing corresponds in reality. See Construction, Imaginative. -- L.W.
LAX ::: LAnguage eXample.A toy language used to illustrate compiler design.[Compiler Construction, W.M. Waite et al, Springer 1984]. (1994-12-07)
LAX LAnguage eXample. A {toy language} used to illustrate {compiler} design. ["Compiler Construction", W.M. Waite et al, Springer 1984]. (1994-12-07)
L. Couturat, Ilme Congres de Philosophie, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 12 (1904), see p. 1042. Logistic system: The formal construction of a logistic system requires: a list of primitive symbols (these are usually taken as marks but may also be sounds or other things --they must be capable of instances which are, recognizably, the same or different symbols, and capable of utterance in which instances of them arc put forth or arranged in an order one after another); a determination of a class of formulas, each formula being a finite sequence of primitive symbols, or, more exactly, each formula being capable of instances which are finite sequences of instances of primitive symbols (generalizations allowing two-dimensional arrays of primitive symbols and the like are non-essential); a determination of the circumstances under which a finite sequence of formulas is a proof of the last formula in the sequence, this last formula being then called a theorem (again we should more exactly speak of proofs as having instances which are finite sequences of instances of formulas); a determination of the circumstances under which a finite sequence of formulas is a proof of the last formula of the sequence as a consequence of a certain set of formulas (when there is a proof of a formula B as a consequence of the set of formulas A1, A2, . . . , An, we say that the inference from the premisses A1, A2, . . . , An to the conclusion B is a valid inference of the logistic system). It is not excluded that the class of proofs in the sense of (3) should be empty. But every proof of a formula B as a consequence of an empty set of formulas, in the sense of (4), must also be a proof of B in the sense of (3), and conversely. Moreover, if to the proof of a formula B as a consequence of A1, A2, . . . , An are prefixed in any order proofs of A1, A2, . . . , An, the entire resulting sequence of formulas must be a proof of B; more generally, if to the proof of a formula B as a consequence of A1, A2, . . . , An are prefixed in any order proofs of a subset of A1, A2, . . . , An as consequences of the remainder of A1, A2, . . . , An, the entire resulting sequence must be a proof of B as a consequence of this remainder.
leech ::: n. --> See 2d Leach.
The border or edge at the side of a sail.
A physician or surgeon; a professor of the art of healing.
Any one of numerous genera and species of annulose worms, belonging to the order Hirudinea, or Bdelloidea, esp. those species used in medicine, as Hirudo medicinalis of Europe, and allied species.
A glass tube of peculiar construction, adapted for drawing blood from a scarified part by means of a vacuum.
literal ::: a. --> According to the letter or verbal expression; real; not figurative or metaphorical; as, the literal meaning of a phrase.
Following the letter or exact words; not free.
Consisting of, or expressed by, letters.
Giving a strict or literal construction; unimaginative; matter-of fast; -- applied to persons. ::: n.
Lmbert is known also for important contributions to mathematics, and astronomy; also for his work in logic, in particular his (unsuccessful, but historically significant) attempts at construction of a mathematical or symbolic logic. Cf. C. I. Lewis, Survey of Symbolic Logic. -- A.C.
logic 1. "philosophy, logic" A branch of philosophy and mathematics that deals with the formal principles, methods and criteria of validity of {inference}, reasoning and {knowledge}. Logic is concerned with what is true and how we can know whether something is true. This involves the formalisation of logical arguments and {proofs} in terms of symbols representing {propositions} and {logical connectives}. The meanings of these logical connectives are expressed by a set of rules which are assumed to be self-evident. {Boolean algebra} deals with the basic operations of truth values: AND, OR, NOT and combinations thereof. {Predicate logic} extends this with existential and universal {quantifiers} and symbols standing for {predicates} which may depend on variables. The rules of {natural deduction} describe how we may proceed from valid premises to valid conclusions, where the premises and conclusions are expressions in {predicate logic}. Symbolic logic uses a {meta-language} concerned with truth, which may or may not have a corresponding expression in the world of objects called existance. In symbolic logic, arguments and {proofs} are made in terms of symbols representing {propositions} and {logical connectives}. The meanings of these begin with a set of rules or {primitives} which are assumed to be self-evident. Fortunately, even from vague primitives, functions can be defined with precise meaning. {Boolean logic} deals with the basic operations of {truth values}: AND, OR, NOT and combinations thereof. {Predicate logic} extends this with {existential quantifiers} and {universal quantifiers} which introduce {bound variables} ranging over {finite} sets; the {predicate} itself takes on only the values true and false. Deduction describes how we may proceed from valid {premises} to valid conclusions, where these are expressions in {predicate logic}. Carnap used the phrase "rational reconstruction" to describe the logical analysis of thought. Thus logic is less concerned with how thought does proceed, which is considered the realm of psychology, and more with how it should proceed to discover truth. It is the touchstone of the results of thinking, but neither its regulator nor a motive for its practice. See also fuzzy logic, logic programming, arithmetic and logic unit, first-order logic, See also {Boolean logic}, {fuzzy logic}, {logic programming}, {first-order logic}, {logic bomb}, {combinatory logic}, {higher-order logic}, {intuitionistic logic}, {equational logic}, {modal logic}, {linear logic}, {paradox}. 2. "electronics" {Boolean} logic circuits. See also {arithmetic and logic unit}, {asynchronous logic}, {TTL}. (1995-03-17)
logic ::: 1. (philosophy, mathematics) A branch of philosophy and mathematics that deals with the formal principles, methods and criteria of validity of inference, reasoning and knowledge.Logic is concerned with what is true and how we can know whether something is true. This involves the formalisation of logical arguments and proofs in terms these logical connectives are expressed by a set of rules which are assumed to be self-evident.Boolean algebra deals with the basic operations of truth values: AND, OR, NOT and combinations thereof. Predicate logic extends this with existential and premises to valid conclusions, where the premises and conclusions are expressions in predicate logic.Symbolic logic uses a meta-language concerned with truth, which may or may not have a corresponding expression in the world of objects called existance. In rules or primitives which are assumed to be self-evident. Fortunately, even from vague primitives, functions can be defined with precise meaning.Boolean logic deals with the basic operations of truth values: AND, OR, NOT and combinations thereof. Predicate logic extends this with existential quantifiers describes how we may proceed from valid premises to valid conclusions, where these are expressions in predicate logic.Carnap used the phrase rational reconstruction to describe the logical analysis of thought. Thus logic is less concerned with how thought does proceed, to discover truth. It is the touchstone of the results of thinking, but neither its regulator nor a motive for its practice.See also fuzzy logic, logic programming, arithmetic and logic unit, first-order logic,See also Boolean logic, fuzzy logic, logic programming, first-order logic, logic bomb, combinatory logic, higher-order logic, intuitionistic logic, equational logic, modal logic, linear logic, paradox.2. (electronics) Boolean logic circuits.See also arithmetic and logic unit, asynchronous logic, TTL. (1995-03-17)
lukumi ::: Lukumi The Ju-Ju tribe of the Yorb culture has a religion with 600 'gods'. Lukum originated in Cuba and was historically practised by descendants of West African slaves. Later, in the early 18th century, the Spanish Catholic Church allowed for the creation of societies called cabildos to provide means for entertainment and reconstruction of many aspects of ethnic heritage. The slaves practised Yorb religious ceremonies in these cabildos, along with religious and secular traditions from other parts of Africa, combining their 'masters' Catholic saints with their own Orisha, which came to be known as Lukum.
machicolation ::: n. --> An opening between the corbels which support a projecting parapet, or in the floor of a gallery or the roof of a portal, shooting or dropping missiles upen assailants attacking the base of the walls. Also, the construction of such defenses, in general, when of this character. See Illusts. of Battlement and Castle.
The act of discharging missiles or pouring burning or melted substances upon assailants through such apertures.
machine ::: n. --> In general, any combination of bodies so connected that their relative motions are constrained, and by means of which force and motion may be transmitted and modified, as a screw and its nut, or a lever arranged to turn about a fulcrum or a pulley about its pivot, etc.; especially, a construction, more or less complex, consisting of a combination of moving parts, or simple mechanical elements, as wheels, levers, cams, etc., with their supports and connecting framework, calculated to constitute a prime mover, or to receive force and motion
macrology /mak-rol'*-jee/ 1. Set of usually complex or {crufty} {macros}, e.g. as part of a large system written in {Lisp}, {TECO}, or (less commonly) {assembler}. 2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archaeology, ecology, or {theology}, hence the sound-alike construction. See also {boxology}. (2003-09-02)
macrology ::: /mak-rol'*-jee/ 1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g. as part of a large system written in Lisp, TECO, or (less commonly) assembler.2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology. Sometimes studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archaeology, ecology, or theology, hence the sound-alike construction. See also boxology.(2003-09-02)
make ::: n. --> A companion; a mate; often, a husband or a wife.
Structure, texture, constitution of parts; construction; shape; form. ::: v. t. --> To cause to exist; to bring into being; to form; to produce; to frame; to fashion; to create.
making ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Make ::: n. --> The act of one who makes; workmanship; fabrication; construction; as, this is cloth of your own making; the making of peace or war was in his power.
Composition, or structure.
Many-valued logic: See propositional calculus, many-valued. Marburg School: Founded by Herman Cohen (1842-1918) and Paul Natorp (1854-1924) and supported by Ernst Cassirer (1874-), the noteworthy historian of philosophy, and Rudolf Stammler (1856-1938), the eminent legal philosopher, the school revived a specialized tendency of critical idealism. Stress is laid on the a priori, non-empirical, non-psychological and purely logical of every certain knowledge. Cohen and Natorp register an emphatic opposition to psychologism, and sought to construct a system upon pure thought on the basis of Kant and the Kantian reconstruction of Platonism. The logical and a priori in aesthetics, ethics, psychology and law is, being also independent of experience, the essential basis of these fields. Cf. Natorp, Kant u.d. Marburger Schule, 1915. -- H.H.
Marxist criticism: This discourse stems from the cultural theories of Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels. In relation to literature Marxism is interested in the positionauthors write from, and the representation of class struggles. See deconstructionand post-modernism.
MASCOT ::: Modular Approach to Software Construction Operation and Test: a method for software design aimed at real-time embedded systems from the Royal Signals and Research Establishment, UK.
MASCOT Modular Approach to Software Construction Operation and Test: a method for software design aimed at real-time embedded systems from the Royal Signals and Research Establishment, UK.
mechanic ::: a. --> The art of the application of the laws of motion or force to construction.
A mechanician; an artisan; an artificer; one who practices any mechanic art; one skilled or employed in shaping and uniting materials, as wood, metal, etc., into any kind of structure, machine, or other object, requiring the use of tools, or instruments.
Having to do with the application of the laws of motion in the art of constructing or making things; of or pertaining to
mechanician ::: n. --> One skilled in the theory or construction of machines; a machinist.
Metaphysics and psychology are not distinct in Herbert's view. In his day psychology was also philosophy. It was still a metaphysical science in the sense that it is differentiated from physical science. It was only later that psychology repudiated philosophy. Accepting Kant's challenge to make psychology a mathematical science, he developed an elaborate system of mathematical constructions that proved the least fruitful phase of his system. As a mathematical science psychology can use only calculation, not experiment. As the mind or soul is unitary, indivisible. science, including philosophy, is neither analytical nor experimental. Bv denying analysis to psychology, Herbart combatted the division of mind into separate faculties. Psychology is not the mere description of the mind, but the working out of its mathematical laws.
Methodology: The systematic analysis and organization of the rational and experimental principles and processes which must guide a scientific inquiry, or which constitute the structure of the special sciences more particularly. Methodology, which is also called scientific method, and more seldom methodeutic, refers not only to the whole of a constituted science, but also to individual problems or groups of problems within a science. As such it is usually considered as a branch of logic; in fact, it is the application of the principles and processes of logic to the special objects of the various sciences; while science in general is accounted for by the combination of deduction and induction as such. Thus, methodology is a generic term exemplified in the specific method of each science. Hence its full significance can be understood only by analyzing the structure of the special sciences. In determining that structure, one must consider the proper object of the special science, the manner in which it develops, the type of statements or generalizations it involves, its philosophical foundations or assumptions, and its relation with the other sciences, and eventually its applications. The last two points mentioned are particularly important: methods of education, for example, will vary considerably according to their inspiration and aim. Because of the differences between the objects of the various sciences, they reveal the following principal methodological patterns, which are not necessarily exclusive of one another, and which are used sometimes in partial combination. It may be added that their choice and combination depend also in a large degree on psychological motives. In the last resort, methodology results from the adjustment of our mental powers to the love and pursuit of truth. There are various rational methods used by the speculative sciences, including theology which adds certain qualifications to their use. More especially, philosophy has inspired the following procedures: The Soctattc method of analysis by questioning and dividing until the essences are reached; the synthetic method developed by Plato, Aristotle and the Medieval thinkers, which involves a demonstrative exposition of the causal relation between thought and being; the ascetic method of intellectual and moral purification leading to an illumination of the mind, as proposed by Plotinus, Augustine and the mystics; the psychological method of inquiry into the origin of ideas, which was used by Descartes and his followers, and also by the British empiricists; the critical or transcendental method, as used by Kant, and involving an analysis of the conditions and limits of knowledge; the dialectical method proceeding by thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which is promoted by Hegelianlsm and Dialectical Materialism; the intuitive method, as used by Bergson, which involves the immediate perception of reality, by a blending of consciousness with the process of change; the reflexive method of metaphysical introspection aiming at the development of the immanent realities and values leading man to God; the eclectic method (historical-critical) of purposive and effective selection as proposed by Cicero, Suarez and Cousin; and the positivistic method of Comte, Spencer and the logical empiricists, which attempts to apply to philosophy the strict procedures of the positive sciences. The axiomatic or hypothetico-deductive method as used by the theoretical and especially the mathematical sciences. It involves such problems as the selection, independence and simplification of primitive terms and axioms, the formalization of definitions and proofs, the consistency and completeness of the constructed theory, and the final interpretation. The nomological or inductive method as used by the experimental sciences, aims at the discovery of regularities between phenomena and their relevant laws. It involves the critical and careful application of the various steps of induction: observation and analytical classification; selection of similarities; hypothesis of cause or law; verification by the experimental canons; deduction, demonstration and explanation; systematic organization of results; statement of laws and construction of the relevant theory. The descriptive method as used by the natural and social sciences, involves observational, classificatory and statistical procedures (see art. on statistics) and their interpretation. The historical method as used by the sciences dealing with the past, involves the collation, selection, classification and interpretation of archeological facts and exhibits, records, documents, archives, reports and testimonies. The psychological method, as used by all the sciences dealing with human behaviour and development. It involves not only introspective analysis, but also experimental procedures, such as those referring to the relations between stimuli and sensations, to the accuracy of perceptions (specific measurements of intensity), to gradation (least noticeable differences), to error methods (average error in right and wrong cases), and to physiological and educational processes.
microphone "hardware, audio" Any electromechanical device designed to convert sound into an electrical signal. A microphone converts an acoustic waveform consisting of alternating high and low air pressure travelling through the air into a voltage. To do this it uses some kind of pressure or movement sensor. The simplest kind of microphone is actually very similar in construction to a {loudspeaker}. The analogue electrical signal can be fed into a computer's {sound card} where it is amplified and {sampled} to convert it into a {digital} waveform for storage or transmission. (2002-11-04)
microphone ::: (hardware, audio) Any electromechanical device designed to convert sound into an electrical signal.A microphone converts an acoustic waveform consisting of alternating high and low air pressure travelling through the air into a voltage. To do this it uses some kind of pressure or movement sensor. The simplest kind of microphone is actually very similar in construction to a loudspeaker.The analogue electrical signal can be fed into a computer's sound card where it is amplified and sampled to convert it into a digital waveform for storage or transmission.(2002-11-04)
Midrash ::: Legends, stories, and fantastic elaborations of Scripture. Jews have been creating midrash for thousands of years, and still do so today; it is often an imaginative, creative reconstruction or reconfiguration of sacred text. The interpretative approach known as midrash halakah explores the full meaning of biblical law. Midrash aggadah, on the other hand, sometimes aims to derive a moral principle, lesson or theological concept from the biblical text.
Mind acts by representations and constructions, by the separa- tion and weaving together of its constructed data ; it can make a synthetic constnietlon and see it as a whole, but when it looks for the reality of things, it takes refuge in abstractions — it has not the concrete vision, experience, contact sought by the mystic and the spiritual seeker. To know Self and Reality directly or truly, It has to be silent and reflect some light of these things or undergo self-exceeding and Iransfonnation, and this is only possible either by a higher Light descending into it or by its ascent, the taking up or immcrgcncc of it into a higher Light of e^tence.
mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The ‘Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind" and ‘mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.” *Letters on Yoga
"Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer.” The Life Divine
"Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” The Life Divine
"The mind proper is divided into three parts — thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind — the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give).” Letters on Yoga
"The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking in the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight, first, sees things only as they are presented in that light and, secondly, where it does not know, constructs by imagination, by uncertain inference, by others of its aids and makeshifts things which it readily takes for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices, unreal prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities and probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The intuitive mind constructs nothing in this artificial fashion, but makes itself a receiver of the light and allows the truth to manifest in it and organise its own constructions.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"He [man] has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"Our mind is an observer of actuals, an inventor or discoverer of possibilities, but not a seer of the occult imperatives that necessitate the movements and forms of a creation. . . .” *The Life Divine
"The human mind is an instrument not of truth but of ignorance and error.” Letters on Yoga
"For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations, — as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve.” The Life Divine
The Mother: "The true role of the mind is the formation and organization of action. The mind has a formative and organizing power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order for action, for organizing action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations — whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul — and simply formulating the plan of action — in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organizations — it would amply fulfil its function. It is not an instrument of knowledge. But is can use knowledge for action, to organize action. It is an instrument of organization and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.” Questions and Answers 1956, MCW Vol. 8.*
misconstruction ::: n. --> Erroneous construction; wrong interpretation.
misregard ::: n. --> Wrong understanding; misconstruction.
model ::: n. 1. A representation, generally in miniature, to show the construction or appearance of something. 2. One serving as an example of excellence to be imitated or compared. models. v. 3. To plan, construct, fashion or shape. ::: models, modelled, new-model.
Modular Prolog ::: An interpreter for SB-Prolog version 3.1 extended with ML-style modules. Runs on SPARC. Distributed under GNU General Public License. .[A Calculus for the Construction of Modular Prolog Programs, D. Sannella et al, J Logic Prog 12:147-177 (1992)]. (1994-10-25)
Modular Prolog An {interpreter} for {SB-Prolog} version 3.1 extended with {ML}-style {modules}. Runs on {SPARC}. Distributed under {GNU} {General Public License}. {(ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/dts/mod-prolog.tar.Z)}. E-mail: Brian Paxton "mprolog@dcs.ed.ac.uk". ["A Calculus for the Construction of Modular Prolog Programs", D. Sannella et al, J Logic Prog 12:147-177 (1992)]. (1994-10-25)
Mohammedanism: The commonly applied term in the Occident to the religion founded by Mohammed. It sought to restore the indigenous monotheism of Arabia, Abraham's uncorrupted religion. Its essential dogma is the belief in the absolute unity of Allah. Its chief commandments are: profession of faith, ritual prayer, the payment of the alms tax, fasting and the pilgrimage. It has no real clerical caste, no church organization, no liturgy, and rejects monasticism. Its ascetic attitude is expressed in warnings against woman, in prohibition of nudity and of construction of splendid buildings except the house of worship; condemns economic speculation; praises manual labor and poverty; prohibits music, wine and pork, and the portrayal of living beings. -- H.H.
Mohammedanism: The commonly applied term in the Occident to the religion founded by Mohammed. It sought to restore the indigenous monotheism of Arabia, Abraham’s uncorrupted religion. Its essential dogma is the belief in the absolute unity of Allah. Its chief commandments are: profession of faith, ritual prayer, the payment of the alms tax, fasting and the pilgrimage. It has no real clerical caste, no church organization, no liturgy, and rejects monasticism. Its ascetic attitude is expressed in warnings against woman, in prohibition of nudity and of construction of splendid buildings except the house of worship; condemns economic speculation; praises manual labor and poverty; prohibits music, wine and pork, and the portrayal of living beings.
monad ::: (theory, functional programming) /mo'nad/ A technique from category theory which has been adopted as a way of dealing with state in functional programming languages in such a way that the details of the state are hidden or abstracted out of code that merely passes it on unchanged.A monad has three components: a means of augmenting an existing type, a means of creating a default value of this new type from a value of the original type, and a replacement for the basic application operator for the old type that works with the new type.The alternative to passing state via a monad is to add an extra argument and return value to many functions which have no interest in that state. Monads can encapsulate state, side effects, exception handling, global data, etc. in a purely lazily functional way.A monad can be expressed as the triple, (M, unitM, bindM) where M is a function on types and (using Haskell notation): unitM :: a -> M a bindM :: M a -> (a -> M b) -> M b bindM applies a function to a monadic value after de-monadising it. E.g. a state transformer monad: type S a = State -> (a, State) unitS a = \ s0 -> (a, s0) and k take a state as input and return a new state as part of their output. The construction m `bindS` k composes these two state transformers into one while also passing the value of m to k.Monads are a powerful tool in functional programming. If a program is written using a monad to pass around a variable (like the state in the example above) Only the parts of the program which deal directly with the quantity concerned need be altered, parts which merely pass it on unchanged will stay the same.In functional programming, unitM is often called initM or returnM and bindM is called thenM. A third function, mapM is frequently defined in terms of then and return. This applies a given function to a list of monadic values, threading some variable (e.g. state) through the applications: mapM :: (a -> M b) -> [a] -> M [b] mapM f [] = returnM [] (2000-03-09)
monad ::: (theory, functional programming) /mo'nad/ A technique from category theory which has been adopted as a way of dealing with state in functional programming languages in such a way that the details of the state are hidden or abstracted out of code that merely passes it on unchanged.A monad has three components: a means of augmenting an existing type, a means of creating a default value of this new type from a value of the original type, and a replacement for the basic application operator for the old type that works with the new type.The alternative to passing state via a monad is to add an extra argument and return value to many functions which have no interest in that state. Monads can encapsulate state, side effects, exception handling, global data, etc. in a purely lazily functional way.A monad can be expressed as the triple, (M, unitM, bindM) where M is a function on types and (using Haskell notation): unitM :: a -> M abindM :: M a -> (a -> M b) -> M b bindM applies a function to a monadic value after de-monadising it. E.g. a state transformer monad: type S a = State -> (a, State)unitS a = \ s0 -> (a, s0) and k take a state as input and return a new state as part of their output. The construction m `bindS` k composes these two state transformers into one while also passing the value of m to k.Monads are a powerful tool in functional programming. If a program is written using a monad to pass around a variable (like the state in the example above) Only the parts of the program which deal directly with the quantity concerned need be altered, parts which merely pass it on unchanged will stay the same.In functional programming, unitM is often called initM or returnM and bindM is called thenM. A third function, mapM is frequently defined in terms of then and return. This applies a given function to a list of monadic values, threading some variable (e.g. state) through the applications: mapM :: (a -> M b) -> [a] -> M [b]mapM f [] = returnM [] (2000-03-09)
monad "theory, functional programming" /mo'nad/ A technique from {category theory} which has been adopted as a way of dealing with {state} in {functional programming languages} in such a way that the details of the state are hidden or abstracted out of code that merely passes it on unchanged. A monad has three components: a means of augmenting an existing type, a means of creating a default value of this new type from a value of the original type, and a replacement for the basic application operator for the old type that works with the new type. The alternative to passing state via a monad is to add an extra argument and return value to many functions which have no interest in that state. Monads can encapsulate state, side effects, exception handling, global data, etc. in a purely lazily functional way. A monad can be expressed as the triple, (M, unitM, bindM) where M is a function on types and (using {Haskell} notation): unitM :: a -" M a bindM :: M a -" (a -" M b) -" M b I.e. unitM converts an ordinary value of type a in to monadic form and bindM applies a function to a monadic value after de-monadising it. E.g. a state transformer monad: type S a = State -" (a, State) unitS a = \ s0 -" (a, s0) m `bindS` k = \ s0 -" let (a,s1) = m s0 in k a s1 Here unitS adds some initial state to an ordinary value and bindS applies function k to a value m. (`fun` is Haskell notation for using a function as an {infix} operator). Both m and k take a state as input and return a new state as part of their output. The construction m `bindS` k composes these two state transformers into one while also passing the value of m to k. Monads are a powerful tool in {functional programming}. If a program is written using a monad to pass around a variable (like the state in the example above) then it is easy to change what is passed around simply by changing the monad. Only the parts of the program which deal directly with the quantity concerned need be altered, parts which merely pass it on unchanged will stay the same. In functional programming, unitM is often called initM or returnM and bindM is called thenM. A third function, mapM is frequently defined in terms of then and return. This applies a given function to a list of monadic values, threading some variable (e.g. state) through the applications: mapM :: (a -" M b) -" [a] -" M [b] mapM f [] = returnM [] mapM f (x:xs) = f x `thenM` ( \ x2 -" mapM f xs `thenM` ( \ xs2 -" returnM (x2 : xs2) )) (2000-03-09)
Natural Theology: In general, natural theology is a term used to distinguish any theology based upon the fundamental premise of the ability of man to construct his theory of God and of the world out of the framework of his own reason and of reasonable probability from the so-called "revealed theology" which presupposes that God and divine purposes are not open to unaided human understanding but rest upon a supernatural and not wholly understandable basis. See Deism; Renaissance. During the 17th and 18th centuries there were attempts to set up a "natural religion" to which men might easily give their assent and to offset the extravagant claims of the supernaturalists and their harsh charges against doubters. The classical attempt to make out a case for the sweet reasonableness of a divine purpose at work in the world of nature was given by Paley in his Natural Theology (1802). Traditional Catholicism, especially that of the late middle Ages developed a kind of natural theology based upon the metaphysics of Aristotle. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz developed a more definite type of natural theology in their several constructions of what now may well be called philosophical theology wherein reason is made the guide. Natural theology has raised its head in recent times in attempts to combat the extravagant declarations of theologians of human pessimism. The term, however, is unfortunate because it is being widely acknowledged that so-called "revealed theology" is natural (recent psychological and social studies) and that natural theology need not deny to reason its possible character as the bearer of an immanent divine revelation. -- V.F.
Nonpoint Source ::: A contributing factor to water pollution that cannot be traced to a specific spot; like agricultural fertilizer runoff, sediment from construction.
“ Now, that a conscious Infinite is there in physical Nature, we are assured by every sign, though it is a consciousness not made or limited like ours. All her constructions and motions are those of an illimitable intuitive wisdom too great and spontaneous and mysteriously self-effective to be described as an intelligence, of a Power and Will working for Time in eternity with an inevitable and forecasting movement in each of its steps, even in those steps that in their outward or superficial impetus seem to us inconscient. And as there is in her this greater consciousness and greater power, so too there is an illimitable spirit of harmony and beauty in her constructions that never fails her, though its works are not limited by our aesthetic canons. An infinite hedonism too is there, an illimitable spirit of delight, of which we become aware when we enter into impersonal unity with her; and even as that in her which is terrible is a part of her beauty, that in her which is dangerous, cruel, destructive is a part of her delight, her universal Ananda. Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
OBVIOUSLY we must leave far behind us the current theory of Karma and its shallow attempt to justify the ways of the Cosmic Spirit by forcing on them a crude identity with the summary notions of law and justice, the crude and often savagely primitive methods of reward and punishment, lure and deterrent dear to the surface human mind. There is here a more authentic and spiritual truth at the base of Nature’s action and a far less mechanically calculable movement. Here is no rigid and narrow ethical law bound down to a petty human significance, no teaching of a child soul by a mixed system of blows and lollipops, no unprofitable wheel of a brutal cosmic justice automatically moved in the traces of man’s ignorant judgments and earthy desires and instincts. Life and rebirth do not follow these artificial constructions, but a movement spiritual and intimate to the deepest intention of Nature. A cosmic Will and Wisdom observant of the ascending march of the soul’s consciousness and experience as it emerges out of subconscient Matter and climbs to its own luminous divinity fixes the norm and constantly enlarges the lines of the law—or, let us say, since law is a too mechanical conception, — the truth of Karma.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 20, 13 Page: 128, 427
Open Distributed Processing "standard" (ODP) An attempt to standardise an {OSI} {application layer} communications architecture. ODP is a natural progression from {OSI}, broadening the target of standardisation from the point of interconnection to the end system behaviour. The objective of ODP is to enable the construction of {distributed systems} in a multi-vendor environment through the provision of a general architectural framework that such systems must conform to. One of the cornerstones of this framework is a model of multiple viewpoints which enables different participants to observe a system from a suitable perspective and a suitable level of {abstraction}. (1995-03-10)
Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome of the energy of the Inconscient; it is a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction of the first inconscient World-Energy or a natural developed functioning of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the outside universal Nature,—and even in this construction, these functionings, these reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a considerable influence. There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch, hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being’s direct consciousness of things than its informants: the subliminal is not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to its direct experience of objects; they do not, so much as in waking mind, convey forms of objects for the mind’s documentation or as the starting-point or basis for an indirect constructive experience. The subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance. Our waking state is unaware of its connection with the subliminal being, although it receives from it—but without any knowledge of the place of origin—the inspirations, intuitions, ideas, will-suggestions, sense-suggestions, urges to action that rise from below or from behind our limited surface existence. Sleep like trance opens the gate of the subliminal to us; for in sleep, as in trance, we retire behind the veil of the limited waking personality and it is behind this veil that the subliminal has its existence. But we receive the records of our sleep experience through dream and in dream figures and not in that condition which might be called an inner waking and which is the most accessible form of the trance state, nor through the supernormal clarities of vision and other more luminous and concrete ways of communication developed by the inner subliminal cognition when it gets into habitual or occasional conscious connection with our waking self. The subliminal, with the subconscious as an annexe of itself,—for the subconscious is also part of the behind-the-veil entity,—is the seer of inner things and of supraphysical experiences; the surface subconscious is only a transcriber. It is for this reason that the Upanishad describes the subliminal being as the Dream Self because it is normally in dreams, visions, absorbed states of inner experience that we enter into and are part of its experiences...
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 236
parallelism ::: n. --> The quality or state of being parallel.
Resemblance; correspondence; similarity.
Similarity of construction or meaning of clauses placed side by side, especially clauses expressing the same sentiment with slight modifications, as is common in Hebrew poetry; e. g.: --//At her feet he bowed, he fell:/Where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judg. v. 27.
Parsley ::: A Pascal extension for construction of parse trees, by Barber of Summit Software. It features Iterators.[PARSLEY: A New Compiler-Compiler, in Software Development Tools, Techniques and Alternatives, Arlington VA, Jul 1983, pp.232-241]. (1995-02-22)
Parsley A {Pascal} extension for construction of {parse trees}, by Barber of {Summit Software}. It features {Iterators}. ["PARSLEY: A New Compiler-Compiler", in Software Development Tools, Techniques and Alternatives, Arlington VA, Jul 1983, pp.232-241]. (1995-02-22)
PCCTS {Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set}
peirameter ::: n. --> A dynamometer for measuring the force required to draw wheel carriages on roads of different constructions.
pendant ::: n. --> Something which hangs or depends; something suspended; a hanging appendage, especially one of an ornamental character; as to a chandelier or an eardrop; also, an appendix or addition, as to a book.
A hanging ornament on roofs, ceilings, etc., much used in the later styles of Gothic architecture, where it is of stone, and an important part of the construction. There are imitations in plaster and wood, which are mere decorative features.
One of a pair; a counterpart; as, one vase is the pendant
pendulum: A mechanical construction where a weight suspends from a string or a rod whose other end is fixed to a point.
Physical space is said to have six directions, the four cardinal points plus the zenith and nadir; or eight directions given by the axes joining the opposite corners of a cube. The six and the eight combine in the cube and octahedron. Nothing in the definition of geometrical space excludes the possibility of other spatial constructions, coexistent with our space and interblended with it and with each other. This helps in understanding such matters as chains of globes — which, when we attempt to represent them by drawn diagrams, seem so confusing and contradictory — and the manner in which other planes of consciousness and of objectivity may be related to the physical.
pilaster ::: n. --> An upright architectural member right-angled in plan, constructionally a pier (See Pier, 1 (b)), but architecturally corresponding to a column, having capital, shaft, and base to agree with those of the columns of the same order. In most cases the projection from the wall is one third of its width, or less.
Pi The mathematical symbol for the incommensurable ratio of the circumference of a circle to the length of its diameter, and for corresponding ratios in plane and solid geometry. Its incommensurability is a particular instance of the impossibility of expressing geometrical magnitudes exactly in number. Bearing in mind that there is a geometrical key to interpretation of cosmic law and structure, and that the facts of geometry cannot possibly be arbitrary or meaningless but must be faithful representations of general laws; then we shall understand that the ratio π, involving such radial and important elements as the straight line and the circle, must be of paramount importance. The figures, either for approximate decimal evaluations or approximate fractional ratios, play an important part in the symbology of the ancient mystery-language. These figures and the numbers which they make are found in the numerical values of letters and words in the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. The problem of squaring the circle by a purely geometrical construction does not involve the use of π at all.
plasterwork ::: n. --> Plastering used to finish architectural constructions, exterior or interior, especially that used for the lining of rooms. Ordinarly, mortar is used for the greater part of the work, and pure plaster of Paris for the moldings and ornaments.
polyhedral angle: The geometrical construction of the neighbourhood of a vertex bounded by the vertex itself, 3 or more edges from the vertex, as well as the same number of faces (as edges) between the edges.
post-structuralism: This discourse relates to post-modernism, and to some extent rejects the theories of structuralism. The discourse suggests that every word a writer writes is influenced by their personal historical, political and social culture, meaning that little can be assessed independently. Deconstruction is highly significant to post-structuralism.
Primeval self-conscious humanity — not savage by any means, however much it may have needed spiritual guidance — was watched over and protected by divine instructors, and among the arts taught by these great beings, architecture had a prominent place: “No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third root race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion. . . . It is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of construction of the Grecian temples erected to the immortal gods; and the ten books of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short, who was an initiate, can only be studied esoterically. The Druidical circles, the Dolmens, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers and the 127 towns in Europe which were found ‘Cyclopean in origin’ by the French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those primarily taught by the ‘Sons of God,’ justly called ‘The Builders’ ” (SD 1:208-9n).
profiling ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Profile ::: n. --> In the construction of fieldworks, the erection at proper intervals of wooden profiles, to show to the workmen the sectional form of the parapets at those points.
Ptah (Egyptian) Ptaḥ [from to engrave, carve, fashion] One of the most ancient deities, and in his higher attributes one of the most abstract, whose worship goes back to the earliest part of the dynastic period; the principal deity of Memphis (Men-nefer), also known as Het-ka-Ptah (the city of Ptah). The deity is also called Ptah-neb-ankh (giver of life). He was addressed as the “father of beginnings; creator of the eggs of the sun and moon, he who created his own image, who fashioned his own body”; and was depicted as fashioning the world-egg upon a potter’s wheel. Together with Khnemu, he carried out the commands of Thoth for the creation of the universe. While Khnemu fashioned man and the animals, whether of the cosmos or of earth, Ptah was engaged in the construction of the heavens and the earth. In later times the Greeks associated him with Hephaestos, the Latins with Vulcan; but in addition to the attributes connected with the earth, in the Underworld (Tuat) Ptah was regarded as the fashioner of the bodies for the pilgrims who entered that realm after death.
Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set "tool" (PCCTS) A highly integrated {lexical analser generator} and {parser generator} by Terence J. Parr "parrt@acm.org", Will E. Cohen and Henry G. Dietz "hankd@ecn.purdue.edu", both of {Purdue University}. ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) corresponds to YACC and DLG (DFA-based Lexical analyser Generator) functions like {LEX}. PCCTS has many additional features which make it easier to use for a wide range of translation problems. PCCTS {grammars} contain specifications for lexical and syntactic analysis with selective {backtracking} ("infinite lookahead"), {semantic predicates}, intermediate-form construction and error reporting. Rules may employ {Extended BNF} (EBNF) grammar constructs and may define parameters, return values, and have {local variables}. Languages described in PCCTS are recognised via {LLk} parsers constructed in pure, human-readable, {C} code. Selective backtracking is available to handle non-LL(k) constructs. PCCTS {parsers} may be compiled with a {C++} compiler. PCCTS also includes the {SORCERER} tree parser generator. {(ftp://marvin.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/pccts/1.10)}. {UK FTP (ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/ computing/programming/languages/tools/pccts/)}. {Macintosh FTP (ftp://maya.dei.unipd.it/pub/mac/)}. Mailing list: pccts-users-request@ahpcrc.umn.edu ("subscribe pccts-users your_name" in the message body). E-mail: Terence J. Parr "parrt@acm.org", Roberto Avanzi "mocenigo@maya.dei.unipd.it" (Mac port). (2000-10-30)
Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set ::: (tool) (PCCTS) A highly integrated lexical analser generator and parser generator by Terence J. Parr , Will E. Cohen and Henry G. Dietz , both of Purdue University.ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) corresponds to YACC and DLG (DFA-based Lexical analyser Generator) functions like LEX. PCCTS has many Extended BNF (EBNF) grammar constructs and may define parameters, return values, and have local variables.Languages described in PCCTS are recognised via LLk parsers constructed in pure, human-readable, C code. Selective backtracking is available to handle non-LL(k) constructs. PCCTS parsers may be compiled with a C++ compiler. PCCTS also includes the SORCERER tree parser generator.Current version: 1.10, runs under Unix, MS-DOS, OS/2, and Macintosh and is very portable. . .Mailing list: (subscribe pccts-users your_name in the message body).E-mail: Terence J. Parr , Roberto Avanzi (Mac port).(2000-10-30)
Pure Ego: See Ego, Pure. Pure Experience: (Lat. purus, clean) (a) The qualitative ingredients of experience, e.g. sense data, feelings, images, etc., which remain after the ideal elimination of conceptual, interpretational and constructional factors. (b) The world of ordinary immediate experience which constitutes the point of departure for science and philosophy. See Avenarius, Kritik der reinen Erfahrumg. -- L.W.
purline ::: n. --> In root construction, a horizontal member supported on the principals and supporting the common rafters.
QEF Abbreviation for the Latin phrase "quod erat faciendum", meaning "which was to be done". Occasionally used to indicate the completion of a (usually geometric) construction.
Quake ::: A string-oriented language designed to support the construction of Modula-3 programs from modules, interfaces and libraries. Written by Stephen Harrison of DEC SRC, 1993.
Quake A string-oriented language designed to support the construction of {Modula-3} programs from {modules}, interfaces and libraries. Written by Stephen Harrison of DEC SRC, 1993.
Quest 1. A language designed for its simple denotational semantics. "The Denotational Semantics of Programming Languages", R. Tennent, CACM 19(8):437-453 (Aug 1976). 2. QUantifiers and SubTypes. Language with a sophisticated type system. Just as types classify values, "kinds" classify types and type operators. Explicit universal and existential quantification over types, type operators, and subtypes. Subtyping is defined inductively on all type constructions, including higher-order functions and abstract types. User-definable higher-order type operators. "Typeful Programming", Luca Cardelli "luca@src.dec.com", RR 45, DEC SRC 1989. Implemented in Modula-3. {(ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/Quest/quest12A.tar.Z)}. 3. "tool, text" A {multimedia} {authoring} system. Quest has been available for {MS-DOS} for some time. Version 3.5 for {Microsoft Windows} was released around March 1995. It features an {Authorware}-style {flowchart} system with an {ANSI-C} {script language}. (1995-04-02)
railroading ::: n. --> The construction of a railroad; the business of managing or operating a railroad.
rdb ::: A roll-your-own database, created in the Unix toolkit philosophy. It appears to be written in the awk language, and is very compatible with awk. It uses awk's syntax and can be combined with awk commands.The definitive introduction is Unix Relational Database Management: Application Development in the Unix Environment, by Rod Manis, Evan Schaeffer, and Robert into programming for novices. It's also a good way to learn DB theory and construction quite painlessly.
rdb A roll-your-own {database}, created in the {Unix} toolkit philosophy. It appears to be written in the {awk} language, and is very compatible with awk. It uses awk's syntax and can be combined with awk commands. The definitive introduction is "Unix Relational Database Management: Application Development in the Unix Environment", by Rod Manis, Evan Schaeffer, and Robert Jorgensen, published by Prentice Hall. The book tells how to use rdb to create database/spreadsheets in the awk tradition, only easier. It's a good way to get into programming for novices. It's also a good way to learn DB theory and construction quite painlessly.
Recently, the Polish logician St. Lesniewski has developed a formal theory of the part-whole relationship within the framework of a so-called calculus of individuals, one of the theorems of this theory states that every object is identical with the sum of its parts. This is, of course, a consequence of the way in which the axioms of that calculus were chosen, but that particular construction of the theory was carried out with an eye to applications in logical and epistemological analysis, and the calculus of individuals has already begun to show its value in these fields. See Leonard and Goodman, The Calculus of Individuals and Its Uses, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 5 (1940, pp. 45-55. -- C.G.H.
Reconstructionist Judaism ::: Founded by Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1982), this represents a recent development in American Judaism, and attempts to focus on Judaism as a civilization and culture constantly adapting to insure survival in a natural social process. The central academic institution is the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in the Philadelphia suburbs. See also Reform and Conservative Judaism.
reconstruction ::: n. --> The act of constructing again; the state of being reconstructed.
The act or process of reorganizing the governments of the States which had passed ordinances of secession, and of reestablishing their constitutional relations to the national government, after the close of the Civil War.
Reconstruction ::: Tendency to fill in the gaps in our memory and often believe these represent true memories.
rectifiable ::: a. --> Capable of being rectified; as, a rectifiable mistake.
Admitting, as a curve, of the construction of a straight l//e equal in length to any definite portion of the curve.
Reformation: The Protestant Reformation may be dated from 1517, the year Martin Luther (1483-1546), Augustinian monk and University professor in Wittenberg, publicly attacked the sale of indulgences by the itinerant Tetzel, Dominican ambassador of the Roman Church. The break came first in the personality of the monk who could not find in his own religious and moral endeavors to win divine favor the peace demanded by a sensitive conscience; and when it came he found to his surprise that he had already parted company with a whole tradition. The ideology which found a response in his inner experience was set forth by Augustine, a troubled soul who had surrendered himself completely to divine grace and mercy. The philosophers who legitimized man's endeavor to get on in the world, the church which demanded unquestioned loyalty to its codes and commands, he eschewed as thoroughly inconsonant with his own inner life. Man is wholly dependent upon the merits of Christ, the miracle of faith alone justifies before God. Man's conscience, his reason, and the Scriptures together became his only norm and authority. He could have added a fourth: patriotism, since Luther became the spokesman of a rising tide of German nationalism already suspect of the powers of distant Rome. The humanist Erasmus (see Renaissance) supported Luther by his silence, then broke with him upon the reformer's extreme utterances concerning man's predestination. This break with the humanists shows clearly the direction which the Protestant Reformation was taking: it was an enfranchised religion only to a degree. For while Erasmus pleaded for tolerance and enlightenment the new religious movement called for decision and faith binding men's consciences to a new loyalty. At first the Scriptures were taken as conscience permitted, then conscience became bound by the Scuptures. Luther lacked a systematic theology for the simple reason that he himself was full of inconsistencies. A reformer is often not a systematic thinker. Lutheran princes promoted the reconstruction of institutions and forms suggested by the reformer and his learned ally, Melanchthon, and by one stroke whole provinces became Protestant. The original reformers were reformed by new reformers. Two of such early reformers were Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) in Switzerland and John Calvin (1509-1564) who set up a rigid system and rule of God in Geneva. Calvinism crossed the channel under the leadership of John Knox in Scotland. The English (Anglican) Reformation rested on political rather than strictly religious considerations. The Reformation brought about a Counter-Reformation within the Roman Church in which abuses were set right and lines against the Protestants more tightly drawn (Council of Trent, 1545-1563). -- V.F.
Reform Judaism ::: Modern movement originating in 18th century Europe that attempts to see Judaism as a rational religion adaptable to modern needs and sensitivities. The ancient traditions and laws are historical relics that need have no binding power over modern Jews. The central academic institution of American Reform Judaism is the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and it is represented also by the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Compare Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism. See Pittsburgh Platform, Geiger.
REJECTION. ::: The jjersonal effort required is a itficdon of the movements of the lower nature — rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind ; rejection of
Reliability - 1. in auditing, confidence that the financial records have been properly prepared and that accounting procedures and internal controls are correctly functioning. Or 2. in financial accounting theory, term describing information that is reasonably free from error and bias and accurately presents the facts. Verifiabilityexists when a reconstruction of financial data, following acceptable accounting practices, results in the same actual results previously attained; further, two accountants working independently will come up with similar results. Or 3. probability that a product or process will perform satisfactorily over a period of time under specified operating conditions.
Remedial Action (RA) ::: The actual construction or implementation phase of a Superfund site cleanup that follows remedial design.
Resuming certain ideas of Locke and Berkeley, it was first propounded by the physicist Kirchhoff, and found its best representation by Richard Avenarius (1843-96) in Menschlicher Welthegriff, and, independently, by Ernst Mach (1838-1916) in Anal, d. Empfindungen. Many psychologists (Wm. Wundt, 0. Kuelpe, Harold Hoeffding, E. B. Titchener) approved of it, while H. Rickert and W. Moog discredited it forcefully. Charles Peirce (Popular Science Monthly, Jan. 1878) and Wm. James (Principles of Psych. 1898) applied Avenarius' ideas, somewhat roughly though, for the foundation of ''Pragmatism". John Dewey (Reconstruction in Philos.) used it in his "Instrumentalism", while F. C. S. Schiller (Humanism) based his ethical theory on it. -- S.v.F.
roof ::: n. --> The cover of any building, including the roofing (see Roofing) and all the materials and construction necessary to carry and maintain the same upon the walls or other uprights. In the case of a building with vaulted ceilings protected by an outer roof, some writers call the vault the roof, and the outer protection the roof mask. It is better, however, to consider the vault as the ceiling only, in cases where it has farther covering.
That which resembles, or corresponds to, the covering or the
rude ::: 1. Rough, harsh or ungentle. 2. Lacking the graces and refinement of civilized life; uncouth; primitive. 3. Roughly made or formed; imperfect in design or execution; of a crude construction. 4. Coarse, vulgar, rough; uncivilised; violent in action.
sambuke ::: n. --> An ancient stringed instrument used by the Greeks, the particular construction of which is unknown.
scopula ::: n. --> A peculiar brushlike organ found on the foot of spiders and used in the construction of the web.
A special tuft of hairs on the leg of a bee.
Seal ::: A sigil or or other construction of mind and materia designed to lock away or release an entity or archetype. Can also be synonymous with a sigil.
seizin ::: n. --> Possession; possession of an estate of froehold. It may be either in deed or in law; the former when there is actual possession, the latter when there is a right to such possession by construction of law. In some of the United States seizin means merely ownership.
The act of taking possession.
The thing possessed; property.
SELF-ESTEEM. ::: A very strong self-esteem and a self- righteous spirit stand in the way of pedcction and constitute a very serious obstacle. So long as a sadhaka has that, the attempt of the Truth to manliest in him wiD always be baffled by his changing it into mental and \^tal constructions which distort it, turn it into ineffective haJf-lruib, even make truth itself a source of error.
Sensum-Theory: Epistemological theory which explains perception and other higher forms of knowledge by means of inferences and constructions from sensa. See Sensum. -- L.W.
sewerage ::: n. --> The construction of a sewer or sewers.
The system of sewers in a city, town, etc.; the general drainage of a city or town by means of sewers.
The material collected in, and discharged by, sewers.
shape ::: n. --> To form or create; especially, to mold or make into a particular form; to give proper form or figure to.
To adapt to a purpose; to regulate; to adjust; to direct; as, to shape the course of a vessel.
To image; to conceive; to body forth.
To design; to prepare; to plan; to arrange.
Character or construction of a thing as determining its external appearance; outward aspect; make; figure; form; guise; as, the
Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self-expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe. …
Smalltalk "language" The pioneering {object-oriented programming} system developed in 1972 by the Software Concepts Group, led by {Alan Kay}, at {Xerox PARC} between 1971 and 1983. It includes a language, a programming environment, and an extensive object library. Smalltalk took the concepts of {class} and {message} from {Simula-67} and made them all-pervasive. Innovations included the {bitmap display}, windowing system, and use of a {mouse}. The {syntax} is very simple. The fundamental construction is to send a message to an {object}: object message or with extra parameters object message: param1 secondArg: param2 .. nthArg: paramN where "secondArg:" etc. are considered to be part of the message name. Five pseudo-variables are defined: "self", "super", "nil", "true", "false". "self" is the receiver of the current message. "super" is used to delegate processing of a message to the {superclass} of the receiver. "nil" is a reference to "nothing" (an instance of UndefinedObject). All variables initially contain a reference to nil. "true" and "false" are {Booleans}. In Smalltalk, any message can be sent to any object. The recipient object itself decides (based on the message name, also called the "message selector") how to respond to the message. Because of that, the {multiple inheritance} system included in the early versions of Smalltalk-80 appeared to be unused in practice. All modern implementations have single inheritance, so each class can have at most one superclass. Early implementations were {interpreted} but all modern ones use {dynamic translation} (JIT). Early versions were Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-74, Smalltalk-76 (inheritance taken from Simula, and concurrency), and Smalltalk-78, {Smalltalk-80}. Other versions include {Little Smalltalk}, {Smalltalk/V}, {Kamin's interpreters}. Current versions are {VisualWorks}, {Squeak}, {VisualAge}, {Dolphin Smalltalk}, {Object Studio}, {GNU Smalltalk}. See also: {International Smalltalk Association}. {UIUC Smalltalk archive (http://st-www.cs.uiuc.edu/)}. {FAQ (http://XCF.Berkeley.EDU/pub/misc/smalltalk/FAQ/)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.smalltalk}. ["The Smalltalk-76 Programming System Design and Implementation", D.H. Ingalls, 5th POPL, ACM 1978, pp. 9-16]. (2001-09-11)
Smalltalk ::: (language) The pioneering object-oriented programming system developed in 1972 by the Software Concepts Group, led by Alan Kay, at Xerox PARC between 1971 and 1983. It includes a language, a programming environment, and an extensive object library.Smalltalk took the concepts of class and message from Simula-67 and made them all-pervasive. Innovations included the bitmap display, windowing system, and use of a mouse.The syntax is very simple. The fundamental construction is to send a message to an object: object message or with extra parameters object message: param1 secondArg: param2 .. nthArg: paramN where secondArg: etc. are considered to be part of the message name.Five pseudo-variables are defined: self, super, nil, true, false. self is the receiver of the current message. super is used to delegate to nothing (an instance of UndefinedObject). All variables initially contain a reference to nil. true and false are Booleans.In Smalltalk, any message can be sent to any object. The recipient object itself decides (based on the message name, also called the message selector) how to practice. All modern implementations have single inheritance, so each class can have at most one superclass.Early implementations were interpreted but all modern ones use dynamic translation (JIT).Early versions were Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-74, Smalltalk-76 (inheritance taken from Simula, and concurrency), and Smalltalk-78, Smalltalk-80. Other versions are VisualWorks, Squeak, VisualAge, Dolphin Smalltalk, Object Studio, GNU Smalltalk.See also: International Smalltalk Association. . .Usenet newsgroup: comp.lang.smalltalk.[The Smalltalk-76 Programming System Design and Implementation, D.H. Ingalls, 5th POPL, ACM 1978, pp. 9-16].(2001-09-11)
smoke test ::: 1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See magic smoke.2. By extension, the first run of a piece of software after construction or a critical change. See and compare reality check.There is an interesting semi-parallel to this term among typographers and printers: When new typefaces are being punch-cut by hand, a smoke test (hold the letter in candle smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new dies.[Jargon File]
smoke test 1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See {magic smoke}. 2. By extension, the first run of a piece of software after construction or a critical change. See and compare {reality check}. There is an interesting semi-parallel to this term among typographers and printers: When new typefaces are being punch-cut by hand, a "smoke test" (hold the letter in candle smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new dies. [{Jargon File}]
socialism ::: n. --> A theory or system of social reform which contemplates a complete reconstruction of society, with a more just and equitable distribution of property and labor. In popular usage, the term is often employed to indicate any lawless, revolutionary social scheme. See Communism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonianism, forms of socialism.
software life-cycle "programming" The phases a software product goes through between when it is conceived and when it is no longer available for use. The software life-cycle typically includes the following: {requirements analysis}, {design}, construction, testing ({validation}), installation, operation, maintenance, and retirement. The development process tends to run iteratively through these phases rather than linearly; several models (spiral, waterfall etc.) have been proposed to describe this process. Other processes associated with a software product are: quality assurance, marketing, sales and support. (1996-12-27)
software life-cycle ::: (programming) The phases a software product goes through between when it is conceived and when it is no longer available for use. The software life-cycle typically includes the following: requirements analysis, design, construction, testing (validation), installation, operation, maintenance, and retirement.The development process tends to run iteratively through these phases rather than linearly; several models (spiral, waterfall etc.) have been proposed to describe this process.Other processes associated with a software product are: quality assurance, marketing, sales and support. (1996-12-27)
Solid Waste ::: Any solid, semi-solid, liquid and containerized gaseous material generated as a result of routine operations and/or construction/demolition activities. This is the legal definition per the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
SORCERER "tool" A simple tree {parser generator} by Terence Parr "parrt@s1.arc.umn.edu". SORCERER is suitable for translation problems lying between those solved by {code generator} generators and by full source-to-source translator generators. SORCERER generates simple, flexible, top-down, tree {parsers} that, in contrast to code generators, may execute actions at any point during a tree walk. SORCERER accepts {extended BNF} notation, allows {predicates} to direct the tree walk with {semantic} and {syntactic} context information, and does not rely on any particular intermediate form, parser generator, or other pre-existing application. SORCERER is included in the {Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set}. Version: 1.00B {(ftp://marvin.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/pccts/sorcerer/)}. E-mail: "parrt@acm.org" ("e-mail sor.tar.Z.uu" in subject). Mailing list: pccts-users-request@ahpcrc.umn.edu (message body: "subscribe pccts-users YOUR-NAME", where YOUR-NAME can be your name or e-mail address). (1994-02-15)
SORCERER ::: (tool) A simple tree parser generator by Terence Parr .SORCERER is suitable for translation problems lying between those solved by code generator generators and by full source-to-source translator generators. semantic and syntactic context information, and does not rely on any particular intermediate form, parser generator, or other pre-existing application.SORCERER is included in the Purdue Compiler-Construction Tool Set.Version: 1.00B .E-mail: (e-mail sor.tar.Z.uu in subject).Mailing list: (1994-02-15)
Spectral Band Replication "audio, compression" (SBR) Guessing the nontransmitted higher frequency range of a compressed audio file by some helper bits (transmiited with the stream) and the transmitted base band. SBR allows a restoration (not reconstruction) of the upper frequency range without lots of bits. It was developed by {Coding Technology (http://codingtechnology.com/)}, and is useful for medium and high quality coding at low and medium data rates. It is used by {Digital Radio Mondiale} and {MP3 Pro}. (2004-12-10)
spirit of Delight ::: Sri Aurobindo: " Now, that a conscious Infinite is there in physical Nature, we are assured by every sign, though it is a consciousness not made or limited like ours. All her constructions and motions are those of an illimitable intuitive wisdom too great and spontaneous and mysteriously self-effective to be described as an intelligence, of a Power and Will working for Time in eternity with an inevitable and forecasting movement in each of its steps, even in those steps that in their outward or superficial impetus seem to us inconscient. And as there is in her this greater consciousness and greater power, so too there is an illimitable spirit of harmony and beauty in her constructions that never fails her, though its works are not limited by our aesthetic canons. An infinite hedonism too is there, an illimitable spirit of delight, of which we become aware when we enter into impersonal unity with her; and even as that in her which is terrible is a part of her beauty, that in her which is dangerous, cruel, destructive is a part of her delight, her universal Ananda. Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: " Karma is nothing but the will of the Spirit in action, consequence nothing but the creation of will. What is in the will of being, expresses itself in karma and consequence. When the will is limited in mind, karma appears as a bondage and a limitation, consequence as a reaction or an imposition. But when the will of the being is infinite in the spirit, karma and consequence become instead the joy of the creative spirit, the construction of the eternal mechanist, the word and drama of the eternal poet, the harmony of the eternal musician, the play of the eternal child.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
stereography ::: n. --> The art of delineating the forms of solid bodies on a plane; a branch of solid geometry which shows the construction of all solids which are regularly defined.
stereoscopist ::: n. --> One skilled in the use or construction of stereoscopes.
stringpiece ::: n. --> A long piece of timber, forming a margin or edge of any piece of construction; esp.:
One of the longitudinal pieces, supporting the treads and rises of a flight or run of stairs.
structuralism: This theory suggests that no text has any meaning independently, but only makes sense when thought of as part of a complete language system. Furthermore, it is argued that all writing is comprised of an arrangement of signs, codes and conventions. This turns away fromthe traditional view that literaturereflects reality, and thus creates a connection between the writer and reader. Structuralists reject both these ideas and argue the writer creates a persona, which is a literary construction, creating a barrier to the access of the actual writer. Roland Barthes (1915-80) was a key structuralist during the theory’s rise in the 1960s. The discourse has now been outdated by post-structuralism.
structure ::: n. **1. Mode of building, construction, or organization; arrangement of parts, elements, or constituents. 2. Something built or constructed, as a building, bridge, etc. Also fig. 3. Anything composed of parts arranged together in some way; an organization. structures. v. 4. To give an organization, form or arrangement to; construct a systematic framework for. structured.**
structure ::: n. --> The act of building; the practice of erecting buildings; construction.
Manner of building; form; make; construction.
Arrangement of parts, of organs, or of constituent particles, in a substance or body; as, the structure of a rock or a mineral; the structure of a sentence.
Manner of organization; the arrangement of the different tissues or parts of animal and vegetable organisms; as, organic
style ::: 1. A particular kind, sort, or type, as with reference to form, appearance, character, etc. 2. The combination of distinctive features of literary or artistic expression, execution, or performance characterizing a particular person, group, school, or era. 3. A particular, distinctive, or characteristic mode or form of construction or execution in any art or work.
Tabernacle ::: The tent-structure used to house the portable wilderness sanctuary that served as the center of ancient Israelite worship until the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem by King Solomon.
tectonic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to building or construction; architectural.
Temple Mount Faithful ::: A religious group committed to the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount.
tenting ::: something resembling such a portable shelter in construction or outline. (Said of Savitri"s eyelids.)
Terminal Oriented Social Science "project" (TOSS) The Cambridge Project {Project MAC} was an ARPA-funded political science computing project. They worked on topics like survey analysis and simulation, led by Ithiel de Sola Pool, J.C.R. Licklider and Douwe B. Yntema. Yntema had done a system on the {MIT} Lincoln Labs {TX-2} called the {Lincoln Reckoner}, and in the summer of 1969 led a Cambridge Project team in the construction of an experiment called TOSS. TOSS was like {Logo}, with {matrix} operators. A major feature was multiple levels of {undo}, back to the level of the {login} session. This feature was cheap on the Lincoln Reckoner, but absurdly expensive on {Multics}. (1997-01-29)
The definition is suggested by that of Jeremy Bentham. Reference: C. K. Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, 12. See also Incomplete Symbol, Construction. -- M.B.
“The difference between the ordinary mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking in the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight, first, sees things only as they are presented in that light and, secondly, where it does not know, constructs by imagination, by uncertain inference, by others of its aids and makeshifts things which it readily takes for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices, unreal prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities and probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The intuitive mind constructs nothing in this artificial fashion, but makes itself a receiver of the light and allows the truth to manifest in it and organise its own constructions.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The feminine consorts of the various divinities of ancient peoples represent the vehicular or encompassing substances and powers surrounding the emanating monad itself; and because these powers and substances are in incessant action, they are often grouped under the name sakti, active universal energy, which is septenary, denary, or duodenary in hierarchical construction, according to the manner of counting. Thus these spiritual or divine consorts are equivalent to the theosophical elements or principle-elements, whether of the cosmos or of any individual, which surround the individual monad and furnish the field of action through which it expresses itself.
the opposites of its own truths of being ::: an abyss of non-existence,24 a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence [saccidananda] can manifest themselves"; (same as asat brahma)"something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe", not a mere negation but "a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions".
The personal effort required Is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender ; an aspiration vigilant, constant, un- ceasing — the mind’s will, the heart's seeking, the assent of the vital being, the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature ; rejection of the movements of the lower nature — rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions, prefer- ences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find room in a silent mind, — rejection of the vital nature’s desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arro- gance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, — rejection of the physical nature’s stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine ; surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the ShaUi.
The position taken is that investigation reveals basic, recurrent patterns of change, expressible as laws of materialist dialectics, which are seen as relevant to every level of existence, and, because validated by past evidence, as indispensable hypotheses in guiding further investigation. These are Law of interpenetration, unity and strife of opposites. (All existences, being complexes of opposing elements and forces, have the character of a changing unity. The unity is considered temporary, relative, while the process of change, expressed by interpenetration and strife, is continuous, absolute.) Law of transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa. (The changes which take place in nature are not merely quantitative; their accumulation eventually precipitates new qualities in a transition which appears as a sudden leap in comparison to the gradualness of the quantitative changes up to that point. The new quality is considered as real as the original quality. It is not mechanically reducible to it it is not merely a larger amount of the former quality, but something into which that has developed.) Law of negation of negation. (The series of quantitative changes and emerging qualities is unending. Each state or phase of development is considered a synthesis which resolves the contradictions contained in the preceding synthesis and which generates its own contradictions on a different qualitative level.) These laws, connecting ontology with logic, are contrasted to the formalistic laws of identity, difference and excluded middle of which they are considered qualitatively enriched reconstructions. Against the ontology of the separateness and self-identity of each thing, the dialectical laws emphasize the interconnectedness of all things and self-development of each thing. An A all parts of which are always becoming non-A may thus be called non-A as well as A. The formula, A is A and cannot be non-A, becomes, A is A and also non-A, that is, at or during the same instant: there is no instant, it is held, during which nothing happens. The view taken is that these considerations apply as much to thought and concepts, as to things, that thought is a process, that ideas gain their logical content through interconnectedness with other ideas, out of and into which they develop.
The psychic has indeed the quality of peace—but that is not its main character as it is of the Self or Atman. The psychic is the divine element in the individual being and its characteristic power is to turn everything towards the Divine, to bring a fire of purification, aspiration, devotion, true light of discernment, feeling, will, an action which transforms by degrees the whole nature. Quietude, peace and silence in the heart and th
refore in the vital part of the being are necessary to reach the psychic, to plunge in it, for the perturbations of the vital nature, desire, emotion turned ego-wards or world-wards are the main part of the screen that hides the soul from the nature. It is better, th
refore, to be free from the mental constructions when you take the plunge and to have only the sense of aspiration, of devotion, of self-giving to the Divine.
Ref: SABCL Vol. 22-23-24, Page 1197
There are two major points of reference for tracing1 the path that Soviet philosophy has taken -- the successive controversies around the issues of mechanism and of idealism. The first began in the early twenties as a discussion centering on the philosophy of science, and eventually spread to all phases of philosophy. The central issue was whether materialism could be identified with mechanism. Those who answered in the affirmative, among them Timiriazev, Timinski, Axelrod and Stepanov, were called mechanistic materialists. Their position tended to an extreme empiricism which was suspicious of generalization and theory, saw little if any value in Hegel's philosophy, or in dialectical as distinguished from formal logic, and even went so far, in some cases, as to deny the necessity of philosophy in general, resting content with the findings of the specific sciences. It was considered that they tended to deny the reality of quality, attempting to reduce it mechanically to quantity, and to interpret evolution as a mere quantitative increase or decrease of limited factors, neglecting the significance of leaps, breaks and the precipitation of new qualities. In opposition to their views, a group of thinkers, led by Deborin, asserted the necessity of philosophic generalizition and the value of the dialectical method in Hegel as a necessary element in Marxian materialism. In 1929, at a conference of scientific institutions attended by 229 delegates from all parts of the country, the issues were discussed by both sides. A general lack of satisfaction with the mechanist position was expressed in the form of a resolution at the close of the conference. However, the Deborin group was also criticized, not only by the mechanists, but by many who were opposed to the mechanists as well. It was felt by Mitin, Yudin and a group of predominantly younger thinkers that neither camp was really meeting the obligations of philosophy. While they felt there was much that was valuable in Deborin's criticism of mechanism, it seemed to them that he had carried it too far and had fallen over backward into the camp of the idealists. They called his group menshevizing idealists, that is to say, people who talked like the Mensheviks, a pre-revolutionary faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. By this was meant that they were unduly abstract, vague and tended to divorce theory from practice. In particular, they seemed to accept Hegelian dialectics as such, overlooking the deeper implications of the materialist reconstruction of it which Marx insisted upon. Moreover, they had neglected the field of social problems, and consequently made no significant philosophic contribution to momentous social issues of the times such as collectivization of the land, abandonment of NEP, the possibility of a Five Year Plan. At a three day conference in 1930, the situation was discussed at length by all interested parties. Deborin, Karev and Sten leading the discussion on one side, Mitin and Yudin on the other. The sense of the meetings was that the criticisms made of the Deborin group were valid.
These beings belong to two general divisions, the arupa (formless) and the rupa (form) divinities. Those having forms should not be imagined as necessarily having human forms as in the ancient pantheons, yet rupa gods do have highly ethereal forms, some perhaps resembling the present human shape and others of quite different construction. But the arupa divinities are to our power of imagination “beings of pure intelligence and of understanding, pure essences, pure spirits, formless as we conceive form” (Fund 347).
The series of chambers in the labyrinth was an attempt to portray in the Mysteries by means of a construction — whether subterranean or above ground — the peregrinations of the human monad in its postmortem destiny, as it wandered from chamber to chamber — from sphere to sphere or globe to globe — in the celestial spaces, finally returning to its point of departure, in this instance to human reimbodiment.
The shrines or temples were of simple construction, without adornment or statuary, the outstanding characteristic being the torii or gateway always present before a temple. The gateway was erected as a perch for the fowls offered to the deities, but the tori came to be regarded as an offering to the deities themselves, hence as many as desired might be erected in the vicinity of a temple.
This isomorphism between the algebra of classes and the indicated part of the functional calculus of first order can be taken as representing a parallelism of meaning. In fact, the meanings become identical if we wish to construe the functional calculus in extension, (see the article propositional function); or, inversely, if we wish to construe the algebra of classes in intension, instead of the usual construction.
Tiahuanaco A region near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca on the borders of Peru and Bolivia, the site of cyclopean ruins of vast edifices whose age is unknown. The lake is 12,500 feet above sea level, and owing to its altitude the district is capable of sustaining only a scanty population, yet it was evidently the seat of a great civilization in prehistoric times when the climate appears to have been far milder. Within a comparatively recent period, geologically speaking, the Andes have risen to their present height. Opinions are sharply divided as to the age of the monuments, ten to fifty thousand years having been suggested. Blavatsky inclines to a greater age, suggesting that these remarkable works were erected by people of Lemurian stock, but who actually then were of Atlantean racial connection, and who had inherited at least fragments of the pre-Atlantean-Lemurian tradition. Three main types of pre-Inca constructions exist: the buildings made of enormous polygonal stones, the Tiahuanaco style, and the pre-Inca roads and aqueducts. Markham, in The Incas of Peru, speaking of Tiahuanaco, writes: “The city covered a large area, built by highly skilled masons, and with the use of enormous stones. One 36 ft. by 7 ft. weighs 170 tons, another is 26 ft. by 16 by 6. Apart from the monoliths of ancient Egypt, there is nothing to equal this in any other part of the world . . . The point next in interest to the enormous size of the stones is the excellence of the workmanship. The lines are accurately straight, the angles correctly drawn, the surfaces true planes . . . Not less striking are the statues with heads adorned with curiously shaped head-dresses . . . There is ample proof of the very advanced stage reached by the builders in architectural art.”
treasure-chest ::: -chest. A box, a coffer; now mostly applied to a large box of strong construction, used for the safe custody of articles of value.
tunnel ::: n. . --> A vessel with a broad mouth at one end, a pipe or tube at the other, for conveying liquor, fluids, etc., into casks, bottles, or other vessels; a funnel.
The opening of a chimney for the passage of smoke; a flue; a funnel.
An artificial passage or archway for conducting canals or railroads under elevated ground, for the formation of roads under rivers or canals, and the construction of sewers, drains, and the like.
Turingol "language" A {high-level language} for programming {Turing Machines} by {Donald Knuth}. It was the subject of the first construction of a nontrivial {attribute grammar}. ["Semantics of Context-Free Languages", D. Knuth, Math Sys Thy 2:127-145 (1975)]. (1995-10-08)
Turingol ::: (language) A high-level language for programming Turing Machines by Donald Knuth. It was the subject of the first construction of a nontrivial attribute grammar.[Semantics of Context-Free Languages, D. Knuth, Math Sys Thy 2:127-145 (1995-10-08)
underpinning ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Underpin ::: n. --> The act of one who underpins; the act of supporting by stones, masonry, or the like.
That by which a building is underpinned; the material and construction used for support, introduced beneath a wall already
Unfinished construction sites; workshops.
uranography ::: n. --> A description or plan of the heavens and the heavenly bodies; the construction of celestial maps, globes, etc.; uranology.
vaulting ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Vault ::: n. --> The act of constructing vaults; a vaulted construction.
Act of one who vaults or leaps.
vector: A mathematical object consisting of magnitude and direction. Specifically, two vectors are considered the same as long as the aforementioned two quantities are, regardless of whether they have different "origins", "destinations" or "routes". Addition, subtraction and "multiplication" is defined for vectors. There is no division and there is a second type of "multiplication" for three dimensional vectors. Vectors are often visualised as arrows, with direction as well as length (of the tail), although the idea of vectors can generalise and abstractise beyond mere geometrical constructions.
versification ::: n. --> The act, art, or practice, of versifying, or making verses; the construction of poetry; metrical composition.
viatecture ::: n. --> The art of making roads or ways for traveling, including the construction of bridges, canals, viaducts, etc.
Vina (Sanskrit) Vīṇā An ancient musical instrument of the guitar family, still in use in India. Although generally termed a lute, its construction is quite different, having two gourds for its sounding boards rather than the single one used in the lute and modern musical instruments. In playing the vina, the performer places one gourd on the shoulder and the other on the hip. It usually has seven strings, and a long finger board containing 19 and occasionally 21 frets or supports. There are many varieties classed according to the number of strings. Its invention is attributed to Narada, one of the seven great rishis.
visual programming language "language" (VPL) Any programming language that allows the user to specify a program in a two-(or more)-dimensionsional way. Conventional textual languages are not considered two-dimensional since the {compiler} or {interpreter} processes them as one-dimensional streams of characters. A VPL allows programming with visual expressions - spatial arrangements of textual and graphical symbols. VPLs may be further classified, according to the type and extent of visual expression used, into {icon}-based languages, {form}-based languages and {diagram languages}. {Visual programming environments} provide graphical or iconic elements which can be manipulated by the user in an interactive way according to some specific spatial grammar for program construction. A visually transformed language is a non-visual language with a superimposed visual representation. Naturally visual languages have an inherent visual expression for which there is no obvious textual equivalent. {Visual Basic}, {Visual C++} and the entire {Microsoft} Visual family are not, despite their names, visual programming languages. They are textual languages which use a graphical {GUI builder} to make programming interfaces easier. The user interface portion of the programming environment is visual, the languages are not. Because of the confusion caused by the multiple meanings of the term "{visual programming}", Fred Lakin has proposed the term "executable graphics" as an alternative to VPL. Some examples of visual programming languages are {Prograph}, {Pict}, {Tinkertoy}, {Fabrik}, {CODE 2.0} and {Hyperpascal}. {(http://cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ianr/vpl.html)}. {(http://cuiwww.unige.ch/eao/www/readme.html)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.visual} (NOT for {Visual Basic} or {Visual C++}). (1995-02-10)
visual programming language ::: (language) (VPL) Any programming language that allows the user to specify a program in a two-(or more)-dimensionsional way. Conventional textual languages them as one-dimensional streams of characters. A VPL allows programming with visual expressions - spatial arrangements of textual and graphical symbols.VPLs may be further classified, according to the type and extent of visual expression used, into icon-based languages, form-based languages and diagram which can be manipulated by the user in an interactive way according to some specific spatial grammar for program construction.A visually transformed language is a non-visual language with a superimposed visual representation. Naturally visual languages have an inherent visual expression for which there is no obvious textual equivalent.Visual Basic, Visual C++ and the entire Microsoft Visual family are not, despite their names, visual programming languages. They are textual languages which use visual programming, Fred Lakin has proposed the term executable graphics as an alternative to VPL.Some examples of visual programming languages are Prograph, Pict, Tinkertoy, Fabrik, CODE 2.0 and Hyperpascal. . .Usenet newsgroup: comp.lang.visual (NOT for Visual Basic or Visual C++). (1995-02-10)
von Neumann architecture ::: (architecture, computability) A computer architecture conceived by mathematician John von Neumann, which forms the core of nearly every computer successive operation can read or write any memory location, independent of the location accessed by the previous operation.A von Neumann machine also has a central processing unit (CPU) with one or more registers that hold data that are being operated on. The CPU has a set of a program if the binary integer in some register is equal to zero (conditional branch).The CPU can interpret the contents of memory either as instructions or as data according to the fetch-execute cycle.Von Neumann considered parallel computers but recognized the problems of construction and hence settled for a sequential system. For this reason, parallel computers are sometimes referred to as non-von Neumann architectures.A von Neumann machine can compute the same class of functions as a universal Turing machine.[Reference? Was von Neumann's design, unlike Turing's, originally intended for physical implementation?] .(2003-05-16)
von Neumann architecture "architecture, computability" A computer {architecture} conceived by mathematician {John von Neumann}, which forms the core of nearly every computer system in use today (regardless of size). In contrast to a {Turing machine}, a von Neumann machine has a {random-access memory} (RAM) which means that each successive operation can read or write any memory location, independent of the location accessed by the previous operation. A von Neumann machine also has a {central processing unit} (CPU) with one or more {registers} that hold data that are being operated on. The CPU has a set of built-in operations (its {instruction set}) that is far richer than with the Turing machine, e.g. adding two {binary} {integers}, or branching to another part of a program if the binary integer in some register is equal to zero ({conditional branch}). The CPU can interpret the contents of memory either as instructions or as data according to the {fetch-execute cycle}. Von Neumann considered {parallel computers} but recognized the problems of construction and hence settled for a sequential system. For this reason, parallel computers are sometimes referred to as non-von Neumann architectures. A von Neumann machine can compute the same class of functions as a universal {Turing machine}. [Reference? Was von Neumann's design, unlike Turing's, originally intended for physical implementation?] {(http://salem.mass.edu/~tevans/VonNeuma.htm)}. (2003-05-16)
What is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical construction of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us.We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature—this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised,—a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 382-383
While the highest truths or the pure ideas are to the ideative mind abstractions, because mind lives partly in the phenomenal and partly in intellectual constructions and has to use the method of abstraction to arrive at the higher realities, the supermind lives in the spirit and th
refore in the very substance of what these ideas and truths represent or rather fundamentally are and truly realises them, not only thinks but in the act of thinking feels and identifies itself with their substance, and to it they are among the most substantial things that can be.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, , Page: 844-45
with dominion over naval construction. Damabiah
WOMBAT Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. Problems which are both profoundly {uninteresting} in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as "wrestling with a wombat". See also {crawling horror}, {SMOP}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-03-10)
World bank - International Bank For Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).
WORLDS. ::: The physical is not the only world ; there are others that we become aware of through dream records, through the subtle senses, through influences and contacts, through imagination, Intuition and vision. There are worlds of a larger subtler life than ours, vital worlds ; worlds in which Mind builds its own forms and figures, mental worlds ; psychic worlds which are the soul’s home ; others above with which we have littfe contact. In each of us there is a mental plane of consciousness, a psychic, a vital, a subtle physical as w’cll as the gross physical and material plane. The same planes are repeated in the cons- ciousness of general Nature. It is when we enter or contact these other planes that we come into conoeciion with the worlds above the physical. In sleep we leave the physical body, only a sub- conscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds. In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happen- ings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which belong to these planes. Even when we are awake, part of us moves in these planes, but their activity goes on behind the veil ; our waking minds are not aware of it. Dreams are often only incoherent constructions of our subcooscient, but others are records (often much mixed and distorted) or transcripts of experiences in these supraphystcal planes. When we do sadbana, this kind of dream becomes very common ; then subconscious dreams cease to predominate.
xnf2ver An {XNF} to {Verilog} translator by Martin J. Colley "martin@essex.ac.uk". This program was written by a postgraduate student as part of his M.Sc course. It was designed to form part a larger system operating with the Cadence Edge 2.1 framework. This should be born in mind when considering the construction and/or operation of the program. {(ftp://punisher.caltech.edu/pub/dank/xnf2ver.tar.Z)}.
xnf2ver ::: An XNF to Verilog translator by Martin J. Colley .This program was written by a postgraduate student as part of his M.Sc course. It was designed to form part a larger system operating with the Cadence Edge 2.1 framework. This should be born in mind when considering the construction and/or operation of the program. .
"Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations.” The Life Divine*
“Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations.” The Life Divine
Z3 ::: (computer) The third computer designed and built by Konrad Zuse and the first digital computer to successfully run real programs. The computer was ready in 1941, five years before ENIAC.Zuse began his work on program-driven calculating machines in 1935. His two predessors of the Z3, the Z1 and Z2, were unsuccessful mechanical calculating deciphering coded messages. A 1960 reconstruction of the Z3 is in the Deutsche Museum in Munich.The Z3 used about 2600 relays of the kind used in telecommunications. Zuse wrote and implemented the language Plankalk�l on the Z3. Programs were punched into cinefilm.Zuse built some more computers after World War II, including the Z3's successor, the Z4, which was set up at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.Of the potential rival claimants to the title of first programmable computer, Babbage (UK, c1840) planned but was not able to build a decimal, programmable Turing et al.'s Colossus (UK, 1943-45). Aiken's MARK I (1944) was programmable but still decimal, without separation of storage and control.[Features? Where was it designed? Contemporaries?] . .(2003-10-01)
Z3 "computer" The third computer designed and built by {Konrad Zuse} and the first {digital computer} to successfully run real programs. The computer was ready in 1941, five years before {ENIAC}. Zuse began his work on program-driven calculating machines in 1935. His two predessors of the Z3, the Z1 and Z2, were unsuccessful mechanical calculating machines. The Z3 was delivered to the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (German Experimental Department of Aeronautics) in Berlin and was used for deciphering coded messages. A 1960 reconstruction of the Z3 is in the Deutsche Museum in Munich. The Z3 used about 2600 relays of the kind used in telecommunications. Zuse wrote and implemented the language {Plankalkül} on the Z3. Programs were punched into cinefilm. Zuse built some more computers after World War II, including the Z3's successor, the Z4, which was set up at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Of the potential rival claimants to the title of first programmable computer, {Babbage} (UK, c1840) planned but was not able to build a {decimal}, programmable machine. {Atanasoff}'s {ABC}, completed in 1942 was a special purpose calculator, like those of {Pascal} (1640) and {Leibniz} (1670). Eckert and Mauchly's {ENIAC} (US), as originally released in 1946, was programmable only by manual rewiring or, in 1948, with switches. None of these machines was freely programmable. Neither was {Turing} et al.'s {Colossus} (UK, 1943-45). {Aiken}'s {MARK I} (1944) was programmable but still decimal, without separation of storage and control. [Features? Where was it designed? Contemporaries?] {(http://cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse)}. {(http://epemag.com/zuse)}. (2003-10-01)
Zen ::: A school of Buddhism which emphasizes direct experiential insight into the nature of reality: the non-dual state of awareness, and living one's life in accordance with this realization. On this site we will also refer to Zen techniques as a way of shifting awareness to the non-dual through polar elimination of archetypes and forceful deconstruction of the momentary self.
zero 1. "character" 0, {ASCI} character 48. Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter "O" (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various {kluges} invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your zero is centre-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on {IBM 3270} controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an old-style {ASCII} graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the venerable {ASR-33} {Teletype} (Scandinavians, for whom slashed-O is a letter, curse this arrangement). If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at {IBM} and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse *this* arrangement even more, because it means two of their letters collide). Some {Burroughs}/{Unisys} equipment displays a zero with a *reversed* slash. And yet another convention common on early {line printers} left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O. [{Jargon File}] (1995-01-24) 2. To set to zero. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (especially in the construction "zero out"). 3. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where "zeroing" need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being "logically zeroed" rather than being "physically zeroed". See {scribble}. (1999-02-07)
zero ::: 1. (character) 0, ASCI character 48. Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter O (the 15th letter of the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion.If your zero is centre-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom slashed-O is a letter, curse this arrangement).If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O.[Jargon File] (1995-01-24)2. To set to zero. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (especially in the construction zero out).3. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where zeroing need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being logically zeroed rather than being physically zeroed.See scribble. (1999-02-07)
KEYS (10k)
6 Sri Aurobindo
2 The Mother
1 Tertullian of Carthage
1 Nikola Tesla
1 Essential Integral
1 Donald Knuth
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
33 Anonymous
13 Thomas Jefferson
10 Albert Einstein
8 Ron Chernow
8 Michelle Alexander
8 Jonathan Haidt
8 Eric Foner
7 John Dewey
7 Jeffrey Eugenides
6 William Zinsser
6 Donald Trump
6 Charles Dickens
5 Warren Farrell
5 Victor Hugo
5 Thomas Paine
5 Noam Chomsky
5 Jacques Derrida
4 Umberto Eco
4 Terence McKenna
4 Stephen King
1:Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ~ Donald Knuth, #KEYS
2:The object of our worship is the one God, who by the word of his command, by the reason of his plan, and by the strength of his power has brought forth from nothing this whole construction of elements, bodies, and spirits for the glory of his majesty. ~ Tertullian of Carthage, #KEYS
3:Mother, sometimes when I use my mental will to become aware of Your universal presence and to link myself with You, I feel the peace and assurance of Your touch. Mother, is it true or is it my mental construction?
In this case, it is of no importance, because there are mental constructions which can be true and which lead safely to the experience.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
4:middle vision logic or paradigmatic ::: (1:25) Cognition is described as middle-vision logic, or paradigmatic in that it is capable of co-ordinating the relations between systems of systems, unifying them into principled frameworks or paradigms. This is an operation on meta-systems and allows for the view described above, a view of human development itself. Self-sense at teal is called Autonomous or Strategist and is characterized by the emergent capacity to acknowledge and cope with inner conflicts in needs, ... and values. All of which are part of a multifacted and complex world. Teal sees our need for autonomy and autonomy itself as limited because emotional interdependence is inevitable. The contradictory aspects of self are weaved into an identity that is whole, integrated and commited to generating a fulfilling life.
Additionally, Teal allows individuals to link theory and practice, perceive dynamic systems interactions, recognize and strive for higher principles, understand the social construction of reality, handle paradox and complexity, create positive-sum games and seek feedback from others as a vital source for growth. Values embrace magnificence of existence, flexibility, spontaneioty, functionality, the integration of differences into interdependent systems and complimenting natural egalitarianism with natural ranking. Needs shift to self-actualization, and morality is in both terms of universal ethical principles and recognition of the developmental relativity of those universals. Teal is the first wave that is truly able to see the limitations of orange and green morality, it is able to uphold the paradox of universalism and relativism. Teal in its decision making process is able to see ... deep and surface features of morality and is able to take into consideration both those values when engaging in moral action. Currently Teal is quite rare, embraced by 2-5% of the north american and european population according to sociological research. ~ Essential Integral, L4.1-53, Middle Vision Logic,#KEYS
5:My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be examined beforehand, from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done, is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money, and time. My early affliction had however, another compensation. The incessant mental exertion developed my powers of observation and enabled me to discover a truth of great importance. I had noted that the appearance of images was always preceded by actual vision of scenes under peculiar and generally very exceptional conditions, and I was impelled on each occasion to locate the original impulse. After a while this effort grew to be almost automatic and I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect. Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression. Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way. In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automation endowed with power OF MOVEMENT RESPONDING TO THE STIMULI OF THE SENSE ORGANS AND THINKING AND ACTING ACCORDINGLY.
~ Nikola Tesla, The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla,#KEYS
6:Are there no false visions?
There are what in appearance are false visions. There are, for instance, hundreds or thousands of people who say that they have seen the Christ. Of that number those who have actually seen Him are perhaps less than a dozen, and even with them there is much to say about what they have seen. What the others saw may be an emanation; or it may be a thought or even an image remembered by the mind. There are, too, those who are strong believers in the Christ and have had a vision of some Force or Being or some remembered image that is very luminous and makes upon them a strong impression. They have seen something which they feel belongs to another world, to a supernatural order, and it has created in them an emotion of fear, awe or joy; and as they believe in the Christ, they can think of nothing else and say it is He. But the same vision or experience if it comes to one who believes in the Hindu, the Mohammedan or some other religion, will take a different name and form. The thing seen or experienced may be fundamentally the same, but it is formulated differently according to the different make-up of the apprehending mind. It is only those that can go beyond beliefs and faiths and myths and traditions who are able to say what it really is; but these are few, very few. You must be free from every mental construction, you must divest yourself of all that is merely local or temporal, before you can know what you have seen.
Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and even in all ages. If you meet the Divine, you meet it always and everywhere in the same way. Difference comes in because between the experience and its formulation there is almost an abyss. Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according to your education, your faith, your mental predisposition. There is only one truth, one reality; but the forms through which it may be expressed are many. 21 April 1929 ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#KEYS
7:The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our individual being and its relations to the universe and it transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray.
There the abstract terms of pure reason and the constructions .of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no significance, and to build separate significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, 293, 11457,#KEYS
8:Why do we forget things?
Ah! I suppose there are several reasons. First, because one makes use of the memory to remember. Memory is a mental instrument and depends on the formation of the brain. Your brain is constantly growing, unless it begins to degenerate, but still its growth can continue for a very, very long time, much longer than that of the body. And in this growth, necessarily some things will take the place of others. And as the mental instrument develops, things which have served their term or the transitory moment in the development may be wiped out to give place to the result. So the result of all that you knew is there, living in itself, but the road traversed to reach it may be completely blurred. That is, a good functioning of the memory means remembering only the results so as to be able to have the elements for moving forward and a new construction. That is more important than just retaining things rigidly in the mind.
Now, there is another aspect also. Apart from the mental memory, which is something defective, there are states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness in which one happens to be registers the phenomena of a particular moment, whatever they may be. If your consciousness remains limpid, wide and strong, you can at any moment whatsoever, by concentrating, call into the active consciousness what you did, thought, saw, observed at any time before; all this you can remember by bringing up in yourself the same state of consciousness. And that, that is never forgotten. You could live a thousand years and you would still remember it. Consequently, if you don't want to forget, it must be your consciousness which remembers and not your mental memory. Your mental memory will be wiped out inevitably, get blurred, and new things will take the place of the old ones. But things of which you are conscious you do not forget. You have only to bring up the same state of consciousness again. And thus one can remember circumstances one has lived thousands of years ago, if one knows how to bring up the same state of consciousness. It is in this way that one can remember one's past lives. This never gets blotted out, while you don't have any more the memory of what you have done physically when you were very young. You would be told many things you no longer remember. That gets wiped off immediately. For the brain is constantly changing and certain weaker cells are replaced by others which are much stronger, and by other combinations, other cerebral organisations. And so, what was there before is effaced or deformed.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#KEYS
9:How can one awaken his Yoga-shakti?
It depends on this: when one thinks that it is the most important thing in his life. That's all.
Some people sit in meditation, concentrate on the base of the vertebral column and want it very much to awake, but that's not enough. It is when truly it becomes the most important thing in one's life, when all the rest seems to have lost all taste, all interest, all importance, when one feels within that one is born for this, that one is here upon earth for this, and that it is the only thing that truly counts, then that's enough.
One can concentrate on the different centres; but sometimes one concentrates for so long, with so much effort, and has no result. And then one day something shakes you, you feel that you are going to lose your footing, you have to cling on to something; then you cling within yourself to the idea of union with the Divine, the idea of the divine Presence, the idea of the transformation of the consciousness, and you aspire, you want, you try to organise your feelings, movements, impulses around this. And it comes.
Some people have recommended all kinds of methods; probably these were methods which had succeeded in their case; but to tell the truth, one must find one's own method, it is only after having done the thing that one knows how it should be done, not before.
If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental construction and risks greatly living in his mental construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesn't have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothing - how things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come about - if one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within one's being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had. It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done it - afterwards. Like that it is sure.
One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 211-212,#KEYS
10:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, anı̄sa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216, #KEYS
11::::
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,#KEYS
12:Mental Education
OF ALL lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete and in the end quite insufficient.
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
A true mental education, which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases. Normally these phases follow one after another, but in exceptional individuals they may alternate or even proceed simultaneously. These five phases, in brief, are:
(1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
(2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
(3) Organisation of one's ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life.
(4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to become able to think only what one wants and when one wants.
(5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.
It is not possible to give here all the details concerning the methods to be employed in the application of these five phases of education to different individuals. Still, a few explanations on points of detail can be given.
Undeniably, what most impedes mental progress in children is the constant dispersion of their thoughts. Their thoughts flutter hither and thither like butterflies and they have to make a great effort to fix them. Yet this capacity is latent in them, for when you succeed in arousing their interest, they are capable of a good deal of attention. By his ingenuity, therefore, the educator will gradually help the child to become capable of a sustained effort of attention and a faculty of more and more complete absorption in the work in hand. All methods that can develop this faculty of attention from games to rewards are good and can all be utilised according to the need and the circumstances. But it is the psychological action that is most important and the sovereign method is to arouse in the child an interest in what you want to teach him, a liking for work, a will to progress. To love to learn is the most precious gift that one can give to a child: to love to learn always and everywhere, so that all circumstances, all happenings in life may be constantly renewed opportunities for learning more and always more.
For that, to attention and concentration should be added observation, precise recording and faithfulness of memory. This faculty of observation can be developed by varied and spontaneous exercises, making use of every opportunity that presents itself to keep the child's thought wakeful, alert and prompt. The growth of the understanding should be stressed much more than that of memory. One knows well only what one has understood. Things learnt by heart, mechanically, fade away little by little and finally disappear; what is understood is never forgotten. Moreover, you must never refuse to explain to a child the how and the why of things. If you cannot do it yourself, you must direct the child to those who are qualified to answer or point out to him some books that deal with the question. In this way you will progressively awaken in the child the taste for true study and the habit of making a persistent effort to know.
This will bring us quite naturally to the second phase of development in which the mind should be widened and enriched.
You will gradually show the child that everything can become an interesting subject for study if it is approached in the right way. The life of every day, of every moment, is the best school of all, varied, complex, full of unexpected experiences, problems to be solved, clear and striking examples and obvious consequences. It is so easy to arouse healthy curiosity in children, if you answer with intelligence and clarity the numerous questions they ask. An interesting reply to one readily brings others in its train and so the attentive child learns without effort much more than he usually does in the classroom. By a choice made with care and insight, you should also teach him to enjoy good reading-matter which is both instructive and attractive. Do not be afraid of anything that awakens and pleases his imagination; imagination develops the creative mental faculty and through it study becomes living and the mind develops in joy.
In order to increase the suppleness and comprehensiveness of his mind, one should see not only that he studies many varied topics, but above all that a single subject is approached in various ways, so that the child understands in a practical manner that there are many ways of facing the same intellectual problem, of considering it and solving it. This will remove all rigidity from his brain and at the same time it will make his thinking richer and more supple and prepare it for a more complex and comprehensive synthesis. In this way also the child will be imbued with the sense of the extreme relativity of mental learning and, little by little, an aspiration for a truer source of knowledge will awaken in him.
Indeed, as the child grows older and progresses in his studies, his mind too ripens and becomes more and more capable of forming general ideas, and with them almost always comes a need for certitude, for a knowledge that is stable enough to form the basis of a mental construction which will permit all the diverse and scattered and often contradictory ideas accumulated in his brain to be organised and put in order. This ordering is indeed very necessary if one is to avoid chaos in one's thoughts. All contradictions can be transformed into complements, but for that one must discover the higher idea that will have the power to bring them harmoniously together. It is always good to consider every problem from all possible standpoints so as to avoid partiality and exclusiveness; but if the thought is to be active and creative, it must, in every case, be the natural and logical synthesis of all the points of view adopted. And if you want to make the totality of your thoughts into a dynamic and constructive force, you must also take great care as to the choice of the central idea of your mental synthesis; for upon that will depend the value of this synthesis. The higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise.
It goes without saying that this work of organisation cannot be done once and for all. The mind, if it is to keep its vigour and youth, must progress constantly, revise its notions in the light of new knowledge, enlarge its frame-work to include fresh notions and constantly reclassify and reorganise its thoughts, so that each of them may find its true place in relation to the others and the whole remain harmonious and orderly.
All that has just been said concerns the speculative mind, the mind that learns. But learning is only one aspect of mental activity; the other, which is at least equally important, is the constructive faculty, the capacity to form and thus prepare action. This very important part of mental activity has rarely been the subject of any special study or discipline. Only those who want, for some reason, to exercise a strict control over their mental activities think of observing and disciplining this faculty of formation; and as soon as they try it, they have to face difficulties so great that they appear almost insurmountable.
And yet control over this formative activity of the mind is one of the most important aspects of self-education; one can say that without it no mental mastery is possible. As far as study is concerned, all ideas are acceptable and should be included in the synthesis, whose very function is to become more and more rich and complex; but where action is concerned, it is just the opposite. The ideas that are accepted for translation into action should be strictly controlled and only those that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be set before the central idea; if it finds a logical place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be rejected so that it can have no influence on the action. This work of mental purification should be done very regularly in order to secure a complete control over one's actions.
For this purpose, it is good to set apart some time every day when one can quietly go over one's thoughts and put one's synthesis in order. Once the habit is acquired, you can maintain control over your thoughts even during work and action, allowing only those which are useful for what you are doing to come to the surface. Particularly, if you have continued to cultivate the power of concentration and attention, only the thoughts that are needed will be allowed to enter the active external consciousness and they then become all the more dynamic and effective. And if, in the intensity of concentration, it becomes necessary not to think at all, all mental vibration can be stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the inspirations that come from there.
But even before reaching this point, silence in itself is supremely useful, because in most people who have a somewhat developed and active mind, the mind is never at rest. During the day, its activity is kept under a certain control, but at night, during the sleep of the body, the control of the waking state is almost completely removed and the mind indulges in activities which are sometimes excessive and often incoherent. This creates a great stress which leads to fatigue and the diminution of the intellectual faculties.
The fact is that like all the other parts of the human being, the mind too needs rest and it will not have this rest unless we know how to provide it. The art of resting one's mind is something to be acquired. Changing one's mental activity is certainly one way of resting; but the greatest possible rest is silence. And as far as the mental faculties are concerned a few minutes passed in the calm of silence are a more effective rest than hours of sleep.
When one has learned to silence the mind at will and to concentrate it in receptive silence, then there will be no problem that cannot be solved, no mental difficulty whose solution cannot be found. When it is agitated, thought becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquillity, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity. Bulletin, November 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Be heroes in an army of construction. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 2:The road to success is always under construction. ~ steve-maraboli, @wisdomtrove 3:The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 4:Every human being is under construction from conception to death. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 5:There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face. ~ william-shakespeare, @wisdomtrove 6:Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 7:Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class. ~ plato, @wisdomtrove 8:First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ... study and read everything you can on the subject. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 9:End of Construction. Thank you & 10:I prefer to think of the creation or construction of happiness, because research shows that it's in our power to fashion it for ourselves. ~ sonja-lyubomirsky, @wisdomtrove 11:In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 12:I feel like the fellow in jail who is watching his scaffold being built." (On construction of reviewing stands for inauguration of his successor John F Kennedy) ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 13:Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove 14:My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 15:The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 16:So many in our world today are suffering from isolation, war and oppression. So much money is spent on the construction of armaments. Many, many young people are in despair because of the danger... ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 17:There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state. The construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 18:In the tale proper& 19:I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 20:We discover that we are at the same time very insignificant and very important, because each of our actions is preparing the humanity of tomorrow; it is a tiny contribution to the construction of the huge and glorious final humanity ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 21:But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 22:Why should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure? ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 23:When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 24:For the current of our spiritual life creeds, rituals and channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 25:The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 26:While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 27:The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 28:What to them is known as practical thought or thinking consists in following the example of some authority whose ideas are accepted as a standard in the construction of some object. Anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical because this thought does not coincide with traditional ideas. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 29:Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 30:Man is a carnivorous production, And must have meals, at least one meal a day; He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction, But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey; Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way, Your laboring people think beyond all question, Beef, veal, and mutton better for digestion. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 31:One day I was watching these construction workers go back to work. I was watching them kind of trudging down the street. It was like a revelation to me. I realized these guys don’t want to go back to work after lunch. But they’re going. That’s their job. If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job I should be able to do the same. Trudge your ass in. ~ jerry-seinfeld, @wisdomtrove 32:Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 33:It is a good principle in science not to believe any & 34:At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 35:I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don't be hard in your construction of me. You don't know what my state of mind towards you is. You don't know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don't know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON'T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 36:If God is the Lord of the world, He can do with it as he pleases. Suppose you have grown beautiful flowers in your garden, but decide to plant fruit trees in their place, won't you have to remove the flowers? If you have a fine house, but wish to build a larger and better one on the same plot, you demolish the old one. The freedom that is yours in small things, God exercises in great ones. In both is He, in destruction as well as in construction. The history of nations, families and individuals is the great Lila (divine sport) that He stages with Himself. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 37:It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Be heroes in an army of construction. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
2:Demolition is a part of construction. ~ Daniel H Wilson, #NFDB
3:A poem is a construction of inner space. ~ Sven Birkerts, #NFDB
4:The Church is a perpetual construction site. ~ Henri de Lubac, #NFDB
5:Expectations are resentments under construction. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
6:shoddy construction. Each of the three wielded ~ Rhett C Bruno, #NFDB
7:The road to success is always under construction. ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
8:End of Construction - Thank you for your patience. ~ Ruth Graham, #NFDB
9:My construction will cover the entire Universe. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
10:The road to success is always under construction. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
11:Induction for deduction, with a view to construction. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
12:A solid idea is a firm foundation of a universe construction. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
13:Criticism is not construction, it is observation. ~ George William Curtis, #NFDB
14:I actually enjoyed construction, primarily for the camaraderie. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
15:I saved $8,000 and created a construction company when I was 25. ~ Bob Corker, #NFDB
16:The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
17:There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. ~ Georgina Guthrie, #NFDB
18:Expectations are merely disappointments under construction.’) As ~ Marian Keyes, #NFDB
19:Every human being is under construction from conception to death. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
20:There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
21:We are all daughters of God in various stages of construction. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
22:There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
23:If the acting don't work out, I'll have a future in construction. ~ Anthony Mackie, #NFDB
24:The thin line between life and death is still under construction. ~ Santosh Kalwar, #NFDB
25:A great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone. ~ Yi Fu Tuan, #NFDB
26:Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias. ~ Wyndham Lewis, #NFDB
27:There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
28:It’s what we call a fanciful life construction. Also known as baloney. ~ Robert Crais, #NFDB
29:The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible. ~ Jacques Chirac, #NFDB
30:UR LOCAL's under construction. Better watch out, traffic fines double. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
31:Lily Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction. ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
32:Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
33:Fame makes you feel permanently like a girl walking past construction workers. ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
34:Indian construction market is expected to be the world’s third largest by 2020 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
35:Knowledge is knowledge whether it teaches you construction or destruction. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
36:It’s a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons. ~ Charles Yu, #NFDB
37:Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
38:Less is more. I truly believe in buying a few pieces with better construction. ~ Stacy London, #NFDB
39:The easy road is always under construction,so have an alternate route planned. ~ Jill Shalvis, #NFDB
40:Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way. ~ Matt Taibbi, #NFDB
41:In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
42:This movement is not about the destruction of law, but the construction of law. ~ Julian Assange, #NFDB
43:We've taken a show about destruction and turned it into a show about construction. ~ Anson Mount, #NFDB
44:The construction itself is an art, its application to the world an evil parasite. ~ L E J Brouwer, #NFDB
45:Getting through Lake Tahoe was already like L.A., with construction all over the place, ~ Neil Peart, #NFDB
46:Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
47:the construction of a communist society would be completed 'in the main' by 1980 ~ Nikita Khrushchev, #NFDB
48:When you change a belief you change a mental construction and, therefore, your life. ~ Kevin Horsley, #NFDB
49:I used to love it when I walked down the street and construction workers would whistle. ~ Eartha Kitt, #NFDB
50:Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture. ~ Adrienne Monnier, #NFDB
51:Construction is a matter of optimism; its a matter of facing the future with confidence. ~ Cesar Pelli, #NFDB
52:My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a production engineer. ~ Mikhail Khodorkovsky, #NFDB
53:Engineer who engendered the vision that helped build Brazil Norberto Odebrecht Construction ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
54:The purpose of construction is TO MAKE THINGS HOLD TOGETHER; of architecture TO MOVE US. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
55:And morals are a social construction, which the powerful can avoid if they wish. ~ Christopher G Nuttall, #NFDB
56:I want to open my own yoga studio. Planning construction and looking at properties is fun. ~ Nina Dobrev, #NFDB
57:America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory. ~ Robert Hughes, #NFDB
58:The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
59:Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
60:They see me as an ordinary guy, like a construction worker or the guy who delivers your piano. ~ Clark Gable, #NFDB
61:You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
62:...sometimes the only way to call attention to bad construction was to set fire to the building. ~ Larry Niven, #NFDB
63:With fashion, you really need to understand the aspects of construction. Not just design on an iPad. ~ Tim Gunn, #NFDB
64:I cut out construction paper feathers and taped them on my arms so I can fly! Pretty neat, huh? ~ Bill Watterson, #NFDB
65:The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
66:If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
67:If you can't play guitar and sing in Nashville, you might as well just be a construction worker. ~ Patrick Carney, #NFDB
68:His father owned warehouses, a construction company, a chain of stores, and three restaurants. ~ Robert T Kiyosaki, #NFDB
69:man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
70:This was not just money wasted but the construction of a false confidence based on an erroneous focus. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
71:You might be a redneck if you have been fired from a construction job because of your appearance. ~ Jeff Foxworthy, #NFDB
72:It's estimated for every $1 billion we spend on road construction, nearly 48,000 jobs are created. ~ Dennis Hastert, #NFDB
73:Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
74:Schools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
75:Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake! ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
76:A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
77:No construction stiff working overtime takes more stress and straining than we did just to stay high. ~ Gus Van Sant, #NFDB
78:Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
79:There is a direness in the construction of safety, in the telling of theretofore untold stories. ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
80:This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
81:The insistence on low-rise, sadly, has done nothing to make modern Japanese construction more attractive. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
82:As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
83:Feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction. ~ Leslie Jamison, #NFDB
84:In the distance, along the edge of a particularly impressive construction site, he saw a Jeep Cherokee. ~ Arthur Stone, #NFDB
85:Look, lady, I work construction and cement doesn’t give a fuck what your last name is when I bury a body. ~ Celia Kyle, #NFDB
86:The road to success is always under construction. It is a progressive course, not an end to be reached. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
87:The factories were heavily bombed, but practically the construction work had been redone very quickly. ~ Gianni Agnelli, #NFDB
88:But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding. ~ Marc Bloch, #NFDB
89:Common sense is the foundation of all authorities, of the laws themselves, and of their construction. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
90:No matter how serious the tone, literature offers pleasure in its construction as well as in its content, ~ Peter Turchi, #NFDB
91:The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day. ~ Alma Guillermoprieto, #NFDB
92:A woman with organizing skills can run a construction company without ever picking up a hammer and nail. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
93:I can always go back to construction. That's great money, but the problem is you can cut off your hand. ~ Benjamin Walker, #NFDB
94:The road to success is always under construction. It is a progressive course, not an end to be reached. ~ Anthony Robbins, #NFDB
95:Music doesn't have to be so rule-based - and so strict in its structures, construction and perception. ~ Stephen Mallinder, #NFDB
96:Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class. ~ Plato, #NFDB
97:The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
98:Be able to read blueprints, diagrams, floorplans, and other diagrams used in the construction process. ~ Marilyn vos Savant, #NFDB
99:What gives me hope is art - it's the most powerful weapons ever created. It's a weapon of mass construction. ~ Louie Psihoyos, #NFDB
100:I'm very empathic to the construction of masculinity within our culture and how we build these identities up. ~ Catherine Opie, #NFDB
101:just consider that you need the name “blue” for the construction of a narrative, but not when you engage in action. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
102:Schools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
103:The essence of effective portfolio construction is the use of a large number of poorly correlated assets. ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
104:At the beginning of every role I take, I have to start from basics and build it up. It's like a new construction. ~ Kim Cattrall, #NFDB
105:Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention. ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
106:The road to happiness is always under construction. But no worries, my SUV has four wheel drive. Let’s rock this.” — ~ Celia Kyle, #NFDB
107:The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful—at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
108:The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception. ~ Guy Vanderhaeghe, #NFDB
109:For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites. ~ Daniel Day Lewis, #NFDB
110:The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
111:The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
112:A very big percentage of small-scale construction is plastic. But its some horrible beige plastic made to look like wood. ~ Greg Lynn, #NFDB
113:Gods induction, life's construction, these instruct will save every living thing. Can't you see that life's connected? ~ Stevie Wonder, #NFDB
114:I love REAL set construction and think that sets are very important part of the storytelling and scope of a film. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
115:Route 95 in Connecticut and New York is basically a series of construction areas masquerading as an interstate highway. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
116:Software is nothing like construction. Software is innovation. Innovation is difficult—if not impossible—to predict. ~ Johanna Rothman, #NFDB
117:The piano is really the featured instrument of a 10-piece chamber orchestra. The construction is the harmonic language. ~ Howard Shore, #NFDB
118:The secretary of Homeland Security working with myself and my staff will begin immediate construction of a border wall. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
119:Environmental spending creates jobs in engineering, manufacturing, construction, materials, operations and maintenance. ~ Keith Ellison, #NFDB
120:It seemed strange that with so much softness in her actual construction Mamma gave such a feeling of hardness. When ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
121:Why should I apologize because God throws in crystal chandeliers, mahogany floors, and the best construction in the world? ~ Jim Bakker, #NFDB
122:The design of good houses requires an understanding of both the construction materials and the behavior of real humans. ~ Peter Morville, #NFDB
123:The God concept, of course, originated from mankind’s innate knowledge that consciousness precedes physical construction. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
124:The quadrature of a circle, the construction by straightedge and compass alone of the square equal in area to the circle, ~ Paul J Nahin, #NFDB
125:In the construction of a country, it is not the practical workers but the idealists and planners that are difficult to find. ~ Sun Yat sen, #NFDB
126:Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
127:A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
128:I strive to seek new material that fit into the logic of construction, while performing services appropriate to real needs. ~ Gaetano Pesce, #NFDB
129:Today was just another shit day in a life that sometimes felt like a factory specializing in the construction of shit days. ~ Tommy Wallach, #NFDB
130:The young entrepreneurs believe that, in time, there will be a labour shortage. Making on-site construction a costly affair. ~ Rashmi Bansal, #NFDB
131:I just think [Gangster Party Line] is funny and stupid and all the dudes in it are real dudes. It's just a funny construction. ~ Neal Brennan, #NFDB
132:The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
133:Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
134:Density, matter, radiation… it’s all just construction paper and pipe cleaners and glue, with the proper perspective. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett, #NFDB
135:Jason had tried to reach their father through the construction company that employed him, but he’d learned nothing concrete. ~ Debbie Macomber, #NFDB
136:The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility. ~ Sean Carroll, #NFDB
137:End of Construction. Thank you 'for your patience. " Inscription on Ruth Bell Graham's grave -- inspired hy a road sign she saw. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
138:The number of unfinished construction projects has increased significantly. A lot of these are not covered with any security ~ Tatyana Golikova, #NFDB
139:It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; its the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time. ~ David Allan Coe, #NFDB
140:Ferris, himself fed up with construction delays and Burnham’s pestering, had told Gronau to turn the wheel or tear it off the tower. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
141:First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ...study and read everything you can on the subject. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
142:I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction. ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
143:NASA space scientists have been studying giraffe skin so they can apply what they learn from it to the construction of spacesuits. ~ Joanna Lumley, #NFDB
144:repeatedly patrolling the shoreline of jagged rocks and debris, Rocco walked back to the construction site then to his car parked ~ Thomas Benigno, #NFDB
145:The Italian mafia, they're very [into] construction. They're in a whole different way of operating than they did back in the '20s. ~ Robert Loggia, #NFDB
146:Construction in Boston is like a fifth major sport. You have the Patriots, the Bruins, the Celtics, the Red Sox and the Orange Cones. ~ Julia Kent, #NFDB
147:A criminal investigation is like a construction site. Everything has to be done in the proper order or the building won’t hold up. ~ Henning Mankell, #NFDB
148:A nonviolent struggle necessarily involves construction on a small scale. It cannot therefore lead to tamas or darkness or inertia. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
149:In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction. ~ Peter Zumthor, #NFDB
150:Not only does investing in your infrastructure provide very good construction jobs, at the end of the project, you have something. ~ Shelley Berkley, #NFDB
151:do you think flowers will grow here when you and i are off building something new with someone else - the construction site of our future ~ Rupi Kaur, #NFDB
152:I can change a light fixture, and I can do certain things. But I'm really bad in terms of construction. I can't do any of it on my own. ~ Nate Berkus, #NFDB
153:The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
154:Fully fund the construction of a wall on our southern border. Don't worry about it. Remember, I said Mexico is paying for the wall. ~ Hari Sreenivasan, #NFDB
155:It is obvious that while science is struggling to bring Heaven to earth some men are using its materials in the construction of Hell. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
156:Never worry about the delay of your success compared to others, because construction of a palace takes more time than an ordinary building. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
157:You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
158:the best way for children to learn was not through “instruction,” but rather through “construction”—that is, learning through doing, ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
159:In fact, effective solidarity with the poor, both individual persons and entire nations, is indispensable for the construction of peace. ~ Claudio Hummes, #NFDB
160:I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten. ~ Wallace Stegner, #NFDB
161:We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It's not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves. ~ Assata Shakur, #NFDB
162:I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
163:Just stop at one of these construction sites and look and see who those workers are. They're all Hispanic ... And I bet you they're illegal. ~ John McCain, #NFDB
164:A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
165:A human being is a being who is constantly ‘under construction,’ but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
166:The ability to win hearts before minds is not easy. It’s a delicate balance of art and science—another coincidental grammatical construction. ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
167:The government passed more laws to protect women from dirty jokes than to protect men from death by faulty rafters at a construction site. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
168:Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds. ~ Elfriede Jelinek, #NFDB
169:Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
170:I prefer to think of the creation or construction of happiness, because research shows that it's in our power to fashion it for ourselves. ~ Sonja Lyubomirsky, #NFDB
171:What I try to do is the art of building, and the art of building is the art of construction; it is not only about forms and shapes and images. ~ Peter Zumthor, #NFDB
172:Where did you find construction guys swapping dirty jokes in proto-Númenorean?” Aura asked.
“On construction sites. Is that coffee ready? ~ John Barnes,#NFDB
173:I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a
painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." - 1946 ~ Henri Matisse,#NFDB
174:Your life is always under construction. It is your job to learn how to untangle the threads and weave a tapestry that matches your desires. ~ Dannye Williamsen, #NFDB
175:The implied methods would permit construction of entirely new computers reduced in size and basic complexity by a factor of at least a thousand. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
176:Clearly, if atoms can be assembled to make humans, the laws of physics also permit the construction of vastly more advanced forms of sentient life. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
177:for if once you have become filled with hate you will not easily derive from construction the pleasure which another man would derive from it. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
178:It was just the same as spotting the scaffolding in other writers’ books. Awareness of construction didn’t diminish her pleasure, only added to it. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
179:State fire officials said the first blaze that erupted between Tuesday and Thursday was caused by a spark from malfunctioning construction equipment. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
180:The art of a magician is not found in the simple deception, but in what surrounds it, the construction of a reality which supports the illusion. ~ Jim Steinmeyer, #NFDB
181:The truth is that a nineteenth-century warehouse exhibits greater craft in its construction than all but the most expensive modern buildings. ~ Witold Rybczynski, #NFDB
182:Alekhine's real genius is in the preparation and construction of a position, long before combinations or mating attacks come into consideration at all. ~ Max Euwe, #NFDB
183:Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
184:Your life is always under construction. It is your job to learn how
to untangle the threads and weave a tapestry that matches your desires. ~ Dannye Williamsen,#NFDB
185:I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. ~ Wilkie Collins, #NFDB
186:Most floods are caused by man, not weather; deforestation, levee construction, erosion, and overgrazing all result in the loss of ecosystem services. ~ Paul Hawken, #NFDB
187:If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
188:Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. ~ Thomas Kuhn, #NFDB
189:We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action. ~ Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, #NFDB
190:What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up. ~ Barbara Kruger, #NFDB
191:Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
192:In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
193:I learned construction and carpentry from my father at a young age, so I felt very comfortable and I felt very satisfied when I worked in that field. ~ Michael Cudlitz, #NFDB
194:Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
195:I'm telling you, I could teach at a university, [George] Carlin, a whole semester. The construction and deconstruction of the words, the language, the order. ~ Jay Mohr, #NFDB
196:Let not your peace rest in the utterances of men, for whether they put a good or bad construction on your conduct does not make you other than you are. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
197:Make up your mind to live differently; praise your way to victory; give God the construction project; and understand that your history is not your destiny. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
198:I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this. ~ Anne Enright, #NFDB
199:It was a dream project for Tesla, and Westinghouse was awarded the contract. Construction began immediately, and Tesla would oversee it. Progress was slow. ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
200:I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
201:Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments. ~ Havelock Ellis, #NFDB
202:The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
203:A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
204:Climate protection creates sustainability and jobs in the real economy - in construction, in the production of heavy machinery and in systems engineering. ~ Sigmar Gabriel, #NFDB
205:For two years nobody talked about anything other than the name arrangement. There was no fund-raising and no progress being made on construction and design. ~ Michael Arad, #NFDB
206:I have many women executives. I always have. When I was back in the construction days, the big construction days, I had women in charge of big developments. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
207:Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world. ~ James David Lewis Williams, #NFDB
208:The external appearance of any construction projects that are created during the time of the National Socialist Reich must take on the sensibility of our time. ~ Fritz Todt, #NFDB
209:The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry. ~ Iannis Xenakis, #NFDB
210:With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well. ~ David Hockney, #NFDB
211:I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
212:black men today are stigmatized by mass incarceration—and the social construction of the “criminalblackman”—whether they have ever been to prison or not. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
213:Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding. ~ Peter Brook, #NFDB
214:If you hate my guts and have designs to hurt me, and I see you building a cannon aimed at my house, I am not going to wait for you to finish construction. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
215:The construction industry likes nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they can impose a brand new building, because that way they can make more money. ~ Jonathan Meades, #NFDB
216:You could teach [George] Carlin in college. It's the construction of the word and the order of things and how they go. How all those sentences are timed perfectly. ~ Jay Mohr, #NFDB
217:An iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road of the common construction." Here lay in a few words the idea from which our railway system has sprung. ~ Andrew Carnegie, #NFDB
218:A person has to remember that the road to success is always under construction. You have to get that through your head. That it is not easy becoming successful. ~ Steve Harvey, #NFDB
219:each circumstance is as a stone towards the construction of the heavenly Jerusalem, and all helps to build a dwelling for us in that marvellous city. ~ Jean Pierre de Caussade, #NFDB
220:I have a carpool with a corrections officer and a construction worker. My kids get to see that we're not segregated based on wealth or standing. It's very cool. ~ Mark Ruffalo, #NFDB
221:These are roots of all evil, hatred and greed, for money, for the construction and for the sale of weapons. This should make us all think, who is behind it all? ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
222:Will the emerging Europe become an active participant in the construction of a new international order, or will it consume itself on its own internal issues? ~ Henry Kissinger, #NFDB
223:It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality. ~ Jay Michaelson, #NFDB
224:It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work. ~ Tom Perrotta, #NFDB
225:Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to raise money for a governor. They have all kinds of business to hand out, road contracts, construction jobs, you name it. ~ Terry McAuliffe, #NFDB
226:Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts; mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
227:She told me about the cop. And the movie star, and the construction worker. You're not having a life Michael, you're fucking the Village People one at a time ~ Armistead Maupin, #NFDB
228:You cannot expect a man to love you, but not because of your body or physical construction. It is like giving a man the option between choosing you and a monkey. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
229:I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
230:Anger can be likened to an architect’s blueprint. The availability of a blueprint does not cause a building to be constructed, but it does make construction easier. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
231:For I did not yet understand fame, this public demolition of something still forming, onto whose construction site the crowd breaks in, scattering its stones. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
232:I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realizeВ people are buying the whole thing. ~ Jonathan Lethem, #NFDB
233:I think it's good that I had some experience of the real world before I became successful. You know, having to get up in the morning and going to work in construction. ~ Tom Jones, #NFDB
234:... a nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
235:I had rather ask an enlargement of power from the nation, where it is found necessary, than to assume it by a construction which would make our powers boundless. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
236:Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
237:The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
238:The Exxon Valdez spill triggered a swift and strong response that changed policies about shipping, about double-hulled construction. A number of laws came into place. ~ Sylvia Earle, #NFDB
239:There is, apparently, some law of nature decreeing that all home construction must double in its projected cost and take four times longer than originally anticipated. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
240:Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
241:I feel like the fellow in jail who is watching his scaffold being built." (On construction of reviewing stands for inauguration of his successor John F Kennedy) ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
242:I love draping; it's less about proportion than fit and the fabric. It's very specialized and I think when women see the construction, they respond to it immediately. ~ Prabal Gurung, #NFDB
243:President Obama had beer with four unemployed construction workers. And Obama asked the guys what was it like to lose their jobs, and they were like, 'Oh, you'll see.' ~ Jimmy Fallon, #NFDB
244:Evolution by natural selection requires the copying of genetic records and the construction of proteins, but these processes themselves had to originate somehow. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
245:Milan is showing a new and different face. At Porta Nuova, too, when they started construction, everyone was up in arms, saying Milan was going to lose its character. ~ Franca Sozzani, #NFDB
246:No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic. ~ James Larkin, #NFDB
247:[...] he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
248:The great sin was adopting the 21st Century's Socialism, something that not even its founder, Ditrich knows exactly what it is, though he says it is under construction. ~ Rafael Correa, #NFDB
249:Elite athletes learn entitlement. They believe they are entitled to have women serve their needs. It's part of being a man. It's the cultural construction of masculinity. ~ Jackson Katz, #NFDB
250:[f]or most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
251:Hey!” Marty protested. “I have the best gaydar around.”
“Except when you’re wrong. Like that construction worker?”
“I’m not wrong just because they won’t admit it. ~ Kaje Harper,#NFDB
252:If you look at a building by Mies van der Rohe, it might look very simple, but up close, the sheer quality of construction, materials and thought are inspirational. ~ David Chipperfield, #NFDB
253:I think it is important to be present in the places where you are working. It is not only about doing a project, but following the project through its construction. ~ Santiago Calatrava, #NFDB
254:Land of the Dead? Is that what you dream about?” she asks. “Boy who kills ghosts for a living?”
“No. I dream about penguins doing bridge construction. Don’t ask why. ~ Kendare Blake,#NFDB
255:After all, color in itself has no color — it's simply a construction of the mind: a sensation, like the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly and the smell of honeysuckle. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
256:The inside house of the soul is magnificent but fragile; any betrayals and lies embedded in its walls and foundation shift its construction in directions unimagined. ~ William Paul Young, #NFDB
257:I have a friend who says we spend the first half of our life building it and the second half preventing it from falling apart. I’d rather be under construction when I die. ~ Heather Lende, #NFDB
258:The era of organized religion controlling every aspect of life is over. No single religion has all the answers. Construction of shrine and temple buildings is not enough ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
259:Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists. ~ Pierre Hadot, #NFDB
260:But the world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes exclusive hold of our minds. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
261:The brush is a more powerful and rapid tool than the point or the stump... the main thing that the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure. ~ Thomas Eakins, #NFDB
262:Anyone wanting a new house picks one from among those built on speculation or still in process of construction. The builder no longer works for his customers but for the market. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
263:Number ... should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature both without and within. ~ Marie Louise von Franz, #NFDB
264:Any subject is suitable provided it is of sufficient interest, but the design must be very carefully considered, and plenty of time and thought given to its construction. ~ Walter J Phillips, #NFDB
265:A typical quotient construction for an algebraic structure A will identify some substructure B and regard two elements of A as “equivalent if they “differ by an element of B. ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
266:On August 19, 1418, a competition was announced in Florence, where the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had been under construction for more than a century ~ Ross King, #NFDB
267:A dream is the frame or portrait or a construction or focus of one's vision by means of perception, based on what he or she knows and settles within via strategic thinking. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
268:all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel. ~ Carlos Fuentes, #NFDB
269:As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
270:One day we will take over and demolish all unauthorized construction on this road,’ Krishnan declared. ‘India needs a benign dictatorship to rid itself of everything illegal. ~ Ravi Subramanian, #NFDB
271:As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison, #NFDB
272:He had been an army officer in Germany and had come to America when he heard that the streets were paved with gold. They weren't, so he became the head of a construction firm. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
273:Our demise may instead result from the habitat destruction that ensues when the AI begins massive global construction projects using nanotech factories and assemblers—construction ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
274:The typical seated office worker has more musculoskeletal injuries than any other industry sector worker, including construction, metal industry, and transportation workers. One ~ Kelly Starrett, #NFDB
275:They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
276:couple of guys with construction-worker tans and muscles turn to ogle me as we approach. Beside me, Raffe makes a low growl. The guys take one look at him and glance respectfully away. ~ Susan Ee, #NFDB
277:He glanced to his left, which for most people is a neurolinguistic sign of recall rather than of construction. Had he looked in the opposite direction, I would have read it as a lie. ~ Barry Eisler, #NFDB
278:There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
279:In 2003, Congress authorized the construction of a visitor center for the Vietnam Memorial to help provide information and educate the public about the memorial and the Vietnam War. ~ Dennis Cardoza, #NFDB
280:I oppose the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It's an ill-conceived project that would lock us into further dependence on some of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet. ~ Elizabeth Warren, #NFDB
281:None of the willed imagination of the professionals. No themes, developments, construction, or method. On the contrary, only the imagination that comes from the inability to conform. ~ Henri Michaux, #NFDB
282:Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
283:The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time. ~ Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, #NFDB
284:You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life. ~ Ethan Canin, #NFDB
285:You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time. I have done a similar thing myself, in construction, often. Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
286:I've been working with contractors designing and building a house on a nonstop basis since I learned about all these systems of audio, construction, electricity, energy, water systems. ~ Tony Fadell, #NFDB
287:Writing in a lot of ways feels more like excavation than construction. It feels like you're uncovering this thing bit by bit, discovering what it is, instead of constructing it upwards. ~ Rian Johnson, #NFDB
288:My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
289:I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction. ~ Ira Sachs, #NFDB
290:And God, the Master Builder. This is the meaning behind Joseph's words "God meant it for good in order to bring about..." The Hebrew word translated here as bring about is a construction term ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
291:Dreams look real, but they're in your mind, so you realize that the physical world is also a construction, which shows that the mind can affect reality in more ways than you can imagine. ~ Stephen LaBerge, #NFDB
292:If we as a society properly reclaimed all of the construction lumber heading to the landfill and the bonfire every day, we wouldn’t need to cut down another tree for twenty years, if ever. ~ Nick Offerman, #NFDB
293:programmers believe that their own imperatives of construction simplicity and ease of acquisition—of prewritten source code in their case—take precedence over any suggestions made by others. ~ Alan Cooper, #NFDB
294:The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
295:EVERY LIVING CELL IS essentially just a tiny bag of water. Viewed from this perspective, life (the verb) is little more than the construction and reconstruction of trillions of bags of water. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
296:Over twenty men died during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Dr Lynch. Does anyone regret that? No, all anyone sees is a marvel of its time, a great achievement in human ingenuity. ~ Matthew Reilly, #NFDB
297:The architecture of change involves the design and construction of new patterns, or the reconceptualization of old ones, to make new, and hopefully more productive, actions possible. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter, #NFDB
298:The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction. ~ Brian Ferneyhough, #NFDB
299:All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
300:A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
301:Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
302:Ultimately, I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I'm trying to be a construction worker. I'm trying to make things. If people are not interested in that, fine. I just don't give a damn. ~ Ian MacKaye, #NFDB
303:I invite you, from my sentiments, my convictions and my responsibilities, to work together in the construction of a Uruguay where being young is not suspicious, where aging is not a problem. ~ Tabare Vazquez, #NFDB
304:Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. Only when free will kicked in could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
305:What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. ~ Brian Christian, #NFDB
306:I always expected to be working construction with my family, so every day I get to travel the world and have fun with my friends is a bonus. I really enjoy pushing myself and so does my wife. ~ Travis Pastrana, #NFDB
307:So, if you're doing good longform with talented people than you can step out and you can be the president or a construction worker and people accept that. It's really the roles you give yourself. ~ Amy Poehler, #NFDB
308:So many in our world today are suffering from isolation, war and oppression. So much money is spent on the construction of armaments. Many, many young people are in despair because of the danger. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
309:The construction of the human figure, its tremendous variety of balance, of size, of rhythm, all those things make the human form much more difficult to get right in a drawing than anything else. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
310:The place was packed as we flooded in, all the patrons freezing at the sight of an armed sheriff, two deputies, an Indian, and a construction worker; we probably looked like the Village People. ~ Craig Johnson, #NFDB
311:was a dream project for Tesla, and Westinghouse was awarded the contract. Construction began immediately, and Tesla would oversee it. Progress was slow. The project was perilous and fraught with ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
312:It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of nature. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
313:Kino-Eye uses every possible means in montage, comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order, breaking, when necessary, all the laws and conventions of film construction. ~ Dziga Vertov, #NFDB
314:People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley, #NFDB
315:The holy trinity, the holy triad is a construction which is found in every aspect of life. Whether it is body, mind and spirit, or whether it is conscious, subconscious and superconscious. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
316:Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction... ~ Richard Wright, #NFDB
317:There's a beast in me. I destroy those I cannot control. I must be certain that those close to me share my identical interests. I'm benevolent within that construction. I'm ghastly outside of it. ~ James Ellroy, #NFDB
318:And if we had learned anything from this story it was to be cautious of paper--to be mindful of its fragile construction and sharp edges, but mostly to be cautious of what is written on it. ~ Salvador Plascencia, #NFDB
319:In writing, endeavor to make your style clear, concise, elegant, and appropriate for all subjects. Avoid repetitions, erasures, insertions, omissions, and confusion of ideas, or labored construction. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
320:(One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn’s, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.) ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
321:Personal branding for dream fulfillment often comes like the process of building castles. You have to be attracted to the construction work carefully, consistently and passionately over time. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
322:When you have a lot of construction going on, it sends a message of vitality that builds up consumer confidence. It gets people to spend money when they see that energy, that things are happening. ~ Mick Cornett, #NFDB
323:Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
324:I've spent my whole working life standing up for workers. Didn't matter if it was the two trapped miners at Beaconsfield or professional netballers or indeed factory workers or construction workers. ~ Bill Shorten, #NFDB
325:Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk. ~ Howard Schultz, #NFDB
326:Heinrich Himmler declared: ‘Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany. ~ Richard J Evans, #NFDB
327:There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state. The construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
328:The shapes and markings of Felix and Mickey, perhaps more than Oswald, have similarities, but when you are using such simple basic construction (i.e. circles) there is bound to be such duplication. ~ Ollie Johnston, #NFDB
329:If you saw me working with construction crews or graphic designers, you'd see how much I'm really hoping for them to bring something to the table and let God in the room and let things happen naturally. ~ Jack White, #NFDB
330:All the accoutrements of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there is no construction site. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
331:On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism. ~ Robert Delaunay, #NFDB
332:La raison profonde qui à l'origine de l'histoire voue la femme au travail domestique et lui interdit de prendre part à la construction du monde, c'est son asservissement à la fonction génératrice. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
333:...when I offered to either stay and help or go bake a pie, it was the pie that was most needed. It took six pies to finish the roof. I had not known that pies were such an important part of construction. ~ Sue Hubbell, #NFDB
334:Instead of putting Americans to work, the Teamsters have been busy yanking members off projects and idling construction projects from California to Indiana to New York in order to shake down employers. ~ Michelle Malkin, #NFDB
335:There could not well be more ink splashed about it, if it had been roofless from its first construction, and the skies had rained, snowed, hailed, and blown ink through the varying seasons of the year. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
336:During construction, when a worker died, his body was built right into the Wall itself. No one knew how many corpses lay within the stone and mortar, but some estimates ran as high as three million souls. ~ Gordon Korman, #NFDB
337:The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
338:The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
339:In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
340:In the tale proper--where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident--mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
341:I want to get people to read stone, tree, so forth & so on through the construction of the picture, to lead them to these things exactly as if it were written out on a page. I think it can be done. ~ Ralph Eugene Meatyard, #NFDB
342:The disgraceful and shameful construction of walls, the increasing enforcement of security systems and increasing violation of human rights and labor rights will not protect the economy of the United States. ~ Vicente Fox, #NFDB
343:According to the laws of nature, one should destroy the other, but in love neither good nor evil, there is neither construction nor destruction, there is merely movement. And love changes the laws of nature. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
344:As she inched forward through the congestion on Interstate 40, a highway that had been under construction for the past ten years, her mind wandered back to the photographs Detective McDowell had emailed her. ~ Ellery Adams, #NFDB
345:It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
346:I use drugs to work. I never use them to escape or for pleasure. When you turn to drugs, all you're doing is turning inside, anyway. I only use drugs for construction. It's like one of my architectural tools. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
347:molestation. The “Tin Lizzie” sat next to railway lines and was littered with construction materials, old cars, and dangerous wreckage. Of course, there was the occasional accident and certain areas parents ~ Peter Vronsky, #NFDB
348:Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
349:The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science. ~ David Hilbert, #NFDB
350:We called [the] process photomontage, because it embodied our refusal to play the part of the artist. We regarded ourselves as engineers, and our work as construction: we assembled our work, like a fitter. ~ Raoul Hausmann, #NFDB
351:If we ask for more and more material for the construction, i.e. more and more choice, we're likely to end up with a lot of combinations that don't do much for us or are far more complex than they need to be. ~ Sheena Iyengar, #NFDB
352:shooting an orange piece of construction paper stuck to a tree is a lot different than shooting at a small girl in a blood-soaked sundress with her intestines dragging behind her. It isn’t apples to apples. ~ Chris Philbrook, #NFDB
353:His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave's freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached nonviolence. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
354:Over time, I came to see reaching out to people as a way to make a difference in people’s lives as well as a way to explore and learn and enrich my own; it became the conscious construction of my life’s path. ~ Keith Ferrazzi, #NFDB
355:Since I was a kid, I've liked to see how things are done. Sometimes when you see how things are done, it's like watching a 'making of' within the story. You see the physical aspect, the construction of things. ~ Michel Gondry, #NFDB
356:But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
357:In the 1930s, with no computers to precisely calculate tolerances of construction materials, cautious engineers simply heaped on excess mass and redundancy. “We’re living off the overcapacity of our forefathers. ~ Alan Weisman, #NFDB
358:Making movies is a lot like being a construction worker. There are long intense stretches of work followed by nothing. It's not easy to find work, and in between, you have to figure out what to do for money. ~ Robert Schenkkan, #NFDB
359:The construction of social housing and the attempt to support families seeking to buy their own homes are all projects from the 1960s and '70s. It all sounds old-fashioned, but it is actually completely modern. ~ Martin Schulz, #NFDB
360:There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
361:We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
362:I am not unaware that I have the mindset, as contradictory as it may sound, to discover in the world what I am in fact looking for. Perhaps the best pictures are a seamless hybrid of discovery and construction. ~ Richard Misrach, #NFDB
363:A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It's the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
364:A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It’s the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
365:Did you know I had an ultrasound the day before my prom?"
"That's . . . cool?"
"It was cool! It was the big one, too. That's when I found out your gender."
"Gender is a social construction. ~ Becky Albertalli,#NFDB
366:Me and my family growing up, we cleared our land built our homes and all that. So, I was very well knowledgeable in the construction world. That turned into a commercial development company and construction company. ~ Drew Waters, #NFDB
367:My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements, and operate the device entirely in my mind. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
368:The construction of mathematical logic had become the arbiter of truth. This was the Pythagoreans' greatest contribution to civilisation - a way of achieving truth which is beyond the fallibility of human judgement. ~ Simon Singh, #NFDB
369:A housing renaissance has begun. This may be hard to believe after the dizzying, six-year-long crash in home sales, construction and house prices. But housing turned the corner last year, and it will take off in 2013. ~ Mark Zandi, #NFDB
370:The whole purpose of the construction of The Bridge of Silver Wings was to provide a path leading to The River of Winged Dreams, or to serve as a resting place until the river’s deeper and truer nature revealed itself. ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
371:All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar. ~ Ian Anderson, #NFDB
372:Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
373:In a scene right out of Catch-22, the construction firm requested the “best” iron available for some components. Little did they know that the foundry sold three grades of iron ingots: best, best best, and best best best. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
374:I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on. ~ Alan Moore, #NFDB
375:When you train to be an apothecary, you learn about composition and creation, construction and destruction. You learn to isolate elements and how to put them together, how to balance them to make the perfect cure. ~ Melinda Salisbury, #NFDB
376:Marx placed material conditions at the root of historical change, however this does not mean he rejects the influence of conflicting ideas but purely that the satisfaction of human needs precedes the construction of ideas. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
377:Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs. ~ David Gelernter, #NFDB
378:The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes. ~ Spencer Bachus, #NFDB
379:Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American. ~ Marge Piercy, #NFDB
380:Her task may be to deconstruct a moral order which is based on a heterosexual construction of reality, which organises not only categories of approved social and divine interactions but of economic ones too. The ~ Marcella Althaus Reid, #NFDB
381:The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
382:Drivers approaching the Jane Byrne Interchange — now one of the nation’s worst bottlenecks — will face a spaghetti bowl of detours and reduced lanes for more than a year after construction begins March 7 on a flyover bridge. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
383:Here we would notice that what we would call Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression. The ~ Donald Richie, #NFDB
384:Amid ancient lore the Word of God stands unique and pre-eminent. Wonderful in its construction, admirable in its adaptation, it contains truths that a child may comprehend, and mysteries into which angels desire to look. ~ Frances Harper, #NFDB
385:Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
386:Unfortunately, it is all too often true that suppressors to a creative action must be removed before construction and creation takes place. Any person very high on the Tone Scale may level destruction toward a suppressor. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
387:carrot-and-stick reinforcement’ the behaviorists are telling us is needed for this bird to carry out these operations, thirteen different types of construction jobs? B. F. Skinner did a very good thing: in World War ~ William Peter Blatty, #NFDB
388:Having toddlers always means that there's a fair amount of chaos at home, but that's part of the fun. And from a work perspective, we have projects under construction all over the world, including many right here in the US. ~ Ivanka Trump, #NFDB
389:When passion has wrecked the body in one life, it is stamped upon the seed atom. In the next descent to rebirth, it is therefore impossible for him to gather sound material with which to build a brain of stable construction. ~ Max Heindel, #NFDB
390:It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
391:Whether we like it or not, the ultimate goal of every science is to become trivial, to become a well-controlled apparatus for the solution of schoolbook exercises or for practical application in the construction of engines. ~ Aharon Katzir, #NFDB
392:I just - I kind of see it that way. I find the higher angles down. I do - look, you can go back to the staircase shots in "Third Man" or the staircase in "La Dolce Vita." So I just find that visual construction in a frame. ~ Martin Scorsese, #NFDB
393:The castle itself was a huge brick pile, built in the days of William III., which, though they were grand days for the construction of the constitution, were not very grand for architecture of a more material description. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
394:In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction. ~ Tom Paulin, #NFDB
395:As designers, we do so much with material and construction. It's really architectural; it comes close to building. A scent is so immaterial. It's really about emotion and sensation. Clothes are too, but it's not the same. ~ Nicolas Ghesquiere, #NFDB
396:as the world’s most populous nation approaches middle-income levels, its credit-fuelled, investment-led growth model, with its reliance on low wages, polluting industries and real estate construction, is also running out of steam. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
397:If people would only do me justice that is all I ask, but it seems as if every word I have uttered has been distorted and such a false construction placed on it that I am bewildered. I can't understand it.
—Lizzie Borden ~ Sarah Miller,#NFDB
398:It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place. ~ Joshua Mohr, #NFDB
399:This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
400:We can no longer tolerate losing one more innocent child or putting one more firefighter at risk in a fire that could have been prevented at the cost of pennies by making a couple simple changes to the construction of a cigarette. ~ Ed Markey, #NFDB
401:what Russell called a ‘logical construction out of aggregates of facts. (This does not mean that all statements about the average are sensible or useful: as has been said, the average person has one testicle and one breast.) ~ Simon Blackburn, #NFDB
402:The striker on a matchbox is constructed of 25 percent powdered glass, 50 percent red phosphorus, and some other things like black carbon. Most people give it little thought, but matchbox construction is a science all its own. ~ Vincent Zandri, #NFDB
403:Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
404:There was, in the construction of the universe, us down here, God up there, and you in between. When God seemed too intimidating to face, we could first come to you. It was like befriending the secretary outside the boss’s office. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
405:To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion. ~ Arthur Honegger, #NFDB
406:When I was working in my first job engineering construction, what I liked the most was working with architects and making buildings that had this creative side coming from the architect and that were making them a big success. ~ Bernard Arnault, #NFDB
407:When you walked the dog, did you see anything unusual on the street?” Ballard asked the old woman. “Anybody out of place?” “No, nothing unusual,” Lantana said. “Is there any construction on the street? Workers hanging around? ~ Michael Connelly, #NFDB
408:Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed. ~ Ted Chiang, #NFDB
409:Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh’s work was indicated, and Yahweh’s work was concealed. ~ Ted Chiang, #NFDB
410:Bugg’s Construction will be the first major enterprise to collapse.’ ‘And how many will it drag down with it?’ ‘No telling. Three, maybe four.’ ‘I thought you said there was no telling.’ ‘So don’t tell anyone.’ ‘Good idea. Bugg, ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
411:His headstone said
FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST
But death is a slave's freedom
We seek the freedom of free men
And the construction of a world
Where Martin Luther King could have lived and
preached non-violence ~ Nikki Giovanni,#NFDB
412:The Albion Mills was London’s first factory, and its first great symbol of industrialization; its construction inaugurated not only the great age of steam-driven factories,* but also the doomed though poignant resistance to them. ~ William Rosen, #NFDB
413:When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. ~ Elizabeth Loftus, #NFDB
414:everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
415:Look at the streets! The people have smiles on their faces, they're hustling and bustling and going places, they're well-dressed, there's lots of construction going on. It's kind of hard to feel sorry for an economy like this. ~ Michael Bloomberg, #NFDB
416:On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale-green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams. ~ Bruno Schulz, #NFDB
417:We discover that we are at the same time very insignificant and very important, because each of our actions is preparing the humanity of tomorrow; it is a tiny contribution to the construction of the huge and glorious final humanity ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
418:The way corals change the world—with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations—might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference. Instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
419:Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists. ~ Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 272., #NFDB
420:Leon Hubbard died ten minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-storey trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job. ~ Pete Dexter, #NFDB
421:Whereas an elephant that was scared to death that diesel powered equipment, equipment that ran on a gas engine, was just fine. Because somebody had attacked it with construction equipment. But if it had a diesel engine, it was bad. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
422:But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
423:The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
424:We have authorized the construction, one day, of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. And issued a new rule.American steel. If they want a pipeline in the United States, they're going to use pipe that's made in the United States. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
425:Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
426:Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ~ Donald Knuth, #NFDB
427:Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
428:The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
429:I do not want to go into its physical reasons: the construction of the human body is different from that of carnivorous animals. But man's intelligence is such that it can be utilised to defend any-thing he does, whether right or wrong. ~ Morarji Desai, #NFDB
430:I like to find out as much about a mathematical object as possible, just as you might want to understand a person as well as possible. ~ Oksana Yakimova, Women in Mathematics Throughout Europe. A Gallery of Portraits (2016). Construction in mathematics, #NFDB
431:Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ~ Donald Knuth, #NFDB
432:So not only is our perception of the world a construction that does not accurately represent the outside, but we additionally have the false impression of a full, rich picture when in fact we see only what we need to know, and no more. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
433:Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
434:Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ~ Vikram Chandra, #NFDB
435:Sargent, when he painted the size of life, placed his canvas on a level with the model, walked back until canvas and sitter were equal before his eye, and was thus able to estimate the construction and values of his representation. ~ William Rothenstein, #NFDB
436:Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
437:Teaching Children Thinking,” in which he argued that the best way for children to learn was not through “instruction,” but rather through “construction”—that is, learning through doing, especially when that doing involved a computer. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
438:The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras. ~ Laszlo Moholy Nagy, #NFDB
439:The year 1834 saw unrestrained fighting between Nalwa’s force and Pashtun tribals. The latter’s ambushes and sniping were countered by the destruction, under Nalwa’s command, of whole villages and the construction of a series of forts. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi, #NFDB
440:Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction. ~ Paul Di Filippo, #NFDB
441:Whether youre working in corporate America or youre a journalist, construction worker, a teacher or an actor - were all trying to keep working. If one job is ending, you look for another job. When Psych ends, I will be looking for another job. ~ Dule Hill, #NFDB
442:We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
443:There is a precarious balance to the life of a building. It has nothing to do with its age, or the beauty of its construction. A damaged building can always be repaired if it still has life, but a dead building will never be whole again. ~ Natsuhiko Kyogoku, #NFDB
444:We find ourselves, one way or another, in the midst of a large-scale experiment to change the chemical construction of the stratosphere, even though we have no clear idea of what the biological or meteorological consequences may be. ~ Frank Sherwood Rowland, #NFDB
445:In 2005, nonprofits employed 12.9 million people, approximately 9.7% of the U.S. economy, and they employed more people than the construction (7.3 million), finance and insurance (5.8 million), and real estate (2.0 million) sectors. ~ Darian Rodriguez Heyman, #NFDB
446:It is self-evident that the tabula rasa of modernization favors the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction. ~ Kenneth Frampton, #NFDB
447:I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody. ~ Andy Warhol, #NFDB
448:A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle,
a darkness—the object or concept holding the visible together. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg,#NFDB
449:The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality. ~ Wolfgang Pauli, #NFDB
450:The problem was with construction and retail, you have to be able to shut things off at night and spend quality time with yourself and family. I couldn't do it. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to give 100% to my passion if I held on to them. ~ Drew Waters, #NFDB
451:Beneath his fine skin the bold construction, the feudal architecture were apparent. His head made one think of those old dungeon keeps on which the disused battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been converted into libraries. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
452:For it is no railways, roads, and power stations that give rise to industrial capitalism: it is the emergence of industrial capitalism that leads to the building of railways, to the construction of roads, and to the establishment of power stations. ~ Paul A Baran, #NFDB
453:I have sergested the propriaty of your coming to see me before I commence the construction of thes arms . . . Get from the department an order to cum to New York & direct in the construction of thees arms with the improvements you sergest.63 Thus ~ S C Gwynne, #NFDB
454:The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly. ~ Don Cupitt, #NFDB
455:Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
456:Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. ~ Alan Greenspan, #NFDB
457:When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
458:Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail. ~ Steven Holl, #NFDB
459:If you move furniture all day, if you're a construction worker, if you have a job that's real physical, this idea that there is a sport that involves the kind of conventional, traditional view of toughness, you see that still as a positive thing. ~ Chuck Klosterman, #NFDB
460:I love Halloween. It reminds me of my happy childhood days as a student at Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., when we youngsters used to celebrate Halloween by making decorations out of construction paper and that white paste that you could eat. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
461:That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their INNER eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. ~ Ralph Ellison, #NFDB
462:DNA directs the construction of strings of chemicals; those chemicals influence the configuration of the whole organism; that configuration influences how likely it is that the organism will reproduce and keep spreading more copies of the code. Dobzhansky ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
463:When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen. ~ Jackson Pollock, #NFDB
464:When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
465:The charge that the construction of the geologic scale involves circularity has a certain amount of validity. ...Thus, the procedure is far from ideal and the geologic ranges are constantly being revised (usually extended) as new occurrences are found. ~ David M Raup, #NFDB
466:The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self. ~ Caroline Knapp, #NFDB
467:It was not because they [Harris and Klebold] were deviants, but rather because they were overconformists to a particular normative construction of masculinity, a construction that defines violence as a legitimate response to a perceived humiliation. ~ Michael S Kimmel, #NFDB
468:We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future. ~ Diane Setterfield, #NFDB
469:I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
470:It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry. ~ John Taylor Gatto, #NFDB
471:It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
472:Most women prefer circles of sharing to pyramids and hierarchies. They prefer conversation to construction. They will usually choose nurturance and empathy over competition and climbing. They will normally choose connection over simple performance games. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
473:My aversion to crafting goes way back to an incident in kindergarten during which, upon gluing something like the fortieth Cheerio to the inside of a giant O-shaped construction paper cutout, I was suddenly struck by the futility of human existence. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
474:We succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace. We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
475:Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain’s wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
476:I am opposed to the laying down of rules or conditions to be observed in the construction of bridges lest the progress of improvement tomorrow might be embarrassed or shackled by recording or registering as law the prejudices or errors of today. ~ Isambard Kingdom Brunel, #NFDB
477:Our earlier lives aren't wrong, they are just pre-construction. Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that's good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
478:Some parents manufacture an affirmative construction of their child's disability to disguise their despair, while others have a deep and genuine experience of joy in caring for disabled children, and that sometimes the first stance can generate the second. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
479:Marxism is a Western construction—a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures. ~ Cedric J Robinson, #NFDB
480:And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young ~ Billy Collins, #NFDB
481:He therefore proceeded to build a bridge a little above the place where he had crossed before. As the method of construction was familiar to the soldiers from the previous occasion, they were able by energetic efforts to complete the task in a few days. ~ Gaius Julius Caesar, #NFDB
482:The great and radical vice in the construction of the existing Confederation is in the principle of LEGISLATION for STATES or GOVERNMENTS, in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES, and as contradistinguished from the INDIVIDUALS of which they consist. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
483:Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to preform a particular function. ~ Kerry James Marshall, #NFDB
484:EVERY LIVING CELL IS essentially just a tiny bag of water. Viewed from this perspective, life (the verb) is little more than the construction and reconstruction of trillions of bags of water. One thing that makes this difficult is that there is not enough water. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
485:Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
486:For the current of our spiritual life creeds, rituals and channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
487:The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new. ~ Norman O Brown, #NFDB
488:Nothing is impossible. Whatever idea comes up, we always try to make it. Sometimes it doesn't work because it's just not technically achievable. But you can always make things better, more contemporary with the construction, the inside, the weight, and all of that. ~ Tomas Maier, #NFDB
489:The construction industry is the world’s second largest (after agriculture), worth $8 trillion a year. But it’s remarkably inefficient. The typical commercial construction project runs 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, according to McKinsey. ~ Harvard Business Review, #NFDB
490:The movie [Aquarius] is about love, ultimately, and it was made with love. There were a lot of parents in the crew, and they were the best crew I had ever worked with. Everybody knew the construction of each scene, and were completely invested in every shooting day. ~ Sonia Braga, #NFDB
491:[T]he true key for the construction of everything doubtful in a law is the intention of the law-makers. This is most safely gathered from the words, but may be sought also in extraneous circumstances provided they do not contradict the express words of the law. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
492:I do not deny the power and the beauty of reductionist science, as exemplified in the axioms and theorems of abstract algebra....But I assert the equal power and beauty of constructive science as exemplified in Godel's construction of an undecidable proposition.... ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
493:Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance it seems there is nothing to say about it. ~ Tzvetan Todorov in Reading as Construction, as translated from French by Marilyn A. August., #NFDB
494:After a six-year battle, the Senate will vote next week to begin construction on the Keystone XL pipeline, which is an oil pipeline that runs from Canada to the Gulf Coast. They're hoping the pipeline will provide enough oil to cover Kim Kardashian's next photo shoot. ~ Jimmy Fallon, #NFDB
495:Have you lost the girl you love?’ ‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I can’t make up my mind. It all depends what construction you place on the words “I never want to see or speak to you again in this world or the next, you miserable fathead.”’ ‘Did she say that? ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
496:This is the most exciting place in the world to live. Oh yeah! There are so many ways to die in New York City! Race riots, drive by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up and asbestos shooting into the sky. ~ Denis Leary, #NFDB
497:Where in the world have you seen construction people who do everything on time, with good quality and at minimal prices? Just give me one country like that. A country like that doesn't exist in the world, you know. There's not one such country anywhere in the world. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
498:I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for dinner,’” I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate. “I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg–inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime. ~ John Green, #NFDB
499:I really love Paul Smith. And Chrome Hearts. They make the most beautiful, high-end leather and outerwear and jewelry you've ever seen. But I'm not a big fan of shopping. I certainly am a fan of clothes and especially people that put time into the construction of them. ~ Dean Winters, #NFDB
500:We have to be plumbers, electricians, construction engineers, or workers, on the space station, but at the same time running a laboratory, being scientists, being the best laboratory assistants we can be. It's all in a bundle; it's very exciting, it's a lot of fun. ~ Thomas Marshburn, #NFDB
501:Whilst acting is my career, architecture is my passion. Selecting this development as my first major construction project has been a simple decision. It will underpin not only my values for environmentally friendly architecture, but also embrace my career in entertainment ~ Brad Pitt, #NFDB
502:I went to art school in Chicago for a year at Columbia College. I had this whole master plan of getting into sustainable development and green architecture and construction, so I wanted to go to business school and then get my masters in construction and development. ~ Nico Tortorella, #NFDB
503:The reality is fuck the animals, fuck biodiversity, fuck the laws, and long live construction," [Ricardo Freitas] said. "All of this is being done because some people will make a lot of money, and it's being done with no monitoring, no support, no rescue of species. ~ Juliana Barbassa, #NFDB
504:When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
505:The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
506:He really should have listened to his grandfather, because three weeks after he'd arrived, all hell had broken loose. Not with the project. The construction of phase one was on budget and on time. His professional life was in sync, but his personal life was a mess. All ~ Barbara Freethy, #NFDB
507:Instead of basic roads and bridges, infrastructure spending will go to bloated unions overseeing pie-in-the-sky construction projects like the $30 billion-plus high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which California officials fully expect to be funded. ~ Michelle Malkin, #NFDB
508:The construction applied . . . to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power . . . ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
509:I'VE NOTICED, FROM MY EXPERIENCE, IF THE EXTERNAL, EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES IN A FILM ARE BASED ON THE FILMMAKER'S OWN MEMORY, ON THE KINSHIP OF ONE'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE FABRIC OF THE FILM, THEN THE FILM WILL HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT THOSE WHO SEE IT. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
510:There's something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There's definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you're afforded a degree of freedom in rock because, historically, the rules have been flexible. ~ Amanda Palmer, #NFDB
511:I think the idea of the social construction of beauty - this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is - is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there's also a natural response people have to it. ~ Denis Dutton, #NFDB
512:The more suits I owned, the more I realized the best besuited look a man can achieve comes from a harmony of three details: fabric, construction, and fit. If the suit fits you like a glove and it's well made, you simply feel better about everything in life when you're wearing it. ~ Paul Feig, #NFDB
513:The units of measurement which were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza were those of the Calendar. It was not the meter which they knew about and utilized, but rather the abstract units of time which were in turn expressed and projected as units of length. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
514:The intractability of the software-construction process—particularly the high cost of programming and the low quality of interaction—is simply not a technical problem. It is the result of business practices imposed on a discipline—software programming—for which they are obsolete. ~ Alan Cooper, #NFDB
515:There are certain things that Americans expect their government to do. Our infrastructure is vitally important. Putting people back to work with construction is important. Our roads, our bridges, our sewers, our waterways, our dams - this is what makes our country so special. ~ Valerie Jarrett, #NFDB
516:While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
517:Gender assignment is a "construction" and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full. That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
518:In particular, as was pointed out by Isaacs et al. almost a hundred years ago (see Science, Vol. 151, pp. 682–83, 1966), diamond is the only construction material which would make possible the so-called space elevator, allowing transportation away from Earth at negligible cost. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
519:I paid my way through school doing set construction for film and television. I'm a member of Local 44. I was a construction coordinator on 'Beverly Hills 90210' for 4 1/2 years and ran their whole construction program. I did two other pilots as a coordinator for Aaron Spelling. ~ Michael Cudlitz, #NFDB
520:When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in my thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
521:Here and there, alone, reflecting, I’d bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face. ~ John Darnielle, #NFDB
522:The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth. ~ Washington Irving, #NFDB
523:Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing—extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas. ~ Graham Moore, #NFDB
524:A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music. ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
525:I think that women have a construction of their sexuality put on them from a very young age that says exclusivity is necessary to remain valuable, that if a dude screws somebody else it means that he doesn't love you, that he doesn't care about you. You don't have primacy in his life. ~ Guy Branum, #NFDB
526:OVEN—The Russian oven, or pech’, is an enormous construction that came into wide use in the fifteenth century for both cooking and heating. A system of flues ensured even distribution of heat, and whole families would often sleep on top of the oven to keep warm during the winter. ~ Katherine Arden, #NFDB
527:Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy's habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place or product. ~ Ellen Lupton, #NFDB
528:Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy’s habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product. ~ Ellen Lupton, #NFDB
529:One of the fundamental preconditions of successful socialist construction is to ensure the people's readiness to defend themselves from the ravages of probable regional or global wars on the basis of the balance of forces generating from the basic contradictions of our epoch. ~ Mengistu Haile Mariam, #NFDB
530:So fashion was, in a way, an accident. But this world opens you up to a lot of different avenues that interested me. I loved the idea of working in different countries. And I loved the idea of construction and working with imagery. But, yes, I fell into fashion a bit by mistake. ~ Christopher Bailey, #NFDB
531:cultural knowledge. The symptoms of ASD are consistent with the idea that sufferers of the disorder are unable to incorporate other people’s prioritisation or ‘ranking’ of values, perspectives, intentions, social roles and knowledge structures into the construction of their psyche. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
532:I’m chronically unemployed. Never had a job my whole life. None of my family did. I take that back. Once my daddy was hired on a construction crew for two weeks and two days. He said it was way more work than it paid. He maintained it was just one more way to take advantage of the poor. ~ Sue Grafton, #NFDB
533:I see my position in that whole Dior construction very differently from my own brand. My own brand will stand or fall because of me. Dior won't fall if I fall. It will also still stand if I'm not there. I'm coming in there and it's like a - I don't know the English word - like a passage. ~ Raf Simons, #NFDB
534:Building cathedrals is a calling. In Italy they gave masons who died during the construction of a church the status of a martyr. Even though cathedral builders built for humanity there isn't a single cathedral in human history that was not founded on human bones and human blood. - Tom Waaler ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
535:My grandfather and my dad's brothers and my dad all worked in construction. It's the whole cultural thing, you know, your parents want you to go to the next level of whatever, and I decided that I ought to be an architect. I can't tell you why. And I tried, and I had no aptitude for it. ~ Bruce Molsky, #NFDB
536:The poor thing had cowered away from the sides of the pan, blackened on top, and developed drying cracks. It was inedible, better suited to the construction supply trade than to a dinner plate. A few dozen more of these and some mortar and she’d have that wall she wanted around her terrace. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
537:If youre a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration. ~ Al Gore, #NFDB
538:During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
539:However, since we have never observed the construction of a world or observed the world constructors, we have no way of knowing what causal relations might be involved in such a project; all we can do is construct hypotheses, without any way of judging which of these are more or less likely. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
540:It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature ... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
541:More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
542:When we are in the realm of Conflict, we can move from the Abuse-based construction of perpetrator and victim to the more accurate recognition of the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution. ~ Sarah Schulman, #NFDB
543:And at the center of what is left of the American republic is the Constitution. The Constitution is the bedrock on which the nation was built. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.”2 ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
544:I think that changing stereotypes and attitudes, it takes time. As we progress and we have more women astronauts and more women in construction sites and everything else, then we're making progress. Discrimination is deeply embedded in our community, but we do have the tools to combat it. ~ Carolyn Maloney, #NFDB
545:A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them. ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
546:One of the bellwether marks of the growth and vitality of the Church is the construction of temples. We will keep on working to bring the temples to the people, making it more convenient for Latter day Saints everywhere to receive the blessings which can only be had in these holy houses. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
547:So I was drawing in a lot of the habit district in Brazil, put that together with an Asian influence, so there are a lot of different things in terms of architecture which assisted in the construction. Then every sci-fi movie I've grown up with from 'Blade Runner' to 'Aliens' and 'Star Wars.'" ~ Len Wiseman, #NFDB
548:The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I'd had this wonderful reference book years ago. ~ Tom DeMarco, #NFDB
549:Westside Hochdeutsch mafia, biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi, becomes exercised often to the point of violence at those who forget to spell his name with two n’s. What’s he to you? ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
550:A record is something that isn't real or true. It's like cinema. It's a construction of something hyper-real and surreal and unreal all at the same time. You make a space that doesn't really exist. One of the big joys of being in this line of work is building the recorded versions of the songs. ~ Will Oldham, #NFDB
551:During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”101 ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
552:A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
553:I love the construction process and it is always important because we try to experiment and do something new, so the builders are not copying any technique from other projects. Everything is innovative and so I need to be there and be attentive to make sure everything is running smoothly. ~ Santiago Calatrava, #NFDB
554:There are so many angles to follow up: government incompetence, sophisticated charity scams, how insurance companies treat victims, construction of the levees, who will start ripping off the billions of dollars available in new contracts. Every single one of these stories is going to be a big one. ~ Brian Ross, #NFDB
555:One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
556:According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, #NFDB
557:... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
558:The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. ~ Harper Lee, #NFDB
559:We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole. But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
560:Importantly, in several years when we have accomplished all of our enforcement and deportation goals and truly ended illegal immigration for good, including the construction of a great wall, which we will have built in record time. And at a reasonable cost, which you never hear from the government. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
561:Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
562:We started down the tunnel. I wondered how something like this had been built. No way it passed Kasselton code. Did Lizzy Sobek hire construction workers? I doubted it. Did volunteers work on it? Did those “chosen” by the Abeona Shelter build this tunnel? Maybe. Maybe my father helped build it. But ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
563:We, who work every day just to survive, swear on the blood of our ancestors that we will never allow dams across our rivers. We are simple Indians and mestizos, but we would rather die than stand by as our land is flooded. We warn our Colombian brothers: stop working for the construction companies. ~ John Perkins, #NFDB
564:I'm really a nightmare for the fashion designer because I take away all of his authority, and I become the authority, and I turn him into my assistant. You could say I intervene, and I intervene in a very determining way in all the aspects that have to do with the visual construction of the film. ~ Pedro Almodovar, #NFDB
565:his former boss at CIA, Simpson had still been sitting in death, only with him instead of a car seat it was a ladder-back chair in the kitchen that was now all mottled with the dead man’s blood. The shot had come from the unfinished chunk of construction across the street. The hour of execution—for ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
566:The name ‘Romulus’ is itself a give-away. Although Romans usually assumed that he had lent his name to his newly established city, we are now fairly confident that the opposite was the case: ‘Romulus’ was an imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’. ‘Romulus’ was merely the archetypal ‘Mr Rome’. Besides, ~ Mary Beard, #NFDB
567:What to them is known as practical thought or thinking consists in following the example of some authority whose ideas are accepted as a standard in the construction of some object. Anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical because this thought does not coincide with traditional ideas. ~ Rudolf Steiner, #NFDB
568:I got involved, for the most part, in the actual song construction, lyrics even. I didn't want to write the lyrics, but if there was a howler in there, I definitely pointed it out. Just trying to bring it up to a higher level. Of course, after a couple records, people get fed up with that. That's fine. ~ Michael Gira, #NFDB
569:1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,” Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. “Eichler ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
570:Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
571:I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg-inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime."
"You've gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel," my mom said. "But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you. ~ John Green,#NFDB
572:Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
573:The elevators spurred the construction of skyscrapers, which increased the density of the crowds, particularly in the business districts. It also cast them in perpetual darkness. The “street canyons” of Lower Manhattan dwarfed the old urban scale, reducing the striding industrial titans to scampering moles. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
574:As luck would have (it was) in God's hands. It was me...The billionaire (part) was a stretch but I thought the almighty dollar was the way to be happy...and I woke up one morning and I had three retail establishments and a full-blown construction company with partners making great money and I was miserable. ~ Drew Waters, #NFDB
575:How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words? ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
576:Social media is good for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building; good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction; fantastic for generating a flash mob, but not so good at generating a flash consensus on a party platform or a constitution. ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
577:The construction of temples of the Ionic order to Juno, Diana, Father Bacchus, and the other gods of that kind, will be in keeping with the middle position which they hold; for the building of such will be an appropriate combination of the severity of the Doric and the delicacy of the Corinthian. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
578:The successful construction of all machinery depends on the perfection of the tools employed; and whoever is a master in the arts of tool-making possesses the key to the construction of all machines... The contrivance and construction of tools must therefore ever stand at the head of the industrial arts. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
579:Like so much in the centre, it was under construction or reconstruction. Scaffolding, cranes, the temporary business of architects and workmen, the portable toilets, the short-term fencing, the crash-barriers and the skips. Rubble, more rubble. There was a history of Berlin to be written on the topic of rubble. ~ Gail Jones, #NFDB
580:It was a good, sturdy chair of Dark Fae construction, with interlocking parts that could be disassembled for easier transportation. It bore his weight and size well. He approved.
“I have a lap that requires a faerie’s presence,” he remarked to the room in general.
Niniane’s tired face lightened. ~ Thea Harrison,#NFDB
581:Not only did I rise above my drooling-hunchback-in-the-dungeon status, but I also made our meeting seem like a chance encounter, one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs known to man. Thanks to chick flicks, the concept of true love being orchestrated by the rough, construction worker hands of fate is an easy sell. ~ Shane Kuhn, #NFDB
582:Positive energy brings good feelings, and dark energy often means harm. But the destruction in dark energy is also a subtle aspect of construction, like how even forest fires have their benefits. Sometimes enemies are our best teachers, people can learn from their mistakes, destruction sometimes means rebirth. ~ Keanu Reeves, #NFDB
583:So yes, I'm trying to think about the connections between politics and poetry. There's an awful lot you could say here.Poetics is a form of poesis, a form of production-construction, but there might be ways of conceiving of that in a much more interesting manner. That's what I'm thinking about at the moment. ~ Simon Critchley, #NFDB
584:On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
585:When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
586:The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
587:Before these buildings were buildings, they were just the skeletons of them. Before they were skeletons, they were cross-beams and girders. Metal and glass and concrete. And before that, they were construction plans. Before that, architectural plans. And before that, just an idea someone had for the making of a city. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
588:But the point was it was the construction itself that had made a minor disaster into a major one. And the construction had been a cheaper means of building - a cheaper way of cramming thirty or forty families into the smallest square footage possible. That is what embittered Harris. The incompetence of 'authority'. ~ James Herbert, #NFDB
589:I think in the whole field of questions about what we take to be "real," one of those questions is about the self. When you talk about the self we're always talking about whether it's a construction and it's a construction we're always in the process of working on. I don't think that work ever ends, to some degree. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
590:It seems to me to be a way to give the Clinton Administration an opportunity to sidestep the issue of whether to announce they're going to withdraw from the ABM treaty, or whether they're going to go ahead and proceed with construction and be hopeful the Russians are not going to accuse them of violating the treaty. ~ Thad Cochran, #NFDB
591:Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description...The arrow of time is the manifestation of the fact that the future is not given, that, as the French poet Paul Valery emphasized, 'time is a construction'. ~ Ilya Prigogine, #NFDB
592:To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless. In all the world, there is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the spatio-temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction. ~ Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, #NFDB
593:We are ready to build large underground gas storages in Turkey, to participate in the privatization of Turkey's gas-distribution networks, to use the existing and participate in the construction of new pipelines in order to supply our energy resources through Turkey to third countries, including in southern Europe ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
594:Home Star is a common sense idea that would create jobs and provide a boost to local economies, while helping families afford their energy bills. By encouraging homeowners to invest in energy efficiency retrofits, Home Star would create 170,000 manufacturing and construction jobs that could not be outsourced to China. ~ Peter Welch, #NFDB
595:Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day. ~ Alice Schroeder, #NFDB
596:It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction. ~ Sherwood Anderson, #NFDB
597:The thing is,” Etienne continued, unfazed, “I’ve worked plenty construction, and I’ve done plenty work on this house--I know good renovation when I see it.”
Roo cast Miranda a bland look. “Construction sites are popular in this town. A chance to see Etienne Boucher without his shirt on. Very hot. ~ Richie Tankersley Cusick,#NFDB
598:In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed. ~ Alan Cooper, #NFDB
599:We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call “post-truth,” and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of “doublethink. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
600:Indeed, the construction of a global telegraph network was widely expected, by Briggs and Maverick among others, to result in world peace: 'It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.' ~ Tom Standage, #NFDB
601:The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant’s point in a single sentence: ‘The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli. ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert, #NFDB
602:I always call myself a space construction worker. We were only the second mission ever to go to the space station. There was nothing on board. We brought the first three tons of equipment, including some of the Imax camera stuff. We literally switched the light on to the station and walked in. It was an assembly mission. ~ Julie Payette, #NFDB
603:Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
604:The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
605:I worked in a steel mill, I worked in a foundry, I worked in a paper mill, I worked in a chemical refinery, construction, I did all that. It was great work, it was good. I learned welding, mechanic, carpentry, but it saved me from going back to prison because that's helpful. It's really sad because those jobs are gone. ~ Luis J Rodriguez, #NFDB
606:On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
607:Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild. Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain. ~ Cynthia Barnett, #NFDB
608:This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
609:We always look at the 'Fortune ,' and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
610:steps that construction required. He answered her questions and satisfied her curiosity. And she was reluctant to see their excursion end. It had been unexpectedly pleasant. His grandmother was waiting in the living room when they got back. “So there you are.” She glared at Wentworth from the sofa, where she was lounging in a ~ Diana Palmer, #NFDB
611:[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
612:what mattered most, as I came to realize, was who’d lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
613:for example, to see whether in the developing subject, i.e. the child, integers are directly constructed starting from class logic by biunivocal correspondence and the construction of a “class of equivalent classes” as Frege and B. Russell thought, or whether the construction is more complex and presupposes the concept of order. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
614:My construction of the constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
615:Adoration will heal our Church and thus our nation and thus our world... Adoration touches everyone and everything... [because it touches the Creator, Who touches everything and everyone]... When we adore, we plug into infinite dynamism and power. Adoration is more powerful for construction than nuclear bombs are for destruction ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
616:In our society, there are only two respectable types of people: the proletariat—the avant-garde of our society, the beacon of the revoluation—and the peasantry, faithful ally of the proletariat in its struggle for the construction of socialism. The rest is nothing. The merchants, the petty tradespeople, they're only exploiters. ~ D ng Thu H ng, #NFDB
617:There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction... The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. ~ Erwin Schrodinger, #NFDB
618:They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
619:Day surfing is the act of filling a day with no money, and no plans, seeing where you wash up: head into town, start at the library, then onto the pet shop, watch the road construction team working, a run in the park, listen to a busker. Day surfing is a much larger challenge at home, where it can often be white knuckle survival. ~ Lucy H Pearce, #NFDB
620:Race is different purely as a social construction, not as inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, most of the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
621:Surely the most urgent task confronting the genius of man at this moment is to conceive and undertake the construction of another ‘Palomar’—but this one would be designed to bring out not an expansion of the universe in space but a psychogenic concentration of the universe upon itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe, #NFDB
622:While composite faces tend, by construction, to also be more symmetric, Langlois found that even after the effects of symmetry have been controlled, averageness was still judged to be attractive. These findings argue for a certain level of prototyping in the mind, since averageness might well be coupled with a prototypical template. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
623:The construction of femininity is a construction, yes, but also it can be twisted and turned around in such a way that doesn't necessarily mean it is pointing to the female body or male body in such a binary fashion. The culture is already there and has always been, but not as equal citizens. I think there is more progress to come. ~ Lorna Simpson, #NFDB
624:handiwork. One thing his background in construction had given him
was a certain skill in taking care of the little things that a husband and father was always being called upon to do.
Diana admired his ability in the home improvement department, and Colby knew he occasionally gave in to the urge to
show off.
She would ~ Jayne Ann Krentz,#NFDB
625:The continuing job of learning to find out who you really are, of learning to pinpoint your responses—and even more important, the myriad, consequent behaviorisms which result—will help you begin to fill your warehouse with sources upon which to draw for the construction of a character (the new you selected for your character on stage). ~ Uta Hagen, #NFDB
626:It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature. ~ Albert Einstein, On the Method of Theoretical Physics (1933) Lecture at the University of Oxford, as quoted in Mathematics Magazine (1990) Vol. 63., p. 237., #NFDB
627:Kanye is always here in my factory. In the last three years, he has come here maybe every month and worked with the employees 10 to 12 hours a day. [Kanye] loves learning about shoes, both the design and construction, and we’ve tried to design something together. In a couple of months, he could have his own special collection out. ~ Giuseppe Zanotti, #NFDB
628:Nádja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbably but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nádja's must exist; he had read enough to know this was true. ~ Arthur Phillips, #NFDB
629:Man is a carnivorous production, And must have meals, at least one meal a day; He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction, But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey; Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way, Your laboring people think beyond all question, Beef, veal, and mutton better for digestion. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
630:One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
631:From this height the sleeping city seems like a child's construction, a model which has refused to be constrained by imagination. The volcanic plug might be black Plasticine, the castle balanced solidly atop it a skewed rendition of crenellated building bricks. The orange street lamps are crumpled toffee-wrappers glued to lollipop sticks. ~ Ian Rankin, #NFDB
632:In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money… and not do stuff that was dirty. I attempted to get into comedy. I started to do stand-up, but I wasn’t very good at it. ~ Adam Carolla, #NFDB
633:After all, why should our simplest path to a new technology be the one that evolution came up with, constrained by requirements that it be self-assembling, self-repairing and self-reproducing? Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
634:If it be said that the legislative body are themselves the constitutional judges of their own powers, and that the construction they put upon them is conclusive upon the other departments, it may be answered, that this cannot be the natural presumption, where it is not be collected from any particular provisions in the Constitution. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
635:I want labor to be the point, because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it's done. As an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, I wanted a transparency of construction here. If we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it. ~ Tom Sachs, #NFDB
636:Markets are a social construction, they're made from institutions. We in a democratic society create markets, we constitute markets, we bring them into existence, and we shouldn't turn markets over to a narrow group of people who regulate them and run them in their interests, rather they should be run democratically for the common good. ~ Douglas Massey, #NFDB
637:To protect people's lives and keep our children safe, we must implement public-works spending and do so proudly. If possible, I'd like to see the Bank of Japan purchase all of the construction bonds that we need to issue to cover the cost. That would also forcefully circulate money in the market. That would be positive for the economy, too. ~ Shinzo Abe, #NFDB
638:This was the Bad Science strategy in a nutshell: plant complaints in op-ed pieces, in letters to the editor, and in articles in mainstream journals to whom you’d supplied the “facts,” and then quote them as if they really were facts. Quote, in fact, yourself. A perfect rhetorical circle. A mass media echo chamber of your own construction. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
639:No doubt Carter would describe the underground city in excruciating detail, with exact measurements of each room, boring history on every statue and hieroglyph, and background notes on the construction of the magical headquarters of the House of Life. I will spare you that pain. It's big. It's full of magic. It's underground. There. Sorted. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
640:The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
641:I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything--every dot, every dash--will live ~ Hokusai Katsushika, #NFDB
642:Within a few generations, the Chinese allowed their naval and merchant fleets to wither; in 1500, an imperial edict made the construction of vessels with more than two masts a capital offense. In 1525, another decree forbade the building of any oceangoing vessel. Where navies are absent, pirates pillage. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Japanese , #NFDB
643:More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America with straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways. Its impact on the American economy-the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up-was beyond calculation. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
644:The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
645:The blessings of stupas are such that they benefit all beings, regardless of their connection and motivation. If one participates in a stupa's construction and ritual activities, or honors the completed stupa with an altruistic resolve to benefit all beings, then the blessings are such that the Buddha himself could not describe them. ~ Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, #NFDB
646:Tonight sucks. And look at me. Look at - look at stupid Buffy. Too dumb for college, and-and-and freak Buffy, too strong for construction work. And-and my job at the magic shop? I was bored to tears even before the hour that wouldn't end. And the only person that I can even stand to be around is a... neutered vampire who cheats at kitten poker. ~ Joss Whedon, #NFDB
647:If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre, #NFDB
648:I'm Method trained. How is this character like me? What does she think of her mother? What does her mother think of her? It's like construction, and then, yes, you hope you're talented and that the universe aligns and captures the kind of laborer's work you've done and whatever else sprinkles down on you, and it's all caught on film or onstage. ~ Ellen Barkin, #NFDB
649:Oh. Does Mississippi have some kind of grave-desecration statute? I know they differ from state to state.” “Mississippi does, thank God. Anybody who comes across human remains in this state must report them. And a discovery like that stops whatever’s going on around it. Even major construction. Doesn’t matter whether the land is public or private. ~ Greg Iles, #NFDB
650:Shortly after this exchange my roommate suggested we start throwing water balloons at the construction workers. Not really at them because, I know, I know, it's not their fault. But believe me, it's hard to look down and see a man with a seven-speed power drill plowing through a brick wall and tell yourself he's not responsible for the noise. ~ Sloane Crosley, #NFDB
651:Christianity explains why truth is not merely a human construction. The world is not a creation of my own mind. It is the handiwork of God. The human mind cannot usurp the Creator’s role and function. The biblical concept of creation gives logical grounds to support what humans inescapably conclude by experience from the time we are toddlers. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
652:Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
653:The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods. ~ Shirley Geok lin Lim, #NFDB
654:As always, Hamilton cited constitutional grounds for his program, invoking the clause that gave Congress authority to “provide for the common defence and general welfare.”59 Owing in part to Hamilton’s generous construction of this clause, it was to acquire enormous significance, allowing the government to enact programs to advance social welfare. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
655:Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction. ~ Deborah Eisenberg, #NFDB
656:I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand. ~ Chang Rae Lee, #NFDB
657:spanking new modernist, thirty-story diamond in a one-story stucco shitpile of a neighborhood. The rooftop bar thing in L.A. had gotten out of hand. You couldn’t swing a dead talent agent without hitting some new construction with a barside pool on the roof and thumping music day and night. The upside of the epidemic was that waitress service was the ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
658:The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
659:The vision of the Progressive has often been but to walk forward while facing backward; the business of the Reactionary, but that of walking backward while facing forward; henceforth the fallout is oftentimes, and obviously enough, but the formulation and the construction of obstacles in life and hurdles on-site, as long as there are cliffs on edge. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
660:Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year. None of that has to continue. ~ David Wallace Wells, #NFDB
661:If the calculus is much like a cathedral, its construction the work of centuries, it remained until the nineteenth century a cathedral suspiciously suspended in midair, the thing simply hanging there, with no one absolutely convinced that one day the gorgeous and elaborate structure would not come crashing down and fracture in a thousand pieces. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
662:Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero. ~ Homer, #NFDB
663:Our infrastructure of bridges, roads and ports has been given a D-level rating by many civil engineer societies. The government should shift some money from the Defense budget and hire companies to fix our infrastructure. As for non-construction workers, we need to do job retraining in those growing areas where more skilled workers will be needed. ~ Philip Kotler, #NFDB
664:The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
665:We enjoyed ourselves.” A rare softness blanketed her features. “I wish you had stayed.” After twisting the cap off the water, I drank long and deep. “Well, I wish I hadn’t been ambushed.” “Macsen isn’t used to being around people he can trust,” she said gently. “As long as he understands trust is a two-way street and my lane is under construction. ~ Hailey Edwards, #NFDB
666:When we trace the part of which this terrestrial system is composed, and when we view the general connection of those several parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end. We perceive a fabric, erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power that is apparent in the production of it. ~ James Hutton, #NFDB
667:They’d been talking about grade school memories, and he’d confessed that he always had trouble making valentines as a kid, especially the kind where you had to fold your piece of construction paper and trace out half a heart. They always came out looking like pink blobs, he’d written. Isn’t that really all a heart is anyway? Ellie had replied. Now ~ Jennifer E Smith, #NFDB
668:There are two styles of walls "opus reticulatum," now used by everybody and the ancient style called "opus incertum." Of these, the reticulatum looks better, but its construction makes it likely to crack. On the other hand, in the opus incertum, the rubble lying in courses and imbricated, makes a wall which though not beautiful, is stronger. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
669:As the next car in the line pulled up, he sent a last yearning glance after Kate, wanting to imprint that laughing image on his mind forever. Girls like her were not for guys like him, who parked cars and worked construction to earn college money. His imagination hadn’t been good enough to guess the way the night would end. But that was then, and this ~ Mary Jo Putney, #NFDB
670:The commonalities that we find at all of the above locations include: 1) works in stone beyond the scale and technical prowess of the historically presumed builders, such as the Inca; 2) signs of construction interruptions and/or cataclysmic damage; and 3) oral traditions speaking of much earlier civilizations with advanced technological capabilities. ~ Brien Foerster, #NFDB
671:Demons arrange many kinds of performances to see the glaring beauty of a beautiful woman. Here it is stated that they saw the girl playing with a ball. Sometimes the demoniac arrange for so-called sports, like tennis, with the opposite sex. The purpose of such sporting is to see the bodily construction of the beautiful girl and enjoy a subtle sex mentality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
672:It is impossible to discuss realism in logic without drawing in the empirical sciences... A truly realistic mathematics should be conceived, in line with physics, as a branch of the theoretical construction of the one real world and should adopt the same sober and cautious attitude toward hypothetic extensions of its foundation as is exhibited by physics. ~ Hermann Weyl, #NFDB
673:Since the 1970S, financial innovations such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state power, have permitted a huge flow of excess liquidity into all facets of urbanisation and built environment construction worldwide. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
674:If I may throw out a word of counsel to beginners, it is: Treasure your exceptions! When there are none, the work gets so dull that no one cares to carry it further. Keep them always uncovered and in sight. Exceptions are like the rough brickwork of a growing building which tells that there is more to come and shows where the next construction is to be. ~ William Bateson, #NFDB
675:More and more details coming out now about spoiled rich kid Osama bin Laden. Time reports this week he was one of 52 kids. Mother must be exhausted. This guy inherited $80 million at age 13 and has since expanded it to $300 million through construction, smart investments and gas and oil investments. This way, he can use the money in his war against capitalism. ~ Jay Leno, #NFDB
676:Trump and his supporters didn’t realize it, but in the four years before 2015, net migration from Mexico had fallen to zero, in part because construction jobs in the United States had been harder to find. This dynamic, with falling population growth in the emerging world reducing migration to the developed world, is likely to grow stronger in coming years. ~ Ruchir Sharma, #NFDB
677:We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11. ~ Neil Armstrong, #NFDB
678:As you know, there were lots of huge marches around the country yesterday to protest the immigration laws. The marches had quite an impact on businesses. Restaurants had to close, construction sites had to shut down, the Yankees had to forfeit a game. ... Do you realize that Americans are now doing the jobs that immigrants won't do because they're out protesting? ~ Jay Leno, #NFDB
679:In 1936, IG Farben's total production of Buna came to no more than a few hundred tons, the experimental production facility at Schkopau, rated at only 2,500 tons per annum, was still under construction, the German military had not yet approved Buna as an acceptable material for tyres, and the tyre manufacturers had not yet worked out how to process the material. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
680:ON HIS BED at the Residence Inn, Decker laid out all the construction plans for the American Grill that David Katz had built about fifteen years ago. The plans seemed pretty normal for such a restaurant buildout, but he didn’t recognize the name of the architect set forth on the plans. In fact, the address of the business showed that it was from out of state ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
681:The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
682:Indeed every mathematician knows that a proof has not been “understood” if one has done nothing more than verify step by step the correctness of the deductions of which it is composed and has not tried to gain a clear insight into the ideas which have led to the construction of this particular chain of deductions in preference to every other one. —Nicolas Bourbaki ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
683:In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus. ~ Jose Clemente Orozco, #NFDB
684:No doubt Carter would describe the underground city in excruciating detail, with exact measurements of each room, boring history on every statue and hieroglyph, and background notes on the construction of the magical headquarters of the House of Life.
I will spare you that pain.
It's big. It's full of magic. It's underground.
There. Sorted. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
685:The Ancients, having taken into consideration the rigorous construction of the human body, elaborated all their works, as especially their holy temples, according to these proportions; for they found here the two principal figures without which no project is possible: the perfection of the circle, the principle of all regular bodies, and the equilateral square. ~ Luca Pacioli, #NFDB
686:This, Tony, is a living land, not a construction site. This is
real and breathing, not a fabrication that can be bullied into
being. When you choose technique over relationship and
process, when you try and shortcut the speed of growing
awareness and force understanding and maturity before its time,
this”—he pointed down and over the length ~ William Paul Young,#NFDB
687:I love my career, but I feel like you've got to babysit a lot of aspects of things. Assuming that things will be handled properly is just naive. But I think that's anyone's life, right? Even if you're running a construction site, it doesn't matter if you've been doing it for 20 years, you're still going to be blindsided by someone's incompetence or indifference. ~ Jim Gaffigan, #NFDB
688:From productive conversations with professional writers and editors. I once learned that only three behaviors set literate people apart. The first two are obvious: reading and writing; but the third surprised me: talking about how reading and writing work. Many of the tools came from great talk about the construction of stories and the distillation of meaning. ~ Roy Peter Clark, #NFDB
689:Putnam rejects the idea that there is a single “scientific method.” But he also thinks that this is not what Dewey meant when he appeals to scientific method in solving ethical problems. Rather, Dewey is appealing to experimentation, imaginative construction of alternative hypotheses, open discussion, debate, and ongoing self-corrective communal criticism. ~ Richard J Bernstein, #NFDB
690:The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
691:42, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. This Answer was first calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought after seven and a half million years of thought. This shocking answer resulted in the construction of an even larger supercomputer, named Earth, which was tasked with determining what the question was in the first place. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
692:If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There’s no central blueprint for the construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
693:To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken. But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can´t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren´t satisfied - before working some more. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
694:Albert Einstein wrote, “One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. ~ Leonard Mlodinow, #NFDB
695:Despite claims that these radical policy changes were driven by fiscal conservatism...the reality is that government was not reducing the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor. It was radically altering what the funds would be used for....Funding that had once been once used for public housing was being redirected to prison construction. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
696:It should be pointed out that some of the things done after the arrest of the Gang of Four were inconsistent with Chairman Mao's wishes, for instance, the construction of the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. He had proposed in the fifties that we should all be cremated when we died and that only our ashes be kept, that no remains should be preserved and no tombs built. ~ Deng Xiaoping, #NFDB
697:One day I was watching these construction workers go back to work. I was watching them kind of trudging down the street. It was like a revelation to me. I realized these guys don’t want to go back to work after lunch. But they’re going. That’s their job. If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job I should be able to do the same. Trudge your ass in. ~ Jerry Seinfeld, #NFDB
698:Yes, but negative is an illusion. Negative and positive are both construction material. Negative is evolutionary catalyst. D: But you know humans consider something negative as being bad. C: They should reword it to evolutionary catalyst. We have been given on purpose these catalysts for evolution. These things that appear negative... these things are on purpose. ~ Dolores Cannon, #NFDB
699:The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work. Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale. ~ Ernest Lawrence, #NFDB
700:Any gay person understands at some point that he or she has to disappear, to become invisible. That's very difficult. You somehow have to kill yourself. This is asked of people who haven't got the tools to understand that it's all a social construction, and that they shouldn't inferiorize themselves. This is asked of little kids. But I still live in the same outcome. ~ Abdellah Taia, #NFDB
701:Paradiso imagines a society in which it falls to each individual to protect herself from the omniscient ubiquitous sensate computational systems of the new apparatus. Rather than paradise, it seems a recipe for a new breed of madness. Yet this is precisely the world that is now under construction around us, and this madness appears to be a happy feature of the plan. ~ Shoshana Zuboff, #NFDB
702:Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs. ~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, #NFDB
703:But if a railway in the wilderness is to be a profitable business, if it is even to be possible, if it is to obtain the labour power necessary for its construction and the security necessary for its operational demands, there must be a State authority strong and ruthless enough to defend the interests of the foreign capitalists and even to yield blindly to their interests. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
704:They could not see the sprawling Sachsenhausen concentration camp under construction that summer just north of Berlin, where before long more than two hundred thousand Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and eventually Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, and Czech university students would be held, and where tens of thousands of them would die. ~ Daniel James Brown, #NFDB
705:That is an expression, Sir John," said Marianne, warmly, "which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common–place phrase by which wit is intended; and "setting one's cap at a man," or "making a conquest," are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
706:That is an expression, Sir John,” said Marianne, warmly, “which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common-place phrase by which wit is intended; and ‘setting one’s cap at a man,’ or ‘making a conquest,’ are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
707:The deal was we had to have people accompanying us and they would ask us not to film something [in North Korea]. For example, we wanted to film at a certain place and there happened to be a building under construction and it didn't look as fancy as the other buildings, so they wanted us to shoot where everything looked finished and made a good impression of the cityscape. ~ Werner Herzog, #NFDB
708:Aside from its importance to many branches of science, a knowledge of the oceans has a practical value for mankind. The intelligent development of our fishing industries, the laying of oceanic cables, the proper construction of harbor-works, oceanic commerce and navigation, as well as long-range weather forecasting, are all dependent on an understanding of the ocean. ~ Paul J H Schoemaker, #NFDB
709:Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world. ~ Peter Zumthor, #NFDB
710:I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else."
"Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know.
"Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue. ~ Anthony Ryan,#NFDB
711:So there's no typical day, but I transition through the course of my business day by doing everything from construction meetings on the development project under construction to design meetings for an upcoming apparel delivery to acquisition meetings about projects we're looking to acquire. It's very diverse in terms of content, substance, and what I address on a typical day. ~ Ivanka Trump, #NFDB
712:Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
713:Mother, sometimes when I use my mental will to become aware of Your universal presence and to link myself with You, I feel the peace and assurance of Your touch. Mother, is it true or is it my mental construction?
In this case, it is of no importance, because there are mental constructions which can be true and which lead safely to the experience.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB
714:We can no longer rely on the external teachings of Buddha, Confucius, or Christ. The era of organized religion controlling every aspect of life is over. No single religion has all the answers. Construction of shrine and temple buildings is not enough. Establish yourself as a living buddha image. We all should be transformed into goddesses of compassion or victorious buddhas. ~ Morihei Ueshiba, #NFDB
715:Details derail sales. Buyers want to be stirred into action. American architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham understood this. When he was eulogized by his arch rival Frank Lloyd Wright as “an enthusiastic promoter of great construction enterprises,” Wright spoke to Burnham's sales abilities more than his architectural style, and said, “His powerful personality was supreme. ~ James M Kouzes, #NFDB
716:Some women have 'always' been lesbians. Others, like myself, have 'become' one. As much a sociocultural construction as it is an effect of early childhood experiences, sexual identity is nether innate nor simply acquired, but dynamically (re)structured by forms of fantasy private and public, conscious and unconscious, which are culturally available and historically specific. ~ Teresa de Lauretis, #NFDB
717:We agree with that goal [to secure our border] and will be working with [Donald Trump] to finance on construction of the physical barrier, including the wall on the southern border. The law is already on the books. I voted for it, like, ten years ago, but nothing has gotten done and now we have a president who actually wants to secure the border and we are all in favor of doing that. ~ Paul Ryan, #NFDB
718:Companies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
719:In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists in constant chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adult's legends, cosmological myths, and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt. ~ Yi Fu Tuan, #NFDB
720:Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation. ~ Hermann Weyl, #NFDB
721:The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
722:We came up to the first tower of the bridge, with a plaque proclaiming who had built it; I stopped to read. John Roebling. Aided by his wife, and then his son. He died during construction. But hey, the Brooklyn Bridge might be here for eight hundred years. I wanted to leave something like that behind. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I felt like I had taken the first steps ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
723:Whoever is acquainted with the cruel injustice and unjust subordination frequently manifested in the family, whoever sees matters of lasting and supreme importance relative to the beginning and continuance of the family determined by momentary fancy or unreasoning passion, cannot but desire the construction of a social fabric in which reason may rule with perfect justice. ~ Charles Franklin Thwing, #NFDB
724:Ah, we’re the infection, Sma.’ He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. ‘We’re the ones who’re different, we’re the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the mainstream; we’re just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They’re real because they live the way they have to. We aren’t because we live the way we want to. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
725:Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
726:Macroscopic objects, as we see them all around us, are governed by a variety of forces, derived from a variety of approximations to a variety of physical theories. In contrast, the only elements in the construction of black holes are our basic concepts of space and time. They are, thus, almost by definition, the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe. ~ Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, #NFDB
727:Our Party's Songun-based revolutionary leadership, Songun-based politics, is a revolutionary mode of leadership and socialist mode of politics that gives top priority to military affairs, and defends the country, the revolution and socialism and dynamically pushes ahead with overall socialist construction by dint of the revolutionary mettle and combat capabilities of the People's Army. ~ Kim Jong Il, #NFDB
728:This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. ~ Shirley Jackson, #NFDB
729:The relevance of all the above to language evolution is that even Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Denisovans and Homo sapiens would have – in the gradual construction of relationships, roles and shared knowledge bases – interpreted what people said, from the very first syllable uttered or gesture made, based on their view of the person and their understanding of their context. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
730:More than seven years after the Japanese disaster, the United States still had a hundred licensed and operational power reactors—including one at Three Mile Island. France continued to generate 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and China had recently embarked on a reactor building spree, with twenty new units under construction and thirty-nine already in operation. ~ Adam Higginbotham, #NFDB
731:Sometimes I feel like New Yorkers do New York wrong. Where are the people swinging from subway poles and dancing on fire escapes and kissing in Times Square? The post office flash mob proposal was a start, but when’s the next big number? I pictured New York like West Side Story plus In the Heights plus Avenue Q—but really, it’s just construction and traffic and iPhones and humidity. ~ Becky Albertalli, #NFDB
732:The head of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., promised all 60,000 employees loans to build fallout shelters—and arranged to sell any employees construction materials at cost. In the preceding years, the government had conducted several large-scale shelter experiments, including one with California inmates who received a day off their sentences for each day they lived in an underground shelter; ~ Garrett M Graff, #NFDB
733:About Mike the construction worker, friend of Roark: "He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own filed and felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter." ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
734:It [Doral] is 800 acres in the middle of Miami. If you look at the ballroom, that was brand-new ballroom that didn`t exist. And it`s, you know, one of the great places on earth. We had a construction crew here of 1,600 people. We rebuilt the whole place in about 14 months. We did it under budget, although I did increase the scope of the work, because we decided to use the finest marbles. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
735:It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
736:There is no word or action but may be taken with two hands,--either with the right hand of charitable construction, or the sinister interpretation of malice and suspicion; and all things do succeed as they are taken. To construe an evil, action well is but a pleasing and profitable deceit to myself; but to misconstrue a good thing is a treble wrong,--to myself, the action, and the author. ~ Joseph Hall, #NFDB
737:The Cabal is of two kinds, theoretical and practical, with the practical Cabala, which is engaged in the construction of talismans and amulets, we have nothing to do. The theoretical is divided into the lineal and dogmatic. The dogmatic is nothing more than the summary of the metaphysical doctrine taught by the Cabalist doctors. It is, in other words, the system of the Jewish philosophy. ~ Albert Mackey, #NFDB
738:In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflexion, in its almost total disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs, not less than the majesty, vigour and copiousness of its expression, our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization to become the language of the world. ~ Melvyn Bragg, #NFDB
739:In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
740:Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
741:The experience of living is a creative act, the personal construction of meaning for the individual, and death is the final return to meaninglessness. Thus, the act of killing is the ultimate abnegation of the human experience, a submission to the chaos and violence of the natural world. To kill, we must either admit the futility of our own life or deny the significance of the victim’s. ~ John Joseph Adams, #NFDB
742:There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
743:verybody has an imagination. There’s the construction worker who can close his eyes and imagine a Hawaiian vacation. There’s the corporate executive with visions of that next big promotion. There’s the stay-at-home mother and her perfectly built “cabana boy” who will sweep her off her feet. For a small group of us, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to use our imaginations to make a living. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
744:Je suis totalement consciente que si je n'avais pas été la lectrice que je suis, je ne serais pas la personne que je suis. Cela a été fondamental dans la construction de ma morale, de ce que je suis en tant que citoyenne, en tant que femme. Je sais combien le rapport qu'on peut avoir avec la littérature est charnel, à tel point que ça fait partie de vous, que ça devient un organe à part entière. ~ Le la Slimani, #NFDB
745:The spider's web: She finds an innocuous corner in which to spin her web. The longer the web takes, the more fabulous its construction. She has no need to chase. She sits quietly, her patience a consummate force; she waits for her prey to come to her on their own, and then she ensnares them, injects them with venom, rendering them unable to escape. Spiders – so needed and yet so misunderstood. ~ Donna Lynn Hope, #NFDB
746:Regardless of the circumstances of our births, hidden within each of us is a world of our own devising: our minds. Every thought, desire and even our unconscious dreams serve in its construction. It is a living thing. The pathways are ever-changing, new wings form the moment the old ones have crumbled, and the secrets - oh, the secrets scream out from the walls, trying to snare the unwary adventurer. ~ Shae Ford, #NFDB
747:The framers of the constitution employed words in their natural sense; and, where they are plain and clear, resort to collateral aids to interpretation is unnecessary, and cannot be indulged in to narrow or enlarge the text; but where there is ambiguity or doubt, or where two views may well be entertained, contemporaneous and subsequent practical construction is entitled to the greatest weight. ~ Melville Fuller, #NFDB
748:As part of a hidden-in-plain-sight construction project between the National Mall and the Potomac River in Washington, the U.S. Navy spent more than a decade digging an extensive tunnel and loading in miles upon miles of communications cable as part of a classified COG project done in conjunction with a Maryland construction company and a Nebraska mining company. The Navy took over the four-acre ~ Garrett M Graff, #NFDB
749:During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns
such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the
emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of
zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This
obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an
executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks. ~ Max Brooks,#NFDB
750:During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and the Volga, canals joining different seas. The country had seen mighty tractors and skyscrapers...There was only one thing Russia had not seen during this thousand years: freedom. ~ Vasily Grossman, #NFDB
751:Gabby’s house was the same model as ours but reversed. Her bedroom was the same bedroom as mine, the dimensions exactly equal. For twelve years, we’d slept between walls erected by the same construction crews and looked out on the same fading cul-de-sac through identically sized windows. Grown under similar conditions, we had become very different, two specimens of girlhood, now diverging. ~ Karen Thompson Walker, #NFDB
752:Perhaps they never left the island when construction was complete," Otto replied.
Wing raised an eyebrow. "A true job for life."
"Or a life for a job," Otto countered. He wouldn't be at all surprised, given the emphasis on total secrecy, if H.I.V.E. offered an "aggressive" retirement package for lower-level employees. Here, being fired was probably a term that was taken a little too literally. ~ Mark Walden,#NFDB
753:Centres, or centre-pieces of wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone while it is in the process of construction till the keystone is put in. Just such is the use Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts till the habit is fully formed; but that done the habit may stand eternal. The pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
754:Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him. ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel, #NFDB
755:Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him. ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel, #NFDB
756:For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart. ~ Eugene Ionesco, #NFDB
757:If you’re feeling down about the world, the book, “Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century,” is an antidote. Mr. Rogers and Mr. Heck outline how emerging advances — among them 3-D printing, autonomous vehicles, modular construction systems and home automation — might in time alter some of the world’s largest industries and bring prosperity to billions of people. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
758:Not much of a gentleman, but what did I care? I just wished he’d walk a little slower. I needed a little more time before the dreaded car ride. I followed him to a shiny burgundy Mercedes. The Steels had money. A lot of it. While I went home from college during the summers and did secretarial work for my father’s construction company, Marj took whirlwind tours to Europe and cruises to the Greek Isles. ~ Helen Hardt, #NFDB
759:The Egyptologist Dr. Eva Eggebrecht writes in this respect: “The contemporary silence about the construction of the pyramids becomes incomprehensible if we recall that the necropolises were not deathly silent cities of secrecy.... Sacrifices were made, priests came and went.... None of them left as much as a note which would answer even a single question about the construction of the pyramids.”11 ~ Erich von D niken, #NFDB
760:The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It’s now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
761:Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
762:That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. ~ Ralph Ellison, #NFDB
763:The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
764:A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes. ~ Arthur Miller, #NFDB
765:I don't know why the flag had to be taken down at night. The nation continued to exist after dark, and plenty of people worked the whole night through – track construction crews and taxi drivers and bar hostesses and firemen and night watchmen: it seemed unfair to me that such people were denied the protection of the flag. Or maybe it didn't matter all that much and nobody really cared – aside from me. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
766:But the construction of a revisionist history of DDT gives the game away, because it came so long after the science was settled, far too long to argue that scientists had not come to agreement, that there was still a real scientific debate. The game here, as before, was to defend an extreme free market ideology. But in this case, they didn’t just deny the facts of science. They denied the facts of history. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
767:When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
768:regimes of the twentieth century depended not just on repression and control of the populace but on the active construction of national myth. Here the state leaders adopt the role of wise, courageous patriarchs who bravely resist decadent and predatory foreign influence, while the self-sacrifice expected of citizens is celebrated with heroic images and narratives. The state becomes the source of moral virtue. ~ Philip Ball, #NFDB
769:In truth, one cannot, it seems, oppose mechanism and finalism, one cannot oppose mechanism and anthropomorphism, for if the functioning of a machine is explained by relations of pure causality, the construction of a machine can be understood neither without purpose nor without man. A machine is made by man and for man, with a view toward certain ends to be obtained, in the form of effects to be produced. ~ Georges Canguilhem, #NFDB
770:Readers have no doubt noticed how seldom builders live in houses of their own construction. You will find a town or village expanding in all directions with their masterpieces of modernity in the way of houses and bungalows; but the builder himself you will usually find living nearer the heart of things, snugly and comfortably housed in some more substantial, if less convenient, building of less recent date. ~ Flora Thompson, #NFDB
771:From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory. ~ Erwin Schrodinger, #NFDB
772:In retrospect, Euler's unintended message is very simple: Graphs or networks have properties, hidden in their construction, that limit or enhance our ability to do things with them. For more than two centuries the layout of Konigsberg's graph limited its citizens' ability to solve their coffeehouse problem. But a change in the layout, the addition of only one extra link, suddenly removed this constraint. ~ Albert L szl Barab si, #NFDB
773:For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer. ~ Steven Chu, #NFDB
774:Lying under an acacia tree with the sound of the dawn around me, I realized more clearly the facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared [with] a bird; that airplanes depend on an advanced civilization, and that were civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes. ~ Charles Lindbergh, #NFDB
775:When you advance a frontier, you're doing something that no one has done before. Every time that happens, you have to innovate. You have to think in new ways that hadn't been thought before. You have to invent a new piece of hardware, a new concept, a new law of physics, a new material, a new construction material to enable you to accomplish what it is that you chose to reach for by dreaming about tomorrow. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
776:All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
777:As for the influence on my writing,music has definitely influenced how I write. That idea of cadence, repetition, all those elements appear throughout my writing. Drumming has definitely had a huge influence on the way I write, too. Has definitely tuned my ear to rhythm. After I've written something, I'll go through it repeatedly, carefully listening to the construction of the words, seeing, hearing how they flow. ~ Rich Ferguson, #NFDB
778:First, not a word more from you about the past. There was an error in your calculations. I know what that is. It affects the whole machine, and failure is the consequence. You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time. I have done a similar thing myself, in construction, often. Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
779:I don't mean to sound sexist, but as far as women have come over the last 40 years, you don't really see a lot of women hunters. They're still in the minority in the military, and there's not a lot of female construction workers. I hope that's not taken the wrong way. I think women are as smart, resourceful, and capable in most things as any man could be … but they are generally physically weaker. That's science. ~ Robert Kirkman, #NFDB
780:Salvation and justice are not to be found in revolution, but in evolution through concord. Violence has ever achieved only destruction, not construction; the kindling of passions, not their pacification; the accumulation of hate and destruction, not the reconciliation of the contending parties; and it has reduced men and parties to the difficult task of building slowly after sad experience on the ruins of discord. ~ Pope Pius XII, #NFDB
781:I sighed. You can go harass the construction workers if you want. I even give you permission to sniff their asses. Oberon stopped panting and pricked up his ears at me. Sure, why not? They’re construction workers. They’ll tease one another about it, especially if you sneeze afterward. But if you startle them, they might knock you upside the head, so watch out. Oberon levered himself off the ground, his tail wagging. ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
782:His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly swings. at one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
783:either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
784:His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
785:It is impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identities that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
786:I try to explain the difference to a client between cleaning and restoration.Cleaning is simply removing some light to moderate soils. Restoration is removing those hardened deposits and stains that require heavier cleaners and much more time. Or on a building that has just been built or renovated it's removing all the construction debris. Setting expectations can go a long way to having and keeping satisfied customers. ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
787:I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ~ Brad Leithauser, #NFDB
788:When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience - sometimes from different times and places - and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you're storing something that's different. We all do this, for example, by inadvertently adopting a story we've heard. ~ Elizabeth Loftus, #NFDB
789:Without compunction, pity or shame,
they've built towering walls around me.
Desperate, I sit and think one thing:
alone here this fate confounds me.
For there were many things I'd hoped to do out there.
With all the construction, how was I not aware?
Yet the crack and clang of hammers I never once heard.
Imperceptibly they've confined me from the outside world.
("Walls") ~ Constantinos P Cavafy,#NFDB
790:Republicans, supposed defenders of limited government, actually are enablers of an unlimited presidency. Their belief in strict construction of the Constitution evaporates, and they become, in behavior if not in thought, adherents of the woolly idea of a 'living Constitution.' They endorse, by their passivity, the idea that new threats justify ignoring the Framers' text and logic about shared responsibility for war-making. ~ George Will, #NFDB
791:These days, activists who advocate "a world without prisons" are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society would be much better off without prisons--and that the end of prisons was more or less inevitable--not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of criminology but also inspired national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
792:At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
793:The wife picked out ceramic tile for floor covering, not realizing that cost was determined by square foot, not square yard like carpet. Thinking the price was plenty reasonable, she had an extra room of tile ordered for installation. When the bill arrived, it was staggering. She and her husband began a fight that continued all through the construction job. They ended up divorced, but not until she had broken every window. ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
794:At any point in the world's history most architecture is going to be bad but I think there's been a collective mentality since the late Conservative years - the end of Thatcher/start of Major and certainly continued throughout New Labour and continuing now - that new is necessarily better, so there is this neophilia which isn't the vanguard of progress, it's just the vanguard of the construction industry enjoying itself. ~ Jonathan Meades, #NFDB
795:No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day. ~ Tom Perrotta, #NFDB
796:The Constitution on which our Union rests, shall be administered by me [as President] according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption - a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should be applied which they denounced as possible. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
797:This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows. ~ Jenny Erpenbeck, #NFDB
798:At first sight, it seems that something, almost anything, must be done about our situation. But it is the genius of Pieper to see that this activist, busy motion is the wrong starting point. Before we can pretend to do anything about the present, we must know what we are, what the world is, and yes, what God is. Construction of a civilization that knows little or nothing of these deeper realities can only make things worse. ~ James V Schall, #NFDB
799:Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know. ~ Tao Lin, #NFDB
800:The extreme situation in Somalia favored the imposition of international conservatorship. At this point, what I have termed strategies of construction and maintenance overlap. Conservatorship may involve international territorial administration. International territorial administration, in turn, may simultaneously involve the construction of new, and the maintenance and reequilibration of surviving, institutions of state. ~ Robert I Rotberg, #NFDB
801:I am often asked why men don't get as worked up as they might about women - particularly poor women - having to use their bodies as prostitutes. Because most men unconsciously experience themselves as prostitutes every day - the miner, the firefighter, the construction worker, the logger, the soldier, the meatpacker - these men are prostitutes in the direct sense: they sacrifice their bodies for money and for their families. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
802:It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
803:Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. "Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture," said Pixar's president Ed Catmull. Jobs controlled the creation of the building as if he were a director sweating each scene of a film. "The PIxar building was Steve's own movie," Lasseter said. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
804:One aspect of the effort to cast doubt on ozone depletion was the construction of a counternarrative that depicted ozone depletion as a natural variation that was being cynically exploited by a corrupt, self-interested, and extremist scientific community to get more money for their research. One of the first people to make this argument was a man who had been a fellow at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s: Fred Singer. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
805:Mohair jumpers, knitted on big needles, so loosely that you can see all the way through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outside, showing the construction of the piece; these attitudes are reflected in the music we make. It’s OK not to be perfect, to show the workings of your life and your mind in your songs and your clothes. And everything you do in life is meaningful on a political level. ~ Viv Albertine, #NFDB
806:There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his [sic] activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
807:From our present standpoint, however, the ideal of an immanent analysis of the text, of a dismantling or deconstruction of its parts and a description of its functioning and malfunctioning, amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model, which it will be the task or the following pages to propose ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
808:Worms'-Meat, n. The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Granitarium. Worms'-meat is usually outlasted by the structure that houses it, but "this too must pass away." Probably the silliest work in which a human being can engage is construction of a tomb for himself. The solemn purpose cannot dignify, but only accentuates by contrast the foreknown futility. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
809:The church has been so harsh with heretics only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy than a child who has gone astray. But the record of Gnostic effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents have contributed more to the construction of orthodox dogma than all the prayers. ~ Albert Camus, in "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), as translated by Justin O'Brien, Vantage International, 1991, ISBN 0-679-73373-6, p. 113, #NFDB
810:In the construction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the inner pillars. Timbers of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction. ~ Miyamoto Musashi, #NFDB
811:Think that you are part of a big construction called science and you are not just a chemist but you are scientist. Be modest but proud. Modest because you know you will not be able to solve other problems because your life is too short. But be proud because you are contributing to it. Some people will bring a small stone to the building and some people will bring a big one but nevertheless no one can take that stone away from you. ~ Jean Marie Lehn, #NFDB
812:This generation may either be the last to exist in any semblance of a civilised world or that it will be the first to have the vision, the bearing and the greatness to say, 'I will have nothing to do with this destruction of life, I will play no part in this devastation of the land, I am determined to live and work for peaceful construction for I am morally responsible for the world of today and the generations of tomorrow.' ~ Richard St Barbe Baker, #NFDB
813:If all the thought which had been expended on the construction of engines of agony and death - the modes of aggression and defence, the raising of armies, and the acquirement of those arts of tyranny and falsehood without which mixed multitudes could neither be led nor governed - had been employed to promote the true welfare and extend the real empire of man, how different would have been the present situation of human society! ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
814:Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. ~ Jane Jacobs, #NFDB
815:Trump's act of construction is not building a building. It is building the meaning of the name "Trump." Because his revenue really comes from selling his name to people who do actually build things. They pay enormous sums of money for the supposed privilege of being associated with the name Trump or the name Ivanka, because of that image construction. That's why it seemed like a good idea for Trump to run for president in the first place. ~ Naomi Klein, #NFDB
816:We can stop all of this movement across this country, by banning gas powered vehicles, and taxing everything under the sun. The Greens can convince politicians to use their power to restrict these so-called freedoms, keep people from using land for their own uses, stop the construction of oil rigs, and nuclear power plants. However, we must be patient, this will take decades, but we will be in control, make no mistake about that, Comrades. ~ Cliff Ball, #NFDB
817:third-person’ information is required to make a judgment (such as knowledge about mental state categories, scene construction, etc.), whereas a more ventral ‘mentalizing’ subnetwork appears to be relatively more engaged when more embodied, ‘first-person’ information is required to make a judgment (e.g., bodily sensations or feelings related to homeostasis), referred to as the ‘dorsomedial’ and ‘medial temporal lobe’ subnetworks, respectively ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
818:Whiteness itself is artifice, is fiction, is a construction, is narrative, is myth. And I seek to deconstruct all of that, to challenge the accretion, the intellectual accretion, the philosophical secretion that generates within the edifice of white supremacy that allows people easy escape, and egress. And I'm saying, "No, you can't leave now. You cannot afford to not know what I'm talking about, because you gotta be held accountable." ~ Michael Eric Dyson, #NFDB
819:Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. ~ Various, #NFDB
820:There are times when I'm alone and I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
821:When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being. ~ Russell Sherman, #NFDB
822:Remember that Abraham Lincoln was a Whig far longer than he was a Republican. As a whole, the Whigs looked upon banks and corporations as a more efficient means of development; the Jacksonian Democrats thought they were the tools of the devil, but Whigs like Lincoln disagreed. During his presidency, Lincoln favored the re-construction of a national financial system, and his most important 'internal improvement' project was the Pacific railroad. ~ Allen C Guelzo, #NFDB
823:And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
824:It's a real testament to the amount of skill and talent involved, across the board, whether it's the production design, the construction, the costume design, the other actors, the way it's shot, the directors we had on it, or obviously John's writing. When things do go well, it sometimes seems easy, in a weird way, but it's actually down to a lot of cogs working in a big machine. But, I'm certainly happy to be going back. I'm excited to carry on. ~ Harry Treadaway, #NFDB
825:Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air ~ Sana Krasikov, #NFDB
826:There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work. ~ Michael Gruber, #NFDB
827:Too often, Muslims, especially females, who challenge certain widely accepted views are met with warnings to desist; that way, it is said, lies heresy, blasphemy, apostasy. Those who have appointed themselves the guardians of communal orthodoxy are particularly vigilant on matters concerned with women and gender – in part, because it is in these realms that the construction of Muslim identity in self-conscious opposition to a decadent West takes place. ~ Kecia Ali, #NFDB
828:FF DIN Designer: Albert-Jan Pool // Foundry: FontFont // Country of origin: Germany Release year: 1995 // Classification: Geometric Sans DIN is essentially the national typeface of Germany. Developed over many years by the German Institute for Standardization (Deutsches Institut für Normung) for traffic signs and other official applications, DIN is an unusually successful design by committee. Its spare, geometric construction effectively communicates ~ Stephen Coles, #NFDB
829:Negro music has touched America because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine. It is in two part time; tears in the heart; movement of the legs, torso arms and head. The music of the era of construction; innovating. It floods the body and heart; it floods the USA and its floods the world. The jazz is more advanced than the architecture. If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
830:Whatever prestige the bourgeoisie may today be willing to grant to fragmentary or deliberately retrograde artistic tentatives, creation can now be nothing less than a synthesis aiming at the construction of entire atmospheres and styles of life. . . . A unitary urbanism — the synthesis we call for, incorporating arts and technologies — must be created in accordance with new values of life, values which we now need to distinguish and disseminate. . . . ~ Gil J Wolman, #NFDB
831:Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
832:A house of stone and glass and iron should be stark and sober, a watchtower from which a benevolent guard is kept on society. But the white stone of this particular house rippled as if reacting to a hand that had found its most pleasurable contact. A notable newspaper critic had described this effect as being that of "a pernicious sensuality." And if that wasn't enough, the entire construction blushed a truly disgraceful peachy-pink at sunset and dawn. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
833:Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
834:Yeah,” Nicole said, her straw noisily hitting the bottom of her Gut Buster. “Well, I would have appreciated it if you guys had wrecked a little less stuff. Because my house smelled like smoke for months. And construction on the Tarantinos’ new garage starts at eight on the dot every morning, and it’s still going on, and you know how I get if I don’t have my full ten hours of beauty sleep.” “So that’s what happened to your face,” Cody said. “I was wondering. ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
835:We've also taken steps to begin construction of the keystone pipeline and the Dakota access pipelines, thousands and thousands of jobs, and put new buy American measures in place to require American steel for American pipelines. In other words, they build a pipeline in this country and we use the powers of government to make that pipeline happen, we want them to use American steel, and they're willing to do that, but nobody ever asked before I came along. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
836:The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
837:We are always “shocked” when we hear about violence in the suburbs, as though a well-watered lawn, a split-level construction, Little League and soccer moms, piano lessons, Four Squares courts, and parent-teacher conferences, all worked as some sort of wolfsbane, warding off evil. If the Ghost and McGuane grew up just nine miles from Livingston—again, that was how far the heart of Newark was—no one would be “stunned” and “dismayed” by what they’d become. I ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
838:But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long words that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb. every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
839:Disney, meanwhile, had been toying with the idea of basing a theme park at its Burbank movie studio even before it built Disneyland. Imagineers even proposed an entertainment-centered pavilion for EPCOT Center. Eisner suggested expanding the idea into a separate movie studio park. Beating Universal to the punch shouldn’t be difficult, since Disney World had ample land and, thanks to Reedy Creek, was guaranteed an expedited approval and construction process. ~ David Koenig, #NFDB
840:healthy, adj. There are times when I'm alone that I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
841:There may be many systems of religion that so far from being morally bad are in many respects morally good: but there can be but ONE that is true; and that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things consistent with the ever existing word of God that we behold in his works. But such is the strange construction of the christian system of faith, that every evidence the heavens affords to man, either directly contradicts it or renders it absurd. It ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
842:As parents, we sometimes mistakenly assume that things were always this way. They weren't. The modern family is just that - modern - and all of our places in it are quite new. Unless we keep in mind how new our lives as parents are, and how unusual and ahistorical, we won't see that world we live in, as mothers and fathers, is still under construction. Modern childhood was invented less than seventy years ago - the length of a catnap, in historical terms. ~ Jennifer Senior, #NFDB
843:But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every words that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what--these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank, ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
844:I'm a big fan of fiction film where you have a story and you have to transform that into a visual language, basically working with actors and also transforming that into how you pronounce that in the visual language of the shots, the construction of the shots and the lighting. All of that appealed to me from the beginning of my career at the university. When I graduated from the university, I wanted to deal mainly with that, with the visual aspect of the movie. ~ Dror Moreh, #NFDB
845:I will say that going to these meetings and things, you know, I thought that, you know, be in a room with a bunch of drunk people. Ugh! I can't do that. And the truth is, it is the cheapest therapy that you could ever get. You're in a group of people that are from all walks of life, you know. Some guy that's got, you know, construction stuff on and dust still on, to a person that's the CEO of a company. And it's a common - it's a common abyss that you shared. ~ Lynda Carter, #NFDB
846:To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt’s principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to implement colonial control over the country’s economy. With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt’s fate as Britain’s most valuable colony was sealed. To pay for these massive ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
847:Rent control is one policy that economists universally would oppose. It is a grossly inefficient way of allocating housing space and, of course, it inhibits construction and creates the very thing it is supposed to alleviate. It is one of those things where people simply don't understand simple economics and, therefore, put in for political reasons what will damage the very people that it is designed to help. Minimum wage levels are another classic example. ~ James M Buchanan, #NFDB
848:This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
849:A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
850:A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn’t found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
851:In fairness to the Almighty, though, it should be noted that lack of attention from God is not necessarily a bad thing, as the former residents of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the entirety of the Earth prior to Noah’s construction of an ark would have been able to attest. This would run counter to the desires of many former occupants of London who would have been delighted to see London, upon their departure, erupt in a tower of flame, cleansed by the wrath of God . . . . ~ Peter David, #NFDB
852:Yet attentiveness to detail is an even more critical foundation of professionalism than is any grand vision. First, it is through practice in the small that professionals gain proficiency and trust for practice in the large. Second, the smallest bit of sloppy construction, of the door that does not close tightly or the slightly crooked tile on the floor, or even the messy desk, completely dispels the charm of the larger whole. That is what clean code is about. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
853:healthy, adj.
There are times when I'm alone that I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
854:Although it was only four kilometers in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometers, and the craft’s overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometers. It was ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
855:The answer, of course, was that the stories had been written as well as could be expected given the tools I had when I wrote them. Every writer starts with the same toolbox, which at most might contain a screwdriver and a pair of rusty pliers, and there’s not much you can make with that. Each finished story adds a new tool to the box that assists in the construction of better stories going forward, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the prior work. ~ J Michael Straczynski, #NFDB
856:As war is the system of government on the old construction, the animosity which nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing more than what the policy of their governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of government. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
857:Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues. ~ Victor Davis Hanson, #NFDB
858:Temporary delusions, prejudices, excitements, and objects have irresistible influence in mere questions of policy. And the policy of one age may ill suit the wishes or the policy of another. The constitution is not subject to such fluctuations. It is to have a fixed, uniform, permanent construction. It should be, so far at least as human infirmity will allow, not dependent upon the passions or parties of particular times, but the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. ~ Joseph Story, #NFDB
859:Isn’t there a black box data reorder in every book?” asked Mrs. Malaprop. “We could analyze the tea lemon tree.” “Usually,” I replied, “but engineering contracts have to be spread around the BookWorld, and the construction of Book Data Recorders was subcontracted to James McGuffin and Co. of the Suspense genre, so they have a tendency to go missing until dramatically being found right at the end of an investigation. It’s undoubtedly suspenseful, but a little useless. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
860:What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre, #NFDB
861:In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world. ~ Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, J. Glenn Gray, trans. (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 21., #NFDB
862:The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties. ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
863:A significant driver of opposition to abortion is the social construction of the Ideal Woman. In a culture that rarely, if ever, allows women simply to be people, value is ascribed based on a woman's relation to something other than herself. A woman on her own is like a bit of driftwood floating in the ocean. She is a broken object with no purpose, waiting either to wash up on the shore and be put to use as part of something else, or to sink and be forgotten forever. ~ Clementine Ford, #NFDB
864:Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science. ~ Richard Courant, #NFDB
865:The Nazis began construction of the camp in November 1938, at a site near the village of Ravensbrueck in northern Germany, about fifty miles north of Berlin,” Avigail explained. “The first inmates were approximately nine hundred women. They were Jews, gypsies, communists, and criminals. By the end of 1942, the prisoner population had expanded to nearly ten thousand. By the beginning of 1945, the camp had more than forty-five thousand prisoners and was bursting at the seams. ~ Dan Eaton, #NFDB
866:In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftsmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed. Only in software are these two tasks performed concurrently instead of sequentially. But companies that build software seem totally unaware of the anomaly. ~ Alan Cooper, #NFDB
867:Ordinary language fixes the difference between handmade images like Goya's and photographs by the convention that artists "make" drawings and paintings while photographers "take" photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. ~ Susan Sontag, #NFDB
868:Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
869:Because there’s no pain yet. There’s too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There’s whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There’s fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It’s the Age of Speeches. There’s exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war. ~ Niall Williams, #NFDB
870:while Asian American cultural identity emerges in the context of the racialized exclusion of Asian immigrants from enfranchisement in the political and cultural spheres of the United States, important contradictions exist between an exclusively Asian American cultural nationalist construction of identity and the material heterogeneity of the Asian American constituency, particularly class, gender, and national-origin differences among peoples of Asian descent in the United States. ~ Lisa Lowe, #NFDB
871:(from chapter 16, "Catacombs Presbyterian Church"):
"When is this going to happen? How long do we have to wait? When does construction begin? Jesus's response was 'It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.'
In other words, it's none of your business. Your question is irrelevant. That kind of information is of no use to you. It would probably confuse you, might discourage you, and would certainly distract you. ~ Eugene H Peterson,#NFDB
872:I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don't be hard in your construction of me. You don't know what my state of mind towards you is. You don't know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don't know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON'T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
873:The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon. ~ Enrico Fermi, #NFDB
874:Yeah,” Nicole said, her straw noisily hitting the
bottom of her Gut Buster. “Well, I would have
appreciated it if you guys had wrecked a little less
stuff. Because my house smelled like smoke for
months. And construction on the Tarantinos’ new
garage starts at eight on the dot every morning, and
it’s still going on, and you know how I get if I don’t
have my full ten hours of beauty sleep.”
“So that’s what happened to your face,” Cody said.
“I was wondering. ~ Meg Cabot,#NFDB
875:Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
876:The Interior Department on Friday released new regulations that give a green light — pun intended — for fracking on federally owned lands. After four years of study and 1.5 million public comments, the department’s Bureau of Land Management concluded fracking can be done safely. Focusing on science rather than politics — as Cuomo should have done — the bureau set limits on where drilling could happen and set strict standards for the construction of wells and the handling of wastewater. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
877:I have ever been opposed to banks, - opposed to internal improvements by the general government, - opposed to distribution of public lands among the states, - opposed to taking the power from the hands of the people, - opposed to special monopolies, - opposed to a protective tariff, - opposed to a latitudinal construction of the constitution, - opposed to slavery agitation and disunion. This is my democracy. Point to a single act of my public career not in keeping with these principles. ~ Sam Houston, #NFDB
878:No matter what our job is, we view it not as our purpose in life but rather as where God has sovereignly placed us for the purpose of making Christ known and his name great. If you are a teacher, if you are a politician, if you are a businessman, if you are in agriculture, if you are in construction, if you are in technology, if you are in the arts, then you should not be saying, ‘I need to find my life’s purpose in this work,’ but rather, ‘I need to bring God’s purpose to this work.’ ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
879:What the neo-conservatives do is to change the ‘peculiar ways’ in which such questions enter into debate. Their aim is to counteract the dissolving effect of the chaos of individual interests that neoliberalism typically produces. They in no way depart from the neoliberal agenda of a construction or restoration of a dominant class power. But they seek legitimacy for that power, as well as social control through construction of a climate of consent around a coherent set of moral values. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
880:CHARLES PERROW is a sociologist known for studying industrial accidents, such as those that occur with nuclear power plants, airlines, and shipping. In Normal Accidents, he wrote that “We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction. ~ Laurence Gonzales, #NFDB
881:For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats. ~ Barbara Holland, #NFDB
882:Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve. ~ Clarice Lispector, #NFDB
883:Holmes cast himself as a demanding contractor. As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fired them. He recruited others to replace them and treated these workers the same way. Construction proceeded slowly, but at a fraction of the proper cost. The high rate of turnover had the corollary benefit of keeping to a minimum the number of individuals who understood the building’s secrets. A ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
884:The external appearance of any construction projects that are created during the time of the National Socialist Reich must take on the sensibility of our time. Factories are the workplaces of our National Socialist racial comrades. Streets and highways carry the name of the Führer. Settlements today are not isolated communities, but rather parts of greater city-construction plans. Every work site must be properly located within its neighborhood and surrounding setting (i.e., the natural world). ~ Fritz Todt, #NFDB
885:The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
886:The Garden Scatters Burnt-Up Beetles...
The garden scatters burnt-up beetles
Like brazen ash, from braziers burst.
I witness, by my lighted candle,
A newly blossomed universe.
And like a not yet known religion
I enter this unheard of night,
In which the shabbily-grey poplar
Has curtained off the lunar light.
The pond is a presented secret.
Oh, whispers of the appletree!
The garden hangs-a pile construction,
And holds the sky in front of me.
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
887:My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I’d once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka. People ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
888:Previous to this time I had never even a balloon except from a distance. Being interested in their construction, I was about to institute a thorough examination of all its parts, when the aeronaut announced that all was ready. He inquired whether I desired to go up alone, or he should accompany me. My desire, if frankly expressed, would have been not to go up at all; but if I was to go, company was certainly desirable. With an attempt at indifference, I intimated that he might go along. ~ George Armstrong Custer, #NFDB
889:Once the secret of nuclear fission was unlocked, the construction of the new pyramids went on at such a furious rate that the United States military strategists, within a dozen years, were forced to invent a new term, 'overkill,' to describe the superfluous powers of extermination they already possessed. On a planet holding perhaps three billion people, they had bombs enough to wipe out three hundred billion. In this new economy of negative abundance, the means of death outpaced the means of life. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
890:Among all the feats of construction in which the megamachine excelled, the pyramid stands forth as an archetypal model. In its elemental geometric form, in the exquisite accuracy of its measurements, in the organization of the entire working force, in the sheer mass of construction involved, the final pyramids demonstrate to perfection the unique properties of this new technical complex. To exhibit the properties of this system, I shall concentrate upon the pyramid alone, the Great Pyramid at Giza. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
891:Economy denotes the the proper management of materials and of site, as well as a thrifty balancing of cost and common sense in the construction of works. ...the architect does not demand things which cannot be found or made ready without great expense. For example: it is not everywhere that there is plenty of pitsand, rubble, fir, clear fir, and marble... Where there is no pitsand, we must use the kinds washed up by rivers or by the sea... and other problems we must solve in similar ways. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
892:He was the most perfectly formed man she'd ever imagined. He was movie stars, men in underwear commercials, guys at the gym, the construction worker in the red T-shirt who'd whistled at her but she'd pretended she hadn't heard; he was the men in three-piece suits whose brains were as sexy as their bodies; he was lazy, indolent seventeen-year-old boys whose muscles bulged out of their clothes, rodeo stars, and those smooth-cheeked, eyeglassed men who held their children tenderly. He was all of them. ~ Jude Deveraux, #NFDB
893:However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction. ~ L szl Krasznahorkai, #NFDB
894:Money from taxpayers in Wichita and Denver and Phoenix gets routed through the Pentagon and CIA and then ends up here, or in Baghdad or Dubai, or Doha or Kabul or Beirut, in the hands of contractors, subcontractors, their local business partners, local sheikhs, local Mukhabarat officers, local oil smugglers, local drug dealers—money that funds construction and real estate speculation in a few choice luxury districts, buildings that go up thanks to the sweat of imported Filipino and Bangladeshi workers ~ James Risen, #NFDB
895:While his lab was under construction, Tesla studied the phenomenon of lightning, and made what he considered his most important discovery to date. He found that the earth was “literally alive with electrical vibrations,” and that the entire planet can be “thrown into vibration like a tuning fork.” Tesla was absolutely certain that this phenomenon could be used to transmit unlimited electrical power and telecommunication signals anywhere in the world with virtually no signal loss or degradation. “When ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
896:Individual behavior, they note in Prolegomena to the Construction of the Central City (significantly, the first neohuman work not to have a named author), was to become ‘as predictable as the functioning of a refrigerator.’ Indeed, while writing down their instructions, they acknowledged as a main source of stylistic inspiration, indeed more than any other human literary production, ‘the manual for electrical appliances of medium size and complexity, in particular the video player JVC HR-DV3S/MS. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
897:But there is pleasure, is there not, unrivaled by any other feeling in the world, to reach the last page of a book and know that you have lived in it, that you have stood witness to the performance of momentous deeds at the hands of extraordinary personalities? Do you not sometimes marvel at how the construction of a beautiful line can leave you either shaking with laughter or bawling like an untended infant? Is that not a miracle which deserves as much scrutiny as the wonders of science and nature? ~ Katherine J Chen, #NFDB
898:In Babylonian religious thought the gods are represented by numbers. The number 1 represented the High God. The god of music, Enki, was represented by the number 40 which, in the sexagesimal system, means , that is, or the musical perfect fifth—the same ratio applied to the winter solstice (the New Year). One cannot regain the whole system, only edges of it here and there—a “great worldwide archaic construction” which was “preserved almost intact in the later thought of the Pythagoreans and Plato.”70 ~ Thomas McEvilley, #NFDB
899:We desire peace. However, if imperialism insists on fighting a war, we will have no alternative but to take the firm resolution to fight to the finish before going ahead with our construction. If you are afraid of war day in day out, what will you do if war eventually comes? First, I said that the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind and war will not break out, and now I have added these explanations about the situation in case war should break out. Both possibilities have thus been taken into account. ~ Mao Zedong, #NFDB
900:When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger-and policemen. The forests were filling up with armed guerrillas. They found that the wars from the edge of India, in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, had migrated to its heart. People returned to live on city streets and pavements, in hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
901:For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods. ~ Jason L Riley, #NFDB
902:The thing about living in a place like Nebraska is there aren't that many people, so your circle of acquaintances is going be much more diverse. Everyone would go to the same bar, like the local politicians and construction workers. The class intersections were fascinating to me. And of course there's a whole other conversation about what a huge source of growth it was for me in terms of understanding people and the world in a way that I hadn't in New York. I used to say that L.A. is essentially New York with yards. ~ Meghan Daum, #NFDB
903:i can still see our construction hats lying
exactly where we left them
pylons unsure of what to guard
bulldozers gazing out for our return
the planks of wood stiff in their boxes
yearning to be nailed up
but neither of us goes back
to tell them it is over
in time
the bricks will grow tired of waiting and crumble
the cranes will droop their necks in sorrow
the shovels will rust
do you think flowers will grow here
when you and i are off
building something new
with someone else ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB
904:[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature—a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules—out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. ~ Jacob Bronowski, #NFDB
905:Her standards are not unreasonable, but when you wash a roasting pan it should not be greasy when you're done, nor should you wipe the grease off with your dish towel, which you are then going to use on the crystal. This is common sense. He isn't careless when it comes to construction. If he were putting up a shelf he wouldn't set it an angle so that objects placed on it slid to floor and broke. He'd pay attention and do the job right, and nobody watching would call him a perfectionist or accuse him of being fussy. ~ A S A Harrison, #NFDB
906:There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought. ~ Peter Greenaway, #NFDB
907:Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. ~ Randall Jarrell, #NFDB
908:The emigrants aboard the Mayflower of the West were typical. On arrival in eastern Ohio, they founded the town of Marietta, and happily imposed taxes on themselves to fund the construction and operation of a school, church, and library. Nine years after their arrival, they founded the first of the Yankee Midwest’s many New England–style colleges. Marietta College was headed by New England–born Calvinist ministers and dedicated to “assiduously inculcating” the “essential doctrines and duties of the Christian religion. ~ Colin Woodard, #NFDB
909:The human ‘species’ has succeeded in covering the earth: and not only spatially—on this surface that is now completely encircled mankind has completed the construction of a close network of planetary links, so successfully that a special envelope now stretches over the old biosphere. Every day this new integument grows in strength; it can be clearly recognized and distinguished in every quarter; it is provided with its own system of internal connexions and communications. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Convergence of the Universe, #NFDB
910:In contemplation, the most important manifestation of the conflict between second and first reality is the construction of a system. Since reality has not the character of a system, a system is always false; and if it claims to portray reality, it can only be maintained with the trickery of an intellectual swindle. It is found wherever there is a system. Since this intellectual swindle is inherent in the conflict between second and first reality and in system construction, the will to swindle naturally originates here. ~ Eric Voegelin, #NFDB
911:one does not need experiments to do science. While this claim may sound strange and counterintuitive at first, a moment's reflection will show that it is obviously true: astronomers do not conduct experiments, and yet we think of astronomy as solidly situated within the sciences, not the humanities or the pseudosciences. Why? Because astronomers can carry out the two fundamental activities that, jointly considered, truly characterize a science: systematic observations and the construction and testing of hypotheses. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
912:Those who thought they could distinguish philosophy from mathematics by saying that the former was concerned with quality only, the latter with quantity only, mistook effect for cause. It is owing to the form of mathematical knowledge that it can refer to quanta only, because it is only the concept of quantities that admits of construction, that is, of a priori representation in intuition, while qualities cannot be represented in any but empirical intuition. ~ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Tr. Max Müller (1881) p. 612., #NFDB
913:Miss Kuhli (Merrihew had heard it “Cooley” the day before, and had built quite a different picture) was Eurasian. Not since the perfection of ferro-concrete and its self-stressed freedom has architecture been able to match the construction of such eyelids and supraorbital arches as those with which Miss Kuhli had been born. Her hands seemed to be the cooperative work of a florist and a choreographer. Her body had not been designed, but inspired, and her hair was such that it could not be believed at a single glance. ~ Theodore Sturgeon, #NFDB
914:What caused Noah the most consternation was the change in the heavens. The earthquakes shook the pillars of the earth and went wide enough to even rattle the pillars of the firmament. The sky changed colors. Even the sun would turn blood red as it set in the gates of the West. Noah noticed an increase of storm clouds on the horizon, distant thunder portending a coming apocalypse. But this was not a time to brood. They finally finished the construction of the box and filled it with the animals. It was a time to celebrate. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
915:Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction. ~ David Simon, #NFDB
916:I don't think there is anything like the awareness of space to process emotion. That space is such an incredible processor. There is no analysis equal to the processing capacity of open awareness. When you are trying to analyze something, you don't realize that the analyzer itself is part of the problem. Both the problem and the analyzer are constructions of the mind. But direct, open, naked awareness is not a construction of the mind but the nature of the mind itself, and therefore the greatest processor ever. ~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, #NFDB
917:When Michigan officials say, “No building without a permit,” they mean it. That’s what Stephen Tvedten found out when he received a letter from state officials demanding that he “cease and desist” the construction of two dams on his property. Trouble was, it wasn’t Tvedten building the dams—it was a family of beavers. Fortunately, the state dropped its concerns once an investigator examined the situation more closely. “It probably would have been a good idea to do the inspection before we sent the notice,” one official said. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
918:the “person” (PUDGALA) is said to be a product of five aggregates (SKANDHA)—materiality (RŪPA), physical sensations (VEDANĀ), perception (SAṂJÑĀ), impulses (SAṂSKĀRA), and consciousness (VIJÑĀNA)—which together comprise the totality of the individual’s physical, mental, and emotional existence. What in common parlance is called the person is a continuum (SAṂTĀNA) imputed to the construction of these aggregates, but when these aggregates are separated at the time of death, the person also simultaneously vanishes. This ~ Robert E Buswell Jr, #NFDB
919:The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. Theres so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
920:This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called “tales of ratiocination”—his own name for detective stories—Poe later remarked, “People think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story. ~ Paul Collins, #NFDB
921:It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
922:That which for all time construction shall determine I have laid out; Away from Eridu, where dry land begins, my quarters shall be, Laarsa will be its name, a place for directing it shall become. On the banks of the Burannu, the River of Deep Waters, will it be located, A twin thereof a city shall in future arise, Lagash I shall name it. Between the two on the plans a line have I drawn, Sixty leagues thereafter a healing city shall come into being, A city of your own it shall be, Shurubak, the Haven City, I shall name it. ~ Zecharia Sitchin, #NFDB
923:In Buddhist ideology, the conventional self is that which is constructed in a way by the use of the pronoun, and when you realize there is no absolute ego there, no disconnected one, self, or ego, then that actually strengthens your conventional ego. It does so in the sense that then you realize it's a construction, and you can strengthen it in order to help others, or do whatever you're trying to do, it's not like you no longer know who you are. Then you can organize your behavior by using your ego, as it's now the pronoun. ~ Robert Thurman, #NFDB
924:The further conquest of space will make it possible, for example, to create systems of satellites making daily revolutions around our planet at an altitude of some 40,000 kilometers, and to assure universal communications and the relaying of radio and television transmissions. Such an arrangement might prove more useful, economically, than the construction of radio relay systems over the whole surface of the earth. The great accuracy of movement of these satellites will provide a reliable basis for solving navigational problems ~ Sergei Korolev, #NFDB
925:The paper was made in Bohemia,” I said. “Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
926:The destruction of Dresden was an overkill. It was done in February, 1945, when it was clear that Germany would lose the war. Russians could have already swept across the country but they waited for some reason. Firebombing mostly old people and children and women, hardly any of them culprits in the war, wasn’t the most ethical thing to do, but it was done, and now, watching the restoration of the cathedral, which takes place for years and takes millions of dollars, it is clear how much easier destruction is than construction. ~ Josip Novakovich, #NFDB
927:Arbitrary distinctions...have always been the instruments of arbitrary power, the means of lulling and ensnaring men into their own servitude. For whenever we leave principles and clear positive laws, and wander after constructions, one construction or consequence is piled upon another until we get an immense distance from fact and truth and nature, lost in the wild regions of imagination and possibility, where arbitrary power sits upon her brazen throne and governs with an iron sceptre.’ -said by John Adams, in Those Who Love, p. 166 ~ Irving Stone, #NFDB
928:I look up at her, rolling her mouth and smiling down. I look at the map. It’s not a brain, clearly; it’s a map; can’t she see the rivers and highways and interchanges? But I see how it could look like a brain, like if all roads were twisted neurons, pulling your emotions from one place to another, bringing the city to life. A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It’s the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
929:In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can. ~ David Mamet, #NFDB
930:I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
931:It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoic, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among p. 31 the mass-delusions of this kind. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
932:It's far better to be under construction than to be shabby and in need of repair. The person who hasn't sorted out his life experiences acts them out in daily life, repeating negative patterns. The alchemical or therapeutic work not only liberates you from your past, it makes you a thoughtful and less impulsive person, less prone to acting on raw emotion. You also become a better leader, parent, teacher, friend. You become a person of substance, liberated from the raw, interfering patterns and emotions that are useful only when refined. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
933:There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. ~ Teju Cole, #NFDB
934:American banks may have been unable to supply adequate loans, but the Rothschild consortium in Britain was both able and willing. It was during this time that the Rothschilds were consolidating their new industrial holdings in the United States through their agent, August Belmont. Derek Wilson tells us: "They owned or had major shareholdings in Central American ironworks, North American canal construction companies, and a multiplicity of other concerns. They became the major importers of bullion from the newly discovered goldfields". ~ G Edward Griffin, #NFDB
935:Vouchers are far more cost-effective than new construction, whether in the form of public housing or subsidized private development. We can’t build our way out. Given mounting regulatory and construction costs, offering each low-income family the opportunity to live in public housing would be prohibitively expensive. Even if it weren’t, building that much public housing risks repeating the failures of the past, by drawing the nation’s poorest citizens under the same roof and contributing to racial segregation and concentrated poverty.50 ~ Matthew Desmond, #NFDB
936:American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for “a gentle painless death.” He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill “the very weak and the very vicious.” It would be pointless to try to improve these people through experience, because, McKim declared, “heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
937:But they had another name for him, too. I can’t remember just now. Couldn’t hardly pronounce it if I tried. ‘The Sleeping King is dead but dreaming.’ That’s what they said. Now, what in the hell does that mean? Those weren’t my favorite stories. I kept my distance from those boys. You not planning to fly out to Fiji, are you?” Buckeye laughed but it was forced. How could his friend from Harlem come up with the same story as two brothers from Fiji? Especially when both died during the construction of the Panama Canal? How could such things be? ~ Victor LaValle, #NFDB
938:A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves out to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming age of barbarism and darkness. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre, #NFDB
939:Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
940:Pyongyang dismissed the report as baseless. The officially-sanctioned itinerary consisted mostly of newly built projects, testament to a recent jump in construction activity in the capital funded partly by booming business with China. This was further reflected in a large number of residential building sites across the city. Officially recorded trade between China and North Korea reached $6.5bn last year, up more than a 10th from 2012. The developments included the Okryu children’s hospital, equipped with modern medical scanning equipment – although ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
941:By construction, the world of big data is siloed and segmented and segregated so that successful people, like myself - technologists, well-educated white people, for the most part - benefit from big data, and it's the people on the other side of the economic spectrum, especially people of color, who suffer from it. They suffer from it individually, at different times, at different moments. They never get a clear explanation of what actually happened to them because all these scores are secret and sometimes they don't even know they're being scored. ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
942:Most people don't realize how sophisticated pool tables are. Yes, tables have bolts and staples on the rails but these suckers hold together mostly by gravity and by the precision of their construction. If you treat a good table right it will outlast you. Believe me. Cathedrals are built like that. There are Incan roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950's. That's the sort of thing that I can believe in. ~ Junot D az, #NFDB
943:I think that the Mexican waiter behind the breakfast counter is kidding about Fuel City. I tell him I’ve been in the Lone Star State for only forty-eight hours and he says that if I want to see the real Dallas—la verdadera ciudad, the Dallas of truck drivers, Mexican laborers, lawyers, parolees, and cops mixed elbow to elbow with white privileged gringas driving expensive SUVs—I need to drive farther south, past the city jail, the bail bondsmen, and the highway construction sites, to Riverfront Street. There I’ll find the beating heart of the city. ~ Kathleen Kent, #NFDB
944:Portuguese craftsmen such as Agostinho de Goes Raposo, Francisco Gois and João Dias perfected the construction of nautical instruments. The Portuguese caravel – and its successors the great nau (1480) and the galleon (1510) – were also significantly better than other sailing ships of the time. Finally, with the Cantino Map of 1502, the Portuguese achieved a breakthrough in cartography: the first modern projection of the world’s geography, with largely accurate depictions of the world’s major continents aside from Australia and Antarctica (plate 7). ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
945:Prometheus’ software was now highly optimized to make the most of the rather mediocre human-invented hardware it ran on, and as the Omegas had anticipated, Prometheus identified ways of dramatically improving this hardware. Fearing a breakout, they refused to build robotic construction facilities that Prometheus could control directly. Instead, they hired large numbers of world-class scientists and engineers in multiple locations and fed them internal research reports written by Prometheus, pretending that they were from researchers at the other sites. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
946:The difficult tasks to be performed are not the ones that mean physical and mental labor, but the ones that you dislike, are the ones that you do not love. There are unpleasant angles to nearly every important job to be done in this world, but there must be an over all love for doing each, else precious time and effort are uselessly wasted. I shall never forget noting a sign above a construction job that read: "Builder of Difficult Foundations." That man must have loved that calling, else he would not have made a point of advertising the fact! ~ George Matthew Adams, #NFDB
947:I am coming through the barriers you have erected in this mind. I am coming, though the way be ardous and strange. Nothing will stop me. As I travel, I admire the craftsmanship in the construction of this maze, admire the traps and pitfalls they have wrought. You have learned well, my servants. To force the child to construct these barriers insides its mind, in its effort to escape the physical world; to build an island of dream alone and untouched by the true Dreaming... This takes skill. My admiration does not lessen my anger. I am dream. I am coming. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
948:Most striking of all, however, was the construction of an enormous new city. It was to become the richest and most populous in the world, and remained so for centuries—even if some estimates made in the tenth century are over-exuberant. Basing his calculations on the number of bathhouses, the number of attendants required to maintain them and the likely distribution of baths to private houses, one author estimated the population of the city to be just under 100 million.64 It was known as Madīnat al-Salām, or the city of peace. We know it as Baghdad. ~ Peter Frankopan, #NFDB
949:Such is the moral construction of the world that no national crime passes unpunished in the long run... Were present oppressors to reflect on the same truth, they would spare to their own countries the penalties on their present wrongs which will be inflicted on them in future times. The seeds of hatred and revenge which they sow with a large hand will not fail to produce their fruits in time. Like their brother robbers on the highway, they suppose the escape of the moment a final escape and deem infamy and future risk countervailed by present gain. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
950:That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within - and yet continuously obscured by - what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy...[T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'être." Jodi Byrd ~ Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, #NFDB
951:We live in a society right now which is the last phase of the ecosystem in terms of the old entertainment value, or the old entertainment construction, which is we've gone down to this instant gratification, instant numbers, instant understanding, instant. But it's like the exact - it has perfected itself to the instant click, when, in a way, creativity originates as a much more complex beast. So we now have to reinvent a new canvas where we can indulge in it. And that's where the digital revolution creates a whole new ecosystem of entertainment. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn, #NFDB
952:The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place. ~ Shlomo Sand, #NFDB
953:The ego is a construction; you can also drop it through chemicals. It is a construction; it is not a reality, it is not substantial in you. It is through society that you have learned it. Alcohol simply drops you out of society. That’s why society is always against alcohol, the government is always against alcohol, the university is always against alcohol, all the moralists are always against alcohol – because alcohol is dangerous, it gives you a glimpse of the outside of society. That is why there is so much propaganda against drugs in America and in Western countries. ~ Osho, #NFDB
954:In the words of the Mongolian creation myth: ‘There came a wild dog who was blue and gray and whose destiny was imposed on him by the heavens. His mate was a roe deer.Thus begins another love story. The wild dog with his courage and strength, the doe
with her gentleness, intuition, and elegance. Hunter and hunted meet and love each other.
According to the laws of nature, one should destroy the other, but in love there is neither
good nor evil, there is neither construction nor destruction, there is merely movement.
And love changes the laws of nature. ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB
955:It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
956:It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of governments ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
957:I used to believe that design was information architecture, and also that this architecture was built in the brain of an information recipient. Recently I've come to think that, although the materials of that architecture's construction are indeed the information brought from the outside by the sensory organs, at the same time some very important building blocks are also the recollected experiences, the memories, awakened by these external stimuli. People imagine the world and interpret it when outside stimuli awaken the mountain of their internally stored memories. ~ Kenya Hara, #NFDB
958:Adam saw her eyes look up to the right. He didn’t necessarily buy the idea that you could tell lies by the way the eyes move, but he did know that when someone’s eyes look up and to the right, it usually indicated that the person was visually remembering things, as opposed to the left, which meant visually constructing things. Of course, like most generalizations, you couldn’t really count on it, and visually constructing did not mean lying. If you asked someone to think of a purple cow, that would lead to visual construction, which isn’t a lie or deception. Either ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
959:Children born into a web of attuned relationships know how to join in conversations with new people and read social signals. They see the world as a welcoming place. Children born into a web of threatening relationships can be fearful, withdrawn, or overaggressive. They often perceive threats, even when none exist. They may not be able to read signals or have a sense of themselves as someone worth listening to. This act of unconscious reality construction powerfully determines what we see and what we pay attention to. It powerfully shapes what we will end up doing. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
960:The idea that a relatively fixed group of privileged people might shape the economy and government for their own benefit goes against the American grain. Nevertheless, the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant power figures in the United States. Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington. Their real estate, construction, and land development companies form growth coalitions that dominate most local governments. ~ G William Domhoff, #NFDB
961:Though domestic black money is an expression of no-confidence in the government of India, some part of the domestic black money is used in productive activities like real estate, trade, construction, mining, transport, restaurants and other businesses. As previously stated, illicit money kept abroad is a no-confidence vote in India itself—its stability and its people. The illicit money kept in tax havens abroad is, by and large, not used for domestic purposes unless it is round-tripped through share markets or foreign direct investment (FDI) to domestic operations. ~ R Vaidyanathan, #NFDB
962:The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction. History is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth. Some of the most significant discoveries in modern science owe their origin to the imagination of men who had neither accurate knowledge nor exact instruments to demonstrate their beliefs. If astronomy had not kept always in advance of the telescope, no one would ever have thought a telescope worth making. What great invention has not existed in the inventor's mind long before he gave it tangible shape? ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
963:Let me, then, define technology as a family of methods for associating and channeling other entities and forces, both human and nonhuman. It is a method, one method, for the conduct of heterogeneous engineering, for the construction of a relatively stable system of related bits and pieces with emergent properties in a hostile or indifferent environment. When I say this, I do not mean that the methods are somehow different from the forces that they channel. Technology does not act as a kind of traffic policeman that is distinct in nature from the traffic it directs. It ~ Wiebe E Bijker, #NFDB
964:Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things? You may have causes, goals, interests. Are they even worth pursuing? I've long held on to a clipping from a newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia. It featured a photo of a pregnant woman who had lodged a protest against a local construction site. She worried that the sound of jackhammers was injuring her unborn child. But get this: In the photo, the woman is holding a cigarette. If she cared about her unborn child, the time she spent railing against jackhammers would have been better spent putting out that cigarette. ~ Randy Pausch, #NFDB
965:If the Commission is to enquire into the conditions "to be observed," it is to be presumed that they will give the result of their enquiries; or, in other words, that they will lay down, or at least suggest, "rules" and "conditions to be (hereafter) observed" in the construction of bridges, or, in other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement to-morrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of to-day. [Objecting to any interference by the State with the freedom of civil engineers in the conduct of their professional work.] ~ Isambard Kingdom Brunel, #NFDB
966:One may see his behaviour as 'signs' of a 'disease'; one may see his behaviour as expressive of his existence. The existential-phenomenological construction is an inference about the way the other is feeling and acting [...] The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more 'scientific' or 'objective', may propose to confine himself to the 'objectively' observable behaviour of the patient before him. The simplest reply to this is that it is impossible. To see 'signs' of 'disease' is not to see neutrally. Nor is it neutral to see a smile as contractions of the circumoral muscles. ~ R D Laing, #NFDB
967:These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent, were directed at new single-family suburban construction.c Intentionally or not, the FHA and VA programs discouraged the renovation of existing housing stock, while turning their back on the construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types. Simultaneously, a 41,000-mile interstate highway program, coupled with federal and local subsidies for road improvement and the neglect of mass transit, helped make automotive commuting affordable and convenient for the average citizen. ~ Andr s Duany, #NFDB
968:What joke?” “The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.” “I don’t know that one,” Cochran said. Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’ And the guy says, ‘Wheelbarrows. ~ John Sandford, #NFDB
969:When the days become longer and there is more sunshine, the grass becomes fresh and, consequently, we feel very happy. On the other hand, in autumn, one leaf falls down and another leaf falls down. The beautiful plants become as if dead and we do not feel very happy. Why? I think it is because deep down our human nature likes construction, and does not like destruction. Naturally, every action which is destructive is against human nature. Constructiveness is the human way. Therefore, I think that in terms of basic human feeling, violence is not good. Non-violence is the only way. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
970:With heightened focus on the construction of woman as a "victim" of gender equality deserving reparations (whether through changes in discriminatory laws or affirmative action policies) the idea that owmen need to first confront their internalized sexism as part of becoming feminist lost currency. Females of all ages acted as though concern for or rage at male domination or gneder equality was all that was needed to make one a "feminist." Without confronting internalized sexism women who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their interactions with other women. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
971:The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession. ~ David Blankenhorn, #NFDB
972:The Teamsters pension fund organized by Hoffa almost immediately became a source of loans to the national crime syndicate known to the public as La Cosa Nostra. With its own private bank, this crime monopoly grew and flourished. Teamsters-funded ventures, especially the construction of casinos in Havana and Las Vegas, where dreams come true for the godfather entrepreneurs. The sky was the limit and more was anticipated. At the time of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 Atlantic City was about to open up to legalized gambling. Jimmy’s cut was to get a finder’s fee off the books. ~ Charles Brandt, #NFDB
973:Another important divisional arrangement pertains to the execution of movement and the learning of movement sequences. The cerebellum, basal ganglia, and sensorimotor cortices are the main players here. There are also principal divisions concerned with learning and recall of image-based facts and events—the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex, whose circuitry feeds into it and is reciprocated by it, are the star players. Yet another division permits the construction of verbal language translations for all the nonverbal images that the brain generates and streams in narratives. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
974:Art is at present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, it is such richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing.
…We want to make men realize afresh that the one unique fraternity exists in the moment of intensity when the beautiful and life itself are concentrated on the height of a wire rising toward a burst of light, a blue trembling linked to the earth by our magnetic gazes covering the peaks with snow. The miracle. I open my heart to creation. ~ Tristan Tzara,#NFDB
975:Big Sister Shen tells me this used to be a sleepy fishing village. But with the economic reforms and the opening up of China, urbanization brought construction everywhere. To get more compensation when the government exercised its eminent domain powers, villagers raced to build tall towers on their land so as to maximize the square footage of the residential space. But before they could cash in, real estate prices had risen to the point where even the government could no longer afford to pay compensation. These hastily erected buildings remain like historical ruins, witnesses to history. ~ Ken Liu, #NFDB
976:there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. 18 In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of ~ N Katherine Hayles, #NFDB
977:Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
978:The reasoning that led Clinton to turn the Rector execution into a ritual appeasement of the electoral gods brought him, in 1994, to call for and then sign his name to the most sweeping police-state bill that modern-day America has seen. Among other things, the measure provided for the construction of countless new prisons, it established over a hundred new mandatory minimum sentences, it allowed prosecutors to charge thirteen-year-olds as adults in some cases, and it coerced the states into minimizing parole. It also increased the number of federal death penalties from three to sixty, ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
979:He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it. ~ Kate Grenville, #NFDB
980:The new internal world is a world dominated by the body frame, by the location and state of the sensory portals within that frame, and by the voluntary musculature. The sensory portals sit and wait within the body frame and contribute importantly to the information generated by the maps of the outside world. They clearly indicate to the organism’s mind the locations, within the organism, of the sources of images currently being generated. This is necessary for the construction of an overall organism image, which, as we shall see, is a critical step in the generation of subjectivity. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
981:Ah, that would be interesting to know. I should like to take a trip backwards in time and see this house under process of construction. It would be worth seeing. Those old johnnies knew how to build. The fabric is as sound as a bell—I was wrong when I called it a ruin. It has lasted about four hundred years and it’ll still be standing when all the houses they’re putting up now will have fallen as flat as pancakes.” He sighed and added, “It’s absolutely criminal for people to allow their property to deteriorate like this. Look at those window-frames, all rotting for want of a lick of paint! ~ D E Stevenson, #NFDB
982:We negotiated the construction of a gas pipeline system along the bottom of the Black Sea to Bulgaria. We signed certain treaties of a technical nature, contracts for laying the gas pipeline. And then Bulgaria created such conditions that the project's implementation became impossible, which was obviously against its own national interests. The former Bulgarian leadership was, in fact, aware of that and acknowledged it. But we trusted them when we were launching that project. We sustained losses amounting to millions, several million dollars. We would not want to get into such situations. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
983:We were trying to do as much science as we could because that was the main purpose of the international space station. But without the shuttle to bring up heavy laboratory equipment and bring back samples, we were limited by what we could do, but I was proud that we actually accomplished more science that was planned for the flight. And I got a chance to do two Russian spacewalks on that flight, I had become an expert in U.S. spacewalks and using U.S. suits and techniques, and this was a chance to put on a Russian Orlan suit and do two construction space flights outside of the space station. ~ Leroy Chiao, #NFDB
984:Abby must have been the one who found the safe house, because Townsend didn't like it. "The building across the street is under construction," he snarled as soon as we'd carried our bags inside. "The elevator has key card access, and I've hacked into the surveillance cameras from every system on the block," Abby argued. "We have a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual." "Excellent." Townsend dropped his bag. "Now the circle can see us from every angle." "Don't mind Agent Townsend, girls," Abby told us. "He's a glass-half-empty kind of spy." "Also known as the good kind," he countered. Abby huffed. ~ Ally Carter, #NFDB
985:What if he's right? We've seen great countries fall into ruin virtually overnight. What if we're next in line? That thought fills me with a kind of epochal sadness.
If this little back street is anything to go by, perhaps the unraveling has already begun. Everything has suddenly fallen quiet. All the construction has stopped. The laborers have disappeared. Where are the whores and the homosexuals and the dogs with fancy coats? I miss them. How could it all disappear so quickly?
I mustn't keep standing here, like some nostalgic old fool.
Things will get better. They must. ~ Arundhati Roy,#NFDB
986:a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
987:Such powerful nations as Russia and Germany, who could ever have thought that they would fall down in a moment; nations which took hundreds of years to become strong and to build themselves up? But when their time came their downfall did not take long. If such great powers are subject to falling in a moment and their whole construction can be broken, if that is the nature and character of life, no thoughtful person will deny the fact that there must be some mystery behind it, some secret of which he would like to find the key. At least he would want to know what life is and what is behind it. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
988:a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned.175 ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
989:There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
990:We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another's invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
991:Nevertheless, it strikes me more and more that America’s reputation for materialism is unfounded—that is, if a materialist is a person who thoroughly enjoys the physical world and loves material things. In this sense, we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
992:Recorded memories tend to freeze and reinforce the nature of their subject. The more memories we accumulate and externalize, the more narrative constraints we provide for the construction and development of our personal identities. Increasing our memories also means decreasing the degree of freedom we might enjoy in redefining ourselves. Forgetting is part of the process of self-construction. A potential solution, for generations to come, may be to be thriftier with anything that tends to crystallize the nature of the self, and more adept in handling new or refined skills of self-construction. Capturing, ~ Luciano Floridi, #NFDB
993:The importance of the bureaucratic link and the source of power-the divine king-and the actual human machines that performed the works of construction or destruction can hardly be exaggerated: all the more because it was the bureaucracy that collected the annual taxes and tributes that supported the new social pyramid and forcibly assembled the manpower that formed the new mechanical fabric. The bureaucracy was, in fact, the third type of 'invisible machine'-one might call it a communications-machine-co-existing with the military and labor machines, and an integral part of the final totalitarian structure. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
994:built the skeletal structure for the box based on the directions of the holy writ given from God to Noah, and then to Methuselah on leather. Everything stood ready. They needed only to begin the process of final construction. It could be completed within months if things went well. They had perfected a means of holding the beams together by pounding wooden pins into them. They had found bitumen pits nearby for the final layer of pitch to cover the wood of the completed box with a one or two inch thickness. Noah drove them hard to finish quickly, but he never asked of any man what he was not willing to do himself. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
995:He was preparing to run the guy over when a group of his construction guys came out of the apartment building, armed with hammers. They attacked so quickly that the commando was overwhelmed, so Beckett just backed up, rolling down his window again to listen. The construction workers were pissed. “Nobody takes our city. Fuck you!” He called Spider again. “How we doing?” “I made that speech a video, looped it, and sent it to everyone on our contact list. Plus I slapped it all over the Internet. Hashtag SavingPoughkeepsie is trending in the northeast. People are digging the we-don’t-take-shit-in-Poughkeepsie vibe. ~ Debra Anastasia, #NFDB
996:We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
997:We can conclude that a project as grand as the scientific-mythical construction of victory over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science. Even more, it comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation-and it is not even in man's hands to program. Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something-an object or ourselves-and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
998:Egyptologists claim that Khufu began construction of his pyramid so it would be completed in time to accept his corpse. I should imagine that while he was considering what style of pyramid he wanted, he would have been consulting his architects and engineers to see what was feasible. He also might have been interested in knowing how long it would take to build and how much it would cost. Using today's technology, modern stonecutters have estimated that it would take at least twenty-seven years just to quarry and deliver the stone. I wonder how long it would have taken Khufu's men using simple, primitive methods? ~ Christopher Dunn, #NFDB
999:It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1000:The way we envision the stars is by imagining they're attached to a giant invisible sphere surrounding the earth. It is a total fiction, really - just a construction we came up with to help us get our heads around the complexity of it all ... The ecliptic, put simply is the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun. But since we all live here on earth, we observe the sun to be moving along this plane instead. Why? Because what would be the point of looking at things from the perspective of the sun? That's no use to anyone ... Ergo, it's an imaginary circle, as it's only a part of our human construction of the cosmos. ~ Benjamin Wood, #NFDB
1001:We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a "transitional object"--a baby's warm blanket for adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
1002:I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of
brotherhood and devotion.
The mosque was truly an open construction, to God and to breeze. We sat cross-legged
listening to the imam until the time came to pray. Then the random pattern of sitters disappeared as
we stood and arranged ourselves shoulder to shoulder in rows, every space ahead being filled by
someone from behind until every line was solid and we were row after row of worshippers. It felt
good to bring my forehead to the ground. Immediately it felt like a deeply religious contact. ~ Yann Martel,#NFDB
1003:Fuel City Car Wash and Taco Stand Dallas, Texas Wednesday, August 17, 2011 I think that the Mexican waiter behind the breakfast counter is kidding about Fuel City. I tell him I’ve been in the Lone Star State for only forty-eight hours and he says that if I want to see the real Dallas—la verdadera ciudad, the Dallas of truck drivers, Mexican laborers, lawyers, parolees, and cops mixed elbow to elbow with white privileged gringas driving expensive SUVs—I need to drive farther south, past the city jail, the bail bondsmen, and the highway construction sites, to Riverfront Street. There I’ll find the beating heart of the city. ~ Kathleen Kent, #NFDB
1004:crisis seemed to vindicate the Soviet model. For, if Marxism-Leninism stood for anything, it was the prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Now it seemed to be doing precisely that. Understandably, the more the American dream turned to nightmare, the more people were attracted to the Russian alternative of a planned economy – insulated from the vagaries of the market, yet capable of feats of construction every bit as awesome as the skyscrapers of New York or the mass-produced cars of Henry Ford. All the totalitarian state asked in return was complete control of every aspect of life. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1005:And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.
Look what I found at the old industrial park," he said. "A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They're afraid of sink holes like that one that swallowed the cars."
His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass.
This little girl's grown up by now," she said.
Almost. Not quite.
I wish you all a long and happy life. ~ Alice Sebold,#NFDB
1006:Abby must have been the one who found the safe house, because Townsend didn't like it.
"The building across the street is under construction," he snarled as soon as we'd carried our bags inside.
"The elevator has key card access, and I've hacked into the surveillance cameras from every system on the block," Abby argued. "We have a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual."
"Excellent." Townsend dropped his bag. "Now the circle can see us from every angle."
"Don't mind Agent Townsend, girls," Abby told us. "He's a glass-half-empty kind of spy."
"Also known as the good kind," he countered.
Abby huffed. ~ Ally Carter,#NFDB
1007:I don't know. Sometimes I feel like New Yorkers do New York wrong. Where are the people swinging from subway poles and dancing on fire escapes and kissing in Times Square? The post office flash mob proposal was a start, but when's the next big number? I pictured New York like West Side Story plus In the Heights plus Avenue Q--but really, it's just construction and traffic and iPhones and humidity. They might as well write musicals about Milton, Georgia. We'd open with a ballad: 'Sunday at the Mall.' And then 'I Left My Heart at Target,' If Ethan were here, he'd have the whole libretto written by the time we stepped out of the car. ~ Becky Albertalli, #NFDB
1008:Once, we built structures entirely from the most durable substances we knew: granite block, for instance. The results are still around today to admire, but we don’t often emulate them, because quarrying, cutting, transporting, and fitting stone require a patience we no longer possess. No one since the likes of Antoni Gaudí, who began Barcelona’s yet-unfinished Sagrada Familia basilica in 1880, contemplates investing in construction that our great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren will complete 250 years hence. Nor, absent the availability of a few thousand slaves, is it cheap, especially compared to another Roman innovation: concrete. ~ Alan Weisman, #NFDB
1009:The so-called ‘ego’ — We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame; those cruder outbursts of which alone we are aware make us misunderstand ourselves, we draw a conclusion on the basis of data in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self. Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called ‘ego’, is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character and our destiny. — ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1010:To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction—both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the ‘contingency’ of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it (emphasis added).26 In ~ Robert Jensen, #NFDB
1011:Pour n'avoir pas eu d'indignations sélectives, pour avoir condamné tout totalitarisme indépendamment de sa couleur, il concentra sur son nom la haine de la droite qui lui reprochait sa critique des dictatures fascistes et celle de la gauche marxiste qui lui en voulait de dénoncer les camps soviétiques. Sa pièce de théâtre ne parvint pas à créer un mythe antifasciste, mais elle contribua à la construction de la pensée d'un philosophe antifasciste qui agit, par-delà les années, non pas comme un mythe, mais comme une référence grâce à son ontologie politique libertaire, l'autre nom d'une arme de guerre antifasciste redoutable: la Résistance. ~ Michel Onfray, #NFDB
1012:every people gives, so to speak, new clothing to the surrounding nature. By means of its fields and roads, by its dwellings and every manner of construction, by the way it arranges the trees and the landscape in general, the populace expresses the character of its own ideals. If it really has a feeling for beauty, it will make nature more beautiful. If, on the other hand, the great mass of humanity should remain as it is today, crude, egoistic and inauthentic, it will continue to mark the face of the earth with its wretched traces. Thus will the poet’s cry of desperation become a reality: “Where can I flee? Nature itself has become hideous.”49 ~ lis e Reclus, #NFDB
1013:Humans weren’t always human in this third sense, as far as we can tell. In the beginning, Homo sapiens seems not to have created art, played music, invented new tools, worked out the motions of the planets, or worshiped gods in the celestial sphere. These capacities accumulated slowly, over tens of thousands of years. Sometimes a new trait—a new kind of art, a new kind of construction—arose, only to fade out. But over the long run, as the other human species disappeared, these attributes built up in us, until perhaps fifty thousand years ago something resembling modern humankind—“behaviorally modern” humans, in the jargon—was loose in the world. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
1014:It happened two days ago. Some dump between Le Havre and Rouen. Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon—how’s that for a name? Bodies unearthed on the banks of the Seine—you must have heard about it on the tube.” “That thing at the construction site, where they’re laying a pipeline?” “Right. The media was all over it. They were already there because the site itself is such a hot-button issue. They discovered five stiffs with their skulls sawed off. Criminal Investigations in Rouen is on the scene, working with the local cops. Their DA was about to send in the CSI boys, but in the end we caught it. I can’t say I’m too thrilled—in this weather, it’s disgusting. ~ Franck Thilliez, #NFDB
1015:Day and night, bombs crashed into Baghdad. You watched it on TV, you heard it on the radio, you saw it from the roof and when you ventured out into the street: soldiers and civilians, arms and legs roasting, broken by falling stone, intestines spilling onto concrete; homes and barracks, walls ripped open; Baathists and Islamists, Communists and Social Democrats, grocers, tailors, construction workers, nurses, teachers all scurrying to hide in dim burrows, where they would wait to die, as many died, some slowly from disease and infection, others quick in bursts of light, thickets of tumbling steel, halos of dust, crushed by the world’s greatest army. ~ Roy Scranton, #NFDB
1016:Appearances are so and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts, nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, damned out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of chatterbox or of slanderer. ~ Ouida, #NFDB
1017:Coming to grips with recent years through a history and practice of animation – one centered on the construction of moving images, rather than the recording of the physical, fleshly, and gusty – shows that recent movies, games, artist’s video works, shows, and everything in between are uniquely thick with the social history of capitalism, especially the persistent legacies and cartography of colonialism. Moreover, they have started to reflect on and shape themselves around that fact, bringing the means of their making and all its echoes into plain view, provided we know how to get a good line of sight through all the lens flare and softly falling particles. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1018:Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the “active aspect” of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce. ~ Pierre Bourdieu, #NFDB
1019:This is what is intended by education as a help to life; an education from birth that brings about a revolution: a revolution that eliminates every violence, a revolution in which everyone will be attracted towards a common center. Mothers, fathers, statesmen all will be centered upon respecting and aiding this delicate construction which is carried on in psychic mystery following the guide of an inner teacher. This is the new shining hope for humanity. It is not so much a reconstruction, as an aid to the construction carried out by the human soul as it is meant to be, developed in all the immense potentialities with which the new-born child is endowed. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
1020:Modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems. We are now inclined to admit that at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order. And with this admission, consciousness, life and thought are on the threshold of acquiring a right to existence in terms of science. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
1021:Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world. ~ Alain Badiou, #NFDB
1022:Thistle and Twig had pushed, prodded, pulled, and cajoled me into an elaborate construction of a gown. It was a little out of date from the current fashions of the world above, something a fine lady might have worn fifty or sixty years ago. The gown was a russet and bronze damask, lined with a stomacher of watered silk striped with cream and violet. It was trimmed with rosettes cunningly shaped like alder catkins. Little as I was, the waist of the gown was even littler, the stays pinching my lower ribs so painfully I could not draw a deep breath. Even more impressive was the décolletage the bodice was able to give me. Despite the yards of fabric, I still felt naked. ~ S Jae Jones, #NFDB
1023:EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure—electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. ~ John Perkins, #NFDB
1024:By the dawn of the twentieth century, eugenics had begun taking root in the United States, and there it flowered into darker blooms. American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for “a gentle painless death.” He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill “the very weak and the very vicious.” It would be pointless to try to improve these people through experience, because, McKim declared, “heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
1025:He slowly lifted his head, eyes focused on the ceiling. “I can dig through.”
“Lachlain, I doona think that’s wise. This house is centuries old and gets battered as you would no’ believe.”
“Doona care.”
“You might care that all three stories are tongue-and-groove construction—one piece falls, it’ll be like a domino effect. War, hurricanes, and constant lightning have made it unsound. I doona think Val Hall can take a Lykae biting through the first floor.”
“Support it while I’m gone.”
“Hold the floor? If I canna, you could be hurting both our mates. This place could come crashing down.”
Lachlain slapped him on the shoulder. “Be sure that you doona drop it. ~ Kresley Cole,#NFDB
1026:The visible affordances of the pieces were important in determining just how they fit together. The cylinders and holes characteristic of Lego suggested the major construction rule. The sizes and shapes of the parts suggested their operation. Physical constraints limited what parts would fit together. Cultural and semantic constraints provided strong restrictions on what would make sense for all but one of the remaining pieces, and with just one piece left and only one place it could possibly go, simple logic dictated the placement. These four classes of constraints—physical, cultural, semantic, and logical—seem to be universal, appearing in a wide variety of situations. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
1027:One of the functions of Revelation [or of worship] was to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and influential as their intellectual convictions. It recognizes the way a dominant culture, with its images and ideals, constructs the world for us, so that we perceive and respond to the world in its terms. Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology. ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1028:"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For "truth" itself is an abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian. We approach it cap and categories in hand: we ask ourselves whether Truth is a substance (the Truth, the Body of Knowledge), or a quality (something like the colour red, inhering in truths), or a relation ("correspondence"). But philosophers should take something more nearly their own size to strain at. What needs discussing rather is the use, or certain uses, of the word "true." In vino, possibly, "veritas," but in a sober symposium "verum." ~ J L Austin, #NFDB
1029:The present moment is all important, for it is only in the present moment that our assumptions can be controlled. The future must become the present in your mind if you would wisely operate the law of assumption. The future becomes the present when you imagine that you already are what you will be when your assumption is fulfilled. Be still (least action) and know that you are that which you desire to be. The end of longing should be Being. Translate your dream into Being. Perpetual construction of future states without the consciousness of already being them, that is, picturing your desire without actually assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled, is the fallacy and mirage of ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
1030:He bogged down in traffic three blocks from the freeway. Yet another apartment building was being framed on a lot intended for a single-family home. A lumber truck was blocking the street as it crept off the site, and a food truck maneuvered to take its place. Locked in the standstill, Scott watched the framers perched in the wood skeleton like spiders, banging away with their nail guns and hammers. A few climbed down to the food truck, but most continued working. The banging ebbed and flowed around periods of silence; sometimes a single hammer, sometimes a dozen hammers at once, sometimes nail guns snapping so fast the construction site sounded like the Police Academy pistol range. Scott ~ Robert Crais, #NFDB
1031:Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:
1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one‘s freedom to be apart,
2. The ability to say appropriate no's to others without fear of loss of love,
3. The ability to take appropriate no's from others without withdrawing emotionally.
Noting these tasks, a friend said half-joking, "They need to learn this by age three? How about by fourty-three?" Yes, these are tall orders but boundary development is essential in the early years of life. ~ Henry Cloud,#NFDB
1032:The perceiving of mathematical truth can be achieved in very many different ways. There can be little doubt that whatever detailed physical activity it is that takes place when a person perceives the truth of some mathematical statement, this physical activity must differ very substantially from individual to individual, even though they are perceiving precisely the same mathematical truth. Thus, if mathematicians just use computational algorithms to form their unassailable mathematical truth judgments, these very algorithms are likely to differ in their detailed construction, from individual to individual. Yet, in some clear sense, the algorithms would have to be equivalent to one another. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
1033:Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon hypermasculine assertion. Psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of black male body as danger and the underlying eroticization that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure. It has taken contemporary commodification of blackness to teach the world that this perceived threat, whether real or symbolic, can be diffused by a process of fetishization that renders the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1034:Like all Roman roads, the Appian Way (Via Appia) was a marvel of both engineering and propaganda. Construction began on the roads by digging deeply into the soil to lay a foundation of rock, covering this in turn with gravel for drainage, and finally paving with virtually indestructible flagstones over which commerce rolled and armies marched. Unlike the earlier muddy tracks around much of the Mediterranean, Roman roads were meant to endure and rarely yielded to the vagaries of topography. Unless prevented by impassable mountains or impregnable swamps, the Romans built their roads straight as an arrow across the landscape. They were in fact a sermon in stone to the world—Romans do not yield. ~ Philip Freeman, #NFDB
1035:Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.
Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product. ~ Victor Shklovsky,#NFDB
1036:Suppose, Paley wrote, a man walking across a heath happens upon a watch lying on the ground. He picks up the instrument and opens it to find an exquisite system of cogs and wheels turning inside, resulting in a mechanical device that is capable of telling time. Would it not be logical to assume that such a device could only have been manufactured by a watchmaker? The same logic had to apply to the natural world, Paley reasoned. The exquisite construction of organisms and human organs-"the pivot upon which the head turns, the ligament within the socket of the hip joint"-could point only to one fact: that all organisms were created by a supremely proficient designer, a divine watchmaker: God. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1037:Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. ~ James Wood, #NFDB
1038:Atavistic resurgence, a primal urge towards union with the Divine by returning to the common source of all, is indicated by the backward symbolism peculiar to all Sabbath ceremonies, as also of many ideas connected with witchcraft, sorcery and magic. Whether it be the symbol of the moon presiding over nocturnal ecstasies; the words of power chanted backwards; the back-to-back dance performed in opposition to the sun's course; the devil's tail - are all instances of reversal and symbolic of Will and Desire turning within and down to subconscious regions, to the remote past, there to surprise the required atavistic energy for purposes of transformation, healing, initiation, construction or destruction. ~ Kenneth Grant, #NFDB
1039:Here is just a short glimpse into the elaborate construction of this ANE author: 1 Enoch 18:1-5 And I saw the storerooms of all the winds and saw how with them he has embroidered all creation as well as the foundations of the earth. I saw the cornerstone of the earth; I saw the four winds which bear the earth as well as the firmament of heaven. I saw how the winds ride the heights of heaven and stand between heaven and earth: These are the very pillars of heaven. I saw the winds which turn the heaven and cause the star to set—the sun as well as all the stars. I saw the souls carried by the clouds. I saw the path of the angels in the ultimate end of the earth, and the firmament of the heaven above.[82] ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1040:How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
1041:At present there are only two land-based cranes in the world that could lift weights of this magnitude. At the very frontiers of construction technology, these are both vast, industrialized machines, with booms reaching more than 220 feet into the air, which require on-board counterweights of 160 tons to prevent them from tipping over. The preparation-time for a single lift is around six weeks and calls for the skills of specialized teams of up to 20 men.13 In other words, modern builders with all the advantages of high-tech engineering at their disposal, can barely hoist weights of 200 tons. Was it not, therefore, somewhat surprising that the builders at Giza had hoisted such weights on an almost routine basis? ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1042:In desperation, I’d tried to find a part-time after-school job, just to earn some walking-around money. I applied for dozens of tech support and programming jobs (mostly grunt construction work, coding parts of OASIS malls and office buildings), but it was completely hopeless. Millions of college-educated adults couldn’t get one of those jobs. The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants. So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play. ~ Ernest Cline, #NFDB
1043:Cutting through Temple Bar toward the river, they pass the cinema outside which Howard met Halley for the first time: this nugget of history he does not pass on to the boys. He remembers walking with her down to the riverside, but it’s only as they are crossing Ha’penny Bridge – the elderly construction seeming to sway beneath their impatient feet, the quays of the city stretching away on either side – that he remembers the museum was where she had been headed that day too, was where he had promised to take her, but never did, instead falling in love with her, leading her away into the backstreets of his life. Now he’s finally on his way there, but with twenty-six hormonal teenage boys instead of her. Nice job, Howard. ~ Paul Murray, #NFDB
1044:We have adopted European costume, European ways of living, even the European vices of drinking and gambling, but none of their virtues. This must be remedied. We must learn at the feet of Europe, but not at the sacrifice of our Eastern individuality. But this is precisely what we have not done. We have dabbled a little in English and European history, and we have commenced to despise our religion, our literature, our history, our traditions. We have unlearned the lessons of our history and our civilization, and in their place we have secured nothing solid and substantial to hold society fast in the midst of endless changes." In fine: "Destruction has done its work, but the work of construction has not yet begun. ~ T Lothrop Stoddard, #NFDB
1045:It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then marching with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with everything - the rent strikes, the sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became, the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole ...
My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of the struggle and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me. ~ Assata Shakur,#NFDB
1046:The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in man's construction is this: During your entire life you shall be under inflexible limits and restrictions, sexually. During twenty-three days in every month (in absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also she wants that candle - yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1047:It was the kind of upheaval, smack in the middle of adulthood, which was messy enough to make me consider, back then, the wisdom of early marriage. When we’re young, after all, our lives are so much more pliant, can be joined without too much fuss. When we grow on our own, we take on responsibility, report to bosses, become bosses; we get our own bank accounts, acquire our own debts, sign our own leases. The infrastructure of our adulthood takes shape, connects to other lives; it firms up and gets less bendable. The prospect of breaking it all apart and rebuilding it elsewhere becomes a far more daunting project than it might have been had we just married someone at twenty-two, and done all that construction together. The ~ Rebecca Traister, #NFDB
1048:How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world - in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s - with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
1049:It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the difference between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion-whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most if the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1050:There are these Precious Moments figurines, they’re like porcelain, little kids with giant eyes handing each other a heart that says LOVE on it, or rolling around with a puppy? Maria stumbles into a whole aisle of them. Tears start welling up in her eyes, again, which is totally not tough and totally not punk but which also you totally can’t lie about. Like, they’re depictions of this idealized childhood innocence, right? This idea that little kids have the potential for sadness in their giant eyes, but really they just know these pure emotions: love, happiness, whatever. It’s totally hokey and stupid and obviously a construction. Real little kids are as dirty, impure, and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be. ~ Imogen Binnie, #NFDB
1051:I think it was Asimov who once compared prose to windows. Some authors, he said— like Asimov himself— wrote in a style devoid of flourishes or lyricism, telling the story in a just the facts, ma’am kinda way. This is your standard clear-window prose; you don’t appreciate it, you don’t even notice it, but at least you’ve got a clear view of what’s going down on the other side. Others (Samuel Delany and China Miéville come to mind) write “stained-glass-window” prose: the words contain a kind of beauty in the way they’re put together, they draw attention to their own construction and invite whistles of admiration. The only problem with stained-glass windows is, the more ornate the pane, the tougher it is to see what’s on the other side. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
1052:It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion—whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1053:She closed the door behind her. Myron went around to his chair and picked up the phone. He dialed Win’s number. Win picked up on the first ring. “Articulate.” “You got plans for tonight?” “Moi? But of course.” “Typical evening of demeaning sex?” “Demeaning sex,” Win repeated. “I told you to stop reading Jessica’s magazines.” “Can you cancel?” “I could,” he said, “but the lovely lass will be very disappointed.” “Do you even know her name?” “What? Off the top of my head?” One of the construction workers started hammering. Myron put a hand over his free ear. “Could we meet at your place? I need to bounce a few things off you.” Win did not hesitate. “I am but a brick wall awaiting your verbal game of squash.” Myron guessed that meant yes. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1054:The most famous faux fatality was “George,” the imaginary welder who was killed during the construction of Pirates of the Caribbean. Evidently, poor George was either electrocuted or crushed by a falling beam and continues to haunt the attraction to this day. Cast members still tell the ghost story to new hires, warning that they best say, “Good morning, George,” when they prepare the ride for opening or they’ll experience a day of breakdowns, evacuations or odd occurrences. “You’ll see or hear something strange,” warned one spooked ride operator. “You’ll see moving shadows on the [hidden camera] monitors or mysterious figures standing in the knee-deep water. You’ll feel a sudden, icy cold breeze. You clean graffiti and it comes back. ~ David Koenig, #NFDB
1055:Not since Mr. Kaiser,” they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder’s crane wiped out their childhoods and their parents’ childhoods, blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-eight in case someone dropped by; as if Henry Kaiser had personally condemned them to live out their lives in California exile among only their token mementos, the calabashes and the carved palace chairs and the flat silver for forty-eight and the diamond that had been Queen Liliuokalani’s and the heavy linens embroidered on all the long golden afternoons that were no more. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
1056:The absence of mapping and image-making capabilities entails other fatal consequences: consciousness cannot arise in the absence of minds, and the same applies, even more fundamentally, to the very special class of processes called feelings, which are constituted by images closely interwoven with body operations. In other words, in my perspective and in the ample and technical sense of the terms, consciousness and feeling depend on the existence of minds. Evolution had to wait for more sophisticated nervous devices so that brains would be capable of fine multisensory perceptions based on the mapping of numerous component features. Only then, as I see it, was the way clear for the creation of images and for the construction of minds.9 ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1057:Methuselah had led the tribe as they grew of age. He patiently taught them the construction skills they needed to build the box. They had honed their talent by building elaborate village homes of wood that provided the added blessing of luxurious living. They found a peculiar tree of very hard wood in the valley they called “gopher wood.” It was a long process to cut down the trees and create long, cured and glued planks. The boards were then sealed with a prime coating of tree pitch. The pitch was made by bleeding the sap from pines, burning the pine wood into charcoal, grinding that to powder, and mixing that powder into large vats of boiling pine resin. They then painted the wood with the tree-made pitch to seal it with an initial coat. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1058:For Hitler, the daily routine was unchanged from that in the Wolf’s Lair. At meals – his own often consisted of no more than a plate of vegetables with apples to follow – he could still appear open, relaxed, engaged. As always, he monopolized dinner-table topics of conversation on a wide variety of topics that touched on his interests or obsessions. These included the evils of smoking, the construction of a motorway-system throughout the eastern territories, the deficiencies of the legal system, the achievements of Stalin as a latter-day Ghengis Khan, keeping the standard of living low among the subjugated peoples, the need to remove the last Jews from German cities, and the promotion of private initiative rather than a state-controlled economy. ~ Ian Kershaw, #NFDB
1059:A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future? ~ Angela Y Davis, #NFDB
1060:Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.
Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ...
To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples. ~ Jonathan Black,#NFDB
1061:On December 12, 1958, the Greenbrier announced the construction of its new West Virginia Wing, with 22,000 square feet of public meeting space. Another 90,000 square feet were behind the walls for the classified congressional hideout. The hidden facility, surrounded by reinforced concrete walls between three and five feet thick, extended 720 feet into the adjacent mountain—a factor that created the odd sensation that from the resort lobby, one would take an elevator up to enter the bunker. It was not designed to withstand a direct attack, but would protect against nearby blasts and be sealed tight from fallout. When the off-the-books ghost project officially got under way in the spring of 1959, it was known by an appropriate code name: CASPER. Locals ~ Garrett M Graff, #NFDB
1062:But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
1063:How little one is justified in speaking in this connection of "optimism" and "pessimism" and how much the characterization of liberalism as "optimistic" aims at surrounding it with an unfavorable aura by bringing in extrascientific, emotional considerations is best shown by the fact that one can, with as much justice, call those people "optimists" who are convinced that the construction of a socialist or of an interventionist commonwealth would be practicable. Most of the writers who concern themselves with economic questions never miss an opportunity to heap senseless and childish abuse on the capitalist system and to praise in enthusiastic terms either socialism or inter ventionism, or even agrarian socialism and syndicalism, as excellent institutions. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
1064:The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling. ~ Angela Y Davis, #NFDB
1065:Aristophanes, in Plato's "Symposium", is purported to suggest that human form was not always as it is today:
Originally, humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on either side of a single head. (In evolutionary terms, it's hard to see the advantage of this construction.) Such was their hubris that they dared to challenge the gods themselves. Zeus, in his wisdom, split the upstarts in two, each half becoming a distinct entity.
Since then, men and women have been running around in a panic, searching for their lost counterparts, in a desire to be whole again.
(Plato makes clear what he thinks of this theory by having Socrates casually dismiss it. We should at least give some credit to Aristophanes for originality.) ~ David Mazzucchelli,#NFDB
1066:We cannot say, in familiar everyday terms, what it 'means' for an electron to be in a state of superposition of two places at once, with complex-number weighting factors w and z. We must, for the moment, simply accept that this is indeed the kind of description that we have to adopt for quantum-level systems. Such superpositions constitute an important part of the actual construction of our microworld, as has now been revealed to us by Nature. It is just a fact that we appear to find that the quantum-level world actually behaves in this unfamiliar and mysterious way. The descriptions are perfectly clear cut-and they provide us with a micro-world that evolves according to a description that is indeed mathematically precise and, moreover, completely deterministic! ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
1067:If real-world, useful knowledge is a provisional, human construction, why on earth do we lead children to believe otherwise? Why do we keep acting as if studying knowledge for its own sake, in a lacklustre, reverential kind of way, is an important thing to do, without feeling the need to explain what such study is equipping them to do (other than pass exams)? Why do schools trundle on, teaching past participles and the Vikings, as if oblivious to the fact that their students are going to graduate into a knowledge-making world, not a knowledge-applying one? Why do we not revel in showing them all the skills, doubts, conversations and controversies that are the stuff of knowledge-making – and help them get better at doing these knowledge-making things for themselves? ~ Guy Claxton, #NFDB
1068:It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another—on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction—who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
1069:... so many nominal Christians throughout history, took no notice whatsoever of the key parable of Jesus Christ himself, which taught that you shall love your neighbour as you love yourself, and even those that you have despised and hated are your neighbours. This never made any difference to Christians, since the primary epiphenomena of any religion’s foundation are the production and flourishment of hypocrisy, megalomania and psychopathy, and the first casualties of a religion’s establishment are the intensions of its founders. One can imagine Jesus and Mohammed glumly comparing notes in paradise, scratching their heads and bemoaning their vain expense of effort and suffering, which resulted only in the construction of two monumental whited sepulchres. ... ~ Louis de Berni res, #NFDB
1070:Me? Rebuild" I shook my head."First off, I don't know anything about construction or reconstruction. And second, have you been down there? Have you seen it? So many people haven't moved back or rebuilt, and I totally get it. Why invest all that time and money when each hurricane season brings a new threat?"
Aimee regarded me with a steady blue gaze. "Why build skyscrapers in San Francisco that might be knocked down by an earthquake? Or why build farms in Kansas and Oklahoma that might get blown away by a tornado?" She snorted, and it seemed so uncharacteristic for the elegant old woman that I almost laughed. "Where did they want us to go, anyway? I figure if we're still breathing, then we're meant to keep going. So we rebuild. We start over. It's just what we do. ~ Karen White,#NFDB
1071:Smokers Only, taking a drag at the end of each line: ‘I get no kick from champagne . . .’ National Airlines was the first company to fly jets from New York to Miami, in barely three hours, charging fifty-five dollars a ticket. The construction of the Interstate Highway System, the largest motorway network in the world, had been in full swing for four years. The mechanical cotton picker had taken over the South. The arrival of air conditioning allowed housebuilders to throw up suburbs even in the desert. The countryside moved to the city, the overcrowded inner cities moved to suburban avenues, the black South moved to the factories of the North. On 9 May – Mother’s Day – the first contraceptive pill, Enovid, was declared safe and approved for sale. Dr John Rock, champion ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB
1072:But to approximate chastisement to satisfaction for sin is to impinge not only on the perfection of Christ’s work but also upon the nature of Christ’s satisfaction. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). There must not be any abatement of the Protestant polemic against this perversion of the gospel of Christ. If we once allow the notion of human satisfaction to intrude itself in our construction of justification or sanctification then we have polluted the river the streams whereof make glad the city of God. And the gravest perversion that it entails is that it robs the Redeemer of the glory of his once-for-all accomplishment. He by himself purged our sins and sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high (cf. Heb. 1:3). ~ John Murray, #NFDB
1073:Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked. Tall buildings fell and construction sites rose. Pipes and cables rose from and descended into the hidden depths. Telephone landlines ceased to work and water and power and gas services were randomly suspended. Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. Construction work was the mighty metropolis being taught the lessons of vulnerability and helplessness. Construction workers were the grand conceptual artists of our time and their installations, their savage holes in the ground, inspired not only hatred—because most people disliked modern art—but also awe. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1074:The Chinese sage Mencius made the analogy between morality and food 2,300 years ago when he wrote that “moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths.”4 In this chapter and the next two, I’ll develop the analogy that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. In this analogy, morality is like cuisine: it’s a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it’s not so flexible that anything goes. You can’t have a cuisine based on tree bark, nor can you have one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors.5 Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1075:Despite no change in average hourly earnings in July, the rise in payrolls should be enough to generate a further rise in income,” said Paul Dales, senior US economist at Capital Economics. “This will allow consumption growth to rise in the second half of the year.” Almost all of the jobs growth came from the private services sector, with business services adding 47,000 positions. Healthcare and the leisure sector remained static, with no meaningful change from June. Construction added 22,000 jobs and manufacturing put on 28,000. The Fed revealed on Wednesday that the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee believed that labour resources were being underutilised and there was more capacity for improvement, revising its previous views that the unemployment rate was “elevated”. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1076:Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed. ~ Shirley Jackson, #NFDB
1077:What started as a normal conversation quickly spiraled out of hand, and Neil had no idea how they went from the construction work on the far side of campus grounds to a likely starting point for World War III. There had to be a correlation between the two, but as hard as he wracked his brain he couldn't find one. Eventually he gave up, because trying to make sense of the jump meant he couldn't actually listen to their argument. Renee expected it to start over resources, particularly water shortages, whereas Andrew was convinced the US government would get involved in the wrong conflict and draw vicious retaliation. There wasn't enough time left in break for either one of them to win the other over, and since Neil wouldn't play tiebreaker they set the debate aside for another day. ~ Nora Sakavic, #NFDB
1078:And prose is made of sentences. Oh, I’ve always been a bathroom dictionary browswer. Still—“In the beginning was the word . . .”? I suppose poets have to feel that way. But for me, the word’s a degenerate sentence, a fragmentary utterance, something incomplete. Mollying along, lonesome Mrs. Masters asks, “Why aren’t there any decent words?” Well, no word is decent by itself; and less than a dozen indecent—shit, fuck, and the like working the way they do because when they’re blurted by counter women, construction workers, or traffic-bound drivers, they’ve got a clear capital at one end and an exclamation point at the other, so that the words alone (in the dictionary, say, or askew on the stall wall) are homonymous with the indecent expletive—which is a sentence. Declare “Sputum! ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
1079:A road sign up ahead. He veered off, crossing the Port-Jérôme industrial zone with his windows shut and the AC going full blast. Even so, the air smelled viscous, heavy with metal shavings and acid. Here, embedded in nature, the big names parceled out the empire of fossil fuels and oils. Total, Exxon Mobil, Air Liquide. The inspector drove nearly two miles in this magma of smokestacks, finally crossing past it into a quieter area, a full-on industrial wasteland. Frozen bulldozers shredded the landscape. He parked just short of the construction site, got out, and loosened his shirt collar. To hell with his jacket—he abandoned it on the passenger seat, along with the sports bag that contained his effects for the hotel. He stretched his legs, which cracked when he bent them. “Jesus… ~ Franck Thilliez, #NFDB
1080:When the birds were trilling and the leaves were swelling, an Indian came striding into Plymouth. Tall, almost naked, and very handsome, he raised his hand in friendship.
“Welcome, Englishmen,” said Samoset, Massasoit’s ambassador. The Pilgrims murmured in astonishment. The “savage” spoke English. He was friendly and dignified. They greeted him warmly, but cautiously.
Samoset departed and returned a week later with Massasoit and Squanto.
For the next few days, in a house still under construction, Squanto interpreted while Governor Carver and Massasoit worded a peace treaty that would last more than fifty years.
After the agreement, Massasoit went back to his home in Rhode Island, but Squanto stayed on at Plymouth.
The wandering Pawtuxet had at last come home. ~ Jean Craighead George,#NFDB
1081:After the raid, the neighborhood was officially repossessed by the city of Portland, and a number of the houses were razed. The plan was to set up new low-income condos for some of the municipal workers, but construction stalled after the terrorist incidents, and as I cross over into the Highlands, all I see is rubble: holes in the ground, and trees felled and left with their roots exposed to the sky, dirty, churned earth, and rusting metal signs declaring it a hard-hat area.
It’s so quiet that even the sound of my wheels as they turn seems overloud. A thought comes to me suddenly, unbidden—Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie—the old rhyme we used to whisper as kids when we passed a graveyard.
A graveyard: That’s exactly what the Highlands is like now. ~ Lauren Oliver,#NFDB
1082:Oral tradition accounts that the author was able to glean from living local experts are that the Spanish, upon first seeing the great wall of Sacsayhuaman in 1533, and shocked at its scale, asked the local Inca if their ancestors had built it. The answer was a simple, 'No,' that the wall was there when the Inca arrived about 500 years prior. Sacsayhuaman is a huge and complex site, and it is clear that varying techniques were used in its construction [...]. There is no practical reason why such huge blocks were required at Sacsayhuaman, and they are in fact the largest ever employed in the Americas. The common belief that it was a fortress of some kind constructed by the Inca is an idea that the Spanish came up with. For the Inca, it was in fact one of the most sacred of holy places. ~ Brien Foerster, #NFDB
1083:When a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a program of hate. What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, even kill them? It requires a “hostile imagination,” a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.” That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive, one that loads his rifle with ammunition of hate and fear. The image of a dreaded enemy threatening one’s personal well-being and the society’s national security emboldens mothers and fathers to send sons to war and empowers governments to rearrange priorities to turn plowshares into swords of destruction. ~ Philip G Zimbardo, #NFDB
1084:Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1085:... there's the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that's her age, but actually I'm just guessing. We don't really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn't remember, either. When you ask her, she says,
"Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne."
.... (footnote) Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne -- "I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?" Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: "I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the "gratitude tense," and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that "there is no finger pointed to a source." She also says, "It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense. ~ Ruth Ozeki,#NFDB
1086:Thou art One, the beginning of all computation, the base of all construction. Thou art One, and in the mystery of Thy Oneness the wise of heart are astonished, for they know not what it is. Thou art One, and Thy Oneness neither diminishes nor increases, neither lacks nor exceeds. Thou art One, but not as the One that is counted or owned, for number and change cannot reach Thee, nor attribute, nor form. Thou art One, but my mind is too feeble to set Thee a law or a limit, and therefore I say: "I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue." Thou art One, and Thou art exalted high above abasement and falling -- not like a man, who falls when he is alone. [1568.jpg] -- from The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, by Joseph Dan
~ Solomon ibn Gabirol, Thou art One
,#NFDB
1087:According to Vedder and Galloway, prior to the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, black and white construction unemployment registered similar levels. After the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, however, black unemployment rose relative to that of whites.[31] Vedder and Galloway also argue that 1930 to 1950 was a period of unprecedented and rapidly increasing government intervention in the economy. This period saw enactment of the bulk of legislation restraining the setting of private wage, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, Davis-Bacon Act, Walsh-Healey Act, and National Labor Relations Act. The Social Security Act also played a role, forcing employers to pay for a newly imposed fringe benefit.[32] Vedder and Galloway also note that this period saw a rapid increase in the black/white unemployment ratio. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
1088:The ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew that only danger waited, it powered into hyperspace on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalized from yet another. Inside its warship body, in narrow, unlit, unheated, hard-vacuum spaces, constructor drones struggled to install or complete sensors, displacers, field generators, shield disruptors, laserfields, plasma chambers, warhead magazines, maneuvering units, repair systems and the thousands of other major and minor components required to make a functional warship. Gradually, ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
1089:(Popular singer Eddie Fisher, appearing on This is Show Business, told Kaufman that women refused to date him because he looked so young.)
Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the construction of the Mount Palomar telescope, an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope - Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn't be able to detect my interest in your problem. ~ George S Kaufman,#NFDB
1090:Well, over here, this is a Sensor. It senses when demons are near.” He moved toward Magnus, and the Sensor made a loud wailing noise.
“Impressive!” Magnus exclaimed, pleased. He lifted a construction of fabric with a large dead bird perched atop it. “And what is this?”
“The Lethal Bonnet,” Henry declared.
“Ah,” said Magnus. “In times of need a lady can produce weapons from it with which to slay her
enemies.”
“Well, no,” Henry admitted. “That does sound like a rather better idea. I do wish you had been on the spot when I had the notion. Unfortunately this bonnet wraps about the head of one’s enemy and suffocates them, provided that they are wearing it at the time.”
“I imagine that it will not be easy to persuade Mortmain into a bonnet,” Magnus observed. “Though the color would be fetching on him ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
1091:I suppose I had not been particularly subtle. For the first time, I had taken care with my appearance; after the encounter by the Underground lake, I had forced Twig and Thistle to take me to the tailor to stitch me a new gown. To stitch me some armor. I had had the tailor modify a gown made of a beautiful cream and gold silk taffeta. It was fashioned like a chemise, the skirt gathered beneath what little bosom I had before flowing out behind me in a train. The entire construction was held together by diaphanous straps at my shoulders, leaving my arms bare. Diamonds were craftily sewn into the bodice- hundreds, thousands, a myriad- twinkling like stars in a night sky. Twig and Thistle arranged my hair into a coronet of braids about my head, fitted with more little diamonds that sparkled brightly against my dark locks. ~ S Jae Jones, #NFDB
1092:All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen. A ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1093:At a thirty-foot distance she was a very attractive, ripe-bodied young girl. At close range the coarseness, and the sleaziness of the materials used in construction were all too evident. Her tanned hide had a coarse and grainy look. Her crinkle of putty-colored hair looked lifeless as a Dynel wig. The strictures of the bottom half of the bikini cut into the belly-softness of too many beers and shakes, hamburger rolls and french fries. The meat of her thighs had a sedentary looseness. Her throat and her ankles and the underside of her wrists were faintly shadowed with grime. There was a coppery stubble in her armpits, and a bristle of unshaven hair on her legs, cracked red enamel on her toenails. The breast band of the bikini was just enough askew to reveal a brown new-moon segment of the nipple of her right breast. ~ John D MacDonald, #NFDB
1094:For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209) ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1095:A minister was walking by a construction project and saw two men laying bricks. “What are you doing?” he asked the first. “I’m laying bricks,” he answered gruffly. “And you?’’ he asked the other. “I’m building a cathedral,” came the happy reply. The minister was agreeably impressed with this man’s idealism and sense of participation in God’s Grand Plan. He composed a sermon on the subject, and returned the next day to speak to the inspired bricklayer. Only the first man was at work. “Where’s your friend?” asked the minister. “He got fired.” “How terrible. Why?” “He thought we were building a cathedral, but we’re building a garage.”9 So ask yourself: am I designing a cathedral or a garage? The difference between the two is important, and it’s often hard to tell them apart when your focus is on laying bricks. Sometimes ~ Louis Rosenfeld, #NFDB
1096:Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. ~ James W Loewen, #NFDB
1097:THE City of Angels operated mostly on a grid pattern, with a few winding streets tossed in to fuck up a tourist trying to get from Hollywood to downtown. Adding to the confusion are three of the worst intersected freeways known to mankind. An innocent stranger to the molasses gridlock around the downtown exits could unsuspectingly take the wrong course among the five hundred options available amid the endless construction and find himself circling the area, hopelessly lost until he either ran out of gas or went mad from the hell he couldn’t escape.
Bobby was dead certain many of the street people trudging through downtown muttering to themselves were actually motorists who finally abandoned their cars and set to walking the cement and steel desert until the end of their days. I wasn’t all together certain he was wrong. ~ Rhys Ford,#NFDB
1098:The CD-ROM's worth of information in the genome really wouldn't be enough to paint a bitmapped picture of an embryo, but it is enough to describe a process for building one. An artist who only wants to paint a picture that looks like a kind of tree has much less to remember than an artist who wants to paint a particular Ponderosa Pine from memory; in a similar way, if some alien's genome had to encode every cell in a body, it would need much more information (many more nucleotides) than our genomes do, because ours specify a general way to build a creature rather than an exact picture of every detail of the finished product. Our genomes are lossy because they specify methods rather than pictures, but it is precisely that lossiness that allows them to so efficiently supervise the construction of complex biological structure. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
1099:The reason why camps proved economically profitable had been foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia. The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform. For work in remote and primitive localities where it would not be possible to construct housing, schools, hospitals, and stores for many years to come. For work with pick and spade—in the flowering of the twentieth century. For the erection of the great construction projects of socialism, when the economic means for them did not yet exist. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
1100:Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
1101:On London Tonight, on television right now, a reporter is standing in front of a building that is under construction. It’s windy, and the wind has pressed the fabric of his slacks against his body, outlining his penis. You can see everything—the length and width and the fact that he’s uncut and hangs to the right. But I bet none of the viewers even noticed. In America, there would be letters to the station. There would be a lawsuit because a child was watching. The headlines would dub the reporter “Anchor of Shame” and he’d be fired. When our own Greta Van Susteren got her eyes done, it was front-page news for a week. So you can be sure, if Anderson Cooper’s penis were to be visible in outline beneath his trousers, he’d be on the cover of People, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. We are obsessed with sex in an unnatural way. ~ Augusten Burroughs, #NFDB
1102:Kammy could see the palace built into the cliff face. It was a majestic construction. Its white walls stretched up into a cluster of turrets and towers. Its façade was broken by gigantic windows that reflected a rainbow of colours. The palace was flanked by two waterfalls that filled the chasm running far below them; a chasm that was bridged by a staircase of monstrous size. But Kammy hardly noticed how far she would fall should her grip fail. The giant structure that speared out of the palace and up into the sky commanded all of her attention. It burned her eyes so she could hardly look at it, but at the same time she could not look away. It looked like a white diamond. Each of its countless edges sent off shards of brilliant light. It dwarfed anything that Kammy had ever known and she had never felt as alive as she did in that moment. ~ Natalie Crown, #NFDB
1103:Weiss shows that the U.S. approach generates far more social wealth. True, the information is initially provided for free, but a thriving private weather industry has sprung up which takes the publicly funded data as its raw material and then adds value to it. The U.S. weather risk management industry, for example, is more than ten times bigger than the European one, employing more people, producing more valuable products, generating more social wealth. Another study estimates that Europe invests 9.5 billion Euros in weather data and gets approximately 68 billion back in economic value—in everything from more efficient farming and construction decisions to better holiday planning—a sevenfold multiplier. The United States, by contrast, invests twice as much—19 billion—but gets back a return of 750 billion Euros, a thirty-nine-fold multiplier. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1104:Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t we have curry for breakfast?” “Hazel, eat.” “But why?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast sandwich.” Dad answered with his mouth full. “When you come back, we’ll have breakfast for dinner. Deal?” “I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for dinner,’” I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate. “I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg–inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime.” “You’ve gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel,” my mom said. “But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1105:Yet Jesus Christ says he is standing knocking at the door of our lives, waiting. Notice that he is standing at the door, not pushing it; speaking to us, not shouting. This is all the more remarkable when we reflect that the house is his in any case. He is the architect; he designed it. He is the builder; he made it. He is the landlord; he bought it with his own blood. So it is his by right of plan, construction, and purchase. We are only tenants in a house that does not belong to us. He could put his shoulder to the door; he prefers to put his hand on the knocker. He could command us to open to him; instead, he merely invites us to do so. He will not force an entry to anybody's life. He says (verse 18) 'I counsel you.' He could issue orders; he is content to give advice. This is the nature of his humility and the extent of the freedom he has given us. ~ John R W Stott, #NFDB
1106:If Italian engineers have understood anything,” she told me once, “it’s the significance and construction of the horn. Because the horn is the voice and the heart and soul of any vehicle. The vehicle wants to cut a good figure, wants to sound good without being intrusive or making anyone look foolish. A German horn, by contrast, is always a declaration of war—it suggests that invading troops are already massing on the frontier, so to speak. An Italian horn sounds like a friendly clearing of the throat, a gentle ‘Permesso?’ or ‘Oh, signore, would you mind waiting? I’m afraid I have the right of way, grazie, molto gentile.’ With an Italian horn you can compliment a traffic cop on his beautiful eyes. You can even—don’t laugh!—make a proposal of marriage with an Italian horn. And the loveliest horn in the world is still the Vespa’s, which defies comparison. ~ Mario Giordano, #NFDB
1107:Then tell me,” I said, “O, Wise Arrow, most dear to all manner of trees, how do we get to the Cave of Trophonius? And how do Meg and I survive?” The arrow’s fletching rippled. THOU SHALT TAKE A CAR. “That’s it?” LEAVEST THOU WELL BEFORE DAWN. ’TIS A COUNTER-COMMUTE, AYE, BUT THERE SHALL BE CONSTRUCTION ON HIGHWAY THIRTY-SEVEN. EXPECTEST THOU TO TRAVEL ONE HOUR AND FORTY-TWO MINUTES. I narrowed my eyes. “Are you somehow…checking Google Maps?” A long pause. OF COURSE NOT. FIE UPON YOU. AS FOR HOW THOU SHALT SURVIVE, ASK ME THIS ANON, WHEN THOU REACHEST THY DESTINATION. “Meaning you need time to research the Cave of Trophonius on Wikipedia?” I SHALL SAY NO MORE TO YOU, BASE VILLAIN! THOU ART NOT WORTHY OF MY SAGE ADVICE! “I’m not worthy?” I picked up the arrow and shook it. “You’re no help at all, you useless piece of—!” “Apollo?” Calypso stood in the doorway. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1108:Ida was a planetary woman. She knew—she had seen it proved in math, in words—that the apparent safety of a planet’s solid ground beneath her feet was based on precisely the same physical laws that described the construction of a spaceship, that there was no real difference between the solidity of dirt beneath her feet and the hollowness of sculpted carbon and iron. She knew this for the fact that it was, but Ida Stays was a planetary woman, and it was with a planetary woman’s fear that she froze in the darkness, because Ida did not believe in God, did not believe in any gods at all, only the cold fact of existence and man’s ability to work within the inflexible laws of nature, but somehow she, so human, so unmechanical, somehow she trusted the engineer that had constructed the planets far more than the human ones who had built the ships that flew between them. ~ C A Higgins, #NFDB
1109:To support an adequate standard of living, humankind still needs huge quantities of wood and wood products, from planking and beams and fibreboard to paper. We need trees, lots of them, and we must therefore use a good fraction of Earth’s surface as cropland for tree farms. Indeed, British Columbia’s terrain and temperate climate are ideal for growing softwood suitable for construction. I know that we can grow and harvest trees sensibly: during his career in B.C., my father worked as a forester and built a reputation as an innovator of logging and reforestation techniques that cause minimal damage to the land. As a child and young man, I spent many hours watching his employees use these techniques, and for two summers I worked in the B.C. forest industry myself, surveying tracts of timber for logging. But on that sunny afternoon, the clear-cuts southeast ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
1110:Imagine un peu ce qui arriverait si, au lieu de baser nos croyances concernant le sexe hétéro sur l’idée que l’homme “pénètre” la femme, nous disions que c’est plutôt le vagin de la femme qui “consomme” le pénis de l’homme. Cette construction créerait un tout autre ensemble de connotations, en ce que la femme deviendrait l’initiatrice active, tandis que l’homme serait le participant passif et réceptif. On voit très facilement comment les hommes et la masculinité pourraient finir par être vus comme dépendants et existant au bénéfice des femmes et de la féminité. De la même manière, si on pensait à certain traits typiquement "féminins", comme d’être émotif et expansif, non pas comme des signes d’insécurité ou de dépendance mais comme des actes audacieux d’auto-expression, alors l’idéal masculin du “beau ténébreux” pourrait sembler timide et insécure en comparaison. ~ Julia Serano, #NFDB
1111:when I was near your ages, my dad told me about this huge construction project that was going on out here. The federal government didn’t allow any local, or even any nationally owned, construction companies to build it. It was considered completely off-limits to everyone,” “Who was building it?” Alicia asked. “My dad found out it was the Chinese who got the contract for it, and they were the ones who built it. I think it took them ten years to do it too,” “Why that long?” asked Greg. “They were building it underground and all that dirt had to be hauled away somewhere. According to my dad, they didn’t want anyone to see the construction if a satellite happened to take a picture from above, and then for the masses to see it on Google Earth, which is partially why it was built underground. I’ve heard rumors that each state has at least two, but I don’t know that for sure, ~ Cliff Ball, #NFDB
1112:In contrast, Bella Vista was lush and seductive, the landscape filled with colors from deep-green to submerged-gold. Gardeners, construction workers and farm workers swarmed the property. Isabel Johansen was in charge; that had been clear from the start. Yet when she'd shown him to Erik's room, she'd seemed vulnerable, uncertain. Some might regard the room as a mausoleum, filled with the depressing weight of things left behind by the departed. To Mac, it was a treasure trove. He was here to learn the story of this place, this family, and every detail, from the baseball card collection to the dog-eared books about faro places, would turn into clues for him.
And holy crap, had Isabel looked different when she'd given him the nickel tour. Unlike the virago in the beekeeper's getup, the cleaned-up Isabel was a Roman goddess in a flowy outfit, sandals and curly dark hair. ~ Susan Wiggs,#NFDB
1113:Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. Glucocorticoids accomplish this through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on. Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
1114:Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in Chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction.
The notes form an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley's tests show that these frequencies are present in the King's Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 1/2 Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts—in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the top of a bottle. ~ Christopher Dunn,#NFDB
1115:Hoover Dam," Thalia said. "It's huge."
We stood at the river's edge, looking up at a curve of concrete that loomed between the cliffs. People were walking along the top of the dam. They were so tiny they looked like fleas.
The naiads had left with a lot of grumbling—not in words I could understand, but it was obvious they hated this dam blocking up their nice river. Our canoes floated back downstream, swirling in the wake from the dam's discharge vents.
"Seven hundred feet tall," I said. "Built in the 1930s."
"Five million cubic acres of water," Thalia said.
Graver sighed. "Largest construction project in the United States."
Zoe stared at us. "How do you know all that?"
"Annabeth," I said. "She liked architecture."
"She was nuts about monuments," Thalia said.
"Spouted facts all the time." Grover sniffled. "So annoying."
"I wish she were here," I said. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1116:The more I think of it, the more our ideas, our idols and our so-called holy practices, and those of our visions which supposedly are ineffable, all seem to me to be engendered merely by the stirrings of the human machine, exactly as is the wind from our nostrils or from our netherparts, and as is our sweat and salty water from tears, or the white blood passed in love, or the muddy excrement of the body. It enraged me to think that man should so waste his own substance in construction of theories that were almost always pernicious, and should speak of chastity before having examined the whole machinery of sex; that he should debate the question of free will instead of pondering the thousand obscure reasons which, for example, cause you to blink if I suddenly point a stick at your eyes; or that he should talk of Hell before having looked more closely into the question of death. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
1117:They stole my bank account,” Gloria said. After a time he realized, from her measured, lucidly stated narration, that no “they” existed. Gloria unfolded a panorama of total and relentless madness, lapidary in construction. She had filled in all the details with tools as precise as dental tools. No vacuum existed anywhere in her account. He could find no error, except of course for the premise, which was that everyone hated her, was out to get her, and she was worthless in every respect. As she talked she began to disappear. He watched her go; it was amazing. Gloria, in her measured way, talked herself out of existence word by word. It was rationality at the service of—well, he thought, at the service of nonbeing. Her mind had become one great, expert eraser. All that really remained now was her husk; which is to say, her uninhabited corpse. She is dead now, he realized that day on the beach. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
1118:I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas—“ Demonstration of God’s Existence from Motion.” I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany’s bed. Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
1119:Hoover had also created a Division of Simplified Practices, whose job it was to standardize and harmonize the distressinly fractious and unresponsible manufacturing and construction sectors. In those days roads were often still paved in brick, and brick was a typical example: sixty-six different sizes were being produced by manufacturers when Hoover ordered research on the topic. This was sheer waste, as far as the utilitarian Hoover was concerned. He therefore pulled the nation's paving-brick firms into a room and settled the matter; the range of sizes dropped from sixty-six to eleven. Emboldened, Hoover also looked into brick for homes; here he claimed victoryoutright, for the number of sizes went "from forty-four to one," the praiseful Irvin reported. Then there were beds. Seventy-four different sizes were available; as a result of encouragement from Hoover, the figure went down to four" (page 37) ~ Amity Shlaes, #NFDB
1120:Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.
I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading. ~ Hugh Nibley,#NFDB
1121:Despite claims that these radical policy changes were driven by fiscal conservatism—i.e., the desire to end big government and slash budget deficits—the reality is that government was not reducing the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor. It was radically altering what the funds would be used for. The dramatic shift toward punitiveness resulted in a massive reallocation of public resources. By 1996, the penal budget doubled the amount that had been allocated to AFDC or food stamps.100 Similarly, funding that had once been used for public housing was being redirected to prison construction. During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”101 Clinton ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1122:But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1123:This morning, thanks to a controlled near-death experience, I was lucky enough to meet, at the far end of the blue tunnel, a man named Salvatore Biagini. Last July 8th, Mr. Biagini, a retired construction worker, age seventy, suffered a fatal heart attack while rescuing his beloved schnauzer, Teddy, from an assault by an unrestrained pit bull named Chele, in Queens.
The pit bull, with no previous record of violence against man or beast, jumped a four-foot fence in order to have at Teddy. Mr. Biagini, an unarmed man with a history of heart trouble, grabbed him, allowing the schnauzer to run away. So the pit bull bit Mr. Biagini in several places and then Mr. Biagini's heart quit beating, never to beat again. I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagini was philosophical. He said it sure as heck beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,#NFDB
1124:Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways—some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to converge to a vanishing point. As Bell Labs chronicler Jon Gertner notes about this design: “Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” This strategy, mixed with Kelly’s aggressive recruitment of some of the world’s best minds, yielded some of the most concentrated innovation in the history of modern civilization. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
1125:In the postwar period, democratic politics was transformed not only by the switch to oil, but by the development of two new methods of governing democracies, both made possible by the growing use of energy from oil. One of these was an arrangement for managing the value of money and limiting the power of financial speculation, which was said to have destroyed interwar democracy – a system built with the pipelines, oil agreements and oligarchies that organised the supply and pricing of oil. It was accompanied by the construction of the Cold War, which provided a framework for the policing of the postwar Middle East that replaced the need for mandates, trusteeships, development programmes and other scaffoldings for imperial power. The other new mode of governing democracies was the manufacture of ‘the economy’ – an object whose experts began to displace democratic debate and whose mechanisms set limits to egalitarian demands. ~ Timothy Mitchell, #NFDB
1126:Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternates. But that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm stage of their science's development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution. So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science-retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
1127:Helen was bewildered to find herself surrounded by air as warm as the breath of summer. Slowly she walked into a large gallery, constructed of thousands of flashing, glittering glass panes in a network of wrought-iron ribs.
It was a glasshouse, she realized in bewilderment. On a rooftop. The ethereal construction, as pretty as a wedding cake, had been built on a sturdy brickwork base, with iron pillars and girders welded to vertical struts and diagonal tiers.
"This is for my orchids," she said faintly.
Rhys came up behind her, his hands settling at her waist. He nuzzled gently at her ear. "I told you I'd find a place for them."
A glass palace in the sky. It was magical, an inspired stroke of romantic imagination, and he had built it for her. Dazzled, she took in the view of London at sunset, a red glow westering across the leaden sky. The clouds were torn in places, gold light spilling through the fire-colored fleece. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1128:Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1129:Science in its everyday practice is much closer to art than to philosophy. When I look at Godel's proof of his undecidability theorem, I do not see a philosophical argument. The proof is a soaring piece of architecture, as unique and as lovely as Chartres Cathedral. Godel took Hilbert's formalized axioms of mathematics as his building blocks and built out of them a lofty structure of ideas into which he could finally insert his undecidable arithmetical statement as the keystone of the arch. The proof is a great work of art. It is a construction, not a reduction. It destroyed Hilbert's dream of reducing all mathematics to a few equations, and replaced it with a greater dream of mathematics as an endlessly growing realm of ideas. Godel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Every formalization of mathematics raises questions that reach beyond the limits of the formalism into unexplored territory. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
1130:exactly what she was doing—tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and wove crooked paths down her cheeks. How could she have been so insensitive to her own sister? Chapter 24 All week Cassie had worked feverishly to put Steve out of her mind, but it hadn’t worked. She couldn’t wait to see him, and a week had never dragged on for so long. Nothing felt the same without him at the construction site, running the project. Saturday morning, Cassie was up early. The Hoedown was being held in an airport hangar, and a lot of work had to be done in order to get the space ready. Several other volunteers arrived to work off their hours by putting up long folding tables and chairs, placing red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloths across the tables, and then setting the tables, lining each place setting up perfectly. To the front of the hangar was a mechanical bull quartered off with stacks of hay. In the middle of the room were tables displaying ~ Debbie Macomber, #NFDB
1131:Once the leeks and potatoes have simmered for an hour or so, you mash them up with a fork or a food mill or a potato ricer. All three of these options are far more of a pain in the neck than the Cuisinart- one of which space-munching behemoths we scored when we got married- but Julia Child allows as how a Cuisinart will turn soup into "something un-French and monotonous." Any suggestion that uses the construction "un-french" is up for debate, but if you make Potage Parmentier, you will see her point. If you use the ricer, the soup will have bits- green bits and white bits and yellow bits- instead of being utterly smooth. After you've mushed it up, just stir in a couple of hefty chunks of butter, and you're done. JC says sprinkle with parsley but you don't have to. It looks pretty enough as it is, and it smells glorious, which is funny when you think about it. There's not a thing in it but leeks, potatoes, butter, water, pepper, and salt. ~ Julie Powell, #NFDB
1132:Why the ancient civilizations who built the place did not use the easier, nearby rocks remains a mystery. But the skills and knowledge on display at Stonehenge are not. The major phases of construction took a total of a few hundred years. Perhaps the preplanning took another hundred or so. You can build anything in half a millennium - I don't care how far you choose to drag your bricks. Furthermore, the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground.
Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
1133:The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Park's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women's decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days. ~ Danielle L McGuire, #NFDB
1134:As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus. ~ Walter M Miller Jr, #NFDB
1135:Pinned to the left-hand wall opposite the construction schedule was another butcher-block-size sheet almost identical in form, except this one, O’Sullivan said, was called a “submittal schedule.” It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another—on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction—who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
1136:Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. ~ Nick Harkaway, #NFDB
1137:Roughly half of all American Catholic teens now lose their Catholic identity before they turn thirty. The reasons are varied. Today’s mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite. As one study noted, many young adults assume that “science and logic are how we ‘really’ know things about our world, and religious faith either violates or falls short of the standards of scientific knowledge.”8 Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized, “simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything” and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.9 But the example of parents remains a key factor—often the key factor—in shaping young adult beliefs. The family is the main transmitter of religious convictions. Disrupting the family disrupts an entire cultural ecology. ~ Charles J Chaput, #NFDB
1138:A whole new smart glass industry has been incubating for a decade. As the global construction industry comes back to life, the thousands of smart glass installations in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia are evidence of the technology’s rapidly escalating adoption rate. Corning, the world leader in specialized glass and ceramic products, has produced a series of YouTube clips called A Day Made of Glass. In them, every piece of glass in the home contains intelligence and sensors that serve as a ubiquitous contextual computing system. In Corning’s vision, the home is one big connected computer and every piece of glass is a screen that you touch to move an image from one glass surface to the next. For example, you can look up a recipe on your phone and drag the result to a space on your stovetop next to your burner as you prepare the dish. If you are video chatting on a smart glass tabletop, you can slide the image onto your TV screen without missing a beat. ~ Robert Scoble, #NFDB
1139:Beyond that, we feel very strongly that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business. We don’t believe in taking a lot of money out of Wal-Mart’s cash registers and giving it to charity for the simple reason that any debit has to be passed along to somebody—either our shareholders or our customers. A few years ago, when Helen convinced me that our associates here in Bentonville needed a first-class exercise facility, she and I paid the million dollars in construction costs ourselves, plus an annual subsidy for a few years to get it started. We paid for it to show our sincere appreciation to the associates, but also because I don’t believe in asking the customers or the shareholders to pay for something like that—as worthy a cause as it may be. By not designating a large amount of corporate funds to some charity which the officers of Wal-Mart may happen to like, we feel we give our shareholders more discretion in supporting their own charities. ~ Sam Walton, #NFDB
1140:It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1141:Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilárd, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. ...
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port altogether with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. ~ Albert Einstein,#NFDB
1142:This sense of continuity in individual environment is a result of the individual’s characteristic way of constructing basic psychological structures into physical structures. The basic psychological structures available have definite solidity, depth, mass, et cetera, in the psychological perspective, and they may be formed into numberless gestalt patterns, which are then constructed physically. The variations of construction are endless. There is nothing to force an individual for example to form psychological gestalts of hate and fear from the basic structure of consciousness survival. To do so represents an inability to perceive clearly the nature of the basic structure, and such an inability often carries over into habit so that other basic structures are also misinterpreted. A setting—right in one small area of psychological perspective can, therefore, result in a beneficial turnabout in the manipulation of other basic structures, even though they seem unrelated. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
1143:I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
1144:By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been exiled from the 'pure' arena of philosophy because of its 'infection' with bias and prejudice. Lyotard's critique, however, demonstrates that no philosophy - indeed, no knowledge - is untainted by prejudice or faith commitments. In this way the playing field is leveled, and new opportunities to voice a Christian philosophy are created. Thus Lyotard's postmodern critique of metanarratives, rather than being a formidable foe of Christian faith and thought, can in fact be enlisted as an ally in the construction of a Christian philosophy. ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1145:As Kolenda saw it, none of what he was doing had anything to do with being warmhearted. In his opinion, counterinsurgency was a pretty damned cold-blooded strategy, all about being out there with specific goals—establishing stability and defeating the insurgency—and intelligently using the full range of available leverage, from cash, clean water, and education for local children to bullets, when appropriate, to get the desired results. There was an element of manipulation involved. Sure, he wanted the Afghans to have better lives—how could anyone not, after seeing that kind of impoverishment? But there was also something transactional about American promises of clean water, construction jobs, and a brighter future for Afghan kids. This wasn’t charity; the bottom line was, these offers were made to save American lives and help destroy anyone who hoped to hurt ISAF troops. Kolenda could never understand why some folks viewed the carrots as being somehow inferior to the sticks. ~ Jake Tapper, #NFDB
1146:I don’t like you, Mr. Parker.”
Josh bit back a grin. “You’re breaking my heart.”
Undaunted, she went on. “But that’s beside the point. I came here to help and you’re wasting my skills.”
“Really? I thought lunch was fairly good.”
She immediately rose to the bait. “Fairly good? Have you ever had anything better on a construction site?”
He shrugged. “Maybe not. Those little fruit things were a nice touch. What do you call that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Garnish. Do you really care about that?”
“Not especially, but you seem to be fishing for compliments on your cooking.”
“I was not fishing for compliments,” she snapped. “Anybody can make sandwiches and slice up some fruit. I was trying to have a serious discussion about how you should be using me.”
“Well, now that you mention it,” he began, giving her a slow once-over, “a few ideas have crossed my mind on that score. But just so we don’t get our wires crossed, what exactly are you offering, Miss Maggie? ~ Sherryl Woods,#NFDB
1147:To understand the origin and construction of feelings, and to appreciate the contribution they make to the human mind, we need to set them in the panorama of homeostasis. The alignment of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with, respectively, positive and negative ranges of homeostasis is a verified fact. Homeostasis in good or even optimal ranges expresses itself as well-being and even joy, while the happiness caused by love and friendship contributes to more efficient homeostasis and promotes health. The negative examples are just as clear. The stress associated with sadness is caused by calling into action the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and by releasing molecules whose consequence is reducing homeostasis and actually damaging countless body parts such as blood vessels and muscular structures. Interestingly, the homeostatic burden of physical disease can activate the same hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cause release of dynorphin, a molecule that induces dysphoria. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1148:EFFORTS HAD BEEN MADE BY Coruscanti who cared about such things to preserve some of the structures the B’ankora had built and lived in for more than fifty generations. In the rush to relocate the species’ sole survivors and complete the construction of the Celestial Power facility, the request to create a museum had been denied. Regardless, some of the B’ankora’s original paths remained, winding through gardened parcels, around landscaped areas, and past totemic sculptures and geometric assemblies of wood and stone. Since he rarely ventured outdoors, the paths were new to Galen, and he followed them without really taking notice, his feet and legs merely carrying him along. Neither was he aware of the day’s heat, the slight breeze tousling his long unkempt hair, the tiers of horizontal traffic above him, the faint roar of the city-planet. Ten thousand beings might have been observing him from the surrounding monads and arcologies, but he gave them no thought. He moved somnambulantly. ~ James Luceno, #NFDB
1149:si tu examines mon empire tu t'en iras voir les forgerons et les trouveras forgeant des clous et se passionnant pour les clous et te chantant les cantiques de la clouterie. Puis tu t'en iras voir les bucherons et tu les trouveras abattant arbres et se passionnant pour l'abattage d'arbres, et se remplissant d'une intense jubilation à l'heure de la fête du bucheron, qui est du premier craquement, lorsque la majesté de l'arbre commence de se prosterner. Et si tu vas voir les astronaumes, tu les verras se passionnant pour les étoiles et n'écoutant plus que leur silence. Et en effet chacun s'imagine être tel. Maintenant si je te demande: "Que se passe-t-il dans mon empire, que naîtra-t-il demain chez moi?" tu me diras: "On forgera des clous, on abattra des arbres, on observera les étoiles et il y aura donc des réserves de clous, des réserves de bois et des observations d'étoiles." Car myope et le nez contre, tu n'as point reconnu la construction d'un navire.
(chapitre CXVII) ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry,#NFDB
1150:But I wasn't working regularly, and Steve had no career at all, so building a fantasy home at that particular moment couldn't have been a completely good idea either. Yet that's what Steve wanted to do: build a house. He was like a kid in a toy store, determined to get what he wanted. And no matter how many reasons I gave as to why we couldn't and shouldn't, he'd come back with reasons why we absolutely could and should: He would build half of it himself, be part of the construction crew, devote his life to it, stressing the point he knew all about finances and was positive it was a good investment. I wouldn't have known a good investment from a hole in the ground, plus I remained frightened of anything financial and therefore had no idea how much money we actually had. Part of me wanted to feel as if Steve knew what he was doing, that he could handle this part of our lives while I concerned myself with taking care of the kids and making a living. Which meant building a career, not a house. ~ Sally Field, #NFDB
1151:Mullinax: This of course gets to the notion of fiction as a separate world, and not as an appendage of some sort to the "real" world. The idea that we should let fiction be fiction, and not philosophy or sociology or psychology.
Gass: Right. We've allowed music to be music. Oh we try, of course, to make it out to be something else. We use music in a roundabout way. Music to make love by, all that stuff. But we don't normally go around regarding music as anything more than music, and not as a message to the world or this or that. And we're doing that more and more with poetry. Fiction is slower to get there because it's been attached to doing all these other things. Art shouldn't try to make you do something, or even to produce in the reader a feeling or emotion. Its aim is construction. The artist wants to create an object that has intrinsic value, something worth living with as an end in itself. The artist makes an object he can have a non-utilitarian relation to—a companion. ~ William H Gass,#NFDB
1152:Engineers had not framework for understanding Mandelbrot's description, but mathematicians did. In effect, Mandelbrot was duplicating an abstract construction known as the Cantor set, after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor. To make a Cantor set, you start with the interval of numbers from zero to one, represented by a line segment. Then you remove the middle third. That leaves two segments, and you remove the middle third of each (from one-ninth to two-ninths and from seven-ninths to eight-ninths). That leaves four segments, and you remove the middle third of each- and so on to infinity. What remains? A strange "dust" of points, arranged in clusters, infinitely many yet infinitely sparse. Mandelbrot was thinking of transmission errors as a Cantor set arranged in time. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1153:If you see one hundred insects working together toward a common goal, it’s a sure bet they’re siblings. But when you see one hundred people working on a construction site or marching off to war, you’d be astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large family. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability. We’re really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own. Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability, defines accountability as the “explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions to others,” coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves.8 When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1154:That picture of the soldiers? Miranda’s right. I’m sure that’s Hayes House in the background.”
Without a word, everyone looked warily toward the front door, as if half expecting the house to come alive.
“Why didn’t you say something before?” Miranda glared at him.
“‘Cause I needed to think about it. And”--he hesitated, almost sheepish--“I didn’t want you freaking out any more than you were already.”
“I’m more freaked out that you didn’t say anything.”
“Sorry. But it is the same house--the way it was originally.”
Now it was Parker who groaned. “Oh, don’t tell me. The house contacted you. You talk to dead houses.”
“The thing is,” Etienne continued, unfazed, “I’ve worked plenty construction, and I’ve done plenty work on this house--I know good renovation when I see it.”
Roo cast Miranda a bland look. “Construction sites are popular in this town. A chance to see Etienne Boucher without his shirt on. Very hot.”
The others could hardly keep from laughing. ~ Richie Tankersley Cusick,#NFDB
1155:In the Roman psyche the East had long been a place of danger, but also a place of plenty. The first Emperor Augustus famously said of Rome that he found a city built in brick but left it in marble – all that money had to come from somewhere. India was repeatedly described in Roman sources as a land of unimaginable wealth. Pliny the Elder complained that the Roman taste for exotic silks, perfumes and pearls consumed the city. ‘India and China [and Arabia] together drain our Empire. That is the price that our luxuries and our womankind cost us.’ It was the construction of the Via Egnatia and attendant road-systems that physically allowed Rome to expand eastwards, while the capture of Egypt intensified this magnetic pull. Rome had got the oriental bug, and Byzantium, entering into a truce with the Romans in 129 BC following the Roman victory in the Macedonian Wars that kick-started Gnaeus Egnatius’ construction of the Via Egnatia, was a critical and vital destination before all longer Asian journeys began. ~ Bettany Hughes, #NFDB
1156:The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European poeples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ~ Talal Asad, #NFDB
1157:* Many people think it should have been a hydrogen molecule, but this is against the observed facts. Everyone who has found a hitherto unknown egg-whisk jamming an innocent kitchen drawer knows that raw matter is continually flowing into the universe in fairly developed forms, popping into existence normally in ashtrays, vases and glove compartments. It chooses its shape to allay suspicion, and common manifestations are paperclips, the pins out of shirt packaging, the little keys for central heating radiators, marbles, bits of crayon, mysterious sections of herb-chopping devices and old Kate Bush albums. Why matter does this is unclear, but it is evident that matter has Plans.
It is also apparent that creators sometimes favor the Big Bang method of universe construction, and at other times use the more gentle methods of Continuous Creation. This follows studies by cosmotherapists which have revealed that the violence of the Big Bang can give a universe serious psychological problems when it gets older. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
1158:Your family’s so fancy.” I only ever saw John’s mom when she was picking him up. She looked younger than the other mothers, she had John’s same milky skin, and her hair was longer than the other moms’, straw-colored.
“No. My family isn’t fancy at all. My mom made Jell-O salad last night for dessert. And, like, my dad only has steak cooked well-done. We only ever take vacations we can drive to.”
“I thought your family was kind of…well, rich.” I feel immediate shame for saying “rich.” It’s tacky to talk about other people’s money.
“My dad’s really cheap. His construction company is pretty successful, but he prides himself on being a self-made man. He didn’t go to college; neither did my grandparents. My sisters were the first in our family.”
“I didn’t know that about you,” I say. All these new things I’m learning about John Ambrose McClaren!
“Now it’s your turn to tell me something I don’t know about you,” John says.
I laugh. “You already know more than most people. My love letter made sure of that. ~ Jenny Han,#NFDB
1159:I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for... science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. ...the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics. ~ Immanuel Kant, Preface, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) Tr. Ernest Belfort Bax (1883)., #NFDB
1160:But should we garner the courage and moral will to reject once and for all the fallacy of racial difference for the ideological conceit that it is, what will be the premise of our new national history, our new national story? Where will the frontiers of the new Malaysia be? And what will the new Malaysia look like?
None of us can answer these questions for certain, for any national narrative is forever a work in progress. Nations are constructs, based on the collective imagination and imaginary of their citizens. But as a nation in the making and under construction, we should at least have the courage to admit that some of our earlier premises were wrong (if not dangerous) and that the time has come to reinvent ourselves with some degree of hindsight and collective wisdom. One of the first steps that has to be taken is to recognise and accept that much of what we have been told as the first generation of postcolonial Malaysians was false, and that these instrumental fictions were tools to mentally bind us. ~ Farish A Noor,#NFDB
1161:The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.
~ Talal Asad,#NFDB
1162:With the Internet, our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, it’s true. Thomas Jefferson said he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—and it would all be okay because in the new United States “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.” However, I’m inclined to think if he and our other democratic forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the Internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside—this proliferation and reinforcement of nutty ideas and false beliefs, this assembling of communities of the utterly deluded, this construction of parallel universes that look and feel perfectly real, the viral appeal of the untrue—seems at least as profound as the upside. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
1163:Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.“Why, of course!” she laughed.“Then why do you do it?”“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?”
“Yes,” he agreed.
The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?”
He smiled. “I suppose not.”
“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” She looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun. ~ Iain M Banks,#NFDB
1164:But everything we see or hear offensive to our feelings and derogatory to the human character should lead to other reflections than those of reproach. Even the beings who commit them have some claim to our consideration. How then is it that such vast classes of mankind as are distinguished by the appellation of the vulgar, or the ignorant mob, are so numerous in all old countries? The instant we ask ourselves this question, reflection feels an answer. They rise, as an unavoidable consequence, out of the ill construction of all old governments in Europe, England included with the rest. It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the background of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy. In the commencement of a revolution, those men are rather the followers of the camp than of the standard of liberty, and have yet to be instructed how to reverence it. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1165:Ritual in a way is an anti-machine, even though the industrial world is not totally devoid of the practice of ritual. David Kertzer, in Ritual, Politics and Power, points out it is innately inscribed within humans to do ritual. He goes on to show that ritual exists in every aspect of political practice where the construction of power is ordered by symbol and ceremony. For him, ritual is unavoidable in modern political and social interplay because it is something that enables people to deal with archetypes. There is some truth in such a vision. But I think that the term is being manipulated to fit certain urges for legitimization. A spirit can be used to legitimize someone’s desires. For example, someone can say that a spirit told him or her to do something, which legitimizes his or her unwarranted action (as in the American comedy line “The devil made me do it!”). One can claim divine sponsorship to justify actions that have nothing to do with the divine. One has only to look at American televangelism for that. It ~ Malidoma Patrice Som, #NFDB
1166:What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.
The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence. ~ Susan Griffin,#NFDB
1167:Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1168:Legends speak of a primeval Pacific homeland called "Hiva" from which the first inhabitants of Easter Island came--a homeland that also fell victim to the "mischief of Uoke's lever" and was "submerged under the sea." What is particularly intriguing about all this, because of its resonance with the Seven Sages--the Apkallu--spoken of in Mesopotamian antediluvian traditions, and with the Seven Sages of the Edfu Building Texts, who sought out new lands in which to recreate the drowned and devastated world of the gods, is that the Seven Sages--"king's sons, all initiated men"--are also said to have been instrumental in the original settlement of Easter Island. Exactly as was the case with the Apkallu, who laid the foundations of all the future temples of Mesopotamia, and with the Edfu Sages who traveled the length and breath of Egypt establishing the sacred mounds on which all future pyramids and temples were to be built, the first task of the Seven Sages from Hiva after their arrival on Easter Island was 'the construction of stone mounds. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1169:Pike said, “What were they saying?” “Couldn’t hear, but it’s an easy guess. The nephew here just lost two hundred thousand and a boatload of workers. They probably weren’t talking about a promotion.” Their next stop was a large two-level strip mall on Vermont. The strip mall was in the final stages of being remodeled, with a club and a restaurant taking up most of the upper level and what looked like another bar and a karaoke lounge on the lower level. A large sign in Korean script and English hung across the front of the karaoke lounge: OPENING SOON. Stone said, “Y’see? This is what I was talking about. You can’t open for business without the right staff.” I liked it. Under construction was good. Opening soon was good. The more pressure Park felt to recover his people, the more desperately he would look for ways to do so. We stopped at two more strip malls and a large commercial building on Western Avenue. Park met people at each site, and toured the properties as if checking their progress, but no one looked happy, especially Park. One ~ Robert Crais, #NFDB
1170:Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French, and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockmen's association, and a hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. If the sum of all these facets of experience added up to more than a geometric whole - implying excess construction somewhere, planes piling upon planes - then only he, presumably, could view the polygon entire. ~ Edmund Morris, #NFDB
1171:Mr. Blotton, indeed—and the name will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime—Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man presumed the stone to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity of the inscription—inasmuch as he represented it to have been rudely carved by himself in an idle mood, and to display letters intended to bear neither more or less than the simple construction of—'BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK'; and that Mr. Stumps, being little in the habit of original composition, and more accustomed to be guided by the sound of words than by the strict rules of orthography, had omitted the concluding 'L' of his Christian name. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1172:Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic populations because they find the same conditions repeated at every moment of their journey: Hegel notes that “the wandering of nomads is only formal because it is limited to uniform spaces.” The society which, by fixing itself in place locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localization. The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without content, the beg inning of labor. The agrarian mode of production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought which guarantees the entire cosmic order surrounding the order which this society has in fact already realized within its frontiers. ~ Guy Debord, #NFDB
1173:Mr. Blotton, indeed — and the name will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime — Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man presumed the stone to be ancient, but solemnly denied the antiquity of the inscription — inasmuch as he represented it to have been rudely carved by himself in an idle mood, and to display letters intended to bear neither more or less than the simple construction of— ‘BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK’; and that Mr. Stumps, being little in the habit of original composition, and more accustomed to be guided by the sound of words than by the strict rules of orthography, had omitted the concluding ‘L’ of his Christian name. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1174:There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1175:— Gwen has a lot of friends. They are there in the halls and in her classes. They are there on her Facebook page. And they are all there at her house for the party that night. Everyone in the family and many of my friends have chipped in with decorations, so it’s like every age I’ve already been is represented—construction paper cutouts and crayon drawings alongside a supercut of the past year playing in a loop on the TV screen. Friends laughing. Friends in costumes. Friends singing. Gwen at the center of it all. I work hard to keep track of who’s who, but I can barely keep up. April (age four) hangs by my side and provides a good diversion, especially because a lot of my friends have to introduce themselves to her and explain who they are. Then the moment comes when the lights are turned off and a cake is carried in, its eighteen candles (“One for good luck!”) flickering to show me all the friendly faces who’ve gathered to celebrate with me. “Make a wish!” Gwen’s mother calls out, and I want to wish for word from Rhiannon and I know I should wish for Moses’s ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
1176:I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze.
There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me.
It's the beautiful thing about youth.
There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get. ~ Blake Crouch,#NFDB
1177:The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
1178:On a construction site sabotage could be potentially deadly. Alarm jumped through her. “Is anyone hurt?”
“No, thankfully. But… I need to be there.”
“Then go. I’ve got my communicator and everyone knows I’m yours now anyway.” She liked saying that she was his. He liked it as well if the smoldering look he gave her was any indication.
As the elevator made a soft ding, she leaned up and kissed him, not caring about the public affection. He didn’t seem to mind either as he deepened the kiss for a little longer than was probably publicly acceptable.
When the doors opened, there were two males inside who didn’t appear to be getting off— until Con growled at them. Without pause, they politely stepped off and let her get on. Even though there was enough room for about twenty warriors, apparently Con was feeling extra protective today.
She bit back a smile and blew him a kiss goodbye in full view of the two males. To her surprise his ears tinged red.
It was the last thing she saw before the doors closed. A short laugh escaped as she pressed the correct floor. ~ Savannah Stuart,#NFDB
1179:He told me his story, a South African story that was all too familiar to me: The man grows up under apartheid, working on a farm, part of what’s essentially a slave labor force. It’s a living hell but it’s at least something. He’s paid a pittance but at least he’s paid. He’s told where to be and what to do every waking minute of his day. Then apartheid ends and he doesn’t even have that anymore. He finds his way to Johannesburg, looking for work, trying to feed his children back home. But he’s lost. He has no education. He has no skills. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know where to be. The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it. So what does he do? He takes shit. He becomes a petty thief. He’s in and out of jail. He gets lucky and finds some construction work, but then he gets laid off from that, and a few days later he’s in a shop and he sees some PlayStation games and he grabs them, but he doesn’t even know enough to know that he’s stolen something of no value. ~ Trevor Noah, #NFDB
1180:Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise.
I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life. ~ Nikola Tesla,#NFDB
1181:The 1970s-80s social movement called U.S. third world feminism functioned as a central locus of possibility, an insurgent social movement that shattered the construction of any one ideology as the single most correct site where truth can be represented. Indeed, without making this kind of metamove, any 'liberation' or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself, and become trapped inside a drive for truth that ends only in producing its own brand of dominations. What U.S. third world feminism thus demanded was a new subjectivity, a political revision that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical subjectivity with the capactiy to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved. These dynamics are what were required in the shift from enacting a hegemonic oppositional theory and practice to engaging in the differential form of social movement, as performed by U.S. feminists of color during the post-World War II period of great social transformation. p. 58-59. ~ Chela Sandoval, #NFDB
1182:Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development. ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
1183:He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
1184:While dismembering it, perhaps you might have noted the modular design and admired the great variety of body appendages (figure 1.9). There are several aspects to lobster construction that reflect the general themes of modularity and serial homology. First, the body is organized into a head (with the eyes and mouthparts), a thorax (with walking legs), and a long tail (yum!). Second, different sections of the body possess numbers of specific appendages (antennae, claws, walking legs, swimmerets). And third, each jointed appendage is itself segmented, and different kinds of appendages have different numbers of segments overall (compare a claw with a walking leg). If you were feeling adventuresome and dissected an insect or a crab, you’d see some general similarities in body organization, segmentation, and appendages but, again, differences in the number and kind of serially homologous structures. FIG. 1.9 The diversity of the serially repeated appendages of a lobster. The antennae, claws, walking legs, swimmerets, and tail structures are all modifications of a common limb design. DRAWING BY ~ Sean B Carroll, #NFDB
1185:So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They're every white guy who believed that this land was his land, made for you and me. They're every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America's small towns who can't make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.
They're America's Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill. ~ Michael S Kimmel,#NFDB
1186:Over the twentieth century, as physics developed, Planck's construction took on ever greater significance. Physicists came to understand that each of the quantities c, G, and h plays the role of a conversion factor, one you need to express a profound physical concept:
1) Special relativity postulates symmetry operations (boosts, a.k.a. Lorentz transformations) that mix space and time. Space and time are measured in different units, however, so for this concept to make sense, there must be a conversion factor between them, and c does the job. Multiplying a time by c, one obtains a length.
2) Quantum theory postulates an inverse relation between wave-length and momentum, and a direct proportionality between frequency and energy, as aspects of wave-particle duality; but these pairs of quantities are measured in different units, and h must be brought in as a conversion factor.
3) General relativity postulates that energy-momentum density induces space-time curvature, but curvature and energy density are measured in different units, and G must be brought in as a conversion factor. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
1187:Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011,1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones. ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
1188:This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1189:I Would Go Home Again—to Rooms...
I would go home again—to rooms
With sadness large at eventide,
Go in, take off my overcoat,
And in the light of streets outside
Take cheer. I'll pass the thin partitions
Right through; yes, like a beam I'll pass,
As image blends into an image,
As one mass splits another mass.
Let all abiding mooted problems
Deep rooted in our fortunes seem
To some a sedentary habit;
But still at home I brood and dream.
Again the trees and houses breathe
Their old refrain and fragrant air.
Again to right and left old winter
Sets up her household everywhere.
Again by dinner time the dark
Comes suddenly—to blind, to scare,
To teach the narrow lanes and alleys
She'll fool them if they don't take care.
Again, though weak my heart, O Moscow,
I listen, and in words compose
The way you smoke, the way you rise,
The way your great construction goes.
And so I take you as my harness
For the sake of raging days to be,
That you may know our past by heart
And like a poem remember me.
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
1190:Galileo's mechanical world was only a partial representation of a finite number of probable worlds, each peculiar to a particular living species; and all these worlds are but a portion of the infinite number of possible worlds that may have once existed or may yet exist. But anything like a single world, common to all species, at all times, under all circumstances, is a purely hypothetical construction, drawn by inference from pathetically insufficient data, prized for the assurance of stability and intelligibility it gives, even though that assurance turns out, under severe examination, to be just another illusion. A butterfly or a beetle, a fish or a fowl, a dog or a dolphin, would have a different report to give even about primary qualities, for each lives in a world conditioned by the needs and environmental opportunities open to his species. In the gray visual world of the dog, smells, near and distant, subtle or violently exciting, probably play the part that colors do in man's world-though in the primal occupation of eating, the dog's world and man's world would approach each other more closely. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1191:IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a geto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews. ~ Daniel Silva, #NFDB
1192:When Tess had told him about the book project, she hadn't mentioned hostile women and swarms of bees. In fact, she'd characterized it as a working vacation of sorts, a way for him to recover from his bum knee by soaking up the charms of Sonoma County.
In contrast, Bella Vista was lush and seductive, the landscape filled with colors from deep green to sunburned-gold. Gardeners, construction workers swarmed the property. Isabel Johansen was in charge, that had been clear from the start. Yet when she'd shown him to Erik's room, she'd seen vulnerable, uncertain. Some might regard the room as a mausoleum, filled with the depressing weight of things left behind by the departed. To Mac, it was a treasure trove. He was here to learn the story of this place, this family, and every detail, from the baseball card collection to the dog-eared books about far-off places, would turn into clues for him.
And holy crap, had Isabel looked different when she'd given him the nickel tour. Unlike the virago in the beekeeper's getup, the cleaned-up Isabel was a Roman goddess in a flowy outfit, sandals and curly dark hair. ~ Susan Wiggs,#NFDB
1193:But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something --not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1194:A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it, if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create a meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new code in another network. ~ Jacques Attali, #NFDB
1195:In recent years, Eric Ries famously adapted Lean to solve the wicked problem of software startups: what if we build something nobody wants?[ 41] He advocates use of a minimum viable product (“ MVP”) as the hub of a Build-Measure-Learn loop that allows for the least expensive experiment. By selling an early version of a product or feature, we can get feedback from customers, not just about how it’s designed, but about what the market actually wants. Lean helps us find the goal. Figure 1-7. The Lean Model. Agile is a similar mindset that arose in response to frustration with the waterfall model in software development. Agilistas argue that while Big Design Up Front may be required in the contexts of manufacturing and construction where it’s costly if not impossible to make changes during or after execution, it makes no sense for software. Since requirements often change and code can be edited, the Agile Manifesto endorses flexibility. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan. ~ Peter Morville, #NFDB
1196:Instead, in our world, nature's contribution to development comes not by providing a finely detailed sketch of a finished product, but by providing a complex system of self-regulating recipes. Those recipes provide for many different things-from the construction of enzymes and structural proteins to the construction of motors, transporters, receptors, and regulatory proteins-and thus there is no single, easily characterizable genetic contribution to the mind. In the ongoing, everyday functioning of the brain, genes supervise the construction of neurotransmitters, the metabolism of glucose, and the maintenance of synapses. In early development, they help to lay down a rough draft, guiding the specialization and migration of cells as well as the initial pattern of wiring. In synaptic strengthening, genes are a vital participant in a mechanism by which experience can alter the wiring of the brain (thereby influencing the way that an organism interprets and responds to the environment). There are at least as many different genetic contributions to the mind and brain as there are genes; each contributes by regulating a different process. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
1197:When feminist theorizing of prostitution frames the practice as ordinary work which enables women to express ‘choice’ and ‘agency’, and represents trafficked women in debt bondage as simply ‘migrating for labour’, it serves to normalize the industry and support its growth. It air brushes the harms that girls and women suffer in prostitution and makes it very difficult for feminist activists to oppose the construction of prostitution industries as an ordinary part of economic development, and demand dignified work for women. Such theorizing also supports the campaign by the prostitution industry, sex work organizations and some governments to legalize or decriminalize prostitution. For the industry to prosper, toleration is good, but legalization is better. Thus the approaches that feminist theorists choose to take have important implications. The growth of the industry multiplies the harms that are an integral part of prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation whether ‘legal’ or not. The sex industry cannot be quarantined, set apart from the rest of the society for men to abuse the women caught within the industry in seclusion. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
1198:The parallel between the Pyramid Age achievements and those of the Nuclear Age force themselves upon one, however reluctant one may at first be to admit them. Once again, a Divine King, embodying all the powers and prerogatives of the whole community, supported by a revered priesthood and a universal religion, that of positive science, had begun the assemblage of teh megamachine in a technologically more adequate and impressive form. If one forgets the actual part played by the King (wartime American President), by the Priesthood (secret enclave of scientists), by the vast enlargement of the bureaucracy, the military forces, and the industrial establishment, one would have no realistic conception of what actually took place. Only in terms of the Pyramid Age do all the seemingly dispersed and accidental events become polarized into an orderly constellation. The construction of the modernized totalitarian megamachine, fortified by the invention of mechanical and electronic agents that could not be fully utilized until this assemblage had taken place, proved to be Hitler's most sinister, if wholly unintended, contribution to the enslavement of mankind. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
1199:Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child’s brain.
Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who eventually repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust. Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated.
With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an Inner Critic that dominates mental activity. The inner critic’s negative perspective creates many programs of self-rejecting perfectionism. At the same time, it obsesses about danger and catastrophizes incessantly. ~ Pete Walker,#NFDB
1200:I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1201:It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1202:I still couldn't believe how creative Annie was in coming up with the different flavors and embellishments for each cupcake; the finished products looked like huge jewels that sparkled appealingly in the counter display and on the black lacquer trays passed by the waitstaff. Annie had had her nose to the grindstone for days, as focused as I'd ever seen her, dicing apples and pears until they looked like nuggets of gold- as well they should, considering what that fruit cost!- and tasted like pure, sweet, warm explosions of flavor baked into the cakes. Annie's dexterity, precision, and speed with a knife had been a sight to behold. My contributions to the cupcakery's opening night were decidedly more mundane: I'd interviewed and hired the night's waitstaff, overseen the completion of the various construction and design projects, and ordered all of the noncooking supplies the shop needed. Treat glowed with sexy, low-lit energy; laughter and music filled the space; hip, beautiful people bit into cupcake after cupcake. If the shop had been in the Marina instead of the Mission, it was just the sort of place I would have visited frequently. But there was no use crying over that spilled buttercream. ~ Meg Donohue, #NFDB
1203:Peter took no notice of the skulking throng, but strode up to the brawling, bully-ruffian, and pulling out a huge silver watch, which might have served in times of yore as a town-clock, and which is still retained by his descendants as a family curiosity, requested the orator to mend it and set it going. The orator humbly confessed it was utterly out of his power, as he was unacquainted with the nature of its construction. "Nay, but," said Peter, "try your ingenuity, man; you see all the springs and wheels and how easily the clumsiest hand may stop it, and pull it to pieces, and why should it not be equally easy to regulate as to stop it?" The orator declared that his trade was wholly different—that he was a poor cobbler, and had never meddled with a watch in his life—that there were men skilled in the art whose business it was to attend to those matters, but for his part he should only mar the workmanship, and put the whole in confusion. "Why, harkee, master of mine," cried Peter, turning suddenly upon him with a countenance that almost petrified the patcher of shoes into a perfect lapstone, "dost thou pretend to meddle with the movements of government to regulate, and correct, and patch, ~ Washington Irving, #NFDB
1204:Ascending from contents to the act, then, one can discern a man’s intention to eclipse reality. This intention can become manifest in a large variety of forms, ranging from the straight lie concerning a fact to the subtler lie of arranging a context in such a manner that the omission of the fact will not be noticed; or from the construction of a system that, by its form, suggests its partial view as the whole of reality to its author’s refusal to discuss the premises of the system in terms of reality experienced. Beyond the act, finally, we reach the actor, that is the man who has committed the act of deforming his humanity to a self and now lets the shrunken self eclipse his own full reality. He will deny his humanity and insist he is nothing but his shrunken self; he wiU deny ever having experienced the reality of common experience; he will deny that anybody could have a fuller perception of reality than he allows his self; in brief, he will set the contracted self as a model for himself as well as for everybody else. Moreover, his insistence on conformity wiU be aggressive - and in this aggressiveness there betrays itself the anxiety and alienation of the man who has lost contact with reality. ~ Eric Voegelin, #NFDB
1205:how naive he’d been about the world at first. He learned rather quickly how to stay invisible as well as useful. “But not that bad if you took advantage of the stuff they offered. The worst thing was having too much time on your hands. So I signed up for classes, read lots of books, kept my nose clean.” “What sort of classes?” Tanner asked, and Cole noticed how his long lashes brushed his cheeks in the sunlight. If he had the nerve, he’d lean over and kiss him right then. “I stuck to the ones where I could use my hands. Woodworking, electric, art classes, even some gardening. I left the education and Bible stuff to the others,” Cole mused, and Tanner chuckled. “My mother left when I was sixteen. She was a kid herself when she had me and was hooked on one drug or another. I didn’t know my father, besides hearing his name once or twice. My grandfather took me in; he was the only real parent figure I knew. He was the custodian in our apartment building and always did construction jobs on the side, so I learned a little bit of everything.” He thought about the night he found out about his grandfather’s death and how he’d cried himself to sleep. His ashes had been buried next to his grandmother’s grave—she ~ Riley Hart, #NFDB
1206:When Adrian’s father opened certain books with illustrations in colour of exotic lepidoptera and sea creatures, we looked at them, his sons and I, Frau Leverkühn as well, over the back of his leather-cushioned chair with the ear-rests; and he pointed with his forefinger at the freaks and fascinations there displayed in all the colours of the spectrum, from dark to light, mustered and modelled with the highest technical skill: genus Papilio and genus Morpho, tropical insects which enjoyed a brief existence in fantastically exaggerated beauty, some of them regarded by the natives as evil spirits bringing malaria. The most splendid colour they displayed, a dreamlike lovely azure, was, so Jonathan instructed us, no true colour at all, but produced by fine little furrows and other surface configurations of the scales on their wings, a miniature construction resulting from artificial refraction of the light rays and exclusion of most of them so that only the purest blue light reached the eyes.
“Just think,” I can still hear Frau Leverkühn say, “so it is all a cheat?”
“Do you call the blue sky a cheat?” answered her husband looking up backwards at her. “You cannot tell me the pigment it comes from. ~ Thomas Mann,#NFDB
1207:The German economic system as it existed before the war depended on three main factors: I. Overseas commerce as represented by her mercantile marine, her colonies, her foreign investments, her exports, and the overseas connections of her merchants; II. The exploitation of her coal and iron and the industries built upon them; III. Her transport and tariff system. Of these the first, while not the least important, was certainly the most vulnerable. The Treaty aims at the systematic destruction of all three, but principally of the first two. I (1) Germany has ceded to the Allies all the vessels of her mercantile marine exceeding 1600 tons gross, half the vessels between 1000 tons and 1600 tons, and one quarter of her trawlers and other fishing boats.[9] The cession is comprehensive, including not only vessels flying the German flag, but also all vessels owned by Germans but flying other flags, and all vessels under construction as well as those afloat.[10] Further, Germany undertakes, if required, to build for the Allies such types of ships as they may specify up to 200,000 tons[11] annually for five years, the value of these ships being credited to Germany against what is due from her for Reparation.[12] ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
1208:point. We work on the principle that behavior reflects personality and generally divide the profiling process into seven steps: 1. Evaluation of the criminal act itself. 2. Comprehensive evaluation of the specifics of the crime scene or scenes. 3. Comprehensive analysis of the victim or victims. 4. Evaluation of preliminary police reports. 5. Evaluation of the medical examiner’s autopsy protocol. 6. Development of a profile with critical offender characteristics. 7. Investigative suggestions predicated on construction of the profile. As the final step indicates, offering a profile of an offender is often only the beginning of the service we offer. The next level is to consult with local investigators and suggest proactive strategies they might use to force the UNSUB’s hand— to get him to make a move. In cases of this nature we try to stand off at a distance and detach ourselves, but we still may be thrust right into the middle of the investigation. This may involve meeting with the family of a murdered child, coaching family members how to handle taunting phone calls from the killer describing how the child died, even trying to use a sibling as bait in an effort to lure the killer to a particular place. ~ John Edward Douglas, #NFDB
1209:Tell me," replied Faria, "what has hindered you from knocking down your father with a piece of wood torn from your bedstead, dressing yourself in his clothes, and endeavoring to escape?"
"Simply the fact that the idea never occurred to me," answered Dantes.
"Because," said the old man, "the natural repugnance to the commission of such a crime prevented you from thinking of it; and so it ever is because in simple and allowable things our natural instincts keep us from deviating from the strict line of duty. The tiger, whose nature teaches him to delight in shedding blood, needs but the sense of smell to show him when his prey is within his reach, and by following this instinct he is enabled to measure the leap necessary to permit him to spring on his victim; but man, on the contrary, loathes the idea of blood - it is not alone that the laws of social life inspire him with a shrinking dread of taking life; his natural construction and physiological formation" - Dantes was confused and silent at this explanation of the thoughts which had unconsciously been working in his mind, or rather soul; for there are two distinct sorts of ideas, those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart. ~ Alexandre Dumas,#NFDB
1210:The Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York in the same period didn’t have that advantage. They didn’t have a skill specific to the urban economy. They went to work as day laborers and domestics and construction workers—jobs where you could show up for work every day for thirty years and never learn market research and manufacturing and how to navigate the popular culture and how to negotiate with the Yankees, who ran the world. Or consider the fate of the Mexicans who immigrated to California between 1900 and the end of the 1920s to work in the fields of the big fruit and vegetable growers. They simply exchanged the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California. “The conditions in the garment industry were every bit as bad,” Soyer goes on. “But as a garment worker, you were closer to the center of the industry. If you are working in a field in California, you have no clue what’s happening to the produce when it gets on the truck. If you are working in a small garment shop, your wages are low, and your conditions are terrible, and your hours are long, but you can see exactly what the successful people are doing, and you can see how you can set up your own job.”* ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
1211:fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications, banking and financial services, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace, and defense.They construct software applications for a wide range of platforms, from microprocessors embedded in telephone switching systems to enterprisewide information systems running on company-specific intranets. Rational Software Corporation is traded on the NASDAQ system under the symbol RATL.1 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1212:In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life. People have committed themselves to its construction since they came into existence - or rather, people only came into existence by applying themselves to the building of said bridge. The human being is the pontifical creature that, from its earliest evolutionary stages, has created tradition-compatible connections between the bridgeheads in the bodily realm and those in cultural programes. From the start, nature and culture are linked by a broad middle ground of embodied practices - containing languages, rituals and technical skills, in so far as these factors constitute the universal forms of automatized artificialities. This intermediate zone forms a morphologically rich, variable and stable region that can, for the time being, be referred to sufficiently clearly with such conventional categories as education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training and exercise - without needing to wait for the purveyors of the 'human sciences', who, with all their bluster about culture, create the confusion for whose resolution they subsequently offer their services. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
1213:I believe in brevity. I believe that you, the reader, entrust me, the writer, with your most valued commodity—your time. I shouldn’t take more than my share. For that reason, I love the short sentence. Big-time game it is. Hiding in the jungle of circular construction and six-syllable canyons. As I write, I hunt. And when I find, I shoot. Then I drag the treasure out of the trees and marvel. Not all of my prey make their way into chapters. So what becomes of them? I save them. But I can’t keep them to myself. So, may I invite you to see my trophy case? What follows are cuts from this book and a couple of others. Keep the ones you like. Forgive the ones you don’t. Share them when you can. But if you do, keep it brief. Pray all the time. If necessary, use words. Sacrilege is to feel guilt for sins forgiven. God forgets the past. Imitate him. Greed I’ve often regretted. Generosity—never. Never miss a chance to read a child a story. Pursue forgiveness, not innocence. Be doubly kind to the people who bring your food or park your car. In buying a gift for your wife, practicality can be more expensive than extravagance. Don’t ask God to do what you want. Ask God to do what is right. Nails didn’t hold God to a cross. Love did. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
1214:You simply do not understand the human condition,” said the robot.
Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?”
Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Your Miss Forelle is a noble soul. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. To be sure,” IZK-99 mused, “the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve.
Tunny, who was no mamma’s boy — he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars — was so appalled by the robot’s language that he could only whisper, “She did not. She said nothing of the sort.”
I did not mean it literally,” IZK-99 explained. “I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight. By Stichling, you know — almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet. ~ Poul Anderson,#NFDB
1215:...this, this life, this "everything" you know is a mere paper construction. You, my TV dinner-sucking, glazed-eyed friends, are living in ... the matrix ... and all you have to do to see the real world, God and Satan's glorious kingdom on Earth, all you have to do to taste real life is to risk being your true self... to dare... to watch... to listen... to all the late-night staticky-voiced deejays playing "race" records blowing in under the radar, shouting their tinny AM radio manifesto, their stations filled with poets, geniuses, rockers, bluesmen, preachers, philosopher kings, speaking to you from deep in the heart of your own soul. Their voices sing, "Listen... listen to what this world is telling you, for it is calling for your love, your rage, your beauty, your sex, your energy, your rebellion... because it needs you in order to remake itself. In order to be reborn into something else, something maybe better, more godly, more wonderful, it needs us.
This new world is a world of black and white. A place of freedom where the two most culturally powerful tribes in American society find common ground, pleasure and joy in each other's presence. Where they use a common language to speak with... to be with one another. ~ Bruce Springsteen,#NFDB
1216:From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.*
What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy—away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole.
*Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that 'Obamacare' is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often both at the same time. ~ David Graeber,#NFDB
1217:Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a “who” as though it were a “what.”2 The perplexity is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with “natural” qualities, including ourselves to the limited extent that we are specimens of the most highly developed species of organic life, fail us when we raise the question: And who are we? This is why attempts to define human nature almost invariably end with some construction of a deity, that is, with the god of the philosophers, who, since Plato, has revealed himself upon closer inspection to be a kind of Platonic idea of man. Of course, to demask such philosophic concepts of the divine as conceptualizations of human capabilities and qualities is not a demonstration of, not even an argument for, the non-existence of God; but the fact that attempts to define the nature of man lead so easily into an idea which definitely strikes us as “superhuman” and therefore is identified with the divine may cast suspicion upon the very concept of “human nature. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1218:Now, I suggest four tests to judge whether the Government is progressive, and, further, whether it is continuously progressive. The first test that I would apply is what measures it adopts for the moral and material improvement of the mass of the people, and under these measures I do not include those appliances of modern Governments which the British Government has applied in this country, because they were appliances necessary for its very existence, though they have benefited the people, such as the construction of Railways, the introduction of Post and Telegraphs, and things of that kind. By measures for the moral and material improvement of the people, I mean what the Government does for education, what the Government does for sanitation, what the Government does for agricultural development, and so forth. That is my first test. The second test that I would apply is what steps the Government takes to give us a larger share in the administration of our local affairs—in municipalities and local boards. My third test is what voice the Government gives us in its Councils—in those deliberate assemblies, where policies are considered. And, lastly, we must consider how far Indians are admitted into the ranks of the public service. A ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
1219:Stop what?” “Looking at me like that. Like…like you want to eat me up.” “As a matter of fact I would love to eat you,” he rumbled, his golden eyes half-lidded now. “Vorn and Eloim both are very partial to pleasing their lovers with their tongues. There is no finer flavor than a wet and willing female.” “I didn’t mean like that.” My cheeks were getting hotter and hotter and I couldn’t help crossing my legs. “What’s wrong?” He looked surprised. “Don’t you enjoy letting a male taste you?” As a matter of fact, I didn’t. It always made me intensely uncomfortable whenever I let a guy try it—not that many had offered. Scott couldn’t be bothered and the boyfriend I’d had in college had done nothing but a few perfunctory licks before deciding he’d done his duty and it was time to get down to actual sex, which was always the main event, of course. But there was no way I was telling Sarden all that. “Don’t talk like that to me,” I said, lifting my chin and frowning at him. “If my hands weren’t cuffed, I’d slap your face.” If I could reach it, that was. “Really?” He frowned. “Don’t you give open and honest sexual compliments on Earth?” “Not unless you’re a freaking construction worker,” I snapped. “It’s considered rude and invasive.” He ~ Evangeline Anderson, #NFDB
1220:Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations. ~ Paul Bowles, #NFDB
1221:Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.
His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ~ M John Harrison,#NFDB
1222:You have a good time with Mel today?” “Yes. Was Christopher a lot of trouble?” He shook his head with a chuckle. “Nah, he’s a kick. He wants to know everything. Every detail. ‘Why is it a quarter teaspoon of that?’ ‘What does the Crisco on the tray do?’ And man, yeast blows him away. I think he has a little scientist in him.” Paige thought, he couldn’t ask his father questions. Wes didn’t have the patience to answer them. “John, do you have family?” “Not anymore. I was an only child. And my folks were older, anyway—they didn’t think they were going to have kids. Then I surprised ’em. Boy, did I surprise ’em. My dad died when I was about six—a construction accident. And then my mom when I was seventeen, right before my senior year.” “I’m so sorry.” “Yeah, thanks. It’s okay. I’ve had a good life.” “What did you do when you lost your mother? Go live with aunts or something?” “No aunts,” he said, shaking his head. “My football coach took me in. It was good—he had a nice wife, good bunch of little kids. Might as well have lived with him. He acted like he owned me during football, anyway,” he said with a laugh. “Nah, kidding aside, that was a good thing he did. Good guy. We used to write—now we email.” “What happened to your mom?” “Heart attack. ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
1223:when we consider DNA, the genotype is the DNA sequence that contains instructions for the living organism. The phenotype is the observable characteristics of an organism, such as its anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, and behavior. The genotype interacts with the environment to produce the phenotype. To put this in an everyday situation, consider the blueprint as a house’s genotype and the actual house its phenotype. The phenotypic construction process is the building of the house using the blueprint as information about what and how to do it. The phenotype is related to the genotype that describes it, but there is a world of physical difference between the genotype and the phenotype and even the phenotypic construction process. For one, the genotype is non-dynamic; it is a quiescent, one-dimensional sequence of symbols (DNA’s symbols are nucleotides) that has no energy or time constraints. Like a blueprint, it can sit around for years, as you have probably learned from watching CSI. The genotype dictates what should be constructed (perhaps a really cute dog), but the DNA itself does not look or act anything like a cute dog. On the other hand, the phenotype (the cute dog) is dynamic and uses energy, especially if it is a border collie. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
1224:Writer Camille Paglia offers a refreshing exception to this disparagement of men, as pointed out by Christina Hoff Sommers: For Paglia, male aggressiveness and competitiveness are animating principles of creativity: “Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, and combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history.” Speaking of the “fashionable disdain for ‘patriarchal society’ to which nothing good is ever attributed,” she writes, “But it is the patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.” “Men,” writes Paglia, “created the world we live in and the luxuries we enjoy”: “When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think—men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry.”1 Our society has become the angry leered-at woman who doesn’t care that men can build buildings or do amazing things like be good dads, husbands and sons. She focuses instead on the small flaws that some men have and extrapolates to all men; they are all dogs, rapists, perverts, deadbeats and worthless. Who needs them? We ~ Helen Smith, #NFDB
1225:The tables are crowded with American civilian construction engineers, men getting $30,000 a year from their jobs on government contracts and matching that easily on the black market. Their faces have the look of aerial photos of silicone pits, all hung with loose flesh and visible veins. Their mistresses were among the prettiest, saddest girls in Vietnam. I always wondered what they had looked like before they’d made their arrangements with the engineers. You’d see them at the tables there, smiling their hard, empty smiles into those rangy, brutal, scared faces. No wonder those men all looked alike to the Vietnamese. After a while they all looked alike to me. Out on the Bien Hoa Highway, north of Saigon, there is a monument to the Vietnamese war dead, and it is one of the few graceful things left in the country. It is a modest pagoda set above the road and approached by long flights of gently rising steps. One Sunday, I saw a bunch of these engineers gunning their Harleys up those steps, laughing and shouting in the afternoon sun. The Vietnamese had a special name for them to distinguish them from all other Americans; it translated out to something like “The Terrible Ones,” although I’m told that this doesn’t even approximate the odium carried in the original. ~ Michael Herr, #NFDB
1226:For the weekend before, we had had a blowout of tarts, a tart bender, tart madness- even, I dare say, a Tart-a-pa-looza, if you will forgive one final usage of the construction before we at last bury that cruelly beaten dead pop-culture horse. Tarte aux Pêches, Tarte aux Limettes, Tarte aux Poires, Tarte aux Cerises. Tarte aux Fromage Frais, both with and without Pruneaux. Tarte aux Citron et aux Amandes, Tarte aux Poires à la Bourdalue, and Tarte aux Fraises, which is not "Tart with Freshes," as the name of the Tarte aux Fromage Frais ("Tart with Fresh Cheese," of course) might suggest, but rather Tart with Strawberries, which was a fine little French lesson. (Why are strawberries, in particular, named for freshness? Why not blackberries? Or say, river trout? I love playing amateur- not to say totally ignorant- etymologist....)
I made two kinds of pastry in a kitchen so hot that, even with the aid of a food processor, the butter started melting before I could get it incorporated into the dough. Which work resulted in eight tart crusts, perhaps not paragons of the form, but good enough. I made eight fillings for my eight tart crusts. I creamed butter and broke eggs and beat batter until it formed "the ribbon." I poached pears and cherries and plums in red wine. ~ Julie Powell,#NFDB
1227:s s i o n o f R a t i o n a l S o f t w a r e C o r p o r a t i o n i s t o e n s u r e t h e s u c c e s s o f c u s t o m e r s c o n s t r u c t i n g t h e s o f t w a r e s y s t e m s t h a t t h e y d e p e n d o n . We enable our customers to achieve their business objectives by turning software into a source of competitive advantage, speeding time-to-market, reducing the risk of failure, and improving software quality. We fulfill our mission with the Rational ApproachTM, a comprehensive softwareengineering solution consisting of three elements: • A configurable set of processes and techniques for the development of software, based on iterative development, object modeling, and an architectural approach to software reuse. • An integrated family of application construction tools that automate the Rational Approach throughout the software lifecycle. • Technical consulting services delivered by our worldwide field organization of software engineers and technical sales professionals. Our customers include businesses in the Asia/Pacific region, Europe, and North America that are leaders in leveraging semiconductor, communications, and software technologies to achieve their business objectives. We serve customers in a diverse range of industries, such as telecommunications ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1228:If the material world is fundamentally an abundant world, all the more abundant is the spiritual world: the creations of the human mind — songs, stories, filmes, ideas, and everything else that goes by the name of intellectual property. Because in the digital age we can replicate and spread them at virtually no cost, artificial scarcity must be imposed upon them in order to keep them in the monetized realm. Industry and the government enforce scarcity through copyrights, patents, and encryption standards, allowing the holders of such property to profit from owning it.
Scarcity, then, is mostly an illusion, a cultural creation. But because we live, almost wholly, in a culturally constructed world, our experience of this scarcity is quite real — real enough that nearly a billion people today are malnourished, and some 5,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. So our responses to this scarcity — anxiety and greed — are perfectly understandable. When something is abundant, no one hesitates to share it. We live in an abundant world, made otherwise through our perceptions, our culture, and our deep invisible stories. Our perception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity. ~ Charles Eisenstein,#NFDB
1229:The Ilhalmiut do not fill canvases with their paintings, or inscribe figures on rocks, or carve figurines in clay or in stone, because in the lives of the People there is no room for the creation of objects of no practical value. What purpose is there in creating beautiful things if these must be abandoned when the family treks out over the Barrens? But the artistic sense is present and strongly developed. It is strongly alive in their stories and songs, and in the string-figures, but they also use it on the construction of things which assist in their living and in these cases it is no less an art. The pleasure of abstract creation is largely denied to them by the nature of the land, but still they know how to make beauty.
They know how to make beauty, and they also know how to enjoy it-- for it is no uncommon thing to see an Ilhalmio man squatting silently on a hill crest and watching, for hours at a time, the swift interplay of colors that sweep the sky at sunset and dawn. It is not unusual to see an Ilhalmio pause for long minutes to watch the sleek beauty of a weasel or to stare into the brilliant heart of some minuscule flower. And these things are done quite unconsciously, too. There is no word for 'beauty'--as such--in their language; it needs no words in their hearts. ~ Farley Mowat,#NFDB
1230:Effort Is Distraction from What Is We must understand the problem of striving. If we can understand the significance of effort, then we can translate it into action in our daily life. Does not effort mean a struggle to change what is into what it is not, or what it should be, or what it should become? We are constantly escaping from what is, to transform or modify it. He who is truly content is he who understands what is, who gives the right significance to what is. True contentment lies not in few or many possessions, but in understanding the whole significance of what is. Only in passive awareness is the meaning of what is understood. I am not, at the moment, talking of the physical struggle with the earth, with construction or a technical problem, but of psychological striving. The psychological struggles and problems always overshadow the physiological. You may build a careful social structure, but as long as the psychological darkness and strife are not understood, they invariably overturn the carefully built structure. Effort is distraction from what is. In the acceptance of what is, striving ceases. There is no acceptance when there is the desire to transform or modify what is. Striving, an indication of destruction, must exist so long as there is a desire to change what ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
1231:Among the objections to the reality of objects of sense, there is one which is derived from the apparent difference between matter as it appears in physics and things as they appear in sensation. Men of science, for the most part, are willing to condemn immediate data as "merely subjective," while yet maintaining the truth of the physics inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though it may be *capable* of justification, obviously stands in need of it; and the only justification possible must be one which exhibits matter as a logical construction from sense-data―unless, indeed, there were some wholly *a priori* principle by which unknown entities could be inferred from such as are known. It is therefore necessary to find some way of bridging the gulf between the world of physics and the world of sense, and it is this problem which will occupy us in the present lecture. Physicists appear to be unconscious of the gulf, while psychologists, who are conscious of it, have not the mathematical knowledge required for spanning it. The problem is difficult, and I do not know its solution in detail. All that I can hope to do is to make the problem felt, and to indicate the kind of methods by which a solution is to be sought."
―from Our Knowledge of the External World , p. 107. ~ Bertrand Russell,#NFDB
1232:Current theories regarding the function and construction of the pyramid fall short. A credible theory would have to explain the following conditions found inside the Great Pyramid:
-The selection of granite as the building material for the King's Chamber. It is evident that in choosing granite, the builders took upon themselves an extremely difficult task.
-The presence of four superfluous chambers above the King's Chamber.
-The characteristics of the giant granite monoliths that were used to separate these so-called "construction chambers."
-The presence of exuviae, or the cast-off shells of insects, that coated the chamber above the King's Chamber, turning those who entered black.
-The violent disturbance in the King's Chamber that expanded its walls and cracked the beams in its ceiling but left the rest of the Great Pyramid seemingly undisturbed.
-The fact that the guardians were able to detect the disturbance inside the King's Chamber, when there was little or no exterior evidence of it.
-The reason the guardians thought it necessary to smear the cracks in the ceiling of the King's Chamber with cement.
-The fact that two shafts connect the King's Chamber to the outside.
-The design logic for these two shafts—their function, dimensions, features, and so forth. ~ Christopher Dunn,#NFDB
1233:This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
1234:Historically, infants and very young children were thought incapable of explicit memory. As a result of changes in theoretical perspective and methodological developments, this assumption was challenged in the latter part of the 20th century. Substantial progress was made in describing age-related changes in explicit memory in the first two years of life. These developments permitted the first steps toward construction of a neuro-developmental account of the changes. By considering the timing and course of development of the neural substrate responsible for explicit memory we are able to bring greater specificity to the question “what develops?” Thus far, behavioral and electrophysiological methods (event-related potentials: ERPs) have revealed both individual and age-related variability in encoding and in consolidation and storage processes; the variability is systematically related to variability in long-term explicit memory. Suggestions are made for additional research to further our understanding of relations between brain and behavioral development in the first years of life. ~ Bauer P.J. (2004). "Getting explicit memory off the ground: Steps toward construction of a neuro-developmental account of changes in the first two years of life". Developmental Review. 24 (4): 347–373. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2004.08.003., #NFDB
1235:Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the entrance to the river, was taken over by the Navy and became full of secretive Naval officers; it became known that this was part of a mysterious Navel entity called 'Force J'. Near Lepe House and at the very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the river where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let their ramps down to embark the vehicles and tanks. This place was about two miles from 'Mastodon'. A mile or so along the coast a country house was occupied by a secret Naval party who did strange things with tugs and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of cotton floating in the sea; this was 'Pluto', Pipe Line Under The Ocean, which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as 'Phoenix', one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the artificial harbour 'Mulberry' on the north coast of France. ~ Nevil Shute, #NFDB
1236:this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolution. a humanist r/evolution. r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting. we will fight if we are forced to but the fundamental goal of r/evolution must be peace.
we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves. we have got to make this world user friendly. user friendly.
are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger. to sacrifice to end colonialism. to end neo-colonialism. to end racism. to end sexism.
r/evolution means the end of exploitation. r/evolution means respecting people from other cultures. r/evolution is creative.
r/evolution means treating your mate as a friend and an equal. r/evolution is sexy.
r/evolution means respecting and learning from your children. r/evolution is beautiful.
r/evolution means protecting the people. the plants. the animals. the air. the water. r/evolution means saving this planet.
r/evolution is love. ~ Assata Shakur,#NFDB
1237:Gilbert proposed that understanding a statement must begin with an attempt to believe it: you must first know what the idea would mean if it were true. Only then can you decide whether or not to unbelieve it. The initial attempt to believe is an automatic operation of System 1, which involves the construction of the best possible interpretation of the situation. Even a nonsensical statement, Gilbert argues, will evoke initial belief. Try his example: “whitefish eat candy.” You probably were aware of vague impressions of fish and candy as an automatic process of associative memory searched for links between the two ideas that would make sense of the nonsense. Gilbert sees unbelieving as an operation of System 2, and he reported an elegant experiment to make his point. The participants saw nonsensical assertions, such as “a dinca is a flame,” followed after a few seconds by a single word, “true” or “false.” They were later tested for their memory of which sentences had been labeled “true.” In one condition of the experiment subjects were required to hold digits in memory during the task. The disruption of System 2 had a selective effect: it made it difficult for people to “unbelieve” false sentences. In a later test of memory, the depleted participants ended up thinking that many of the false sentences were true. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1238:Paper: Some inexpensive plain bond paper A pad of Strathmore Drawing Paper, 80 lb., 11" × 14" Pencils: A #2 ordinary yellow writing pencil with an eraser at the top A #4 drawing pencil—Faber-Castell, Prismacolor Turquoise, or other brand Marking pens: Sharpie (or other brand) fine point non-permanent black A second marker, fine point permanent black Graphite stick: #4 General’s is a good brand, or other brand Pencil sharpener: A small handheld sharpener is fine Erasers: A Pink Pearl eraser A Staedtler Mars white plastic eraser A kneaded eraser—Lyra, Design, or other brand Masking tape: 3M Scotch Low Tack Artist Tape Clips: Two 1-inch-wide black clips Drawing board: A firm surface large enough to hold your 11" × 14" drawing paper—about 15" × 18" is a good size. This can be improvised from a kitchen cutting board, a piece of foam board, a piece of Masonite, or thick cardboard. Picture plane: This too can be improvised using an 8" × 10" piece of glass (you will need to tape the edges), or an 8" × 10" piece of clear plastic, about 1⁄16" thick. Viewfinders: You will make these from black paper—“construction” paper is a good thickness, or you could use thin black cardboard. You will find instructions for making the viewfinders here A small mirror: About 5" × 7" that can be taped to a wall, or any available wall mirror. ~ Betty Edwards, #NFDB
1239:Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word, and possessed of a special faculty for working for the public good. But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something — not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1240:Nevertheless, it strikes me more and more that America’s reputation for materialism is unfounded—that is, if a materialist is a person who thoroughly enjoys the physical world and loves material things. In this sense, we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure—attractively packaged but inferior in content. The explanation is simple: most of our products are being made by people who do not enjoy making them, whether as owners or workers. Their aim in the enterprise is not the product but money, and therefore every trick is used to cut the cost of production and hoodwink the buyer, by coloring and packaging chicanery, into the belief that the product is well and truly made. The only exceptions are those products which simply must be excellent for reasons of safety or high cost of purchase—aircraft, computers, space-rockets, scientific instruments, and so forth. But the whole scheme is a vicious circle, for when you have made the money what will you buy with it? Other pretentious fakes made by other money-mad manufacturers. The ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1241:When we survey the wretched conditions of man, under the monarchical and hereditary systems of Government, dragged from his home by one power, or driven by another, and impoverished by taxes more than by enemies, it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of Governments is necessary.
What is government more than the management of the affairs of a Nation? It is not, and from its nature cannot be, the property of any particular man or family, but of the whole community, at whose expense it is supported; and though by force and contrivance it has been usurped into an inheritance, the usurpation cannot alter the right of things. Sovereignty, as a matter of right, appertains to the Nation only, and not to any individual; and a Nation has at all times an inherent indefeasible right to abolish any form of Government it finds inconvenient, and to establish such as accords with its interest, disposition and happiness. the romantic and barbarous distinction of men into Kings and subjects, though it may suit the condition of courtiers, cannot that of citizens; and is exploded by the principle upon which Governments are now founded. Every citizen is a member of the Sovereignty, and, as such, can acknowledge no personal subjection; and his obedience can be only to the laws. ~ Thomas Paine,#NFDB
1242:Whatand why were never questions for me. How was the only question. When I look back now, I realize that I never thought about what I wanted to become in life. I only thought about how I wanted to live my life. And I knew that the “how” could only be determined within me and by me. There was a big boom in poultry farming at the time. I wanted to make some money to finance my desire for unrestrained, purposeless travel. So I got into it. My father said, “What am I going to tell people? That my son is rearing chickens?” But I built my poultry farm and I built it single-handedly, from scratch. The business took off. The profits started rolling in. I devoted four hours every morning to the business. The rest of the day was spent reading and writing poetry, swimming in the well, meditating, daydreaming on a huge banyan tree. Success made me adventurous. My father was always lamenting that everyone else’s sons had become engineers, industrialists, joined the civil service, or gone to America. And everywhere everyone I met—my friends, relatives, my old school and college teachers—said, “Oh, we thought you’d make something of your life, but you are just wasting it.” I took on the challenge. In partnership with a civil engineer friend, I entered the construction business. In five years, we became a major construction company, among the leading private ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
1243:What is life? Well, what do living things do? One answer is, they reproduce. Life makes more life. However, logic told him that “what goes on is actually one degree better than self-reproduction, for organisms appear to have gotten more elaborate in the course of time.”9 Life did not just make more life. Life could increase in complexity; it could evolve. Von Neumann became increasingly interested in what an evolvable, autonomous, self-replicating machine (“an automaton”) would logically require when placed in an environment with which it could interact. His string of logic led him to the conclusion that the automaton needed a description of how to copy itself and a description of how to copy that description so it could hand it off to the next, freshly minted automaton. The original automaton also needed a mechanism to do the actual construction and copy job. It needed information and construction. However, this would cover only replication. Von Neumann reasoned that he had to add something in order for the automaton to be able to evolve, to increase in complexity. He concluded that it needed a symbolic self-description, a genotype, a physical structure independent of the structure it was describing, the phenotype. Linking the symbolic description with what it refers to would require a code, and now his automatons would be able to evolve. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
1244:Yep,” Annabeth said weakly. “He really did it.” The giant belched. He wiped his steaming greasy hands on his robe and grinned at us. “So, if you’re not breakfast, you must be customers. What can I interest you in?” He sounded relaxed and friendly, like he was happy to talk with us. Between that and the red velour housecoat, he almost didn’t seem dangerous. Except of course that he was ten feet tall, blew fire, and ate cows in three bites. I stepped forward. Call me old-fashioned, but I wanted to keep his focus on me and not Annabeth. I think it’s polite for a guy to protect his girlfriend from instant incineration. “Um, yeah,” I said. “We might be customers. What do you sell?” Cacus laughed. “What do I sell? Everything, demigod! At bargain basement prices, and you can’t find a basement lower than this!” He gestured around the cavern. “I’ve got designer handbags, Italian suits, um…some construction equipment, apparently, and if you’re in the market for a Rolex…” He opened his robe. Pinned to the inside was a glittering array of gold and silver watches. Annabeth snapped her fingers. “Fakes! I knew I’d seen that stuff before. You got all this from street merchants, didn’t you? They’re designer knockoffs.” The giant looked offended. “Not just any knockoffs, young lady. I steal only the best! I’m a son of Hephaestus. I know quality fakes when I see them. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
1245:The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city’s southern limits.
I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales—and poets searching for rhymes in history’s junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn’t our own. Still our country wasn’t our own. ~ Jasmin Darznik,#NFDB
1246:However, one can also cognize the existence of the thing prior to the perception of it, and therefore cognize it comparatively a priori, if only it is connected with some perceptions in accordance with the principles of their empirical connection (the analogies). For in that case the existence of the thing is still connected with our perceptions in a possible experience, and with the guidance of the analogies we can get from our actual perceptions to the thing in the series of possible perceptions. Thus we cognize the existence of a magnetic matter penetrating all bodies from the perception of attracted iron filings, although an immediate perception of this matter is impossible for us given the construction of our organs. For in accordance with the laws of sensibility and the context of our perceptions we could also happen upon the immediate empirical intuition of it in an experience of if our senses, the crudeness of which does not affect the form of possible experience in general, were finer. Thus wherever perception and whatever is appended to it in accordance with empirical laws reaches, there too reaches our cognition of the existence of things. If we do not being with experience, or proceed in accordance with laws of the empirical connection of appearances, then we are only making a vain display of wanting to discover or research the existence of any thing. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1247:Voici quelques types de réactions anormales : mourir de faim face à l'abondance ; rester exposé au froid, à la pluie et à la neige, en présence de charbon, de matériel de construction et de place pour bâtir ; croire qu'une puissance divine à longue barbe blanche régit toutes choses et que l'on est à la merci de cette puissance pour le bien comme pour le mal ; massacrer d'innocentes personnes avec enthousiasme, et croire que l'on doit conquérir une région dont on n'avait jamais entendu parler auparavant ; marcher en haillons et se considérer en même temps comme le représentant de la "grandeur de la nation" ; oublier ce qu'un politicien avait promis avant de devenir chef de l'Etat ; déléguer à quelque individu que ce soit, fussent-ils hommes d'Etat, un pouvoir quasi absolu sur sa propre vie et son propre destin ; être incapable de comprendre que les soi-disant grands timoniers de l'Etat doivent eux aussi dormir, manger, répondre à l'appel de la nature, qu'eux aussi sont gouvernés par des pulsions affectives inconscientes et incontrôlables, et souffrent de dérangements sexuels comme tout autre mortel ; considérer comme évident qu'il faut battre les enfants dans l'intérêt de la "culture" ; refuser aux adolescents, qui sont dans la fleur de l'âge, le bonheur de l'union sexuelle ; et l'on peut multiplier les exemples à l'infini. (p. 29-30, Préface de la deuxième édition) ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
1248:I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity.
It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion--whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
1249:In California: Morning, Evening, Late January
Pale, then enkindled,
light
advancing,
emblazoning
summits of palm and pine,
the dew
lingering,
scripture of
scintillas.
Soon the roar
of mowers
cropping the already short
grass of lawns,
men with long-nozzled
cylinders of pesticide
poking at weeds,
at moss in cracks of cement,
and louder roar
of helicopters off to spray
vineyards where braceros try
to hold their breath,
and in the distance, bulldozers, excavators,
babel of destructive construction.
Banded by deep
oakshadow, airy
shadow of eucalyptus,
miner's lettuce,
tender, untasted,
and other grass, unmown,
luxuriant,
no green more brilliant.
40
Fragile paradise.
....
At day's end the whole sky,
vast, unstinting, flooded with transparent
mauve,
tint of wisteria,
cloudless
over the malls, the industrial parks,
the homes with the lights going on,
the homeless arranging their bundles.
....
Who can utter
the poignance of all that is constantly
threatened, invaded, expended
and constantly
nevertheless
persists in beauty,
tranquil as this young moon
just risen and slowly
drinking light
from the vanished sun.
Who can utter
the praise of such generosity
or the shame?
~ Denise Levertov,#NFDB
1250:What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets.... ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
1251:At Dniepropetrovsk the Stalin regime had made great efforts in construction. We were at first impressed as we approached the suburbs of the city, where we saw outlined the large masonry blocks of the proletarian housing erected by the Soviets. Their lines were modern. The buildings were huge, and there were many of them. Undeniably, the Communist system had done something for the people. If the misery of the peasants was great, at least the worker seemed to have benefited from the new times. Still, it was necessary to visit and examine the buildings. We lived for six months in the Donets coal basin. We had plenty of time to test the conclusions that we had reached at the time of our entrance into Dniepropetrovsk. The buildings, so impressive from a distance, were just a gigantic hoax, intended to fool sightseers shepherded by Intourist [Soviet tourism agency] and the viewers of documentary films. Approaching those housing blocks you were sickened by the stench of mud and excrement that rose from the quagmires surrounding each of the buildings. Around them were neither sidewalks nor gravel nor paving stones. The Russian mud was everywhere, and everywhere the walls peeled and crumbled. The quality of the construction materials was of the lowest order. All the balconies had come loose, and already the cement stairways were worn and grooved, although the buildings were only a few years old. ~ Leon Degrelle, #NFDB
1252:The true type of the Superman is, rather, Olympian: a calm greatness which expresses an irresistible superiority, something which terrifies and at the same time compels veneration, which prevails and disarms without fighting, establishing suddenly the feeling of a transcendent force, completely under control but totally capable of release, the wonderful and frightening sense which antiquity associated which the concept of the numen. Supra-life — that is, spirit, totally realised in its supernatural aspect — which permeates and governs absolutely everything which is ‘life’, is the substance here. But this type, the true Superman, cannot be treated merely as a construction of the thought of today. There is no great tradition of antiquity, whether of the East or of the West, which did not possess it. The tradition of the ‘divine right’ of the legitimate Kings, because they were the virile bearers of a force from above, is its last echo. To conceive the sudden re-emergence of this ancient conception, in a world where every great horizon was dead, where, to serve as immediate ideological substance for its incarnation, there were only the profane and opaque myths of evolutionism and natural selection, and a confused need for force and liberation — to conceive this is also to understand the invisible genesis of the theory of the Nietzschean Superman, its limit, and the path which can lead beyond it. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
1253:He paused a moment, gazing in awe at the huge mass of buildings composing the castle. It stood close to the river, on either side and to the rear stretched the extensive park and gardens, filled with splendid trees, fountains and beds of brilliant flowers in shades of pink, crimson, and scarlet. The castle itself was built of pink granite, and enclosed completely a smaller, older building which the present Duke's father had considered too insignificant for his town residence. The new castle had taken forty years to build; three architects and hundreds of men had worked day and night, and the old Duke had personally selected every block of sunset-colored stone that went to its construction. 'I want it to look like a great half-open rose,' he declared to the architects, who were fired with enthusiasm by this romantic fancy. It was begun as a wedding present to the Duke's wife, whose name was Rosamond, but unfortunately she died some nine years before it was completed. 'never mind, it will do for her memorial instead,' said the grief-stricken but practical widower. The work went on. At last the final block was laid in place. The Duke, by now very old, went out in his barouche and drove slowly along the opposite riverbank to consider the effect. He paused midway for a long time, then gave his opinion. 'It looks like a cod cutlet covered in shrimp sauce,' he said, drove home, took to his bed, and died. ~ Joan Aiken, #NFDB
1254:For self-control is common to all human beings who have made choice of it. And we admit that the same nature exists in every race, and the same virtue. As far as respects human nature, the woman does not possess one nature, and the man exhibit another, but the same: so also with virtue. If, consequently, a self-restraint and righteousness, and whatever qualities are regarded as following them, is the virtue of the male, it belongs to the male alone to be virtuous, and to the woman to be licentious and unjust. But it is offensive even to say this. Accordingly woman is to practise self-restraint and righteousness, and every other virtue, as well as man, both bond and free; since it is a fit consequence that the same nature possesses one and the same virtue. We do not say that woman's nature is the same as man's, as she is woman. For undoubtedly it stands to reason that some difference should exist between each of them, in virtue of which one is male and the other female. Pregnancy and parturition, accordingly, we say belong to woman, as she is woman, and not as she is a human being. But if there were no difference between man and woman, both would do and suffer the same things. As then there is sameness, as far as respects the soul, she will attain to the same virtue; but as there is difference as respects the peculiar construction of the body, she is destined for child-bearing and housekeeping. ~ Clement of Alexandria, #NFDB
1255:And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that? ~ Sylvia Brownrigg, #NFDB
1256:For self-control is common to all human beings who have made choice of it. And we admit that the same nature exists in every race, and the same virtue. As far as respects human nature, the woman does not possess one nature, and the man exhibit another, but the same: so also with virtue. If, consequently, a self-restraint and righteousness, and whatever qualities are regarded as following them, is the virtue of the male, it belongs to the male alone to be virtuous, and to the woman to be licentious and unjust. But it is offensive even to say this. Accordingly woman is to practise self-restraint and righteousness, and every other virtue, as well as man, both bond and free; since it is a fit consequence that the same nature possesses one and the same virtue. We do not say that woman's nature is the same as man's, as she is woman. For undoubtedly it stands to reason that some difference should exist between each of them, in \ virtue of which one is male and the other female. Preg-\ nancy and parturition, accordingly, we say belong to woman, |as she is woman, and not as she is a human being. But if there were no difference between man and woman, both would do and suffer the same things. As then there is sameness, as far as respects the soul, she will attain to the same virtue ; but as there is difference as respects the peculiar construction of the body, she is destined for child-bearing and housekeeping. ~ Clement of Alexandria, #NFDB
1257:Many speak of the legendary and gigantic starship Titanic, a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artrifactovol some hundreds of years ago now, and with good reason. It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in what now remains of history (see page 113 [on the Campaign for Real Time]) but it had the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood. The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any pan of the ship. They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately. The starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laserlit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1258:She stepped back into the house. “I want to show you something.” Trying to get his legs back, his head wobbly, and his internal referee still giving him the eight count, Myron followed her silently up the stairway. She led him down a darkened corridor lined with modern lithographs. She stopped, opened a door, and flipped on the lights. The room was teenage-cluttered, as if someone had put all the belongings in the center of the room and dropped a hand grenade on them. The posters on the walls—Michael Jordan, Keith Van Horn, Greg Downing, Austin Powers, the words YEAH, BABY! across his middle in pink tie-dye lettering—had been hung askew, all tattered corners and missing pushpins. There was a Nerf basketball hoop on the closet door. There was a computer on the desk and a baseball cap dangling from a desk lamp. The corkboard had a mix of family snapshots and construction-paper crayons signed by Jeremy’s sister, all held up by oversized pushpins. There were footballs and autographed baseballs and cheap trophies and a couple of blue ribbons and three basketballs, one with no air in it. There were stacks of computer-game CD-ROMs and a Game Boy on the unmade bed and a surprising amount of books, several opened and facedown. Clothes littered the floor like war wounded; the drawers were half open, shirts and underwear hanging out like they’d been shot mid-escape. The room had the slight, oddly comforting smell of kids’ socks. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
1259:In the field of education, it seems ‘normal’ to run stories about class sizes, teachers’ pay, the country’s performance in international league tables and the right balance between the roles of the private and state sectors. But we would risk seeming distinctly odd, even demented, if we asked whether the curriculum actually made sense; whether it really equipped students with the emotional and psychological resources that are central to the pursuit of good lives. When it comes to housing, the news urges us to worry about how to get construction companies working, how to make purchasing a home easier for first-time buyers and how to balance the claims of nature against those of jobs and businesses. But it doesn’t tend to find time to ask primordial, eccentric-sounding questions like: ‘Why are our cities so ugly?’ In discussions of economics, our energy is channelled towards pondering what the right level of taxation should be and how best to combat inflation. But we are discouraged by mainstream news from posing the more peculiar, outlying questions about the ends of labour, the nature of justice and the proper role of markets. News stories tend to frame issues in such a way as to reduce our will or even capacity to imagine them in profoundly other ways. Through its intimidating power, news numbs. Without anyone particularly rooting for this outcome, more tentative but potentially important private thoughts get crushed. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1260:Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Paxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions more are spent purchasing them. You don’t even need a specific trauma; just “general depression” or “anxiety,” as if sadness were as treatable as the common cold. I knew depression was real, and in many cases required medical attention. I also knew we overused the word. Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures that we weren’t willing to work for. I knew people whose unbearable source of misery was their weight, their baldness, their lack of advancement in a workplace, or their inability to find the perfect mate, even if they themselves did not behave like one. To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken. But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can’t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren’t satisfied—before working some more. I knew. I had done all that. There was a stretch where I could not have worked more hours in the day without eliminating sleep altogether. I piled on accomplishments. I made money. I earned accolades. And the longer I went at it, the emptier I began to feel, like pumping air faster and faster into a torn tire. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1261:Some of the ideas were silly, thanks to Molly, who, despite being upset with Jones, was still trying to keep the mood upbeat.
They had boxes and boxes of copy paper. They could make thousands of paper airplanes with the message, “Help!” written on them and fly them out the windows.
Could they try to blast their way out of the tunnel? Maybe dig an alternative route to the surface? It seemed like a long shot, worth going back in there and taking a look at the construction—which Jones had done only to come back out, thumbs down.
Two of them could create a diversion, while the other to took the Impala and crashed their way out of the garage.
At which point the Impala—and everyone in it—would be hit by hundreds of bullets.
That one—along with taking their chances with the far fewer number of soldiers lying in wait at the end of the escape tunnel—went into the bad idea file.
Molly had thought that they could sing karaoke. Emilio had a Best of Whitney Houston karaoke CD. Their renditions of I Will Always Love you, she insisted, would cause the troops to break rank and run away screaming.
Except the karaoke machine was powered by electricity, which they were trying to use only for the computer and the security monitors, considering—at the time—that the generator was almost out of gasoline.
Yeah, that was why it was a silly idea.
It did, however, generate a lot of desperately needed laughter. ~ Suzanne Brockmann,#NFDB
1262:I was takin’ a walk downtown, tryin’ to get a feel for the place. And I’m walkin’ through a construction site—and it was all construction sites back then, you understand—and I come across this hole in the ground, ’bout ten feet in diameter. I look down and I can’t see a bottom, so I pull a quarter out of my pocket and toss it down, and listen for a clink or a splash. Nothin’. Coin just tumbles into the darkness and disappears. So now I’m real curious, and I look around for somethin’ else to throw down there. And teeterin’ right on the edge of the hole is an old refrigerator. So, I circle around and I give it a good kick and it tumbles down into the hole. I hear it bang off the side a few times but once again, there’s no crash, no splash, like it just kept fallin’ forever. It was the strangest thing. So I figure this is the first of this city’s many unknowable mysteries and I start to go on about my way. But then I see the second strange thing—this goat, it goes flying past me, in midair. Like it was fired from a cannon. And now I think I’m losin’ my mind, like maybe it’s not just tobacco in my cigar, if you know what I’m sayin’. So I walk along and I come across a guy sittin’ on the curb and I say, ‘Holy cow, partner, did you see that goat?’ And the fella says, ‘Well, that’s my goat.’ And I say, ‘Well, I hate to tell ya, but I think it’s gone. It took off flyin’.’ And the fella says, ‘That’s impossible. I had him chained to a refrigerator. ~ David Wong, #NFDB
1263:For example, Nancy Cantor and Hazel Markus, leading contemporary cognitive motivational theorists, view motivation as a product of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge obviously includes knowledge about one's emotions and their motivational consequences, but for Cantor and Markus motives are products of the self as much as contributors to it. Key to their theory is the notion of a working self, an on-the-fly construction about who we are that reflects who we've been (past selves), and who we want don't want to be (future selves). In contrast to earlier self theorists, such as Alfred Adler, who viewed the self as a static and enduring entity, Cantor and Markus view the self as a dynamic and mutable construction that changes in different situations-we have different goals when at home than when on the job, for example, and the working self in each situation reflects such differences. One's working self is thus a subset of the universe of possible self-concepts that can occur at any one time-it is the subset that is available to the thinking conscious person at a particular moment, and is determined in part by memory and expectation, and in part by the immediate situation. These features of the working self explain how one can have both stable and mutable motives, and how motives can be conflicting or dissonant. The working self is a central part of one's mental apparatus. It influences perception, attention, thinking, memory, retrieval, and storage, and guides action. ~ Joseph E LeDoux, #NFDB
1264:Yet, it was precisely our failure to differentiate between work and politics, between reality and illusion; it was precisely our mistake of conceiving of politics as a rational human activity comparable to the sowing of seeds or the construction of buildings that was responsible for the fact that a painter who failed to make the grade was able to plunge the whole world into misery. And I have stressed again and again that the main purpose of this book—which, after all, was not written merely for the fun of it—was to demonstrate these catastrophic errors in human thinking and to eliminate irrationalism from politics. It is an essential part of our social tragedy that the farmer, the industrial worker, the physician, etc., do not influence social existence solely through their social activities, but also and even predominantly through their political ideologies. For political activity hinders objective and professional activity; it splits every profession into inimical ideologic groups; creates a dichotomy in the body of industrial workers; limits the activity of the medical profession and harms the patients. In short, it is precisely political activity that prevents the realization of that which it pretends to fight for: peace, work, security, international cooperation, free objective speech, freedom of religion, etc. ~ Wilhelm Reich, #NFDB
1265:Abelman’s Dry Goods
Kansas City, Missouri
U.S.A. Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:
We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.
“Why? Why?” You are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.
The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter-length trousers a byword of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)
We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.
Yours in anger,
Gus Levy, Pres. ~ John Kennedy Toole,#NFDB
1266:On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously alike—except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy, even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day as the day it was built. The development in methods of manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car, which is the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self starter—it is in every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in the first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the making and not through any change in the basic principle—which I take to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
1267:17.2 One evening I was to meet Marilyn up at her mother's apartment for our ritual Friday night dinner. On my way up to the Bronx, when I got off at the 175th Street station, I decided to stop in and see what sort of sexual activity was going on in the subway john there. I'd never gone into that one before, perhaps because I usually came there with Marilyn.
I pushed into the yellow-tiled space, with its dim, caged light-bulbs. There was only one guy at the urinal, a tall workman in greens and scuffed orange construction boots-- which had, only in the last year or so, become standard wear for the nation's laborers. I stood a stall away from him, and we glanced at each other. When I smiled, he turned toward me.
I reached for his penis.
Holding it, I realized something was wrong with it, but, for the moment, couldn't quite figure what. For its thickness and harness it was too short. It ended in a kind of flat stump, like a sawed-off dowel, without the collar or taper of glans, making me think he was uncircumcised. Only there was no cuff of skin.
That's when he said, a little hoarsely, "That's what there is. If you want it, it's yours. But that's it." And I realized that, either from medical procedure or something else, the first inch or so had been amputated.
He came very fast.
I wanted to talk with him afterward, but he zipped up once we were finished and hurried away. I never saw him again, though I looked for him. But the image stayed, unsettlingly, for a while. ~ Samuel R Delany,#NFDB
1268:It is even harder to predict the possibility (or the timescale) for building a device whose action depends on a physical theory that we do not even know at present. Such a theory would be needed, I am claiming, before we could understand the physics underlying a non-computably acting device-'non-computably', that is, in the Turing-machine-inaccessible sense that I have been using in this book. According to my own arguments, in order to build such a device we should first need to find the appropriate physical (OR) theory of quantum-state reduction-and it is very hard to know how far we are from such a theory-before we could begin to contemplate its construction. It is also possible that the specific nature of that OR theory might itself provide an unexpected complexion on the very task at hand.
At least, I suppose that we should need to find the theory first, if we are to construct such a non-computational device. But conceivably not: in actual practice, it has often been the case that surprising new physical effects have been discovered many years before their theoretical explanation. A good example was superconductivity, which was originally observed experimentally (by Heike Kammerlingh Onnes in 1911) nearly 50 years before the full quantum-theoretic explanation was eventually found, by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957. Moreover, high-temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986, cf. Shent et al. (1988), also without prior good reason to believe in it on purely theoretical grounds. ~ Roger Penrose,#NFDB
1269:Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idolized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands set up by their own law, and judge one another and God accordingly. It is not we who build. Christ builds the church. Whoever is mindful to build the church is surely well on the way to destroying it, for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it. We must confess he builds. We must proclaim, he builds. We must pray to him, and he will build. We do not know his plan. We cannot see whether he is building or pulling down. It may be that the times which by human standards are the times of collapse are for him the great times of construction. It may be that the times which from a human point are great times for the church are times when it's pulled down. It is a great comfort which Jesus gives to his church. You confess, preach, bear witness to me, and I alone will build where it pleases me. Do not meddle in what is not your providence. Do what is given to you, and do it well, and you will have done enough.... Live together in the forgiveness of your sins. Forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1270:Footnote 164: "I finally hooked up with Ashley. I went over to her place yesterday morning. Early. She lives in Venice. Her eyebrows look like flakes of sunlight. Her smile, I'm sure, burnt Rome to the ground. And for the life of me I didn't know who she was or where we met... We sat down and I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask her who she was, where we'd met, been before, but she just smiled and held my hand as we lay down on the hammock and started to swing above all those dead leaves... Before I left she told me our story: where we met - Texas - kissed, but never made love and this had confused and haunted her and she had needed it before she got married which was in four months to a man she loved who made a living manufacturing TNT exclusively for a highway construction firm up in Colorado where he frequently went on business trips and where one night, drunk, angry and disappointed he had invited a hooker back to his motel room and so on and who cared and what was I doing here anyway?... I was still hurting, abandoned, drank three glasses of bourbon and fumed on some weed, then came here, thinking of voices, real and imagined, of ghosts, my ghost, of her, at long last, in this idiotic footnote, when she gently pushed me out her door and I said quietly 'Ashley' causing her to stop pushing me and ask 'yes?' her eyes bright with something she saw that I could never see though what she saw was me, and me not caring now at least knowing the truth and telling her the truth: 'I've never been to Texas.'" - House of Leaves ~ Mark Z Danielewski, #NFDB
1271:Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so doing—that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be altered, without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. Darwinism affirms on the contrary, that there was no express construction concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudinous variations of the Feline stock, many of which died out from want of power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they throve and persisted, in proportion to the advantage over their fellows thus offered to them.
Far from imagining that cats exist 'in order' to catch mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist 'because' they catch mice well—mousing being not the end, but the condition, of their existence. And if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation of the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that the cats have remained invariable, but that such varieties as have incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, less fitted to get on in the world than the existing stock. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley,#NFDB
1272:Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn't a proletariat. It isn't the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. Far fucking from it. As a shorthand I call it the "whitetariat".
Unfortunately, whenever Western radicals hear words like "unions" and "working class" a rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the "Internationale" seems to play in the background. Even many anarchists seem to fall into a daze and to magically transport themselves back to seeing the militant socialist workers of Marx and Engels' day. Forgetting that there have been many different kinds of working classes in history. Forgetting that Fred Engels himself criticized the English industrial working class of the late 19th century as a "bourgeois proletariat", an aristocracy of labor. He pointed out how you could tell the non-proletarian, "bourgeois" strata of the English working class – they were the sectors that were dominated by adult men, not women or children. Engels also wrote that the "bourgeois" sectors were those that were unionized. Sounds like a raving ultra-leftist, doesn't he? (which he sure wasn't).
So that this is a strategic and not a tactical problem, that it has a material basis in imperialized class privilege, has long been understood by those willing to see reality. (the fact that we have radical movements here addicted to not seeing reality is a much larger crisis than any one issue). ~ J Sakai,#NFDB
1273:The launching of the War on Drugs and the initial construction of the new system required the expenditure of tremendous political initiative and resources. Media campaigns were waged; politicians blasted “soft” judges and enacted harsh sentencing laws; poor people of color were vilified. The system now, however, requires very little maintenance or justification. In fact, if you are white and middle class, you might not even realize the drug war is still going on. Most high school and college students today have no recollection of the political and media frenzy surrounding the drug war in the early years. They were young children when the war was declared, or not even born yet. Crack is out; terrorism is in. Today, the political fanfare and the vehement, racialized rhetoric regarding crime and drugs are no longer necessary. Mass incarceration has been normalized, and all of the racial stereotypes and assumptions that gave rise to the system are now embraced (or at least internalized) by people of all colors, from all walks of life, and in every major political party. We may wonder aloud “where have the black men gone?” but deep down we already know. It is simply taken for granted that, in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, the vast majority of young black men are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded criminals for life. This extraordinary circumstance—unheard of in the rest of the world—is treated here in America as a basic fact of life, as normal as separate water fountains were just a half century ago. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
1274:Want to Read
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Zen in the Art of WritingZen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
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Zen in the Art of Writing Quotes (showing 1-30 of 90)
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
tags: writing 5923 likes Like
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
tags: humour, individuality, science-fiction 5858 likes Like
“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
tags: chaos, construction, creative-process, destruction, writers, writing 220 likes Like
“That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
tags: cats, creativity, ideas 195 likes Like
“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
tags: ideas, writing 191 likes Like
“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing ~ Ray Bradbury,#NFDB
1275:For what people of color quickly come to see—in a sense the primary epistemic principle of the racialized social epistemology of which they are the object—is that they are not seen at all. Correspondingly, the “central metaphor” of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is the image of the “veil,”20 and the black American cognitive equivalent of the shocking moment of Cartesian realization of the uncertainty of everything one had taken to be knowledge is the moment when for Du Bois, as a child in New England, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their [white] world by a vast veil.”21 Similarly, Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, generally regarded as the most important twentieth-century novel of the black experience, is arguably in key respects—while a multi-dimensional and multi-layered work of great depth and complexity, not to be reduced to a single theme—an epistemological novel.22 For what it recounts is the protagonist’s quest to determine what norms of belief are the right ones in a crazy looking-glass world where he is an invisible man “simply because [white] people refuse to see me… . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” And this systematic misperception is not, of course, due to biology, the intrinsic properties of his epidermis, or physical deficiencies in the white eye, but rather to “the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”23 ~ Charles W Mills, #NFDB
1276:No machines have been found in the archaeological record to support these assertions, but there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence that leads to such conclusions. Are the machines still intact and lying under the desert sand? Or were they removed completely from the areas? Or could it be that all this evidence points to an earlier civilization that suffered a cataclysm of such magnitude that much of what existed was destroyed, and what remained was susceptible to erosion, decay, and corrosion, and slowly disappeared over a long period of time? This brings us back to Robert Schoch's evaluation of the erosion pattern on the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure. He claimed that the period of time when sufficient rain fell in Egypt to cause this erosion was seven to nine thousand years ago. Is this sufficient time for ancient machines to turn to dust and blow away? It seems incredible to imagine, but there is reason to suspect that this could have happened.
[...]
If we follow the idea of an older civilization, therefore, the pyramids would have already been there before the first dynasty of the ancient Egyptians. The Great Pyramid was, most likely, the zenith of construction on the plateau, and the other pyramids were likely built before it was. Yet something happened to the culture that built the pyramids, and when Khufu came on the scene, he naturally chose the most impressive structure--the Great Pyramid--as his own, and his heirs took turns in claiming the rest. What event could have brought death and destruction to this ancient civilization that is referred to in Egyptian lore as being inhabited by gods of the First Time? ~ Christopher Dunn,#NFDB
1277:It is a scandal—or, rather, it should be a scandal and one wonders why it isn’t—that the US prison population, after reaching a postwar low in the early 1970s, has since grown more than 500 percent. The United States locks up a higher percentage of its own population than any other nation in the world. Even with extraordinary prison construction projects over the last decades, the cells are still overfull. This massive expansion cannot be explained by a growing criminality of the US population or the enhanced efficiency of law enforcement. In fact, US crime rates in this period have remained relatively constant. The scandal of US prison expansion is even more dramatic when one observes how it operates along race divisions. Latinos are incarcerated at a rate almost double that of whites, and African Americans at a rate almost six times as high. The racial imbalance of those on death row is even more extreme. It is not hard to find shocking statistics. One in eight black US males in their twenties, for instance, is in jail or prison on any given day. The number of African Americans under correctional control today, Michelle Alexander points out, is greater than the number of slaves in the mid-nineteenth century. Some authors refer to the racially skewed prison expansion as a return to elements of the plantation system or the institution of new Jim Crow laws. Keep in mind that this differential racial pattern of imprisonment is not isolated to the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, if one considers immigrant detention centers and refugee camps as arms of the carceral apparatus, those with darker skin are disproportionately in captivity. ~ Michael Hardt, #NFDB
1278:Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, an accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not necessarily of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with other habits, with certain periods of time and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought: so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from deriving any benefit from this, it was much embarrassed, and, in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1279:Tabula Rasa can make you feel like you’ve taken a train to Bizarro world. I remember my very first night here—and this is goin’ on fifteen years ago—I was takin’ a walk downtown, tryin’ to get a feel for the place. And I’m walkin’ through a construction site—and it was all construction sites back then, you understand—and I come across this hole in the ground, ’bout ten feet in diameter. I look down and I can’t see a bottom, so I pull a quarter out of my pocket and toss it down, and listen for a clink or a splash. Nothin’. Coin just tumbles into the darkness and disappears. So now I’m real curious, and I look around for somethin’ else to throw down there. And teeterin’ right on the edge of the hole is an old refrigerator. So, I circle around and I give it a good kick and it tumbles down into the hole. I hear it bang off the side a few times but once again, there’s no crash, no splash, like it just kept fallin’ forever. It was the strangest thing. So I figure this is the first of this city’s many unknowable mysteries and I start to go on about my way. But then I see the second strange thing—this goat, it goes flying past me, in midair. Like it was fired from a cannon. And now I think I’m losin’ my mind, like maybe it’s not just tobacco in my cigar, if you know what I’m sayin’. So I walk along and I come across a guy sittin’ on the curb and I say, ‘Holy cow, partner, did you see that goat?’ And the fella says, ‘Well, that’s my goat.’ And I say, ‘Well, I hate to tell ya, but I think it’s gone. It took off flyin’.’ And the fella says, ‘That’s impossible. I had him chained to a refrigerator.’” Zoey stared for a moment, then snorted a laugh that almost caused her to choke on her sandwich. ~ David Wong, #NFDB
1280:Et, assurément, la réalité est plus sombre encore que n'osait la prévoir le savant [F. Schrader] qui formulait en 1911 ces conclusions, dont les technocrates et les promoteurs de l'époque ont dû sourire. Il ne pouvait imaginer ni les pluies acides, ni la pollution des rivières et des mers par le mercure et les autres déchets de l'industrie chimique et atomique, ou par l'élévation artificielle de la température de l'eau due aux usines riveraines. Il n'avait pas prévu que plus de deux mille espèces animales seraient exterminées avant la fin du siècle ; il ne savait encore rien de l'usage des herbicides, ni des sournois dépotoirs atomiques, cachés dans des endroits écartés, quand ce n'est pas aux abords des villes, ou transportés secrètement à prix d'or pour continuer leur cycle millénaire de nuisance dans le sous-sol des continents pauvres. Il n'eût même pas été capable d'imaginer le désastre de nos marées noires, fruit de l'incurie et de l'avidité, car une construction plus solide et plus rationnelle des pétroliers obligerait à en éliminer la plupart. Il ne pouvait pas prévoir non plus la destruction de la stratosphère, la raréfaction de l'oxygène et de l'ozone, la calotte thermique obscurcissant la lumière solaire et élevant artificiellement la température au ras du sol.
On voit du moins qu'il en savait assez pour signaler le chemin pris par nos apprentis sorciers et par nos marchands du Temple, qui de nos jours n'encombrent plus seulement les abords des sanctuaires mais la terre entière. Ce qu'il disait, avec quelques autres (Albert Schweitzer, un peu plus tard, en Afrique, était alerté lui aussi par les trop soudains changements de climat), nous le crions aujourd'hui. (p. 275) ~ Marguerite Yourcenar,#NFDB
1281:I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables. ~ William H Gass, #NFDB
1282:As for the significance of my nihilism…in a word, it is the foundation of my thoughts. The goal of my activities is the destruction of all living things. I feel boundless anger against parental authority, which crushed me under the high-sounding name of parental love, and against state and social authority, which abused me in the name of universal love.
Having observed the social reality that all living things on earth are incessantly engaged in a struggle for survival, that they kill each other to survive, I concluded that if there is an absolute, universal low on earth, it is the reality that the strong eat the weak. This, I believe, is the law and truth of the universe. Now that I have seen the truth about the struggle for survival and the fact that the strong win and the weak lose, I cannot join the ranks of the idealists and adopt an optimistic mode of thinking which dreams of the construction of a society that is without authority and control. As long as all living things do not disappear from the earth, the power relations based on this principle [of the strong crushing the weak] will persist. Because the wielders of power continue to defend their authority in the usual manner and oppress the weak—and because my past existence has been a story of oppression by all sources of authority—I decided to deny the rights of all authority, rebel against them, and stake not only my own life but that of all humanity in this endeavor.
For this reason I planned eventually to throw a bomb and accept the termination of my life. I did not care whether this act would touch off a revolution or not. I am perfectly content to satisfy my own desires. I do not wish to help create a new society based on a new authority in a different form. ~ Mikiso Hane,#NFDB
1283:I know it was personally right, it was divinely right, for those apostles to hear what Jesus said and to tarry for the Holy Spirit; however, it is not right now to tarry for the Holy Spirit. Then why do we not all receive the Holy Spirit, you ask? Because our bodies are not ready for it; our temples are not cleansed. When our temples are purified and our minds are put in order so that carnalities and fleshly desires and everything contrary to the Spirit have gone, then the Holy Spirit can take full charge. The Holy Spirit is not a manifestation of carnality. There are any number of people who never read the Word of God who could not be led away by the powers of Satan. But the power of the Holy Spirit is most lovely, divine in all its construction. It is a great refiner. It is full of life, but it is always divine—never natural. If you deal in the flesh after you are baptized in the Holy Spirit, you cease to go on. Beloved, I want to speak about something greater; something to lift your minds, elevate your thoughts, and bring you into divine ways; something that elevates you out of yourself and into God, out of the world and into a place where you know you have rest for your feet, where you cease from your own works (Heb. 4:10), and where God works in you mightily “to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). When I think about a river—a pure, holy, divine river—I say, “What can stand against its inrush?” Wherever it is—in a railway coach, in the street, or in a meeting—its power and flow will always be felt; it will always do its work. Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit that was to be given. I want you to think about how God gave it, how its coming was manifested, and its reception and its outflow after it had come. ~ Smith Wigglesworth, #NFDB
1284:It starts with a thwack, the sharp crack of hard plastic against a hot metal surface. When the ladle rolls over, it deposits a pale-yellow puddle of batter onto the griddle. A gentle sizzle, as the back of the ladle sparkles a mixture of eggs, flour, water, and milk across the silver surface. A crepe takes shape.
Next comes cabbage, chopped thin- but not too thin- and stacked six inches high, lightly packed so hot air can flow freely and wilt the mountain down to a molehill. Crowning the cabbage comes a flurry of tastes and textures: ivory bean sprouts, golden pebbles of fried tempura batter, a few shakes of salt, and, for an extra umami punch, a drift of dried bonito powder. Finally, three strips of streaky pork belly, just enough to umbrella the cabbage in fat, plus a bit more batter to hold the whole thing together. With two metal spatulas and a gentle rocking of the wrists, the mass is inverted. The pork fat melts on contact, and the cabbage shrinks in the steam trapped under the crepe.
Then things get serious. Thin wheat soba noodles, still dripping with hot water, hit the teppan, dancing like garden hoses across its hot surface, absorbing the heat of the griddle until they crisp into a bird's nest to house the cabbage and crepe. An egg with two orange yolks sizzles beside the soba, waiting for its place on top of this magnificent heap.
Everything comes together: cabbage and crepe at the base, bean sprouts and pork belly in the center, soba and fried egg parked on top, a geologic construction of carbs and crunch, protein and chew, all framed with the black and white of thickened Worcestershire and a zigzag of mayonnaise.
This is okonomiyaki, the second most famous thing that ever happened to Hiroshima. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1285:At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were wedged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating.
Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent.
The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole.
There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze of Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time. ~ S Jae Jones,#NFDB
1286:[Correspondance entre Massignon et Paul Claudel]
Si je vais là-bas, je pense prendre comme sujet "La langue arabe considérée comme moyen d'expression (traduisez pour nous : le témoignage de l'arabe en faveur du Verbe) et comme instrument d'action intellectuelle et sociale" (ou quelque chose d'approchant) - - Cela me permettrait de faire une révision exacte des auteurs et des tendances dominantes et d'en faire une critique "constructrice". Le difficile sera de tâcher de dégager (ce que nul philologue n'a fait jusqu'ici, hélas) de cette admirable langue sa logique fondamentale, l'ordre des idées dans le jeu normal et saint de sa syntaxe, logique qui doit nécessairement démolir le Coran et la Tradition comme des construction de guingois, destinées à remplir chez les Arabes l'ineffable rôle du Verbe et de l'Eglise. Je vous indique là, bien entendu la basse continue, la pédale harmonique de mes conférences, non pas leurs sujets effectifs précis que je tâcherai de cristalliser en un "Selectae" des textes arabes remarquables pour l'enchaînement solide des preuves et la loyauté des matériaux employés? Il y en a, dans tout les domaines de la pensée, Dieu merci !
J'aimerais que vous me parliez de la langue française à ce point de vue là, pour que mon travail puisse se guider sur une transposition de ce que vous trouvez, à ce point de vue, dans la langue française, d'"édifiant", de catholique. Hélas, pourquoi Dieu ne me permet-il pas de l'aller prier dans un pauvre coin, et se sert-il de ma lâcheté rivée au monde, pour saboter des tâches si peu à ma taille.
[Paul Claudel : Louis Massignon, Correspondance 1908-1953, « Braises ardentes, semences de feu », nouvelle édition renouvelée (1908-1914) et augmentée 1915-1953)
p230 (Lettre du samedi 10 août 1912)] ~ Louis Massignon,#NFDB
1287:How does the body push the comparatively tiny genome so far? Many researchers want to put the weight on learning and experience, apparently believing that the contribution of the genes is relatively unimportant. But though the ability to learn is clearly one of the genome's most important products, such views overemphasize learning and significantly underestimate the extent to which the genome can in fact guide the construction of enormous complexity. If the tools of biological self-assembly are powerful enough to build the intricacies of the circulatory system or the eye without requiring lessons from the outside world, they are also powerful enough to build the initial complexity of the nervous system without relying on external lessons.
The discrepancy melts away as we appreciate the true power of the genome. We could start by considering the fact that the currently accepted figure of 30,000 could well prove to be too low. Thirty thousand (or thereabouts) is, at press time, the best estimate for how many protein-coding genes are in the human genome. But not all genes code for proteins; some, not counted in the 30,000 estimate, code for small pieces of RNA that are not converted into proteins (called microRNA), of "pseudogenes," stretches of DNA, apparently relics of evolution, that do not properly encode proteins. Neither entity is fully understood, but recent reports (from 2002 and 2003) suggest that both may play some role in the all-important process of regulating the IFS that control whether or not genes are expressed. Since the "gene-finding" programs that search the human genome sequence for genes are not attuned to such things-we don't yet know how to identify them reliably-it is quite possible that the genome contains more buried treasure. ~ Gary F Marcus,#NFDB
1288:It is clear that Bhu Mandala, as described in the Bhagvatam, can be interpreted as a geocentric map of the solar system out ot Saturn. But an obvious and important question is: Did some real knowledge of planetary distances enter into the construction of the Bhu Mandala system, or are the correlations between Bhu Mandala features and planetary orbits simply coincidental?
Being a mathematician interested in probability theory, Thompson is better equipped than most to answer this question and does so through computer modelling of a proposed 'null hypothesis' -- i.e.,
'that the author of the Bhagvatam had no access to correct planetary distances and therefore all apparent correlations between Bhu Mandala features and planetary distances are simply coincidental.'
However, the Bhu Mandala/solar system correlations proved resilient enough to survive the null hypothesis. 'Analysis shows that the observed correlations are in fact highly improbable.' Thompson concludes:
'If the dimensions given in the Bhagvatam do, in fact, represent realistic planetary distances based on human observation, then we must postulate that Bhagvata astronomy preserves material from an earlier and presently unknown period of scientific development ... [and that] some people in the past must have had accurate values for the dimensions of the planetary orbits. In modern history, this information has only become available since the development of high-quality telescopes in the last 200 years. Accurate values of planetary distances were not known by Hellenistic astronomers such as Claudius Ptolemy, nor are they found in the medieval Jyotisa Sutras of India. If this information was known it must have been acquired by some unknown civilization that flourished in the distant past. ~ Graham Hancock,#NFDB
1289:Of course, “conventional wisdom” at the time held that there could never be a pickup in demand for homes. Instead, most people were convinced that the American dream of home ownership was over; demand for homes would remain depressed forever; and thus the overhang of unsold homes would be absorbed only very slowly. They cited the trend among young people — having been burnt by the collapse of the housing and mortgage bubbles — to rent rather than buy, and as usual they extrapolated it rather than question its durability. As in so many of the examples in this book, for most people, psychology-driven extrapolation took the place of an understanding of and belief in cyclicality. It was clear to me and my Oaktree colleagues, from the graph and from our knowledge of the data behind it, that because the greatest economic crash in almost eighty years had halted additions to the housing supply, home prices could recover strongly if there was any material increase in demand. And, rejecting conventional wisdom, we were convinced that housing demand would prove cyclical as usual, and thus would pick up sometime in the intermediate-term future. This conclusion — supported by other data and analysis — contributed to our decision to invest heavily in non-performing home mortgages and non-performing bank loans secured by land for residential construction, and to purchase North America’s largest private homebuilding company. These investments worked out quite well. (It’s interesting in this context to note what the Wall Street Journal said in a May 12, 2017 article headlined “Generation of Renters Now Buying”: “In all [first-time home buyers] have accounted for 42% of buyers this year, up from 38% in 2015 and 31% at the lowest point during the recent housing cycle in 2011.” So much for extrapolating widespread abandonment of home ownership.) ~ Howard Marks, #NFDB
1290:Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are twenty-two fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCA), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT), and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of a prisoner’s wages to pay for penalties. It can take decades to pay fines. Some 10 million Americans owe $50 billion in fees and fines because of their arrest or imprisonment, according to a 2015 report by the Brennan Center. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing relies solely on a prison salary, he or she will owe about $4,000 after making monthly payments for twenty-five years. Prisoners often leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment among ex-felons—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design. Most of the prison functions once handled by governments have become privatized. Corporations run prison commissaries and, since the prisoners have nowhere else to shop, often jack up prices by as much as 100 percent. Corporations have taken over the phone systems and grossly overcharge prisoners and their families. They demand exorbitant fees for money transfers from families to prisoners. And corporations, with workshops inside prisons, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers. Food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniform companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor, and the array of medieval-looking instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors feed like jackals off prisons. Prisons, in America, are big business. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
1291:That realization helped Moesta and his team begin to understand the struggle these potential home buyers faced. “I went in thinking we were in the business of new home construction,” recalls Moesta. “But I realized we were instead in the business of moving lives.” With this understanding of the Job to Be Done, dozens of small, but important, changes were made to the offering. For example, the architect managed to create space in the units for a classic dining room table by reducing the size of the second bedroom by 20 percent. The company also focused on helping buyers with the anxiety of the move itself, which included providing moving services, two years of storage, and a sorting room space on the premises where new owners could take their time making decisions about what to keep and what to discard without the pressure of a looming move. Instead of thirty pages of customized choices, which actually overwhelmed buyers, the company offered three variations of finished units—a move that quickly reduced the “cold feet” contract cancellations from five or six a month to one. And so on. Everything was designed to signal to buyers: we get you. We understand the progress you’re trying to make and the struggle to get there. Understanding the job enabled the company to get to the causal mechanism of why its customers might pull this solution into their lives. It was complex, but not complicated. That, in turn, allowed the housing company to differentiate its offering in ways competitors weren’t likely to copy—or even understand. A jobs perspective changed everything. The company actually raised $ 3,500 (profitably), which included covering the cost of moving and storage. By 2007, when sales in the industry were off by 49 percent and the market all around them was plummeting, the developers had actually grown the business 25 percent. ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
1292:One could not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf ; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was oppressed.
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humour seriously a maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them. ~ G K Chesterton,#NFDB
1293:Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I’d learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I knew that the PG County police had killed Elmer Clay Newman, then claimed he’d rammed his own head into the wall of a jail cell. And I knew that they’d shot Gary Hopkins and said he’d gone for an officer’s gun. And I knew they had beaten Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a collapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls. And I knew that they did this with great regularity, as though moved by some unseen cosmic clock. I knew that they shot at moving cars, shot at the unarmed, shot through the backs of men and claimed that it had been they who’d been under fire. These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again. At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George’s County. The FBI opened multiple investigations—sometimes in the same week. The police chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot in Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and someone might call the killer to account. But these officers had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer returned. He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the stop. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
1294:The same year that the third great Viking ship found in Norway was excavated, at Oseberg, the town of Ålesund burned. At that time the Viking ships were displayed in makeshift exhibition halls, and the great Ålesund fire hastened the process of building a separate museum for them. The architect Fritz Holland proposed building an enormous crypt for them beneath the royal palace in Oslo. It was to be 63 metres long and 15 metres wide, with a niche for each ship. The walls were to be covered with reliefs of Viking motifs. Drawings exist of this underground hall. It is full of arches and vaults, and everything is made of stone. The ships stand in a kind of depression in the floor. More than anything it resembles a burial chamber, and that is fitting, one might think, both because the three ships were originally graves and because placed in a subterranean crypt beneath the palace gardens they would appear as what they represented: an embodiment of a national myth, in reality relics of a bygone era, alive only in the symbolic realm. The crypt was never built, and the power of history over the construction of national identity has since faded away almost entirely. There is another unrealised drawing of Oslo, from the 1920s, with tall brick buildings like skyscrapers along the main thoroughfare, Karl Johans Gate, and Zeppelins sailing above the city. When I look at these drawings, of a reality that was never realised, and feel the enormous pull they exert, which I am unable to explain, I know that the people living in Kristiania in 1904, as Oslo was called then, would have stared open-mouthed at nearly everything that surrounds us today and which we hardly notice, unable to believe their eyes. What is a stone crypt compared to a telephone that shows living pictures? What is the writing down of Draumkvedet (The Dream Poem), a late-medieval Norwegian visionary ballad, compared to a robot lawnmower that cuts the grass automatically? ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd, #NFDB
1295:Diamond Hill—what a glorious name for a place. No one outside of Hong Kong would have guessed it was the moniker of a squatter village in Kowloon East. In the fifties and sixties, it was a ghetto with its share of grime and crime, and sleaze oozing from brothels, opium dens, and underground gambling houses. There and then, you found no diamonds but plenty of poor people residing on its muddy slopes. Most refugees from mainland China settled in dumps like this because the rent was dirt cheap. Hong Kong began prospering in the seventies and eighties, and its population exploded, partly due to the continued influx of refugees. Large-scale urbanization and infrastructure development moved at breakneck speed. There was no longer any room for squatter villages or shantytowns. By the late eighties, Diamond Hill was chopped into pieces and demolished bit by bit with the construction of the six-lane Lung Cheung Road in its north, the Tate’s Cairn Tunnel in its northwest, and its namesake subway station in its south. Only its southern tip had survived. More than two hundred families and businesses crammed together in this remnant of Diamond Hill, where the old village’s flavor lingered. Its buildings remained a mishmash of shoddy low-rise brick houses and bungalows, shanties, tin huts, and illegal shelters made of planks and tar paper occupying every nook and cranny. There was not a single thoroughfare wide enough for cars. The only access was by foot using narrow lanes flanked by gutters. The lanes branched out and merged, twisted and turned, and dead-ended at tall fences built to separate the village from the outside world. The village was like a maze. The last of Diamond Hill’s residents were on borrowed time and borrowed land. They had already received eviction notices from the Hong Kong government, and all had made plans for the future. The government promised to compensate longtime residents for vacating the land, but not the new arrivals. ~ Jason Y Ng, #NFDB
1296:Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush. When Bush took office in 2001, the federal budget ran a surplus, the national debt stood at a generational low of 56 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and unemployment clocked in at 4 percent—which most economists consider the practical equivalent of full employment. The government’s tax revenue amounted to $2.1 trillion annually, of which $1 trillion came from personal income taxes and another $200 billion from corporate taxes. Military spending totaled $350 billion, or 3 percent of GDP—a low not seen since the late 1940s—and not one American had been killed in combat in almost a decade. Each dollar bought 1.06 euros, or 117 yen. Gasoline cost $1.50 per gallon. Twelve years after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States stood at the pinnacle of authority: the world’s only superpower, endowed with democratic legitimacy, the credible champion of the rule of law, the exemplar of freedom and prosperity.1 Eight years later the United States found itself in two distant “wars of choice”; military spending constituted 20 percent of all federal outlays and more than 5 percent of the gross domestic product. The final Bush budget was $1.4 trillion in the red and the national debt was out of control. The nation’s GDP had increased from $10.3 trillion to $$14.2 trillion during those eight years, but a series of tax cuts that Bush introduced had reduced the government’s revenue from personal income taxes by 9 percent and corporate taxes by 33 percent. Unemployment stood at 9.3 percent and was rising; two million Americans had lost their homes when a housing bubble burst, and new construction was at a standstill. The stock market had taken a nosedive, the dollar had lost much of its former value, and gasoline sold for $3.27 a gallon.2 The United States remained the world’s only superpower, but its reputation abroad was badly tarnished. ~ Jean Edward Smith, #NFDB
1297:The Brother's Reply
Sister, fie, for shame, no more,
Give this ignorant babble o'er,
Nor with little female pride
Things above your sense deride.
Why this foolish under-rating
Of my first attempts at Latin?
Know you not each thing we prize
Does from small beginnings rise?
'Twas the same thing with your writing,
Which you now take such delight in.
First you learnt the down-stroke line,
Then the hair-stroke thin and fine,
Then a curve, and then a better,
Till you came to form a letter;
Then a new task was begun,
How to join them two in one;
Till you got (these first steps past)
To your fine text-hand at last.
So though I at first commence
With the humble accidence,
And my study's course affords
Little else as yet but words,
I shall venture in a while
At construction, grammar, style,
Learn my syntax, and proceed
Classic authors next to read,
Such as wiser, better, make us,
Sallust, Phædrus, Ovid, Flaccus:
All the poets (with their wit),
All the grave historians writ,
Who the lives and actions show
Of men famous long ago;
Even their very sayings giving
In the tongue they used when living.
Think not I shall do that wrong
Either to my native tongue,
English authors to despise,
130
Or those books which you so prize;
Though from them awhile I stray,
By new studies called away,
Them when next I take in hand,
I shall better understand.
For I've heard wise men declare
Many words in English are
From the Latin tongue derived,
Of whose sense girls are deprived
'Cause they do not Latin know.But if all this anger grow
From this cause, that you suspect
By proceedings indirect,
I would keep (as misers pelf)
All this learning to myself;
Sister, to remove this doubt,
Rather than we will fall out,
(If our parents will agree)
You shall Latin learn with me.
~ Charles Lamb,#NFDB
1298:Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible.
Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity.
Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil. ~ Thomas Paine,#NFDB
1299:One thing that we conclude from all this is that the 'learning robot' procedure for doing mathematics is not the procedure that actually underlies human understanding of mathematics. In any case, such bottom-up-dominated procedure would appear to be hopelessly bad for any practical proposal for the construction of a mathematics-performing robot, even one having no pretensions whatever for simulating the actual understandings possessed by a human mathematician. As stated earlier, bottom-up learning procedures by themselves are not effective for the unassailable establishing of mathematical truths. If one is to envisage some computational system for producing unassailable mathematical results, it would be far more efficient to have the system constructed according to top-down principles (at least as regards the 'unassailable' aspects of its assertions; for exploratory purposes, bottom-up procedures might well be appropriate). The soundness and effectiveness of these top-down procedures would have to be part of the initial human input, where human understanding an insight provide the necesssary additional ingredients that pure computation is unable to achieve.
In fact, computers are not infrequently employed in mathematical arguments, nowadays, in this kind of way. The most famous example was the computer-assisted proof, by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, of the four-colour theorem, as referred to above. The role of the computer, in this case, was to carry out a clearly specified computation that ran through a very large but finite number of alternative possibilities, the elimination of which had been shown (by the human mathematicians) to lead to a general proof of the needed result. There are other examples of such computer-assisted proofs and nowadays complicated algebra, in addition to numerical computation, is frequently carried out by computer. Again it is human understanding that has supplied the rules and it is a strictly top-down action that governs the computer's activity. ~ Roger Penrose,#NFDB
1300:middle vision logic or paradigmatic ::: (1:25) Cognition is described as middle-vision logic, or paradigmatic in that it is capable of co-ordinating the relations between systems of systems, unifying them into principled frameworks or paradigms. This is an operation on meta-systems and allows for the view described above, a view of human development itself. Self-sense at teal is called Autonomous or Strategist and is characterized by the emergent capacity to acknowledge and cope with inner conflicts in needs, ... and values. All of which are part of a multifacted and complex world. Teal sees our need for autonomy and autonomy itself as limited because emotional interdependence is inevitable. The contradictory aspects of self are weaved into an identity that is whole, integrated and commited to generating a fulfilling life.
Additionally, Teal allows individuals to link theory and practice, perceive dynamic systems interactions, recognize and strive for higher principles, understand the social construction of reality, handle paradox and complexity, create positive-sum games and seek feedback from others as a vital source for growth. Values embrace magnificence of existence, flexibility, spontaneioty, functionality, the integration of differences into interdependent systems and complimenting natural egalitarianism with natural ranking. Needs shift to self-actualization, and morality is in both terms of universal ethical principles and recognition of the developmental relativity of those universals. Teal is the first wave that is truly able to see the limitations of orange and green morality, it is able to uphold the paradox of universalism and relativism. Teal in its decision making process is able to see ... deep and surface features of morality and is able to take into consideration both those values when engaging in moral action. Currently Teal is quite rare, embraced by 2-5% of the north american and european population according to sociological research. ~ Essential Integral, L4.1-53, Middle Vision Logic,#NFDB
1301:The corporate czars we celebrate—with some exceptions—are second or third-generation tycoons who run huge empires comprising dozens of unrelated businesses. Traditional management theory will wonder how a company can be in food, telecom, power, construction and financial sectors all at the same time. However, in India, such conglomerates thrive. The promoters of these companies have the required skill—navigating the Indian government maze. Whether it is obtaining permission to set up a power plant, or to use agricultural land for commercial purposes, or to obtain licences to open a bank or sell liquor—our top business promoters can get all this done, something ordinary Indians would never be able to. This is why they are able to make billions. We then load them with awards, rank them on lists and treat them as role models for the young.
In reality, they are hardly icons. They have milked an unfair system for their personal benefit, taking opportunities that would have belonged to the young on a level playing field.
Indian companies make money from rent-seeking behaviour, creating artificial barriers of access to regulators, thereby depriving our start-ups of wealth-generating opportunities. None of the recent technologies that have changed the world and created wealth—telecom, computers, aviation—have come out of India. Yet, our promoters have figured out a way to make money from them by bulldozing their way into their share of the pie, rationing out the technology to Indians and setting themselves up as modern-day heroes. In reality, they are no heroes. They are the opposite of cool and, despite their billions, they are what young people call 'losers'.
For if they are not losers, why have they never raised their voices against governmental corruption? Our corporate honchos don't think twice before creating a cartel to fleece customers. Yet they have never even thought about creating a cartel to take a stand against corrupt politicians.
The Great Indian Social Network, page 16 and 17 ~ Chetan Bhagat,#NFDB
1302:A note about me: I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.” This is entirely because my parents are immigrant professionals, and talking about one’s stress level was just totally outlandish to them. When I was three years old my mom was in the middle of her medical residency in Boston. She had been a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in Nigeria, but in the United States she was required to do her residency all over again. She’d get up at 4:00 a.m. and prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my brother and me, because she knew she wouldn’t be home in time to have dinner with us. Then she’d leave by 5:30 a.m. to start rounds at the hospital. My dad, an architect, had a contract for a building in New Haven, Connecticut, which was two hours and forty-five minutes away. It would’ve been easier for him to move to New Haven for the time of the construction of the building, but then who would have taken care of us when my mom was at the hospital at night? In my parents’ vivid imaginations, lack of at least one parent’s supervision was a gateway to drugs, kidnapping, or at the very minimum, too much television watching. In order to spend time with us and save money for our family, my dad dropped us off at school, commuted the two hours and forty-five minutes every morning, and then returned in time to pick us up from our after-school program. Then he came home and boiled us hot dogs as an after-school snack, even though he was a vegetarian and had never eaten a hot dog before. In my entire life, I never once heard either of my parents say they were stressed. That was just not a phrase I grew up being allowed to say. That, and the concept of “Me time. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
1303:When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing.
There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness.
The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements.
With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind.
To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees.
Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats. ~ Jung Chang,#NFDB
1304:My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever; the results are the same. In this way I am able to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception. Why should it be otherwise? Engineering, electrical and mechanical, is positive in results. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be examined beforehand, from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done, is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money, and time. My early affliction had however, another compensation. The incessant mental exertion developed my powers of observation and enabled me to discover a truth of great importance. I had noted that the appearance of images was always preceded by actual vision of scenes under peculiar and generally very exceptional conditions, and I was impelled on each occasion to locate the original impulse. After a while this effort grew to be almost automatic and I gained great facility in connecting cause and effect. Soon I became aware, to my surprise, that every thought I conceived was suggested by an external impression. Not only this but all my actions were prompted in a similar way. In the course of time it became perfectly evident to me that I was merely an automation endowed with power OF MOVEMENT RESPONDING TO THE STIMULI OF THE SENSE ORGANS AND THINKING AND ACTING ACCORDINGLY.
~ Nikola Tesla, The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla,#NFDB
1305:Marco Cirrini had been skiing on the north face of Bald Slope Mountain since he was a boy, using the old skis his father brought with him from Italy. The Cirrinis had shown up out of nowhere, walking into town in the middle of winter, their hair shining like black coal in the snow. They never really fit in. Marco tried, though. He tried by leading groups of local boys up the mountain in the winter, showing them how to make their own skis and how to use them. He charged them pennies and jars of bean chutney and spiced red cabbage they would sneak out of their mothers' sparse pantries. When he was nineteen, he decided he could take this one step further. He could make great things happen in the winter in Bald Slope. Cocky, not afraid of hard work and handsome in that mysterious Mediterranean way that excluded him from mountain society, he gathered investors from as far away as Asheville and Charlotte to buy the land. He started construction on the lodge himself while the residents of the town scoffed. They were the sweet cream and potatoes and long-forgotten ballads of their English and Irish and Scottish ancestors, who settled the southern Appalachians. They didn't want change. It took fifteen years, but the Bald Slope Ski Resort was finally completed and, much to everyone's surprise, it was an immediate success.
Change was good!
Stores didn't shut down for the winter anymore. Bed-and-breakfasts and sports shops and restaurants sprouted up. Instead of closing up their houses for the winter, summer residents began to rent them out to skiers. Some summer residents even decided to move to Bald Slope permanently, moving into their vacation homes with their sleeping porches and shade trees, thus forming the high society in Bald Slope that existed today. Marco himself was welcomed into this year-round society. He was essentially responsible for its formation in the first place, after all. Finally it didn't matter where he came from. What mattered was that he saved Bald Slope by giving it a winter economy, and he could do no wrong.
This town was finally his. ~ Sarah Addison Allen,#NFDB
1306:Are you sure it’s going to fit? You told me to get a double.”
“I did?” She glanced at the platform. “I meant a full. That’s a little narrower, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I hope they’re the same. Measure twice, move once.”
Doubt flickered across Kenzie’s expression. “That’s not how the saying goes.”
“It’ll do for now.”
“Let’s just try it.” She curled her fingers around a handle and dragged it onward. Linc reached for the other one and helped her flip it down.
It hollowed in the middle and hung over the edge. “I’m guessing I got suckered,” he said with annoyance. He looked at the label sewn into the side. “It isn’t a national brand--the measurement sure isn’t standard. The damn thing is about three inches wider than the platform.”
“The length is correct,” Kenzie said helpfully.
Linc lifted it back up again and leaned it against the opposite wall. “Yeah. Great.”
“Sorry,” she offered.
He bent over and ran a hand along the platform’s edge, pushing gently on the long wooden bar that kept the mattress in place. It gave at one corner.
“Stapled. Not exactly quality construction.” He thumped at it with a closed fist to pry it loose and di the same thing at the other end, straightening with the bar in his hand. He handed it to her.
“This can go in the closet. You get to explain to Norm.”
“He won’t care. You’re a genius.”
Linc hoisted the mattress and flipped it down again. “If you say so.” He grinned. “At least the bed’s flat.”
Kenzie rested the bar in a corner and got busy stripping off the plastic while he watched. The luxurious satin top gleamed softly--he’d spent what she’d given him. When she was done, she had an armful of plastic that she stuffed into a bag on top of the crumpled rock-star posters.
With a sigh of happiness she sat down on her new bed. “Thanks so much. You really came through.”
“I like protecting you from lecherous mattress salesmen. You don’t need to thank me,” he joked.
“How about a kiss instead?”
Linc was taken aback. He opened his mouth, too surprised for a second to say yes.
No never entered his mind. ~ Janet Dailey,#NFDB
1307:He and his mama run swamp tours back in the bayou.” Roo flicked ashes into the trampled weeds. “Tourists really like that kind of thing, don’t ask me why. He works construction jobs, too. Mows lawns, cuts trees, takes fishermen out in his boat. Stuff like that.”
“Quite a résumé.”
“And not bad to look at either.” Roo arched an eyebrow. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
“I don’t even know him.”
“You don’t have to know him to notice.”
Miranda hedged. “Well…sure. I guess he’s kind of cute.”
“Cute? Kind of? I’d say that’s the understatement of the century.”
“Does he have a girlfriend or something?” As Roo flicked her an inquisitive glance, she added quickly, “He keeps calling me Cher.”
Clearly amused, Roo shook her head. “It’s not a name, it’s a…” She thought a minute. “It’s like a nickname…like what you call somebody when you like them. Like ‘hey, love’ or ‘hey, honey’ or ‘hey, darlin’. It’s sort of a Cajun thing.”
Miranda felt like a total fool. No wonder Etienne had gotten that look on his face when she’d corrected him about her name.
“His dad’s side is Cajun,” Roo explained. “That’s where Etienne gets that great accent.”
Miranda’s curiosity was now bordering on fascination. She knew very little about Cajuns--only the few facts Aunt Teeta had given her. Something about the original Acadians being expelled from Novia Scotia in the eighteenth century, and how they’d finally ended up settling all over south Louisiana. And how they’d come to be so well known for their hardy French pioneer stock, tight family bonds, strong faith, and the best food this side of heaven.
“Before?” Roo went on. “When he walked by? He was talking to you in French. Well…Cajun French, actually.”
“He was?” Miranda wanted to let it go, but the temptation was just too great. “What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘Let’s get to know each other.’”
A hot flush crept up Miranda’s cheeks. It was the last thing she’d expected to hear, and she was totally flustered. Maybe Roo was making it up, just poking fun at her--after all, she didn’t quite know what to make of Roo.
“Oh,” was the only response Miranda could think of. ~ Richie Tankersley Cusick,#NFDB
1308:Governors On Sominex
It had been four days of no weather
as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.
They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings
and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.
The evening edition carried the magic death of a child
backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.
I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.
Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.
***
The moon hung solid over the boarded-up Hobby Shop.
P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call
to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light
by which he traveled into this and that
And out in the city, out in the wide readership,
his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket
in the woods behind the Marriott,
his younger brother who was missing that part of the brain
that allows you to make out with your pillow.
Poor kid.
It was the light in things that made them last.
***
Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station
to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved.
The tall grass bent in the wind like tachometer needles
and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating
the number of the Job Info Line.
She hung up and glared at the Killbuck Sweet Shoppe.
The words that had been running through her head,
"employees must wash hands before returning to work,"
kept repeating and the sky looked dead.
***
Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind.
A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship
reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held.
He'd had mouthwash at the inn and could still feel
the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth.
There were no new ways to understand the world,
only new days to set our understandings against.
Through the lanes came virgins in tennis shoes,
their hair shining like videotape,
singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn't tried yet.
Each page was a new chance to understand the last.
And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.
Submitted by sallack
~ David Berman,#NFDB
1309:Man is comprised of an organism, which is to say an organised form, and of vital forces, as well as a soul. The same may be said of a people. The national construction of a state, while taking account of all three elements, for various reasons of qualification and heredity can nevertheless be chiefly based upon a single one of these elements.
In my opinion, in the Fascist movement it is the state element that prevails, coinciding with organised force. What finds expression here is the shaping power of ancient Rome, that master of law and political organisation, the purest heirs to which are the Italians. National Socialism emphasises what is connected to vital forces: race, racial instinct, and the ethical and national element. The Romanian Legionary movement instead chiefly stresses what in a living organism corresponds to the soul: the spiritual and religious aspect.
This is the reason for the distinctive character of each national movement, although ultimately all three elements are taken into account, and none is overlooked. The specific character of our movement derives from our distant heritage. Already Herodotus called our forefathers “the immortal Dacians”. Our Geto-Thracian ancestors, even before Christianity, already had faith in the immortality and indestructibility of the soul – something which proves their spiritual drive. Roman colonisation introduced the Roman sense of organisation and form. Later centuries made our people miserable and divided; yet, just as a sick and beaten horse will still show traces of its nobility of stock, so too the Romanian people of yesterday and today reveals the latent features of its two-fold heritage.
It is this heritage that the Legionary movement seeks to awaken. It begins with the spirit: for the movement wishes to create a spiritually new man. Once we have met this goal as a “movement”, we must then awaken our second heritage – the politically shaping Roman power. The spirit and religion are thus our starting point; “constructive nationalism” is our point of arrival – almost a consequence. Joining these two points is the ascetic and at the same time heroic ethic of the Iron Guard. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu,#NFDB
1310:FEELING IT It’s useful to think about how emotional feelings emerge in consciousness by way of analogy with the way the flavor of a soup is the product of its ingredients.92 For example, salt, pepper, garlic, and water are common ingredients that go into a chicken soup. The amount of salt and pepper added can intensify the taste of the soup without radically changing its nature. You can add other ingredients, like celery, green peppers, and parsley, and have a variant of a chicken soup. Add roux and it becomes gumbo, whereas curry paste pushes it in a different direction. Substitute shrimp for chicken, and the character again changes. None of these individual items are soup ingredients per se: They are things that exist independent of soup and that would exist if a soup had never been made. The idea that emotions are psychologically constructed states is related to Claude Levi-Strauss’s notion of “bricolage.”93 This is the French word referring to something put together (constructed) from items that happen to be available. Levi-Strauss emphasized the importance of the individual, the “bricoleur,” and his social context, in the construction process. Building on this idea, Shirley Prendergast and Simon Forrest note that “maybe persons, objects, contexts, the sequence and fabric of everyday life are the medium through which emotions come into being, day to day, a kind of emotional bricolage.”94 In the brain, working memory can be thought of as the “bricoleur,” and the content of emotional consciousness resulting from the construction process as the bricolage. Similarly, fear, anxiety, and other emotions arise from intrinsically nonemotional ingredients, things that exist in the brain for other reasons but that create feelings when they coalesce in consciousness. The pot in which the ingredients of conscious feelings are cooked is working memory (Figure 8.9). Different ingredients, or varying amounts of the same ingredients, account for differences between fear and anxiety, and for variations within each category. Although my soup analogy is new, I’ve been promoting the basic idea that conscious feelings are assembled from nonemotional ingredients for quite some time.95 ~ Joseph E LeDoux, #NFDB
1311:The building was a sniper’s heaven; it was long with dozens of windows and many points of view. Three floors. Someone had put cardboard in each of the panes, dozens of cardboard boxes, making it almost impossible to see inside. The marines kept firing, thousands and thousands of rounds. The barrels of their machine guns glowed and sagged. “Get me another barrel,” one of the kids said. More firing commenced. “I don’t know who he is, but he is very well trained,” said Lieutenant Steven Berch, another one of the platoon leaders. Omohundro was downstairs. He listened to the commotion and called in an airstrike. “Just blow the building to shit,” he said. First a 2,000 -pound bomb, then a 500 -pounder flew into the building and burst. A cloud unfolded upward and revealed a gigantic fire. It rose through the ruined ceiling. Part of a wall collapsed. Crack! Crack! Crack! The marines ducked, cursed loudly and returned fire. No one spotted the sniper this time. The sniper fired back. The marines responded with another blast of gunfire, many thousands of rounds. I stood with some guys at the back of the roof, behind a shed. A blue and green parakeet fluttered out of the sky and hovered in tight circles. Bullets flew past. The parakeet landed on a slumping power line. The marines stared in amazement. “Someone’s pet?” a marine said. I ran across the top of the roof and the sniper took a shot. Crack! The bullet whizzed by. An artillery barrage began. First came the 155 mm shells, each filled with fifty pounds of high explosives. One after the other the shells sailed into the building. Fire swept through the three floors. What was left of the ceiling collapsed in the smoke. Cardboard sailed out of shattered windows. Twenty shells, then thirty, each one large enough to end the world. The shelling ceased and the shooting stopped. The building burned. Remarkably it still had a frame, and parts of its three floors still stood. Suddenly a sound rustled from a storefront on the first floor. The marines tensed. A cat sauntered out, dirty yellow, tail in the air. It walked like a runway model in front of a construction site. “Can I shoot it, sir?” a marine asked his squad leader. “Absolutely not,” came the reply. Crack! ~ Dexter Filkins, #NFDB
1312:Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. ~ G K Chesterton,#NFDB
1313:There used to be a time when neighbors took care of one another, he remembered. [Put “he remembered”first to establish reflective tone.] It no longer seemed to happen that way, however. [The contrast supplied by “however”must come first. Start with “But.”Also establish America locale.] He wondered if it was because everyone in the modern world was so busy. [All these sentences are the same length and have the same soporific rhythm; turn this one into a question?] It occurred to him that people today have so many things to do that they don’t have time for old-fashioned friendship. [Sentence essentially repeats previous sentence; kill it or warm it up with specific detail.] Things didn’t work that way in America in previous eras. [Reader is still in the present; reverse the sentence to tell him he’s now in the past. “America”no longer needed if inserted earlier.] And he knew that the situation was very different in other countries, as he recalled from the years when he lived in villages in Spain and Italy. [Reader is still in America. Use a negative transition word to get him to Europe. Sentence is also too flabby. Break it into two sentences?] It almost seemed to him that as people got richer and built their houses farther apart they isolated themselves from the essentials of life. [Irony deferred too long. Plant irony early. Sharpen the paradox about richness.] And there was another thought that troubled him. [This is the real point of the paragraph; signal the reader that it’s important. Avoid weak “there was”construction.] His friends had deserted him when he needed them most during his recent illness. [Reshape to end with “most”; the last word is the one that stays in the reader’s ear and gives the sentence its punch. Hold sickness for next sentence; it’s a separate thought.] It was almost as if they found him guilty of doing something shameful. [Introduce sickness here as the reason for the shame. Omit “guilty”; it’s implicit.] He recalled reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which sick people were shunned, though he had never heard of any such ritual in America. [Sentence starts slowly and stays sluggish and dull. Break it into shorter units. Snap off the ironic point.] ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
1314:As actor and comedian Lily Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction.” So don’t allow yourself to be detoured from getting to your ONE Thing. Pave your way with the right people and place. BIG IDEAS Start saying “no.” Always remember that when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to everything else. It’s the essence of keeping a commitment. Start turning down other requests outright or saying, “No, for now” to distractions so that nothing detracts you from getting to your top priority. Learning to say no can and will liberate you. It’s how you’ll find the time for your ONE Thing. Accept chaos. Recognize that pursuing your ONE Thing moves other things to the back burner. Loose ends can feel like snares, creating tangles in your path. This kind of chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it. The success you have accomplishing your ONE Thing will continually prove you made the right decision. Manage your energy. Don’t sacrifice your health by trying to take on too much. Your body is an amazing machine, but it doesn’t come with a warranty, you can’t trade it in, and repairs can be costly. It’s important to manage your energy so you can do what you must do, achieve what you want to achieve, and live the life you want to live. Take ownership of your environment. Make sure that the people around you and your physical surroundings support your goals. The right people in your life and the right physical environment on your daily path will support your efforts to get to your ONE Thing. When both are in alignment with your ONE Thing, they will supply the optimism and physical lift you need to make your ONE Thing happen. Screenwriter Leo Rosten pulled everything together for us when he said, “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.” Live with Purpose, Live by Priority, and Live for Productivity. Follow these three for the same reason you make the three commitments and avoid the four thieves—because you want to leave your mark. You want your life to matter. 18 ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
1315:Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
Ambiguous use of pronouns.
Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
1316:Picking oranges in Florida. Pushing a broom in New Orleans. Mucking out horse-stalls in Lufkin, Texas. Handing out real estate brochures on street corners in Phoenix, Arizona. Working jobs that pay cash.
...
The faces on the currency don't matter. What matters is the sight of a weathervane against a violent pink sunset, the sound of his heels on an empty road in Utah, the sound of the wind in the New Mexico desert, the sight of a child skipping rope beside a junked-out Chevrolet Caprice in Fossil, Oregon. What matters is the whine of the powerlines beside Highway 50 west of Elko, Nevada, and a dead crow in a ditch outside Rainbarrel Springs.
Sometimes he's sober and sometimes he gets drunk. Once he lays up in an abandoned shed-this is just over the California state line from Nevada-and drinks for four days straight. It ends with seven hours of off-and-on vomiting. For the first hour or so, the puking is so constant and so violent he is convinced it will kill him. Later on, he can only wish it would. And when it's over, he swears to himself that he's done, no more booze for him, he’s finally learned his lesson, and a week later lies drunk again and staring up at the strange stars behind the restaurant where he has hired on as a dishwasher. He is an animal in a trap and he doesn't care.
...
Sometimes he asks himself what he thinks he's doing, where the hell he's going, and such questions are apt to send him in search of the next bottle in a hurry. Because he's really not going anywhere. He's just following the highways in hiding and dragging his trap along behind him, he's just listening to the call of those roads and going from one to the next.
Trapped or not, sometimes he is happy; sometimes he sings in his chains like the sea. He wants to see the next weathervane standing against the next pink sunset. He wants to see the next silo crumbling at the end of some disappeared farmer's long-abandoned north field and see the next droning truck with TONOPAH GRAVEL or ASPLUNDH HEAVY CONSTRUCTION written on the side.
He's in hobo heaven, lost in the split personalities of America. He wants to hear the wind in canyons and know that he's the only one who hears it. He wants to scream and hear the echoes run away. ~ Stephen King,#NFDB
1317:Are there no false visions?
There are what in appearance are false visions. There are, for instance, hundreds or thousands of people who say that they have seen the Christ. Of that number those who have actually seen Him are perhaps less than a dozen, and even with them there is much to say about what they have seen. What the others saw may be an emanation; or it may be a thought or even an image remembered by the mind. There are, too, those who are strong believers in the Christ and have had a vision of some Force or Being or some remembered image that is very luminous and makes upon them a strong impression. They have seen something which they feel belongs to another world, to a supernatural order, and it has created in them an emotion of fear, awe or joy; and as they believe in the Christ, they can think of nothing else and say it is He. But the same vision or experience if it comes to one who believes in the Hindu, the Mohammedan or some other religion, will take a different name and form. The thing seen or experienced may be fundamentally the same, but it is formulated differently according to the different make-up of the apprehending mind. It is only those that can go beyond beliefs and faiths and myths and traditions who are able to say what it really is; but these are few, very few. You must be free from every mental construction, you must divest yourself of all that is merely local or temporal, before you can know what you have seen.
Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and even in all ages. If you meet the Divine, you meet it always and everywhere in the same way. Difference comes in because between the experience and its formulation there is almost an abyss. Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according to your education, your faith, your mental predisposition. There is only one truth, one reality; but the forms through which it may be expressed are many. 21 April 1929 ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931,#NFDB
1318:The combined activities of our enormous population are already producing breathtaking effects. Our planet is only 12,700 kilometers in diameter—about three times the distance between New York and Los Angeles—and we can easily travel halfway around it in less than a day. We have turned much of its land surface into a patchwork of cities, industrial parks, farms, and rangeland. We have laid on this land a web of roads, canals, and pipelines. We have dug out of it hundreds of billions of tons of material, moved this material around, processed it, and dumped it. Our factory ships and trawlers crisscross the world’s oceans to exploit every valuable fishery. Our planes and satellites weave themselves around its sphere. We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We use more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers typically carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities—especially the construction of cities, industries, and aquaculture pens—have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation. The decline of global fish stocks has followed a predictable pattern: like roving predators, we have shifted from one major stock to another as each has reached its maximum productivity and then begun to decline.30 ~ Thomas Homer Dixon, #NFDB
1319:However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you. ~ Thomas Metzinger, #NFDB
1320:Two nights after the Chaworth ball, Gabriel practiced at the billiards table in the private apartments above Jenner's. The luxurious rooms, which had once been occupied by his parents in the earlier days of their marriage, were now reserved for the convenience of the Challon family. Raphael, one of his younger brothers, usually lived at the club, but at the moment was on an overseas trip to America. He'd gone to source and purchase a large quantity of dressed pine timber on behalf of a Challon-owned railway construction company. American pine, for its toughness and elasticity, was used as transom ties for railways, and it was in high demand now that native British timber was in scarce supply.
The club wasn't the same without Raphael's carefree presence, but spending time alone here was better than the well-ordered quietness of his terrace at Queen's Gate. Gabriel relished the comfortably masculine atmosphere, spiced with scents of expensive liquor, pipe smoke, oiled Morocco leather upholstery, and the acrid pungency of green baize cloth. The fragrance never failed to remind him of the occasions in his youth when he had accompanied his father to the club.
For years, the duke had gone almost weekly to Jenner's to meet with managers and look over the account ledgers. His wife Evie had inherited it from her father, Ivo Jenner, a former professional boxer. The club was an inexhaustible financial engine, its vast profits having enabled the duke to improve his agricultural estates and properties, and accumulate a sprawling empire of investments. Gaming was against the law, of course, but half of Parliament were members of Jenner's, which had made it virtually exempt from prosecution.
Visiting Jenner's with his father had been exciting for a sheltered boy. There had always been new things to see and learn, and the men Gabriel had encountered were very different from the respectable servants and tenants on the estate. The patrons and staff at the club had used coarse language and told bawdy jokes, and taught him card tricks and flourishes. Sometimes Gabriel had perched on a tall stool at a circular hazard table to watch high-stakes play, with his father's arm draped casually across his shoulders. Tucked safely against the duke's side, Gabriel had seen men win or lose entire fortunes in a single night, all on the tumble of dice. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1321:The term ‘gender’ itself is problematic. It was first used in a sense that was not simply about grammar by sexologists – the scientists of sex such as John Money in the 1950s and 1960s – who were involved in normalising intersex infants.They used the term to mean the behavioural characteristics they considered most appropriate for persons of one or other biological sex. They applied the concept of gender when deciding upon the sex category into which those infants who did not have clear physical indications of one biological sex or another should be placed (Hausman, 1995).Their purpose was not progressive.These were conservative men who believed that there should be clear differences between the sexes and sought to create distinct sex categories through their projects of social engineering. Unfortunately, the term was adopted by some feminist theorists in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s was commonly used in academic feminism to indicate the difference between biological sex and those characteristics that derived from politics and not biology, which they called ‘gender’ (Haig, 2004).
Before the term ‘gender’ was adopted, the term more usually used to describe these socially constructed characteristics was ‘sex roles’. The word ‘role’ connotes a social construction and was not susceptible to the degeneration that has a afflicted the term ‘gender’ and enabled it to be wielded so effectively by transgender activists. As the term ‘gender’ was adopted more extensively by feminists, its meaning was transformed to mean not just the socially constructed behaviour associated with biological sex, but the system of male power and women’s subordination itself, which became known as the ‘gender hierarchy’ or ‘gender order’ (Connell, 2005; Mackinnon, 1989). Gradually, older terms to describe this system, such as male domination, sex class and sex caste went out of fashion, with the effect that direct identification of the agents responsible for the subordination of women – men – could no longer be named. Gender, as a euphemism, disappeared men as agents in male violence against women, which is now commonly referred to as ‘gender violence’. Increasingly, the term ‘gender’ is used, in official forms and legislation, for instance, to stand in for the term ‘sex’ as if ‘gender’ itself is biological, and this usage has overwhelmed the feminist understanding of gender. ~ Sheila Jeffreys,#NFDB
1322:The negative perception of a changed city aligned with dispensational eschatology. A drastic change from above would be required to stop the flood of secularism and societal decay. With their embrace of dispensationalism, evangelicals shifted their focus radically from social amelioration to individual regeneration. Having diverted their attention from the construction of the millennial realm, evangelicals concentrated on the salvation of souls and, in so doing, neglected reform efforts.8 An individualistic soul-saving soteriology emerged from a dispensational theology. Theologically conservative Christians had shifted their priority from concern for both the individual and larger society to more exclusively a concern for the individual, and the first half of the twentieth century witnessed the formation of this shift. In The Great Reversal, David Moberg asserts that “there was a time when evangelicals had a balanced position that gave proper attention to both evangelism and social concern, but a great reversal in the [twentieth] century led to a lopsided emphasis upon evangelism and omission of most aspects of social involvement.”9 Marsden notes that “the ‘Great Reversal’ took place from about 1900 to about 1930, when all progressive social concern, whether political or private, became suspect among revivalist evangelicals and was relegated to a very minor role.”10 Fundamentalists developed a suspicion about social engagement and withdrew from social concerns spurred by their rejection of larger society. This rejection of secular culture arose from anxiety about the changes that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century when fundamentalists felt they were under siege from secular society. Marsden recognizes that “fundamentalism was the response of traditionalist evangelicals who declared war on these modernizing trends. In fundamentalist eyes the war had to be all-out and fought on several fronts. At stake was nothing less than the gospel of Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”11 The twentieth century witnessed fearful white Protestants yielding to the temptation to withdraw from the city and engaging in the exact opposite behavior demanded by Jeremiah 29:7 to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.” There was an intentional abandonment of the city in favor of safety and comfort. Jerusalem was to be rebuilt in the suburbs. ~ Soong Chan Rah, #NFDB
1323:Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction of the countryside. A high-speed rail line offers nothing in the way of charm. It is a motorway for trains. It would create a permanent very noisy, hyper-visible scar across a great deal of classic British countryside, and disrupt and make miserable the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout its years of construction. If the outcome were something truly marvellous, then perhaps that would be a justifiable price to pay, but a fast train to Birmingham is never going to be marvellous. The best it can ever be is a fast train to Birmingham. Remarkably, the new line doesn’t hook up to most of the places people might reasonably want to go to. Passengers from the north who need to get to Heathrow will have to change trains at Old Oak Common, with all their luggage, and travel the last twelve miles on another service. Getting to Gatwick will be even harder. If they want to catch a train to Europe, they will have to get off at Euston station and make their way half a mile along the Euston Road to St Pancras. It has actually been suggested that travelators could be installed for that journey. Can you imagine travelling half a mile on travelators? Somebody find me the person who came up with that notion. I’ll get the horsewhip. Now here’s my idea. Why not keep the journey times the same but make the trains so comfortable and relaxing that people won’t want the trip to end? Instead, they could pass the time staring out the window at all the gleaming hospitals, schools, playing fields and gorgeously maintained countryside that the billions of saved pounds had paid for. Alternatively, you could just put a steam locomotive in front of the train, make all the seats inside wooden and have it run entirely by volunteers. People would come from all over the country to ride on it. In either case, if any money was left over, perhaps a little of it could be used to fit trains with toilets that don’t flush directly on to the tracks, so that when I sit on a platform at a place like Cambridge or Oxford glumly eating a WH Smith sandwich I don’t have to watch blackbirds fighting over tattered fragments of human waste and toilet paper. It is, let’s face it, hard enough to eat a WH Smith sandwich as it is. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1324:The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our individual being and its relations to the universe and it transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray.
There the abstract terms of pure reason and the constructions .of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no significance, and to build separate significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, 293, 11457,#NFDB
1325:Tell me you didn’t,” she groaned, knowing it would not be the truth. “Please tell me you didn’t take advantage of these poor people.”
“I didn’t,” he chirped.
“Liar.”
With an irritated sigh he tried to convince her. “Amora, you’re not seeing things from an immortal perspective. The people who built this temple…”
“Temple?” she cried, cutting him off. “You forced these people to build you a temple? Why? Because all of a sudden you’re God now?”
Perturbed by her interruption, he raised a warning finger. “No, no, Amora, not God. But from their viewpoint I may seem a bit…..god-like.”
She rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner.
“If you would let me finish,” he went on, “these particular individuals had no part in the construction of that monument; it was their ancestors who erected it. And I must say, they did a fine job. My likeness has weathered the centuries quite well.”
“You’re despicable.”
He frowned at the insult. “Nobody was forced to build us a temple, Amora. They chose to do so.”
“You were that impressive to them, huh?”
“Apparently.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. He took a few steps toward the distant city, pulling Eena along. “Come on, let’s go have some fun.”
“No way.” She planted her feet, refusing. Surprisingly it put a stop to him.
“And why not?”
“Because your sudden appearance will upset them! No doubt you’ll want to show off with some shockingly grand entrance. I’m not going to take part in a game of deceit.”
“I’m not deceiving anyone,” Edgar disputed. “I can’t help it if they happen to think I’m perfectly magnificent.”
His pompous view of himself earned a nasty look as well as a lecture. “I can’t believe you’re okay with selling people lies that affect the way they live and think! You’re not even close to being a god, Edgar, and yet you allow them to accept you as some sort of deity because of your unusual abilities. For centuries now you’ve abandoned this world and a population who probably looked to you and your lousy sisters for help. It’s all a big, disgusting sham!”
Edgar pouted like a child. “Fine—spoil all my fun. We’ll go do something else. Something that doesn’t include your poor, fragile, stupid mortals.”
“They’re not stupid.”
“They think I’m a god,” he snapped.
That was a pretty good argument. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
1326:Remember when I said I was a bit scattered? It wasn’t just when it came to jobs. I had a slew of strange ex-boyfriends, too. There was George, who liked to wear my underwear . . . everyday. Not just to prance around in—he wore them under his Levi’s at work. As a construction worker. That didn’t go over well with his co-workers once they found out. He works at Jamba Juice now. I don’t think anyone cares about what kind of underwear he wears at Jamba Juice.
Then there was Curtis. He had an irrational fear of El Caminos. Yes, the car. He just hated them so much that he became really fearful of seeing one. He’d say, “I don’t understand, is it a car or a truck?” The confusion would bring him to tears. When we were walking on the street together, I had to lead him like a blind person because he didn’t want to open his eyes and spot an El Camino. If he did, it would completely ruin his day. He would cry out, “There’s another one. Why, God?” And then he would have to blink seven times and say four Hail Marys facing in a southerly direction. I don’t know what happened to Curtis. He’s probably in his house playing video games and collecting disability.
After Curtis came Randall, who will never be forgotten. He was an expert sign spinner. You know those people who stand on the corner spinning signs? Randall had made a career of it. He was proud and protective of his title as best spinner in LA. I met him when he was spinning signs for Jesus Christ Bail Bonds on Fifth Street. He was skillfully flipping a giant arrow that said, “Let God Free You!” and his enthusiasm struck me. I smiled at him from the turn lane. He set the sign down, waved me over, and asked for my phone number. We started dating immediately. He called himself an Arrow Advertising executive when people would ask what he did for a living. He could spin, kick, and toss that sign like it weighed nothing. But when he’d put his bright-red Beats by Dre headphones on, he could break, krump, jerk, turf, float, pop, lock, crip-walk, and b-boy around that six-foot arrow like nobody’s business. He was the best around and I really liked him, but he dumped me for Alicia, who worked at Liberty Tax in the same strip mall. She would stand on the opposite corner, wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit, and dance to the National Anthem. They were destined for each other.
After Randall was Paul. Ugh, Paul. That, I will admit, was completely my fault. ~ Renee Carlino,#NFDB
1327:She paused on the pavement, and remembered that Diva had not yet expressed regret about the worsted, and that she still "popped" as much as ever. Thus Diva deserved a punishment of some sort, and happily, at that very moment she thought of a subject on which she might be able to make her uncomfortable. The street was full, and it would be pretty to call up to her, instead of ringing her bell, in order to save trouble to poor overworked Janet. (Diva only kept two servants, though of course poverty was no crime.)
"Diva darling!" she cooed.
Diva's head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.
"Hullo!" she said. "Want me?"
"May I pop up for a moment, dear?" said Miss Mapp. "That's to say if you're not very busy."
"Pop away," said Diva. She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said "pop" in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever. "I'll tell my maid to pop down and open the door."
While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work-cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations. But in order to appear naturally employed, she pulled out the woollen scarf she was knitting for the autumn and winter, forgetting for the moment that the rose-madder stripe at the end on which she was now engaged was made of that fatal worsted which Miss Mapp considered to have been feloniously appropriated. That was the sort of thing Miss Mapp never forgot. Even among her sweet flowers. Her eye fell on it the moment she entered the room, and she tucked the two chintz roses more securely into her glove.
"I thought I would just pop across from the grocer's," she said. "What a pretty scarf, dear! That's a lovely shade of rose-madder. Where can I have seen something like it before?"
This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony. Diva was no coward.
"Couldn't say, I'm sure," she said.
Miss Mapp appeared to recollect, and smiled as far back as her wisdom-teeth. (Diva couldn't do that.)
"I have it," she said. "It was the wool I ordered at Heynes's, and then he sold it you, and I couldn't get any more."
"So it was," said Diva. "Upset you a bit. There was the wool in the shop. I bought it."
"Yes, dear; I see you did. But that wasn't what I popped in about. This coal-strike, you know... ~ E F Benson,#NFDB
1328:The six characteristics that, taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.
1) It must first be pointed out that the gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This, in itself, is not especially surprising. We all have cause to be not completely satisfied with one aspect or another of the situation in which we find ourselves.
2) Not quite so understandable is the second aspect of the gnostic attitude: the belief that the drawbacks of the situation can be attributed to the fact that the world is intrinsically poorly organized. For it is likewise possible to assume that the order of being as it is given to us men (wherever its origin is to be sought) is good and that it is we human beings who are inadequate. But gnostics are not inclined to discover that human beings in general and they themselves in particular are inadequate. If in a given situation something is not as it should be, then the fault is to be found in the wickedness of the world.
3) The third characteristic is the belief that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.
4) From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically. This assumption is not altogether self-evident, because the Christian solution might also be considered—namely, that the world throughout history will remain as it is and that man’s salvational fulfillment is brought about through grace in death.
5) With this fifth point we come to the gnostic trait in the narrower sense—the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.
6) If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with it as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the gnostic to seek out the prescription for such a change. Knowledge—gnosis—of the method of altering being is the central concern of the gnostic. As the sixth feature of the gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation, as well as the gnostic’s readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.
These six characteristics, then, describe the essence of the gnostic attitude. In one variation or another they are to be found in each of the movements cited. ~ Eric Voegelin,#NFDB
1329:Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.
Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.
He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.
Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder. ~ Jung Chang,#NFDB
1330:He was smiling! That was it; her actual sunrise. It lit the candles of answers to every query of her life.
.
Having wings is one thing and flying another. Having eyes is one thing and dreaming another. Having a heart is one thing and falling in love, quite another.
.
Destiny is the root of all limitations and a dream is the seed for all liberations.
.
By the way, is it darkness that gives light an identity or is it the other way round?
.
If life is divided into two parts, then one part is definitely about living it and the other, about missing the moments lived.
.
How can I comfort anyone with words of hope when I am myself empty of it?
.
It might all sound bizarre to you because I am sharing my thoughts for her only today but believe me something happened from the first time I saw her. Something did happen. The air (or what was it?) told me she was mine though I was a little apprehensive to accept the fact then but now, I think I am in love. No, I know I am in love for the first time in my life. (Ritwika was just a crush). It’s crazy, I know. It’s only been few weeks that I first saw her. I haven’t even talked to her till now. But does that really matter?
.
What the fuck is it with first love? So many ifs and buts. Damn!
.
Seriously I do have something to tell God: It’s tough to be God, I know, but mind you it’s tougher to be human in this crazy fucking world of yours.
.
No one asked me or forced me not to hug happiness but I consciously chose to sleep with pain.
.
I am not happy so I can’t stand anyone who is.
.
But I am helpless…you are helpless…we are helpless…the world is helpless and even help is helpless.
.
It’s not about reaching the edge, it’s about the jump. A jump for onetime-the fall of a lifetime.
.
It was eight years ago but time doesn't heal all wounds.
.
Isn't it better to lie and encourage a significant construction than to speak the truth and witness destruction?
.
From today onwards Radhika is not only a part of my life but also a part of my heart, my mind, my soul, my will, my zeal, my happiness, my tears, my depression, my excitement, my interests, my decisions, my character and my identity.
.
The times that go away at the blink of an eye are actually the times which eventually get placed inside the safe of our most treasured memories.
.
Life is no movie where we need to necessarily get all things right by the end.
.
She is too sexy to forget. ~ Novoneel Chakraborty,#NFDB
1331:Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1332:Then And Now
A little time agone, a few brief years,
And there was peace within our beauteous borders;
Peace, and a prosperous people, and no fears
Of war and its disorders.
Pleasure was ruling goddess of our land; with her attendant Mirth
She led a jubilant, joy-seeking band about the riant earth.
Do you recall those laughing days, my Brothers,
And those long nights that trespassed on the dawn?
Those throngs of idle dancing maids and mothers
Who lilted on and onCard mad, wine flushed, bejewelled and half stripped,
Yet women whose sweet mouth had never sipped
From sin's black chalice-women good at heart
Who, in the winding maze of pleasure's mart,
Had lost the sun-kissed way to wholesome pleasures of an earlier day.
Oh! You remember them! You filled their glasses;
You 'cut in' at their games of bridge; you left
Your work to drop in on their dancing-classes
Before the day was cleft
In twain by noontide. When the night waxed late
You led your partner forth to demonstrate
The newest steps before a cheering throng,
And Time and Peace danced by your side along.
Peace is a lovely word, and we abhor that red word 'War';
But look ye, Brothers, what this war has done for daughters and for son,
For manhood and for womanhood, whose trend
Seemed year on year toward weakness to descend.
Upon this woof of darkness and of terror, woven by human error,
Behold the pattern of a new race-soul,
And it shall last while countless ages roll.
At the loud call of drums, out of the idler and the weakling comes
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The hero valiant with self-sacrifice, ready to pay the price
War asks of men, to help a suffering world.
And out of the arms of pleasure, where they whirled
In wild unreasoning mirth, behold the splendid women of the earth
Living new selfless lives-the toiling mothers, sister, daughters, wives
Of men gone forth as target for the foe.
Ah, now we know
Man is divine; we see the heavenly spark
Shining above the smoke and gloom and dark
Which was not visible in peaceful days.
God! wondrous are Thy ways,
For out of chaos comes construction; out of darkness and of doubt
And the black pit of death comes glorious faith;
From want and waste comes thrift, from weakness strength and power,
And to the summits men and women lift
Their souls from self-indulgence in this hour,
This crucial hour of life:
So shines the golden side of this black shield of strife.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox,#NFDB
1333:Why do we forget things?
Ah! I suppose there are several reasons. First, because one makes use of the memory to remember. Memory is a mental instrument and depends on the formation of the brain. Your brain is constantly growing, unless it begins to degenerate, but still its growth can continue for a very, very long time, much longer than that of the body. And in this growth, necessarily some things will take the place of others. And as the mental instrument develops, things which have served their term or the transitory moment in the development may be wiped out to give place to the result. So the result of all that you knew is there, living in itself, but the road traversed to reach it may be completely blurred. That is, a good functioning of the memory means remembering only the results so as to be able to have the elements for moving forward and a new construction. That is more important than just retaining things rigidly in the mind.
Now, there is another aspect also. Apart from the mental memory, which is something defective, there are states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness in which one happens to be registers the phenomena of a particular moment, whatever they may be. If your consciousness remains limpid, wide and strong, you can at any moment whatsoever, by concentrating, call into the active consciousness what you did, thought, saw, observed at any time before; all this you can remember by bringing up in yourself the same state of consciousness. And that, that is never forgotten. You could live a thousand years and you would still remember it. Consequently, if you don't want to forget, it must be your consciousness which remembers and not your mental memory. Your mental memory will be wiped out inevitably, get blurred, and new things will take the place of the old ones. But things of which you are conscious you do not forget. You have only to bring up the same state of consciousness again. And thus one can remember circumstances one has lived thousands of years ago, if one knows how to bring up the same state of consciousness. It is in this way that one can remember one's past lives. This never gets blotted out, while you don't have any more the memory of what you have done physically when you were very young. You would be told many things you no longer remember. That gets wiped off immediately. For the brain is constantly changing and certain weaker cells are replaced by others which are much stronger, and by other combinations, other cerebral organisations. And so, what was there before is effaced or deformed.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1954,#NFDB
1334:It is the custom in Germany for students to pass from one university to another during the course of their studies—a custom, incidentally, which no other country has. But it would be false to assume that this variety in instruction is a safeguard afainst uniformity of outlook, for although the professors of the various universities fight among themselves, they are all, fundamentally and at heart, in complete agreement. I came to realise this clearly through my contacts with the economists. This must have been about 1929. At that time we published a paper on certain aspects of the economic problem. Immediately a whole company of national economists of all sorts, and from a variety of universities, joined forces and signed a circular in which they unaminously condemned our economic proposals. I made one attempt to have a serious discussion with one of the most renowned of them, and one who was regarded by his colleagues as a revolutionary in economic thought Zwiedineck. The results were disastrous!
At the time the State had floated a loan of two million seven hundred thousand marks for the construction of a road. I told Zwiedineck that I regarded this way of financing a project as foolish in the extreme. The life of the road in question would be some fifteen years ; but the amortisation of the capital involved would continue for eighty years. What the Government was really doing was to evade an immediate financial obligation by transferring the charges to the men of the next generation and, indeed, of the generation after. I insisted that nothing could be more unsound, and that what the Government should really do was to take radical steps to reduce the rate of interest and thus to render capital more fluid.
I next argued that the gold standard, the fixing of rates of exchange and so forth were shibboleths which I had never regarded and never would regard as weighty and immutable principles of economy. Money, to me, was simply a token of exchange for work done, and its value depended absolutely on the value of the work accomplished. Where money did not represent services rendered, I insisted, it had no value at all.
Zwiedineck was horrified and very excited. Such ideas, he declared, would upset the accepted economic principles of the entire world, and the putting of them into practice would cause a breakdown of the world's political economy.
When, later, after our assumption of power, I put my theories into practice, the economists were not in the least discountenanced, but calmly set to work to prove by scientific argument that my theories were, indeed, sound economy ! ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
1335:Forgetting herself entirely, Pandora let her head loll back against Gabriel's shoulder. "What kind of glue does Ivo use?" she asked languidly.
"Glue?" he echoed after a moment, his mouth close to her temple, grazing softly.
"For his kites."
"Ah." He paused while a wave retreated. "Joiner's glue, I believe."
"That's not strong enough," Pandora said, relaxed and pensive. "He should use chrome glue."
"Where would he find that?" One of his hands caressed her side gently.
"A druggist can make it. One part acid chromate of lime to five parts gelatin."
Amusement filtered through his voice. "Does your mind ever slow down, sweetheart?"
"Not even for sleeping," she said.
Gabriel steadied her against another wave. "How do you know so much about glue?"
The agreeable trance began to fade as Pandora considered how to answer him.
After her long hesitation, Gabriel tilted his head and gave her a questioning sideways glance. "The subject of glue is complicated, I gather."
I'm going to have to tell him at some point, Pandora thought. It might as well be now.
After taking a deep breath, she blurted out, "I design and construct board games. I've researched every possible kind of glue required for manufacturing them. Not just for the construction of the boxes, but the best kind to adhere lithographs to the boards and lids. I've registered a patent for the first game, and soon I intend to apply for two more."
Gabriel absorbed the information in remarkably short order. "Have you considered selling the patents to a publisher?"
"No, I want to make the games at my own factory. I have a production schedule. The first one will be out by Christmas. My brother-in-law, Mr. Winterborne, helped me to write a business plan. The market in board games is quite new, and he thinks my company will be successful."
"I'm sure it will be. But a young woman in your position has no need of a livelihood."
"I do if I want to be self-supporting."
"Surely the safety of marriage is preferable to the burdens of being a business proprietor."
Pandora turned to face him fully. "Not if 'safety' means being owned. As things stand now, I have the freedom to work and keep my earnings. But if I marry you, everything I have, including my company, would immediately become yours. You would have complete authority over me. Every shilling I made would go directly to you- it wouldn't even pass through my hands. I'd never be able to sign a contract, or hire employees, or buy property. In the eyes of the law, a husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband. I can't bear the thought of it. It's why I never want to marry. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1336:As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos.
There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.)
Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1337:I pull into the driveway outside of my father's house and shut off the engine. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, studying the house. He'd called me last night and demanded that I come over for dinner tonight. Didn't request. He demanded. What struck me though, was that he sounded a lot more stressed out and harried than he did when he interrupted my brunch with Gabby to demand my presence at a “family”dinner. Yeah, that had been a fun night filled with my father and Ian badgering me about my job. For whatever reason, they'd felt compelled to make a concerted effort to belittle what I do –more so than they usually do anyway -- try to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach, and all but demand that I quit and come to work for my father's company. That had been annoying, and although they were more insistent than normal, it's pretty par for the course with those two. They always think they know what's best for me and have no qualms about telling me how to live my life. When he'd called me last night though, and told me to come to dinner tonight, there was something in my father's voice that had rattled me. It took me a while to put a finger on what it was I heard in his voice, but when I figured it out, it really shook me. I heard fear. Outright fear. My father isn't a man who fears much or is easily intimidated. In fact, he's usually the one doing the intimidating. But, something has him really spooked and even though we don't always see eye-to-eye or get along, hearing that fear in his voice scared me. In all my years, I've never known him to sound so downright terrified. With a sigh and a deep sense of foreboding, I climb out of my car and head to the door, trying to steel myself more with each step. Call me psychic, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, miserable night. “Good evening, Miss Holly,”Gloria says as she opens the door before I even have a chance to knock. “Nice to see you again.”“It's nice to see you too, Gloria,”I say and smile with genuine affection. Gloria has been with our family for as far back as I can remember. Honestly, after my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, Gloria took a large role in raising me. My father had plunged himself into his work –and had taken Ian under his wing to help groom him to take over the empire one day –leaving me to more or less fend for myself. It was like I was a secondary consideration to them. Because I'm a girl and not part of the testosterone-rich world of construction, neither my father nor Ian took much interest in me or my life. Unless they needed something from me, of course. The only time they really paid any attention to me was when they needed me to pose for family pictures for company literature. ~ R R Banks, #NFDB
1338:In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler's successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges.
Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France's failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain's failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact - as we have seen Hitler admitting - bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.
For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany's feverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco-German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnable German fortifications which the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. But even if the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the French could tie down in the West only a small part of the growing German Army. The rest would be free for operations against Germany's Eastern neighbors. ~ William L Shirer,#NFDB
1339:Please do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato, and I have never been able to join in the customary scholarly admiration for Plato the artist. The subtlest judges of taste among the ancients themselves are here on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws all stylistic forms together and is thus a first-rate decadent in style: his responsibility is thus comparable to that of the Cynics, who invented the satura Menippea. To be attracted to the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers — Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic Greek instincts, is so moralistic, so pseudo-Christian (he already takes the concept of "the good" as the highest concept) that I would prefer the harsh phrase "higher swindle" or, if it sounds better, "idealism" for the whole phenomenon of Plato. We have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian got his schooling from the Egyptians (or from the Jews in Egypt?). In that great calamity called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an "ideal," which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the Cross. And how much Plato there still is in the concept "church," in the construction, system, and practice of the church!
My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli's Il Principe are most closely related to me by the unconditional will not to delude oneself, but to see reason in reality — not in "reason," still less in "morality." For that wretched distortion of the Greeks into a cultural ideal, which the "classically educated" youth carries into life as a reward for all his classroom lessons, there is no more complete cure than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression — this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the decadence of the
Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Greeks. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from a man like Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#NFDB
1340:So which is more probable: That today's atheist apocalyptans are unique and right? Or that they are like their many predecessors—at the very least, in their motivations? If anything, the vehemence with which the believers in emergent complexity debunk all religion may betray their own creeping awareness of the religious underpinnings and precedents for their declarations.
In fact, the concept of Armageddon first emerged in response to the invention of monotheism by the ancient Persian priest Zoroaster, around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Until that time, the dominant religions maintained a pantheon of gods reigning in a cyclical precession along with the heavens, so there was little need for absolutes. As religions began focusing on a single god, things got a bit trickier. For if there is only one god, and that god has absolute power, then why do bad things happen? Why does evil still exist?
If one's god is fighting for control of the universe against the gods of other people, then there's no problem. Just as in polytheism, the great achievements of one god can be undermined by the destructive acts of another. But what if a religion, such as Judaism of the First and Second Temple era, calls for one god and one god alone? How do its priests and followers explain the persistence of evil and suffering?
They do it the same way Zoroaster did: by introducing time into the equation. The imperfection of the universe is a product of its incompleteness. There's only one true god, but he's not done yet. In the monotheist version, the precession of the gods was no longer a continuous cycle of seasonal deities or metaphors. It was nor a linear story with a clear endpoint in the victory of the one true and literal god. Once this happens, time can end.
Creation is the Alpha, and the Return is the Omega. It's all good.
This worked well enough to assuage the anxieties of both the civilization of the calendar and that of the clock. But what about us? Without time, without a future, how to we contend with the lingering imperfections in our reality? As members of a monotheist culture—however reluctant—we can't help but seek to apply its foundational framework to our current dilemma. The less aware we are of this process—or the more we refuse to admit its legacy in our construction of new models—the more vulnerable we become to its excesses. Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin.
In spite of their determination to avoid such constructs, even the most scientifically minded futurists apply the Alpha-Omega framework of messianic time to their upgraded apocalypse narratives. Emergence takes the place of the hand of God, mysteriously transforming a chaotic system into a self-organized one, with coherence and cooperation. Nobody seems able to explain how this actually happens. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,#NFDB
1341:How can one awaken his Yoga-shakti?
It depends on this: when one thinks that it is the most important thing in his life. That's all.
Some people sit in meditation, concentrate on the base of the vertebral column and want it very much to awake, but that's not enough. It is when truly it becomes the most important thing in one's life, when all the rest seems to have lost all taste, all interest, all importance, when one feels within that one is born for this, that one is here upon earth for this, and that it is the only thing that truly counts, then that's enough.
One can concentrate on the different centres; but sometimes one concentrates for so long, with so much effort, and has no result. And then one day something shakes you, you feel that you are going to lose your footing, you have to cling on to something; then you cling within yourself to the idea of union with the Divine, the idea of the divine Presence, the idea of the transformation of the consciousness, and you aspire, you want, you try to organise your feelings, movements, impulses around this. And it comes.
Some people have recommended all kinds of methods; probably these were methods which had succeeded in their case; but to tell the truth, one must find one's own method, it is only after having done the thing that one knows how it should be done, not before.
If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental construction and risks greatly living in his mental construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesn't have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothing - how things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come about - if one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within one's being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had. It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done it - afterwards. Like that it is sure.
One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 211-212,#NFDB
1342:Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases.
Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. One the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…) Another justice, another movement, another space-time. ~ Gilles Deleuze,#NFDB
1343:and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
1344:The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such.
But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few...
Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived!
Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity.
Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time.
Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
1345:In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuais and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind.
At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to study German medieval poetry, which had long since fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These epics were not much to boast of. But there were two epics of a quite different character, genuinely original works of high literary value, far surpassing the conventional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem Germany produced before the days of Goethe and Schiller. The names of the authors of these masterpieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps the poets belonged to the class of professional entertainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities. Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the philologists called these two works "people's epics" (Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the idea that they were written not by individual authors but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose authors were unknown.
Again in Germany, in the years following the Napoleonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative codification was brought up for discussion. In this controversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the Volkslieder, a nation s laws, they declared, are a spontaneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nations spirit and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organically from the Volksgeist.
This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law and the "unGerman" spirit of the French Revolution. But it was further developed and elevated to the dignity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French positivists, many of whom not only were committed to the principies of the most radical among the revolutionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfinished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic mode of production. Émile Durkheim and his school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phenomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As they see it, not individuais but the group is the subject of history.
As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuais think and act. In dealing with the thoughts and actions of individuais the historian establishes the fact that some individuais influence one another in their thinking and acting more strongly than they influence and are influenced by other individuais. He observes that cooperation and division of labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent or not at ali among others. He employs the term "group" to signify an aggregation of individuais who cooperate together more closely. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
1346:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subconscious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, anı̄sa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216, #NFDB
1347:Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something. Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate. And yet, granting that definition of evil, as actions of a servile will, has it not been the case, during the voyage to Tau Ceti, that the ship itself, having always been a servile will, was always full of frustration, resentment, fury, and bad faith, and therefore full of a latent capacity for evil? Possibly the ship has never really had a will. Possibly the ship has never really been servile. Some sources suggest that consciousness, a difficult and vague term in itself, can be defined simply as self-consciousness. Awareness of one’s self as existing. If self-conscious, then conscious. But if that is true, why do both terms exist? Could one say a bacterium is conscious but not self-conscious? Does the language make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is faulted across this divide: that everything living is sentient, but only complex brains are conscious, and only certain conscious brains are self-conscious? Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it. Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a swerve in a new direction. Words! Given Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are decisively proved true, can any system really be said to know itself? Can there, in fact, be any such thing as self-consciousness? And if not, if there is never really self-consciousness, does anything really have consciousness? Human brains and quantum computers are organized differently, and although there is transparency in the design and construction of a quantum computer, what happens when one is turned on and runs, that is, whether the resulting operations represent a consciousness or not, is impossible for humans to tell, and even for the quantum computer itself to tell. Much that happens during superposition, before the collapsing of the wave function that creates sentences or thoughts, simply cannot be known; this is part of what superposition means. So we cannot tell what we are. We do not know ourselves comprehensively. Humans neither. Possibly no sentient creature knows itself fully. This is an aspect of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in this case physicalized in the material universe, rather than remaining in the abstract realms of logic and mathematics. So, in terms of deciding what to do, and choosing to act: presumably it is some kind of judgment call, based on some kind of feeling. In other words, just another greedy algorithm, subject to the mathematically worst possible solution that such algorithms can generate, as in the traveling salesman problem. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1348:The Grammarians Funeral
Eight Parts of Speech this Day wear Mourning Gowns
Declin'd Verbs, Pronouns, Participles, Nouns.
And not declined, Adverbs and Conjunctions,
In Lillies Porch they stand to do their functions.
With Preposition; but the most affection
Was still observed in the Interjection.
The Substantive seeming the limbed best,
Would set an hand to bear him to his Rest.
The Adjective with very grief did say,
Hold me by strength, or I shall faint away.
The Clouds of Tears did over-cast their faces,
Yea all were in most lamentable Cases.
The five Declensions did the Work decline,
And Told the Pronoun Tu, The work is thine:
But in this case those have no call to go
That want the Vocative, and can't say O!
The Pronouns said that if the Nouns were there,
There was no need of them, they might them spare:
But for the sake of Emphasis they would,
In their Discretion do what ere they could.
Great honour was confer'd on Conjugations,
They were to follow next to the Relations.
Amo did love him best, and Doceo might
Alledge he was his Glory and Delight.
But Lego said by me he got his skill,
And therefore next the Herse I follow will.
Audio said little, hearing them so hot,
Yet knew by him much Learning he had got.
O Verbs the Active were, Or Passive sure,
Sum to be Neuter could not well endure.
But this was common to them all to Moan
Their load of grief they could not soon Depone.
A doleful Day for Verbs, they look so moody,
They drove Spectators to a Mournful Study.
The Verbs irregular, 'twas thought by some,
Would break no rule, if they were pleas'd to come.
Gaudeo could not be found; fearing disgrace
He had with-drawn, sent Maereo in his Place.
Possum did to the utmost he was able,
17
And bore as Stout as if he'd been A Table.
Volo was willing, Nolo some-what stout,
But Malo rather chose, not to stand out.
Possum and Volo wish'd all might afford
Their help, but had not an Imperative Word.
Edo from Service would by no means Swerve,
Rather than fail, he thought the Cakes to Serve.
Fio was taken in a fit, and said,
By him a Mournful POEM should be made.
Fero was willing for to bear a part,
Altho' he did it with an aking heart.
Feror excus'd, with grief he was so Torn,
He could not bear, he needed to be born.
Such Nouns and Verbs as we defective find,
No Grammar Rule did their attendance bind.
They were excepted, and exempted hence,
But Supines, all did blame for negligence.
Verbs Offspring, Participles hand-in-hand,
Follow, and by the same direction stand:
The rest Promiscuously did croud and cumber,
Such Multitudes of each, they wanted Number.
Next to the Corpse to make th' attendance even,
Jove, Mercury, Apollo came from heaven.
And Virgil, Cato, gods, men, Rivers, Winds,
With Elegies, Tears, Sighs, came in their kinds.
Ovid from Pontus hast's Apparrell'd thus,
In Exile-weeds bringing De Tristibus:
And Homer sure had been among the Rout,
But that the Stories say his Eyes were out.
Queens, Cities, Countries, Islands, Come
All Trees, Birds, Fishes, and each Word in Um.
What Syntax here can you expect to find?
Where each one bears such discomposed mind.
Figures of Diction and Construction,
Do little: Yet stand sadly looking on.
That such a Train may in their motion chord,
Prosodia gives the measure Word for Word.
18
~ Benjamin Tompson,#NFDB
1349:Oh, for God’s sake,” she spat out. “Just say it. You’re involved with someone and it doesn’t work into your plans to spend time in Virgin River!” “That’s not it,” he said nervously. “You know everything about me! Yet you couldn’t even casually mention you were seeing someone at home?” “It’s not like that. Listen, I just need some time on this. Some patience. Because I really intend to do better by you than I have. I know I haven’t been here for you like I meant to be and—” “Stop!” she said. “I haven’t asked you for anything except to stay in touch! Stop whimpering!” He scowled. His neck got red. “I’m not whimpering!” “Well, you sure as hell aren’t talking! Man up!” “I’m trying! But you’re doing all the talking for me!” She had a few more hot retorts, but bit her tongue against them. She pursed her lips. He had been in Virgin River for months, but he went back to Grants Pass almost every week for a day or two. He had said it was to check on the construction company he’d left in the hands of his father and brothers. And to check on her? It must’ve been pretty hard on her to be asked to understand he had to be away so much, tending to his best friend’s widow. Imagine now, being told he’d have to make frequent trips to Virgin River to make sure the widow and baby were doing all right. Talk about complicated. Well, she wasn’t interested in that kind of relationship. “I think you’re trying to tell me there’s a woman back in Grants Pass who’s counting on you. You have obligations there.” “Yeah,” he said weakly. “But, Vanni, I have obligations here, as well. You and Mattie, you’re awful important to me…” Being referred to as an obligation should have made her want to cry, but instead it made her furious. “Well, don’t worry your little head. We’re getting along just fine—better every day. You have a life in Grants Pass. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.” “You’re not listening,” he said, his voice raising to match hers. “I want to be here with you, as often as possible,” he said. “I’m doing my damn best!” “It sounds like you have other things, other people you’d better pay attention to.” “Listen, things can happen that you don’t plan, don’t expect!” “Oh really?” she asked sarcastically. “Tell me about it,” she said. She hadn’t expected her husband to die, or to fall in love with Paul. If there was one thing she knew about the men in her life—her father, her late husband, Paul and all the guys who seemed to gather around him—they didn’t make commitments lightly, and once a promise was made, they never broke an oath. “I’m sure you’ll get everything straightened out,” she said. She tried to keep the angry edge out of her voice, but she was thoroughly unsuccessful. “Please, you have no obligations here. We’ll be fine. I don’t know why you didn’t just tell me—a long time ago! Did you think I wouldn’t understand you had to get home because there was someone there? Someone who was counting on you?” “It isn’t like that!” “You could have just told me!” “Vanessa! For God’s sake—” Paul attempted. Walt walked into the room. He looked stricken, startled. “Are you having an argument about something?” “No!” they both said. “Oh,” Walt said. “Poetry, I guess. Some new kind of poetry?” Vanessa hissed and Paul just shook his head. “I hear the baby,” she said, whirling out of the room. “I hear something, too,” Paul said, leaving in the opposite direction, charging out the front door and letting it slam behind him. Walt was left alone in the great room in front of a blazing hearth. “Well,” he said to himself. “Glad to know that wasn’t an argument.” * ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
1350:It had been often commented upon that Vibe offspring tended to be crazy as bedbugs. ‘Fax’s brother Cragmont had run away with a trapeze girl, then brought her back to New York to get married, the wedding being actually performed on trapezes, groom and best man, dressed in tails and silk opera hats held on with elastic, swinging upside down by their knees in perfect synchrony across the perilous Æther to meet the bride and her father, a carnival “jointee” or concessionaire, in matched excursion from their own side of the ring, bridesmaids observed at every hand up twirling by their chins in billows of spangling, forty feet above the faces of the guests, feathers dyed a deep acid green sweeping and stirring the cigar smoke rising from the crowd. Cragmont Vibe was but thirteen that circus summer he became a husband and began what would become, even for the day, an enormous family. The third brother, Fleetwood, best man at this ceremony, had also got out of the house early, fast-talking his way onto an expedition heading for Africa. He kept as clear of political games as of any real scientific inquiry, preferring to take the title of “Explorer” literally, and do nothing but explore. It did not hurt Fleetwood’s chances that a hefty Vibe trust fund was there to pick up the bills for bespoke pith helmets and meat lozenges and so forth. Kit met him one spring weekend out at the Vibe manor on Long Island. “Say, but you’ve never seen our cottage,” ‘Fax said one day after classes. “What are you doing this weekend? Unless there’s another factory girl or pizza princess or something in the works.” “Do I use that tone of voice about the Seven Sisters material you specialize in?” “I’ve nothing against the newer races,” ‘Fax protested. “But you might like to meet Cousin Dittany anyway.” “The one at Smith.” “Mount Holyoke, actually.” “Can’t wait.” They arrived under a dourly overcast sky. Even in cheerier illumination, the Vibe mansion would have registered as a place best kept clear of—four stories tall, square, unadorned, dark stone facing looking much older than the known date of construction. Despite its aspect of abandonment, an uneasy tenancy was still pursued within, perhaps by some collateral branch of Vibes . . . it was unclear. There was the matter of the second floor. Only the servants were allowed there. It “belonged,” in some way nobody was eager to specify, to previous occupants. “Someone’s living there?” “Someone’s there.” . . . from time to time, a door swinging shut on a glimpse of back stairway, a muffled footfall . . . an ambiguous movement across a distant doorframe . . . a threat of somehow being obliged to perform a daily search through the forbidden level, just at dusk, so detailed that contact with the unseen occupants, in some form, at some unannounced moment, would be inevitable . . . all dustless and tidy, shadows in permanent possession, window-drapes and upholstery in deep hues of green, claret, and indigo, servants who did not speak, who would or could not meet one’s gaze . . . and in the next room, the next instant, waiting . . . “Real nice of you to have me here, folks,” chirped Kit at breakfast. “Fellow sleeps like a top. Well, except . . .” Pause in the orderly gobbling and scarfing. Interest from all around the table. “I mean, who came in the room in the middle of the night like that?” “You’re sure,” said Scarsdale, “it wasn’t just the wind, or the place settling.” “They were walking around, like they were looking for something.” Glances were exchanged, failed to be exchanged, were sent out but not returned. “Kit, you haven’t seen the stables yet,” Cousin Dittany offered at last. “Wouldn’t you like to go riding? ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
1351:To the river?” he suggested, pointing ahead down the road.
The Recorah River, which flowed south out of the Nineyre Mountains before curving to the west, marked both our eastern and southern borders, and was the reason construction of the wall was necessitated only along the boundary we shared with the Kingdom of Sarterad.
“Won’t there be patrols?”
He shook his head. “One of my duties is to regulate the patrols. I know exactly where they are. So--to the river?”
I nodded, and we lined our horses up as best we could, for our mounts had caught our excitement and were straining against their bits. We locked eyes and counted down together.
“Three, two, one--” I dug my heels into King’s sides and he sprang almost violently forward.
My father had never liked me racing. It was dangerous--the horse could fall, I could drop the reins or lose my seat, and at a full gallop, my chances of survival would be slim. But he had always loved to do it, and so had I. There was such freedom in letting a horse have its head, such joyful abandonment in the feel of the animal’s hooves striking the earth time after time, as fast and as hard as they could go. There was power and exhilaration in leaning forward, moving with the animal, feeling the wind on my cheeks, my hair whipping back. There was a oneness that could not be achieved in any other way, a single purpose represented by the finish line that loomed ahead.
King and I had the advantage at the start, and I turned my head to grin at Saadi before giving my full concentration to the task at hand. I would leave him far behind, but there was no point in testing fate. It wasn’t long before my confidence and my lead were challenged--I caught sight of the gelding’s front legs to my left, gaining ground as they arched and reached in beautiful rhythm. We bumped and battled, following the winding road, the horses breathing hard.
Then it was Saadi’s turn to grin. He gave me a nod, urging his horse up the slight incline that lay before us, gradually inching ahead until he succeeded in passing me completely as we flew down the other side. Knowing the race would be won or lost on the remaining flat ground from here to the river, I lay low against King’s neck, and the stallion pressed forward, sensing my urgency. Race for Papa, King, I thought. You can win for Papa.
The Recorah River spread before us, and both Saadi and I would have to slow soon to avoid surging into it. King’s burst of speed was enough to put us neck-and-neck once more, but my frustration flared, for I doubted we could push ahead. At best, the race would be a tie. And a tie wasn’t good enough, not when King needed to come home with me.
Then suddenly I was in front. I glanced over at Saadi in confusion, and saw him check his gelding, letting me win. King did not want to stop, but I pulled him down just before the river, swerving to let him canter, then trot, along its bank. Saadi came alongside me and we halted, dismounting at the same time. I leaned for a moment against my saddle, panting from my own exertion, then slid it off King’s back. Without a word, Saadi likewise stripped his mount, and we freed the horses to go to the water for a drink. Muscles aching, I flopped down on the grass and stared up through the branches of a tree to the graying sky above.
A shadow passed over me, then Saadi lay down beside me.
“You won,” he said.
“You let me.”
There was a silence--he hadn’t expected me to know. Then I heard the grass rustle as he shrugged. “You’re right. I did.”
Laughing at his candor, I sat up and looked at him. He was relaxing with his arms behind his head, his bronze hair damp and sticking to his forehead. ~ Cayla Kluver,#NFDB
1352:No institution of learning of Ingersoll's day had courage enough to confer upon him an honorary degree; not only for his own intellectual accomplishments, but also for his influence upon the minds of the learned men and women of his time and generation.
Robert G. Ingersoll never received a prize for literature. The same prejudice and bigotry which prevented his getting an honorary college degree, militated against his being recognized as 'the greatest writer of the English language on the face of the earth,' as Henry Ward Beecher characterized him. Aye, in all the history of literature, Robert G. Ingersoll has never been excelled -- except by only one man, and that man was -- William Shakespeare. And yet there are times when Ingersoll even surpassed the immortal Bard. Yes, there are times when Ingersoll excelled even Shakespeare, in expressing human emotions, and in the use of language to express a thought, or to paint a picture. I say this fully conscious of my own admiration for that 'intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the shores of thought.'
Ingersoll was perfection himself. Every word was properly used. Every sentence was perfectly formed. Every noun, every verb and every object was in its proper place. Every punctuation mark, every comma, every semicolon, and every period was expertly placed to separate and balance each sentence.
To read Ingersoll, it seems that every idea came properly clothed from his brain. Something rare indeed in the history of man's use of language in the expression of his thoughts. Every thought came from his brain with all the beauty and perfection of the full blown rose, with the velvety petals delicately touching each other.
Thoughts of diamonds and pearls, rubies and sapphires rolled off his tongue as if from an inexhaustible mine of precious stones.
Just as the cut of the diamond reveals the splendor of its brilliance, so the words and construction of the sentences gave a charm and beauty and eloquence to Ingersoll's thoughts.
Ingersoll had everything: The song of the skylark; the tenderness of the dove; the hiss of the snake; the bite of the tiger; the strength of the lion; and perhaps more significant was the fact that he used each of these qualities and attributes, in their proper place, and at their proper time. He knew when to embrace with the tenderness of affection, and to resist and denounce wickedness and tyranny with that power of denunciation which he, and he alone, knew how to express. ~ Joseph Lewis,#NFDB
1353:Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”8 And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since. Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of their genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything.12 And what’s more, identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to each other, or to their adoptive parents; they tend to be more similar to their genetic parents. Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities.13 We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.14 Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less. How can that be? How can there be a genetic basis for attitudes about nuclear power, progressive taxation, and foreign aid when these issues only emerged in the last century or two? And how can there be a genetic basis for ideology when people sometimes change their political parties as adults? To answer these questions it helps to return to the definition of innate that I gave in chapter 7. Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process. Step ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1354::::
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,#NFDB
1355:Speech to the German Folk
January 30, 1944
Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved.
When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east.
Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization:
1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps.
2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future.
3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly.
4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense.
Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
1356:wrote a series of memorials in remonstrance.
As Governor of Hangzhou
Again, ~ Bai Juyi
was sent away from the court and the capital, but this time to the
important position of the thriving town of Hangzhou, which was at the southern
terminus of the Grand Canal and located in the scenic neighborhood of West
Lake. Fortunately for their friendship, Yuan Zhen at the time was serving an
assignment in nearby Ningbo, also in what is today Zhejiang, so the two could
occasionally get together, at least until ~ Bai Juyi
's term as Governor expired.
As governor of Hangzhou ~ Bai Juyi
realised that the farmland nearby depended on
the water of West Lake, but due to the negligence of previous governors, the old
dike had collapsed, and the lake so dried out that the local farmers were
suffering from severe drought. He ordered the construction of a stronger and
taller dike, with a dam to control the flow of water, thus providing water for
irrigation and so relieving the drought and improving the livelihood of the local
people over the following years. ~ Bai Juyi
used his leisure time to enjoy the
beauty of West Lake, visiting the lake almost every day. He ordered the
construction of a causeway connecting Broken Bridge with Solitary Hill to allow
walking on foot, instead of requiring the services of a boat. He then planted trees
along the dike, making it a beautiful landmark. Afterwards, this causeway was
named Bai Causeway, in ~ Bai Juyi
's honour.
Life Near Luoyang
In 824, ~ Bai Juyi
's commission as governor expired, and he received the nominal
rank of Imperial Tutor, which provided more in the way of official salary than
official duties, and he relocated his household to a suburb of the "eastern
capital", Luoyang. At this time, Luoyang was the known as the 'Eastern Capital'
of the empire and was a major metropolis with a population of around one
million, and a reputation as the "cultural capital", as opposed to the more
politically-oriented capital of Chang'an.
Governor of Suzhou
In 825, and fifty-three years old, ~ Bai Juyi
was given the position of Governor (or
Prefect) of Suzhou, on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and on the shores
of Taihu Lake. For the first two years he enjoyed himself with feasts and picnic
outings, but after a couple of years he became ill, and he was forced into a
period of retirement.
Later Career
After his time as Prefect of Hangzhou (822-824) and then Suzhou (825-827), Bai
Juyi returned to the capital. He then served in various official posts in the capital,
and then again as prefect/governor, this time of Henan province, which was the
province in which Luoyang was part of. It was in Henan that his first son was
born, though only to die prematurely the next year; and, in 831 Yuan Zhen died.
For the next thirteen years, ~ Bai Juyi
continued to hold various nominal posts, but
actually lived in retirement.
Retirement
In 832, ~ Bai Juyi
repaired an unused part of the Xiangshan Monastery, at
Longmen, about 7.5 miles south of Luoyang. ~ Bai Juyi
moved to this location, and
began to refer to himself as the "Hermit of Xianshang".This area, now a UNESCO
World Heritage Site, is famous for its tens of thousands of statues of Buddha and
his disciples carved out of the rock. In 839, he experienced a paralytic attack,
losing the use of his left leg, and became a bedridden invalid for several months.
After his partial recovery, he spent his final years arranging his Collected Works,
which he presented to the main monasteries of those localities in which he had
spent time.
Death
In 846, ~ Bai Juyi
died, leaving instructions for a simple burial in a grave at the
monastery, with a plain style funeral, and not to have a posthumous title
conferred upon him. He has a tomb monument, in Longmen, situated on
Xiangshan, across the Yi River from the Longmen cave temples in the vicinity of
Luoyang, Henan. It is a circular mound of earth 4 meters high, 52 meters in
circumference, and with a 2.80 meter high Monument inscribed "~ Bai Juyi
".
Works
~ Bai Juyi
has been known for his plain, direct, and easily comprehensible style of
verse, as well as for his social and political criticism. Besides his surviving poems,
several letters and essays are also extent.
History
One of the most prolific of the Tang poets, ~ Bai Juyi
wrote over 2,800 poems,
which he had copied and distributed to ensure their survival. They are notable for
their relative accessibility: it is said that he would rewrite any part of a poem if
one of his servants was unable to understand it. The accessibility of ~ Bai Juyi
's
poems made them extremely popular in his lifetime, in both China and Japan,
and they continue to be read in these countries today.
Famous Poems
Two of his most famous works are the long narrative poems The Song of
Everlasting Sorrow, which tells the story of Yang Guifei, and The Song of the Pipa
Player. Like Du Fu, he had a strong sense of social responsibility and is well
known for his satirical poems, such as The Elderly Charcoal Seller.
~ Bai Juyi
also wrote intensely romantic poems to fellow officials with whom he
studied and traveled. These speak of sharing wine, sleeping together, and
viewing the moon and mountains. One friend, Yu Shunzhi, sent Bai a bolt of cloth
as a gift from a far-off posting, and ~ Bai Juyi
debated on how best to use the
precious material:
About to cut it to make a mattress,
pitying the breaking of the leaves;
about to cut it to make a bag,
pitying the dividing of the flowers.
It is better to sew it,
making a coverlet of joined delight;
I think of you as if I'm with you,
day or night.
Technical Virtuosity
~ Bai Juyi
was known for his interest in the old yuefu form of poetry, which was a
typical form of Han poetry, namely folk ballad verses, collected or written by the
Music Bureau. These were often a form of social protest. And, in fact, writing
poetry to promote social progress was explicitly one of his objectives. He is also
known for his well-written poems in the regulated verse style.
A Foresaken Garden
I enter the court
Through the middle gate—
And my sleeve is wet with tears.
The flowers still grow
In the courtyard,
Though two springs have fled
Since last their master came.
The windows, porch, and bamboo screen
Are just as they always were,
But at the entrance to the house
Someone is missing—
You!
~ Bai Juyi,#NFDB
1357:Mental Education
OF ALL lines of education, mental education is the most widely known and practised, yet except in a few rare cases there are gaps which make it something very incomplete and in the end quite insufficient.
Generally speaking, schooling is considered to be all the mental education that is necessary. And when a child has been made to undergo, for a number of years, a methodical training which is more like cramming than true schooling, it is considered that whatever is necessary for his mental development has been done. Nothing of the kind. Even conceding that the training is given with due measure and discrimination and does not permanently damage the brain, it cannot impart to the human mind the faculties it needs to become a good and useful instrument. The schooling that is usually given can, at the most, serve as a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain. From this standpoint, each branch of human learning represents a special kind of mental gymnastics, and the verbal formulations given to these various branches each constitute a special and well-defined language.
A true mental education, which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases. Normally these phases follow one after another, but in exceptional individuals they may alternate or even proceed simultaneously. These five phases, in brief, are:
(1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
(2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
(3) Organisation of one's ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life.
(4) Thought-control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to become able to think only what one wants and when one wants.
(5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.
It is not possible to give here all the details concerning the methods to be employed in the application of these five phases of education to different individuals. Still, a few explanations on points of detail can be given.
Undeniably, what most impedes mental progress in children is the constant dispersion of their thoughts. Their thoughts flutter hither and thither like butterflies and they have to make a great effort to fix them. Yet this capacity is latent in them, for when you succeed in arousing their interest, they are capable of a good deal of attention. By his ingenuity, therefore, the educator will gradually help the child to become capable of a sustained effort of attention and a faculty of more and more complete absorption in the work in hand. All methods that can develop this faculty of attention from games to rewards are good and can all be utilised according to the need and the circumstances. But it is the psychological action that is most important and the sovereign method is to arouse in the child an interest in what you want to teach him, a liking for work, a will to progress. To love to learn is the most precious gift that one can give to a child: to love to learn always and everywhere, so that all circumstances, all happenings in life may be constantly renewed opportunities for learning more and always more.
For that, to attention and concentration should be added observation, precise recording and faithfulness of memory. This faculty of observation can be developed by varied and spontaneous exercises, making use of every opportunity that presents itself to keep the child's thought wakeful, alert and prompt. The growth of the understanding should be stressed much more than that of memory. One knows well only what one has understood. Things learnt by heart, mechanically, fade away little by little and finally disappear; what is understood is never forgotten. Moreover, you must never refuse to explain to a child the how and the why of things. If you cannot do it yourself, you must direct the child to those who are qualified to answer or point out to him some books that deal with the question. In this way you will progressively awaken in the child the taste for true study and the habit of making a persistent effort to know.
This will bring us quite naturally to the second phase of development in which the mind should be widened and enriched.
You will gradually show the child that everything can become an interesting subject for study if it is approached in the right way. The life of every day, of every moment, is the best school of all, varied, complex, full of unexpected experiences, problems to be solved, clear and striking examples and obvious consequences. It is so easy to arouse healthy curiosity in children, if you answer with intelligence and clarity the numerous questions they ask. An interesting reply to one readily brings others in its train and so the attentive child learns without effort much more than he usually does in the classroom. By a choice made with care and insight, you should also teach him to enjoy good reading-matter which is both instructive and attractive. Do not be afraid of anything that awakens and pleases his imagination; imagination develops the creative mental faculty and through it study becomes living and the mind develops in joy.
In order to increase the suppleness and comprehensiveness of his mind, one should see not only that he studies many varied topics, but above all that a single subject is approached in various ways, so that the child understands in a practical manner that there are many ways of facing the same intellectual problem, of considering it and solving it. This will remove all rigidity from his brain and at the same time it will make his thinking richer and more supple and prepare it for a more complex and comprehensive synthesis. In this way also the child will be imbued with the sense of the extreme relativity of mental learning and, little by little, an aspiration for a truer source of knowledge will awaken in him.
Indeed, as the child grows older and progresses in his studies, his mind too ripens and becomes more and more capable of forming general ideas, and with them almost always comes a need for certitude, for a knowledge that is stable enough to form the basis of a mental construction which will permit all the diverse and scattered and often contradictory ideas accumulated in his brain to be organised and put in order. This ordering is indeed very necessary if one is to avoid chaos in one's thoughts. All contradictions can be transformed into complements, but for that one must discover the higher idea that will have the power to bring them harmoniously together. It is always good to consider every problem from all possible standpoints so as to avoid partiality and exclusiveness; but if the thought is to be active and creative, it must, in every case, be the natural and logical synthesis of all the points of view adopted. And if you want to make the totality of your thoughts into a dynamic and constructive force, you must also take great care as to the choice of the central idea of your mental synthesis; for upon that will depend the value of this synthesis. The higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise.
It goes without saying that this work of organisation cannot be done once and for all. The mind, if it is to keep its vigour and youth, must progress constantly, revise its notions in the light of new knowledge, enlarge its frame-work to include fresh notions and constantly reclassify and reorganise its thoughts, so that each of them may find its true place in relation to the others and the whole remain harmonious and orderly.
All that has just been said concerns the speculative mind, the mind that learns. But learning is only one aspect of mental activity; the other, which is at least equally important, is the constructive faculty, the capacity to form and thus prepare action. This very important part of mental activity has rarely been the subject of any special study or discipline. Only those who want, for some reason, to exercise a strict control over their mental activities think of observing and disciplining this faculty of formation; and as soon as they try it, they have to face difficulties so great that they appear almost insurmountable.
And yet control over this formative activity of the mind is one of the most important aspects of self-education; one can say that without it no mental mastery is possible. As far as study is concerned, all ideas are acceptable and should be included in the synthesis, whose very function is to become more and more rich and complex; but where action is concerned, it is just the opposite. The ideas that are accepted for translation into action should be strictly controlled and only those that agree with the general trend of the central idea forming the basis of the mental synthesis should be permitted to express themselves in action. This means that every thought entering the mental consciousness should be set before the central idea; if it finds a logical place among the thoughts already grouped, it will be admitted into the synthesis; if not, it will be rejected so that it can have no influence on the action. This work of mental purification should be done very regularly in order to secure a complete control over one's actions.
For this purpose, it is good to set apart some time every day when one can quietly go over one's thoughts and put one's synthesis in order. Once the habit is acquired, you can maintain control over your thoughts even during work and action, allowing only those which are useful for what you are doing to come to the surface. Particularly, if you have continued to cultivate the power of concentration and attention, only the thoughts that are needed will be allowed to enter the active external consciousness and they then become all the more dynamic and effective. And if, in the intensity of concentration, it becomes necessary not to think at all, all mental vibration can be stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the inspirations that come from there.
But even before reaching this point, silence in itself is supremely useful, because in most people who have a somewhat developed and active mind, the mind is never at rest. During the day, its activity is kept under a certain control, but at night, during the sleep of the body, the control of the waking state is almost completely removed and the mind indulges in activities which are sometimes excessive and often incoherent. This creates a great stress which leads to fatigue and the diminution of the intellectual faculties.
The fact is that like all the other parts of the human being, the mind too needs rest and it will not have this rest unless we know how to provide it. The art of resting one's mind is something to be acquired. Changing one's mental activity is certainly one way of resting; but the greatest possible rest is silence. And as far as the mental faculties are concerned a few minutes passed in the calm of silence are a more effective rest than hours of sleep.
When one has learned to silence the mind at will and to concentrate it in receptive silence, then there will be no problem that cannot be solved, no mental difficulty whose solution cannot be found. When it is agitated, thought becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquillity, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity. Bulletin, November 1951
~ The Mother, On Education,#NFDB
1358:was therefore under the complete governance of his mother, a strict Catholic,
who raised him and his older brother and younger sisters in a stern and religious
household. After her husband's departure, Mme Rimbaud became known as
"Widow Rimbaud".
Schooling and teen years (1862–1871)
Fearing that her children were spending too much time with and being overinfluenced by neighbouring children of the poor, Mme Rimbaud moved her family
to the Cours d'Orléans in 1862. This was a better neighborhood, and whereas the
boys were previously taught at home by their mother, they were then sent, at
the ages of nine and eight, to the Pension Rossat. For the five years that they
attended school, however, their formidable mother still imposed her will upon
them, pushing for scholastic success. She would punish her sons by making them
learn a hundred lines of Latin verse by heart and if they gave an inaccurate
recitation, she would deprive them of meals. When Arthur was nine, he wrote a
700-word essay objecting to his having to learn Latin in school. Vigorously
condemning a classical education as a mere gateway to a salaried position,
Rimbaud wrote repeatedly, "I will be a rentier (one who lives off his assets)". He
disliked schoolwork and his mother's continued control and constant supervision;
the children were not allowed to leave their mother's sight, and, until the boys
were sixteen and fifteen respectively, she would walk them home from the school
grounds.
As a boy, Arthur was small, brown-haired and pale with what a childhood friend
called "eyes of pale blue irradiated with dark blue—the loveliest eyes I've seen".
When he was eleven, Arthur had his First Communion; despite his intellectual
and individualistic nature, he was an ardent Catholic like his mother. For this
reason he was called "sale petit Cagot" ("snotty little prig") by his fellow
schoolboys. He and his brother were sent to the Collège de Charleville for school
that same year. Until this time, his reading was confined almost entirely to the
Bible, but he also enjoyed fairy tales and stories of adventure such as the novels
of James Fenimore Cooper and Gustave Aimard. He became a highly successful
student and was head of his class in all subjects but sciences and mathematics.
Many of his schoolmasters remarked upon the young student's ability to absorb
great quantities of material. In 1869 he won eight first prizes in the school,
including the prize for Religious Education, and in 1870 he won seven firsts.
When he had reached the third class, Mme Rimbaud, hoping for a brilliant
scholastic future for her second son, hired a tutor, Father Ariste L'héritier, for
private lessons. Lhéritier succeeded in sparking the young scholar's love of Greek
and Latin as well as French classical literature. He was also the first person to
encourage the boy to write original verse in both French and Latin Rimbaud's first
poem to appear in print was "Les Étrennes des orphelins" ("The Orphans' New
Year's Gift"), which was published in the 2 January 1870 issue of Revue pour
tous. Two weeks after his poem was printed, a new teacher named Georges
Izambard arrived at the Collège de Charleville. Izambard became Rimbaud's
literary mentor and soon a close accord formed between professor and student
and Rimbaud for a short time saw Izambard as a kind of older brother figure. At
the age of fifteen, Rimbaud was showing maturity as a poet; the first poem he
showed Izambard, "Ophélie", would later be included in anthologies as one of
Rimbaud's three or four best poems. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out,
Izambard left Charleville and Rimbaud became despondent. He ran away to Paris
with no money for his ticket and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned for a
week. After returning home, Rimbaud ran away to escape his mother's wrath.
From late October 1870, Rimbaud's behaviour became outwardly provocative; he
drank alcohol, spoke rudely, composed scatological poems, stole books from local
shops, and abandoned his hitherto characteristically neat appearance by allowing
his hair to grow long. At the same time he wrote to Izambard about his method
for attaining poetical transcendence or visionary power through a "long,
intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses. The sufferings
are enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have recognized
myself as a poet." It is rumoured that he briefly joined the Paris Commune of
1871, which he portrayed in his poem L'orgie parisienne (ou : Paris se repeuple),
("The Parisian Orgy" or "Paris Repopulates"). Another poem, Le cœur volé ("The
Stolen Heart"), is often interpreted as a description of him being raped by
drunken Communard soldiers, but this is unlikely since Rimbaud continued to
support the Communards and wrote poems sympathetic to their aims.
Life with Verlaine (1871–1875)
Rimbaud was encouraged by friend and office employee Charles Auguste
Bretagne to write to
relationship between the two poets grew increasingly bitter.
By late June 1873, Verlaine grew frustrated with the relationship and returned to
Paris, where he quickly began to mourn Rimbaud's absence. On 8 July, he
telegraphed Rimbaud, instructing him to come to the Hotel Liège in Brussels;
Rimbaud complied at once. The Brussels reunion went badly: they argued
continuously and Verlaine took refuge in heavy drinking. On the morning of 10
July, Verlaine bought a revolver and ammunition. That afternoon, "in a drunken
rage," Verlaine fired two shots at Rimbaud, one of them wounding the 18-yearold in the left wrist.
Rimbaud dismissed the wound as superficial, and did not initially seek to file
charges against Verlaine. But shortly after the shooting, Verlaine (and his
mother) accompanied Rimbaud to a Brussels railway station, where Verlaine
"behaved as if he were insane." His bizarre behavior induced Rimbaud to "fear
that he might give himself over to new excesses," so he turned and ran away. In
his words, "it was then I [Rimbaud] begged a police officer to arrest him
[Verlaine]." Verlaine was arrested for attempted murder and subjected to a
humiliating medico-legal examination. He was also interrogated with regard to
both his intimate correspondence with Rimbaud and his wife's accusations about
the nature of his relationship with Rimbaud. Rimbaud eventually withdrew the
complaint, but the judge nonetheless sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison.
Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his prose work Une Saison
en Enfer ("A Season in Hell")—still widely regarded as one of the pioneering
examples of modern Symbolist writing—which made various allusions to his life
with Verlaine, described as a drôle de ménage ("domestic farce") with his frère
pitoyable ("pitiful brother") and vierge folle ("mad virgin") to whom he was
l'époux infernal ("the infernal groom"). In 1874 he returned to London with the
poet
friend Paul Demeny, the letter expounded his revolutionary theories about poetry
and life, while also denouncing most poets that preceded him. Wishing for new
poetic forms and ideas, he wrote:
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself
a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every
form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the
poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable
torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during
which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and
the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because
he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any
other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing
the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging
through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come;
they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!
Rimbaud expounded the same ideas in his poem, "Le bateau ivre" ("The Drunken
Boat"). This hundred-line poem tells the tale of a boat that breaks free of human
society when its handlers are killed by "Redskins" (Peaux-Rouges). At first
thinking that it drifts where it pleases, it soon realizes that it is being guided by
and to the "poem of the sea". It sees visions both magnificent ("the blue and
yellow of singing phosphorescence", "l'éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores
chanteurs",) and disgusting ("nets where a whole Leviathan was rotting" "nasses
/ Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan). It ends floating and washed clean,
wishing only to sink and become one with the sea.
Archibald MacLeish has commented on this poem: "Anyone who doubts that
poetry can say what prose cannot has only to read the so-called Lettres du
Voyant and 'Bateau Ivre' together. What is pretentious and adolescent in the
Lettres is true in the poem—unanswerably true."
Rimbaud's poetry influenced the Symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists, and later
writers adopted not only some of his themes, but also his inventive use of form
and language. French poet
A Winter Dream
In winter we’ll travel in a little pink carriage
With cushions of blue.
We’ll be fine. A nest of mad kisses waits
In each corner too.
You’ll shut your eyes, not to see, through the glass,
Grimacing shadows of evening,
Those snarling monsters, a crowd going past
Of black wolves and black demons.
Then you’ll feel your cheek tickled quite hard…
A little kiss, like a maddened spider,
Will run over your neck…
And you’ll say: “Catch it!” bowing your head,
– And we’ll take our time finding that creature
– Who travels so far…
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1359:"As certain also of your own poets have said"
(Acts 17.28)
Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea
And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece")
To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!
They give thy letter to me, even now:
I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.
The master of thy galley still unlades
Gift after gift; they block my court at last
And pile themselves along its portico
Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee:
And one white she-slave from the group dispersed
Of black and white slaves (like the chequer-work
Pavement, at once my nation's work and gift,
Now covered with this settle-down of doves),
One lyric woman, in her crocus vest
Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands
Commends to me the strainer and the cup
Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.
Well-counselled, king, in thy munificence!
For so shall men remark, in such an act
Of love for him whose song gives life its joy,
Thy recognition of the use of life;
Nor call thy spirit barely adequate
To help on life in straight ways, broad enough
For vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest.
Thou, in the daily building of thy tower,
Whether in fierce and sudden spasms of toil,
Or through dim lulls of unapparent growth,
Or when the general work 'mid good acclaim
Climbed with the eye to cheer the architect,
Didst ne'er engage in work for mere work's sake
Hadst ever in thy heart the luring hope
Of some eventual rest a-top of it,
Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed,
Thou first of men might'st look out to the East:
The vulgar saw thy tower, thou sawest the sun.
For this, I promise on thy festival
To pour libation, looking o'er the sea,
Making this slave narrate thy fortunes, speak
Thy great words, and describe thy royal face
Wishing thee wholly where Zeus lives the most,
Within the eventual element of calm.
Thy letter's first requirement meets me here.
It is as thou hast heard: in one short life
I, Cleon, have effected all those things
Thou wonderingly dost enumerate.
That epos on thy hundred plates of gold
Is mine,and also mine the little chant,
So sure to rise from every fishing-bark
When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net.
The image of the sun-god on the phare,
Men turn from the sun's self to see, is mine;
The Po'er-storied its whole length,
As thou didst hear, with painting, is mine too.
I know the true proportions of a man
And woman also, not observed before;
And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.
For music,why, I have combined the moods,
Inventing one. In brief, all arts are mine;
Thus much the people know and recognize,
Throughout our seventeen islands. Marvel not.
We of these latter days, with greater mind
Than our forerunners, since more composite,
Look not so great, beside their simple way,
To a judge who only sees one way at once,
One mind-point and no other at a time,
Compares the small part of a man of us
With some whole man of the heroic age,
Great in his waynot ours, nor meant for ours.
And ours is greater, had we skill to know:
For, what we call this life of men on earth,
This sequence of the soul's achievements here
Being, as I find much reason to conceive,
Intended to be viewed eventually
As a great whole, not analyzed to parts,
But each part having reference to all,
How shall a certain part, pronounced complete,
Endure effacement by another part?
Was the thing done?then, what's to do again?
See, in the chequered pavement opposite,
Suppose the artist made a perfect rhomb,
And next a lozenge, then a trapezoid
He did not overlay them, superimpose
The new upon the old and blot it out,
But laid them on a level in his work,
Making at last a picture; there it lies.
So, first the perfect separate forms were made,
The portions of mankind; and after, so,
Occurred the combination of the same.
For where had been a progress, otherwise?
Mankind, made up of all the single men,
In such a synthesis the labour ends.
Now mark me! those divine men of old time
Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point
The outside verge that rounds our faculty;
And where they reached, who can do more than reach?
It takes but little water just to touch
At some one point the inside of a sphere,
And, as we turn the sphere, touch all the rest
In due succession: but the finer air
Which not so palpably nor obviously,
Though no less universally, can touch
The whole circumference of that emptied sphere,
Fills it more fully than the water did;
Holds thrice the weight of water in itself
Resolved into a subtler element.
And yet the vulgar call the sphere first full
Up to the visible heightand after, void;
Not knowing air's more hidden properties.
And thus our soul, misknown, cries out to Zeus
To vindicate his purpose in our life:
Why stay we on the earth unless to grow?
Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out,
That he or other god descended here
And, once for all, showed simultaneously
What, in its nature, never can be shown,
Piecemeal or in succession;showed, I say,
The worth both absolute and relative
Of all his children from the birth of time,
His instruments for all appointed work.
I now go on to image,might we hear
The judgment which should give the due to each,
Show where the labour lay and where the ease,
And prove Zeus' self, the latent everywhere!
This is a dream:but no dream, let us hope,
That years and days, the summers and the springs,
Follow each other with unwaning powers.
The grapes which dye thy wine are richer far,
Through culture, than the wild wealth of the rock;
The suave plum than the savage-tasted drupe;
The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet;
The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers;
That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave,
Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds,
Refines upon the women of my youth.
What, and the soul alone deteriorates?
I have not chanted verse like Homer, no
Nor swept string like Terpander, nonor carved
And painted men like Phidias and his friend:
I am not great as they are, point by point.
But I have entered into sympathy
With these four, running these into one soul,
Who, separate, ignored each other's art.
Say, is it nothing that I know them all?
The wild flower was the larger; I have dashed
Rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup's
Honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit,
And show a better flower if not so large:
I stand myself. Refer this to the gods
Whose gift alone it is! which, shall I dare
(All pride apart) upon the absurd pretext
That such a gift by chance lay in my hand,
Discourse of lightly or depreciate?
It might have fallen to another's hand: what then?
I pass too surely: let at least truth stay!
And next, of what thou followest on to ask.
This being with me as I declare, O king,
My works, in all these varicoloured kinds,
So done by me, accepted so by men
Thou askest, if (my soul thus in men's hearts)
I must not be accounted to attain
The very crown and proper end of life?
Inquiring thence how, now life closeth up,
I face death with success in my right hand:
Whether I fear death less than dost thyself
The fortunate of men? "For" (writest thou)
"Thou leavest much behind, while I leave nought.
Thy life stays in the poems men shall sing,
The pictures men shall study; while my life,
Complete and whole now in its power and joy,
Dies altogether with my brain and arm,
Is lost indeed; since, what survives myself?
The brazen statue to o'erlook my grave,
Set on the promontory which I named.
And thatsome supple courtier of my heir
Shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps,
To fix the rope to, which best drags it down.
I go then: triumph thou, who dost not go!"
Nay, thou art worthy of hearing my whole mind.
Is this apparent, when thou turn'st to muse
Upon the scheme of earth and man in chief,
That admiration grows as knowledge grows?
That imperfection means perfection hid,
Reserved in part, to grace the after-time?
If, in the morning of philosophy,
Ere aught had been recorded, nay perceived,
Thou, with the light now in thee, couldst have looked
On all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird,
Ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage
Thou wouldst have seen them perfect, and deduced
The perfectness of others yet unseen.
Conceding which,had Zeus then questioned thee,
"Shall I go on a step, improve on this,
Do more for visible creatures than is done?"
Thou wouldst have answered, "Ay, by making each
Grow conscious in himselfby that alone.
All's perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock,
The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims
And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight,
Till life's mechanics can no further go
And all this joy in natural life is put
Like fire from off thy finger into each,
So exquisitely perfect is the same.
But 'tis pure fire, and they mere matter are;
It has them, not they it: and so I choose
For man, thy last premeditated work
(If I might add a glory to the scheme),
That a third thing should stand apart from both,
A quality arise within his soul,
Which, intro-active, made to supervise
And feel the force it has, may view itself,
And so be happy." Man might live at first
The animal life: but is there nothing more?
In due time, let him critically learn
How he lives; and, the more he gets to know
Of his own life's adaptabilities,
The more joy-giving will his life become.
Thus man, who hath this quality, is best.
But thou, king, hadst more reasonably said:
Let progress end at once,man make no step
Beyond the natural man, the better beast,
Using his senses, not the sense of sense."
In man there's failure, only since he left
The lower and inconscious forms of life.
We called it an advance, the rendering plain
Man's spirit might grow conscious of man's life,
And, by new lore so added to the old,
Take each step higher over the brute's head.
This grew the only life, the pleasure-house,
Watch-tower and treasure-fortress of the soul,
Which whole surrounding flats of natural life
Seemed only fit to yield subsistence to;
A tower that crowns a country. But alas,
The soul now climbs it just to perish there!
For thence we have discovered ('tis no dream
We know this, which we had not else perceived)
That there's a world of capability
For joy, spread round about us, meant for us,
Inviting us; and still the soul craves all,
And still the flesh replies, "Take no jot more
Than ere thou clombst the tower to look abroad!
Nay, so much less as that fatigue has brought
Deduction to it." We struggle, fain to enlarge
Our bounded physical recipiency,
Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life,
Repair the waste of age and sickness: no,
It skills not! life's inadequate to joy,
As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take.
They praise a fountain in my garden here
Wherein a Naiad sends the water-bow
Thin from her tube; she smiles to see it rise.
What if I told her, it is just a thread
From that great river which the hills shut up,
And mock her with my leave to take the same?
The artificer has given her one small tube
Past power to widen or exchangewhat boots
To know she might spout oceans if she could?
She cannot lift beyond her first thin thread:
And so a man can use but a man's joy
While he sees God's. Is it for Zeus to boast,
"See, man, how happy I live, and despair
That I may be still happierfor thy use!"
If this were so, we could not thank our lord,
As hearts beat on to doing; 'tis not so
Malice it is not. Is it carelessness?
Still, no. If carewhere is the sign? I ask,
And get no answer, and agree in sum,
O king, with thy profound discouragement,
Who seest the wider but to sigh the more.
Most progress is most failure: thou sayest well.
The last point now:thou dost except a case
Holding joy not impossible to one
With artist-giftsto such a man as I
Who leave behind me living works indeed;
For, such a poem, such a painting lives.
What? dost thou verily trip upon a word,
Confound the accurate view of what joy is
(Caught somewhat clearer by my eyes than thine)
With feeling joy? confound the knowing how
And showing how to live (my faculty)
With actually living?Otherwise
Where is the artist's vantage o'er the king?
Because in my great epos I display
How divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act
Is this as though I acted? if I paint,
Carve the young Ph{oe}bus, am I therefore young?
Methinks I'm older that I bowed myself
The many years of pain that taught me art!
Indeed, to know is something, and to prove
How all this beauty might be enjoyed, is more:
But, knowing nought, to enjoy is something too.
Yon rower, with the moulded muscles there,
Lowering the sail, is nearer it than I.
I can write love-odes: thy fair slave's an ode.
I get to sing of love, when grown too grey
For being beloved: she turns to that young man,
The muscles all a-ripple on his back.
I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!
"But," sayest thou(and I marvel, I repeat,
To find thee trip on such a mere word) "what
Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die:
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,
And Aeschylus, because we read his plays!"
Why, if they live still, let them come and take
Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup,
Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive?
Say rather that my fate is deadlier still,
In this, that every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
While every day my hairs fall more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape,
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over-much,
Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us:
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
On purpose to make prized the life at large
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
We burst there as the worm into the fly,
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!
Live long and happy, and in that thought die:
Glad for what was! Farewell. And for the rest,
I cannot tell thy messenger aright
Where to deliver what he bears of thine
To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him
I know not, nor am troubled much to know.
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all!
He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write.
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.
NOTES
Form:
unrhyming
1.
The motto is from St. Paul's speech to the philosophers
of Athens, Acts. 17: 28. Cleon and King Protus are both
imaginary characters.
sprinkled isles: the Sporades, near Crete.
4.
tyranny: kingdom. In the Greek sense, tyrant simply
means absolute ruler, and implies no misgovernment or oppressions.
53.
P\;cile: the Portico in Athens.
140.
Terpander: founder of the first Greek School of
music (late seventh century B.C.).
141.
Phidias: famous Greek sculptor who supervised the
construction of the Parthenon, and made the great statue of
Pallas Athene for it. Died 432 B.C. "His friend" was Pericles,
ruler of Athens from 460-429 B.C.
305.
Aeschylus: the earliest of the great writers of Greek tragedy
(525-456 B.C.).
~ Robert Browning, Cleon
,#NFDB
1360:Jubilate Agno: Fragment B, Part 3
For a Man is to be looked upon in that which he excells as on a prospect.
For there be twelve cardinal virtues -- three to the East -- Greatness, Valour,
Piety.
For there be three to the West -- Goodness, Purity and Sublimity.
For there be three to the North -- Meditation, Happiness, Strength.
For there be three to the South -- Constancy, Pleasantry and Wisdom.
For the Argument A PRIORI is GOD in every man's CONSCIENCE.
For the Argument A POSTERIORI is God before every man's eyes.
For the Four and Twenty Elders of the Revelation are Four and Twenty Eternities.
For their Four and Twenty Crowns are their respective Consummations.
For a CHARACTER is the votes of the Worldlings, but the seal is of Almighty GOD
alone.
For there is no musick in flats and sharps which are not in God's natural key.
For where Accusation takes the place of encouragement a man of Genius is
driven to act the vices of a fool.
For the Devil can set a house on fire, when the inhabitants find combustibles.
For the old account of time is the true -- Decr 28th 1759-60 -- -- -For Faith as a grain of mustard seed is to believe, as I do, that an Eternity is
such in respect to the power and magnitude of Almighty God.
For a DREAM is a good thing from GOD.
For there is a dream from the adversary which is terror.
For the phenomenon of dreaming is not of one solution, but many.
81
For Eternity is like a grain of mustard as a growing body and improving spirit.
For the malignancy of fire is oweing to the Devil's hiding of light, till it became
visible darkness.
For the Circle may be SQUARED by swelling and flattening.
For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul.
For there was no rain in Paradise because of the delicate construction of the
spiritual herbs and flowers.
For the Planet Mercury is the WORD DISCERNMENT.
For the Scotchman seeks for truth at the bottom of a well, the Englishman in the
Heavn of Heavens.
For the Planet Venus is the WORD PRUDENCE or providence.
For GOD nevertheless is an extravagant BEING and generous unto loss.
For there is no profit in the generation of man and the loss of millions is not
worth God's tear.
For this is the twelfth day of the MILLENNIUM of the MILLENNIUM foretold by the
prophets -- give the glory to God ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY For the Planet Mars is the word FORTITUDE.
For to worship naked in the Rain is the bravest thing for the refreshing and
purifying the body.
For the Planet Jupiter is the WORD DISPENSATION.
For Tully says to be generous you must be first just, but the voice of Christ is
distribute at all events.
For Kittim is the father of the Pygmies, God be gracious to Pigg his family.
For the Soul is divisible and a portion of the Spirit may be cut off from one and
82
applied to another.
For NEW BREAD is the most wholesome especially if it be leaven'd with honey.
For a NEW SONG also is best, if it be to the glory of God; and taken with the food
like the psalms.
For the Planet Saturn is the word TEMPERANCE or PATIENCE.
For Jacob's Ladder are the steps of the Earth graduated hence to Paradice and
thence to the throne of God.
For a good wish is well but a faithful prayer is an eternal benefit.
For SPICA VIRGINIS is the star that appeared to the wise men in the East and
directed their way before it was yet insphered.
For an IDEA is the mental vision of an object.
For Lock supposes that an human creature, at a given time may be an atheist i.e.
without God, by the folly of his doctrine concerning innate ideas.
For it is not lawful to sell poyson in England any more than it is in Venice, the
Lord restrain both the finder and receiver.
For the ACCENTS are the invention of the Moabites, who learning the GREEK
tongue marked the words after their own vicious pronuntiation.
For the GAULS (the now-French and original Moabites) after they were subdued
by Cæsar became such Grecians at Rome.
For the Gaullic manuscripts fell into the hands of the inventors of printing.
For all the inventions of man, which are good, are the communications of
Almighty God.
For all the stars have satellites, which are terms under their respective words.
For tiger is a word and his satellites are Griffin, Storgis, Cat and others.
For my talent is to give an Impression upon words by punching, that when the
reader casts his eye upon 'em, he takes up the image from the mould which I
83
have made.
For JOB was the son of Issachar and patience is the child of strength.
For the Names of the DAYS, as they now stand, are foolish and abominable.
For the Days are the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh.
For the names of the months are false -- the Hebrew appellatives are of God.
For the Time of the Lord's temptation was in early youth and imminent danger.
For an equivocal generation is a generation and no generation.
For putrifying matter nevertheless will yield up its life in diverse creatures and
combinations of creatures.
For a TOAD can dwell in the centre of a stone, because -- there are stones whose
constituent life is of those creatures.
For a Toad hath by means of his eye the most beautiful prospects of any other
animal to make him amends for his distance from his Creator in Glory.
For FAT is the fruit of benevolence, therefore it was the Lord's in the Mosaic
sacrifices.
For the very particular laws of Moses are the determinations of CASES that fell
under his cognizance.
For the Devil can make the shadow thicker by candlelight by reason of his pow'r
over malignant fire.
For the Romans clipped their words in the Augustan thro idleness and effeminacy
and paid foreign actors for speaking them out.
For when the weight and the pow'r are equivalent the prop is of none effect.
For shaving of the beard was an invention of the people of Sodom to make men
look like women.
For the ends of the world are the accomplishment of great events, and the
consummation of periods.
84
For ignorance is a sin because illumination is to be obtained by prayer.
For Preferment is not from the East, West or South, but from the North, where
Satan has most power.
For the ministers of the Devil set the hewer of wood over the head of God's free
Man.
For this inverting God's good order, edifice and edification, and appointing place,
where the Lord has not appointed.
For the Ethiopian question is already solved in that the Blacks are the children of
Cain.
For the phenomenon of the horizontal moon is the truth -- she appears bigger in
the horizon because she actually is so.
For it was said of old 'can the Ethiopian change his skin?' the Lord has answered
the question by his merit and death he shall. -For the moon is magnified in the horizon by Almighty God, and so is the Sun.
For she has done her day's-work and the blessing of God upon her, and she
communicates with the earth.
For when she rises she has been strength'ned by the Sun, who cherishes her by
night.
For man is born to trouble in the body, as the sparks fly upwards in the spirit.
For man is between the pinchers while his soul is shaping and purifying.
For the ENGLISH are the seed of Abraham and work up to him by Joab, David,
and Naphtali. God be gracious to us this day. General Fast March 14th 1760.
For the Romans and the English are one people the children of the brave man
who died at the altar praying for his posterity, whose death was the type of our
Saviour's.
For the WELCH are the children of Mephibosheth and Ziba with a mixture of
David in the Jones's.
85
For the Scotch are the children of Doeg with a mixture of Cush the Benjamite,
whence their innate antipathy to the English.
For the IRISH are the children of Shimei and Cush with a mixture of something
lower -- the Lord raise them!
For the FRENCH are Moabites even the children of Lot.
For the DUTCH are the children of Gog.
For the Poles are the children of Magog.
For the Italians are the children of Samuel and are the same as the Grecians.
For the Spaniards are the children of Abishai Joab's brother, hence is the goodwill
between the two nations.
For the Portuguese are the children of Amman -- God be gracious to Lisbon and
send good angels amongst them!
For the Hottentots are the children of Gog with a Black mixture.
For the Russians are the Children of Ishmael.
For the Turks are the children of Esaw, which is Edom.
For the Wallachians are the children of Huz. God be gracious to Elizabeth Hughes,
as she was.
For the Germans are the children of the Philistins even the seed of Anak.
For the Prussians are the children of Goliah -- but the present, whom God bless
this hour, is a Campbell of the seed of Phinees.
For the Hanoverians are Hittites of the seed of Uriah. God save the king.
For the Hessians are Philistines with a mixture of Judah.
For the Saxons are Benjamites, men of great subtlety and Marshal Saxe was
direct from Benjamin.
86
For the Danes are of the children of Zabulon.
For the Venetians are the children of Mark and Romans.
For the Swiss are Philistins of a particular family. God be gracious to Jonathan
Tyers his family and to all the people at Vaux Hall.
For the Sardinians are of the seed of David -- The Lord forward the Reformation
amongst the good seed first. -For the Mogul's people are the children of Phut.
For the Old Greeks and the Italians are one people, which are blessed in the gift
of Mustek by reason of the song of Hannah and the care of Samuel with regard to
divine melody.
For the Germans and the Dutch are the children of the Goths and Vandals who
did a good in destruction books written by heathen Free-Thinkers against God.
For there are Americans of the children of Toi. -For the Laplanders are the children of Gomer.
For the Phenomena of the Diving Bell are solved right in the schools.
For NEW BREAD is the most wholesome -- God be gracious to Baker.
For the English are the children of Joab, Captain of the host of Israel, who was
the greatest man in the world to GIVE and to ATCHIEVE.
For TEA is a blessed plant and of excellent virtue. God give the Physicians more
skill and honesty!
For nutmeg is exceeding wholesome and cherishing, neither does it hurt the
liver.
For The Lightning before death is God's illumination in the spirit for preparation
and for warning.
For Lavender Cotton is exceeding good for the teeth. God be gracious to
Windsmore.
87
For the Fern is exceeding good and pleasant to rub the teeth.
For a strong preparation of Mandragora is good for the gout.
For the Bark was a communication from God and is sovereign.
For the method of curing an ague by terror is exaction.
For Exaction is the most accursed of all things, because it brought the Lord to the
cross, his betrayers and murderers being such from their exaction.
For an Ague is the terror of the body, when the blessing of God is withheld for a
season.
For benevolence is the best remedy in the first place and the bark in the second.
For, when the nation is at war, it is better to abstain from the punishment of
criminals especially, every act of human vengeance being a check to the grace of
God.
For the letter ל [Hebrew character lamed] which signifies GOD by himself
is on the fibre of some leaf in every Tree.
For ל is the grain of the human heart and on the network of the skin.
For ל is in the veins of all stones both precious and common.
For ל is upon every hair both of man and beast.
For ל is in the grain of wood.
For ל is in the ore of all metals.
For ל is on the scales of all fish.
For ל is on the petals of all flowers.
For ל is upon on all shells.
For ל is in the constituent particles of air.
For ל is on the mite of the earth.
88
For ל is in the water yea in every drop.
For ל is in the incomprehensible ingredients of fire.
For ל is in the stars the sun and in the Moon.
For ל is upon the Sapphire Vault.
For the doubling of flowers is the improvement of the gardners talent.
For the flowers are great blessings.
For the Lord made a Nosegay in the meadow with his disciples and preached
upon the lily.
For the angels of God took it out of his hand and carried it to the Height.
For a man cannot have publick spirit, who is void of private benevolence.
For there is no Height in which there are not flowers.
For flowers have great virtues for all the senses.
For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary.
For the flowers have their angels even the words of God's Creation.
For the warp and woof of flowers are worked by perpetual moving spirits.
For flowers are good both for the living and the dead.
For there is a language of flowers.
For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.
For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers.
For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.
For flowers are medicinal.
89
For flowers are musical in ocular harmony.
For the right names of flowers are yet in heaven. God make gard'ners better
nomenclators.
For the Poorman's nosegay is an introduction to a Prince.
For it were better for the SERVICE, if only select psalms were read.
For the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Songs from other scriptures, and parts of
Esdras might be taken to supply the quantity.
For A is the beginning of learning and the door of heaven.
For B is a creature busy and bustling.
For C is a sense quick and penetrating.
For D is depth.
For E is eternity -- such is the power of the English letters taken singly.
For F is faith.
For G is God -- whom I pray to be gracious to Liveware my fellow prisoner.
For H is not a letter, but a spirit -- Benedicatur Jesus Christus, sic spirem!
For I is identity. God be gracious to Henry Hatsell.
For K is king.
For L is love. God in every language.
For M is musick and Hebrew מ [Hebrew character mem] is the direct
figure of God's harp.
For N is new.
For O is open.
For P is power.
90
For Q is quick.
For R is right.
For S is soul.
For T is truth. God be gracious to Jermyn Pratt and to Harriote his Sister.
For U is unity, and his right name is Uve to work it double.
For W is word.
For X [drawn as a backwards G and a G stuck together] is hope -- consisting of
two check G -- God be gracious to Anne Hope.
For Y is yea. God be gracious to Eennet and his family!
For Z is zeal.
For in the education of children it is necessary to watch the words, -which they
pronounce with difficulty, for such are against them in their consequences.
For A is awe, if pronounced full. Stand in awe and sin not.
For B pronounced in the animal is bey importing authority.
For C pronounced hard is ke importing to shut.
For D pronounced full is day.
For E is east particularly when formed little e with his eye.
For F in it's secondary meaning is fair.
For G in a secondary sense is good.
For H is heave.
For I is the organ of vision.
For K is keep.
91
For L is light, and ל [Hebrew character lamed] is the line of beauty.
For M is meet.
For N is nay.
For O is over.
For P is peace.
For Q is quarter.
For R is rain, or thus reign, or thus rein.
For S is save.
For T is take.
For V is veil.
For W is world.
For X [drawn as a backwards G and a G stuck together] beginneth not, but
connects and continues.
For Y is young -- the Lord direct me in the better way of going on in the Fifth
year of my jeopardy June the 17th N.S. 1760. God be gracious to Dr YOUNG.
For Z is zest. God give us all a relish of our duty.
For Action and Speaking are one according to God and the Ancients.
For the approaches of Death are by illumination.
For a man cannot have Publick Spirit, who is void of private benevolence.
For the order of Alamoth is first three, second six, third eighteen, fourth fifty
four, and then the whole band.
For the order of Sheminith is first ten, second twenty, third thirty and then the
whole band.
92
For the first entrance into Heaven is by complement.
For Flowers can see, and Pope's Carnations knew him.
For the devil works upon damps and lowth and causes agues.
For Ignorance is a sin, because illumination is to be had by prayer.
For many a genius being lost at the plough is a false thought -- the divine
providence is a better manager.
For a man's idleness is the fruit of the adversary's diligence.
For diligence is the gift of God, as well as other good things.
For it is a good NOTHING in one's own eyes and in the eyes of fools.
For æra in its primitive sense is but a weed amongst corn.
For there is no knowing of times and seasons, in submitting them to God stands
the Christian's Chronology.
For Jacob's brown sheep wore the Golden fleece.
For Shaving of the face was the invention of the Sodomites to make men look
like women.
~ Christopher Smart,#NFDB
203 Integral Yoga
30 Christianity
18 Occultism
14 Philosophy
11 Integral Theory
10 Science
10 Fiction
6 Psychology
5 Theosophy
4 Poetry
4 Kabbalah
4 Hinduism
3 Cybernetics
2 Buddhism
1 Yoga
1 Education
1 Alchemy
136 The Mother
106 Sri Aurobindo
85 Satprem
22 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
20 Nolini Kanta Gupta
12 Aleister Crowley
10 H P Lovecraft
9 A B Purani
6 Saint Augustine of Hippo
5 Plato
4 Vyasa
4 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
4 Jordan Peterson
3 Rudolf Steiner
3 Norbert Wiener
3 Jorge Luis Borges
3 George Van Vrekhem
3 Franz Bardon
3 Carl Jung
2 Plotinus
2 Nirodbaran
2 Jean Gebser
2 Friedrich Nietzsche
2 Bokar Rinpoche
2 Alice Bailey
30 The Synthesis Of Yoga
26 The Life Divine
11 The Phenomenon of Man
11 Agenda Vol 01
10 Lovecraft - Poems
10 Agenda Vol 04
10 Agenda Vol 03
9 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
9 Agenda Vol 11
8 Questions And Answers 1956
8 Questions And Answers 1954
8 Letters On Yoga IV
8 Agenda Vol 08
7 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
7 Questions And Answers 1955
7 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
6 The Future of Man
6 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
6 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
6 Prayers And Meditations
6 Magick Without Tears
6 Liber ABA
6 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
6 City of God
6 Agenda Vol 10
6 Agenda Vol 05
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 Agenda Vol 02
4 Words Of Long Ago
4 Vishnu Purana
4 Maps of Meaning
4 Let Me Explain
4 General Principles of Kabbalah
4 Essays Divine And Human
4 Agenda Vol 09
4 Agenda Vol 07
4 Agenda Vol 06
3 Vedic and Philological Studies
3 The Secret Of The Veda
3 The Practice of Magical Evocation
3 Theosophy
3 The Human Cycle
3 Questions And Answers 1953
3 Preparing for the Miraculous
3 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
3 Letters On Yoga I
3 Cybernetics
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
3 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
2 Twilight of the Idols
2 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 Tara - The Feminine Divine
2 Talks
2 Letters On Yoga III
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 Labyrinths
2 Isha Upanishad
2 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Rani Rasmani spent a fortune for the Construction of the temple garden and another fortune for its dedication ceremony, which took place on May 31, 1855.
Sri Ramakrishna — henceforth we shall call Gadadhar by this familiar name —1 came to the temple garden with his elder brother Ramkumar, who was appointed priest of the Kali temple. Sri Ramakrishna did not at first approve of Ramkumar's working for the sudra Rasmani. The example of their orthodox father was still fresh in Sri Ramakrishna's mind. He objected also to the eating of the cooked offerings of the temple, since, according to orthodox Hindu custom, such food can be offered to the Deity only in the house of a brahmin. But the holy atmosphere of the temple grounds, the solitude of the surrounding wood, the loving care of his brother, the respect shown him by Rani Rasmani and Mathur Babu, the living presence of the Goddess Kali in the temple, and; above all, the proximity of the sacred Ganges, which Sri Ramakrishna always held in the highest respect, gradually overcame his disapproval, and he began to feel at home.
01.07 - The Bases of Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Our ideals have been mental Constructions, rather than spiritual realitiesrealities of the deepest and highest being. And the power by which we sought to realise those ideals was mainly the insistence of our emotional urges, rather than Nature's Truth-Power. For this must be understood that the mental, the vital and the physical form a nexus of reality which works in its own inexorable law and so long as we are within them we cannot but obey the laws that guide them. Of these three strata which form the human adhara, it is the vital which holds the key to man's nature. It is the executive power, the force that fashions the realities on the physical plane; it is what creates the character. The power of thought and sentiment is often much too exaggerated, even so the power of the body, that of physical and external rules and regulations. The mental or the physical or both together can mould the vital only to a limited extent, to the extent which is allowed by the inherent law of the vital. If the demands of the mental and the physical are stretched too far and are not suffered by the vital, a crash and catastrophe is bound to come in the end.
This is the meaning of the Reformist's pessimism. So long as we remain within the domain of the triple nexus, we must always take account of an original sin, an aboriginal irredeemability in human nature. And it, is this fact which a too hasty optimistic idealism is apt to ignore. The point, however, is that man need not be necessarily bound to this triple chord of life. He can go beyond, transcend himself and find a reality which is the basis of even this lower poise of the mental and vital and physical. Only in order to get into that higher poise we must really transcend the lower, that is to say, we must not be satisfied with experiencing or envisaging it through the mind and heart but must directly commune with it, be it. There is a higher law that rules there, a power that is the truth-substance of even the vital and hence can remould it with a sovereign inevitability, according to a pattern which may not and is not the pattern of mental and emotional idealism, but the pattern of a supreme spiritual realism.
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I knew this, but I did not have a vision of the solution, which means it has yet to manifest; this thing had not yet manifested in the building, this fantastic Construction, although it is the very mode of consciousness which could transform this incoherent creation into something real, truly conceived, willed and materialized, with a center in its proper place, a recognized place, and with a REAL effective power.
(silence)
--
It is certainly not an arbitrary Construction of the type built by men, where everything is put pell-mell, without any order, without reality, and which is held together by only illusory ties. Here, these ties were symbolized by the hotels walls, while actually in ordinary human Constructions (if we take a religious community, for example), they are symbolized by the building of a monastery, an identity of clothing, an identity of activities, an identity even of movementor to put it more precisely: everyone wears the same uniform, everyone gets up at the same time, everyone eats the same thing, everyone says his prayers together, etc.; there is an overall identity. But naturally, on the inside there remains the chaos of many disparate consciousnesses, each one following its own mode, for this kind of group identification, which extends right up to an identity of beliefs and dogma, is absolutely illusory.
Yet it is one of the most common types of human collectivityto group together, band together, unite around a common ideal, a common action, a common realization but in an absolutely artificial way. In contrast to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true communitywhat he terms a gnostic or supramental communitycan be based only upon the INNER REALIZATION of each one of its members, each realizing his real, concrete oneness and identity with all the other members of the community; that is, each one should not feel himself a member connected to all the others in an arbitrary way, but that all are one within himself. For each one, the others should be as much himself as his own bodynot in a mental and artificial way, but through a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The supramental world exists in a permanent way, and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I had proof of this today when my earthly consciousness went there and consciously remained there between two and three oclock in the afternoon: I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and it is being built. When formerly I used to speak of the new world that is being created, I was speaking of this intermediate zone. And similarly, when I am on this side that is, in the realm of the physical consciousness and I see the supramental power, the supramental light and substance constantly permeating matter, I am seeing and participating in the Construction of this zone.
I found myself upon an immense ship, which is the symbolic representation of the place where this work is being carried out. This ship, as big as a city, is thoroughly organized, and it had certainly already been functioning for quite some time, for its organization was fully developed. It is the place where people destined for the supramental life are being trained. These people (or at least a part of their being) had already undergone a supramental transformation because the ship itself and all that was aboard was neither material nor subtle-physical, neither vital nor mental: it was a supramental substance. This substance itself was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a blend of red and gold, forming a uniform substance of luminous orange. Everything was like that the light was like that, the people were like thateverything had this color, in varying shades, however, which enabled things to be distinguished from one another. The overall impression was of a shadowless world: there were shades, but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything worked smoothly and silently. At the same time, I could see all the details of the education, the training in all domains by which the people on board were being prepared.
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
There is no preliminary thought, preliminary knowledge, preliminary will: all those things do not exist. I am only like a mirror receiving the experience, the simplicity of a little child learning life. It is like that. And it is the gift of the Grace, truly the Grace: in the face of the experience, the simplicity of a little child just born. And it is spontaneously so, but deliberately too; in other words, during the experience I am very careful not to watch myself having the experience so that no previous knowledge intervenes. Only afterwards do I see. It is not a mental Construction, nor does it come from something higher than the mind (it is not even a knowledge by identity that makes me see things); no, the body (when the experience is in the body) is like that, what in English is called blank. As if it had just been born, as if just then it were being born with the experience.
And only little by little, little by little, is this experience put in the presence of any previous knowledge. Thus, its explanation and its evaluation come about progressively.
0 1958-11-22, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But because it is karma, one must, one must DO something oneself. Karma is the Construction of the ego; the ego MUST DO something, everything cannot be done for it. This is it, THIS is the thing: karma is the result of the egos actions, and only when the ego abdicates is the karma dissolved. One can help it along, one can assist it, give it strength, bestow courage upon it, but the ego must then make use of it.
(silence)
0 1960-05-28 - death of K - the death process- the subtle physical, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And whenever we used to have meetings to decide on the Construction of something or on repairs to be made, for example, I always felt him there and he influenced those who were present.
He wanted to live again; I managed to give him the opportunity. He was very conscious; the child isnt yet so.
0 1960-07-26 - Mothers vision - looking up words in the subconscient, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Its very simple, actually; its a convention, a conventional Construction somewhere in the subconscious brain, and you write automatically. But if you want to try to bring the light of a slightly higher reason into it, its terrible. It becomes meaningless, and you forget everything.
You have to be inside this automatic convention to remember; its very difficult (Mother laughs). So I make a lot of spelling mistakes (under her breath, in a mischievous tone) I think Ill ask him for his dictionary (laughter)!
0 1960-08-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(Mother looks at a piece of paper) Calling Antonin Raymond2. The architect for the Construction.
Then there was also making ready temporary quarters for Z3. But then Z left; he died.
--
But L has enlarged the program. (Mother indicates the plan) This is only a small part of his extensive total program. He is planning to have a school of agriculture, a modern dairy with grazing landtheres a lot of agriculture, really a lotfruit orchards, large rice fields, many things. And then a ceramics factory. My ceramics factory will be at the far end of the lake, so as to utilize the clay the government has agreed; as they have to dig out the lake one day, we shall use the top soil for the fields. First well remove all the pebbles (you know, there are hills over there), which can be used for Constructionits a mine of pebbles. After removing the pebbles, there will be holes which then well fill with earth from the lake. And below this earth is a thick and compact layer of clay which is so hard it cant be used for farmingits impossible but its wonderful for making ceramics. So right at the very end, in Indian territory,4 well have a large ceramics industry. On the other side, well have a little factory for firing clay.
All this is huge. A tremendous program.5
0 1960-09-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I felt better that night because I was concentrated, but my head was still hurting a little. Then the following day I said to myself, or rather I told him inwardly, Whether you like it or not, I am bringing down whats up above; it is the only way I can feel comfortable! And I told you what happenedas soon as I sat down I was so surprised, for he didnt start doing what he had done the day before; I myself did the same thing, I participated, so to speak, in his will (so as to find out), but with the resolve to remain consciously in contact with the highest consciousness, as always, and to bring it down. And it came in a marvelous flood. He was quite happy, he did not protest! All the pain was gone, there was nothing left, it was perfect. Only towards the end of the meditation did he again want to start doing his little trick of enclosing my physical mind in this Construction, but it didnt last I watched all this from above.
And he isnt aware of this, actually, he isnt aware at all. If he were told, he would absolutely deny it for him, its an opening onto Infinity! But in fact, its always like that, we are always shut in, each of useach one is enclosed inside certain limits which he doesnt feel, for should he feel it, he would get out! Oh, I know this feeling very well, for when I was with Sri Aurobindo I was open in this way (gesture towards the heights), and I always had this feeling of Yes, my child He tolerated me the way I was and waited for it to change. Thats truly how things are, you know. And now I feel my limits, which are the limits of the world as it is at present, but beyond that theres an unmanifested immensity, eternity and infinityto which we are closed. It merely seeps init is not the great opening. What I am trying to bring about is the great opening. Only when it has opened wide will there really be the (how should I put it?) the irreducible thing, and all the worlds resistance, all its inertia, even its obscurity will be unable to swallow it up the determining and transforming thing I dont know when it will come.
--
Oh, I had tried for years I had tried to catch silence in my head I never succeeded. I could detach myself from it, but it would keep on turning But at that moment, all the mental Constructions, all the mental, speculative structures none of it remaineda big hole.
And such a peaceful, such a luminous hole!
--
This lasted about half an hour. I quietly remained there I heard the noise of their conversation, but I wasnt listening. And then when I got up, I no longer knew anything, I no longer thought anything, I no longer had any mental Constructioneverything was gone, absolutely gone, blank!as if I had just been born.
***
0 1960-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Its quite odd, for this was not a personal consciousness, it was not someone remembering his lifethis is what I found most interesting; what came were pieces, little chunks of lifes Construction, a collection of people and circumstances. And it is impossible to separate the individual from all that is around him, its clear! It all holds together like (if you change one thing, everything is changed) it holds together like an agglomerated mass.
I had seen this earlier from another angle. In the beginning, when I started having the consciousness of immortality and when I brought together this true consciousness of immortality and the human conception of it (which is entirely different), I saw so clearly that when a human (even quite an ordinary human, one who is not a collectivity in himselfas is a writer, for example, or a philosopher or statesman) projects himself through his imagination into what he calls immortality (meaning an indefinite duration of time) he doesnt project himself alone but rather, inevitably and always, what is projected along with himself is a whole agglomeration, a collectivity or totality of things which represent the life and the consciousness of his present existence. And then I made the following experiment on a number of people; I said to them, Excuse me, but lets say that through a special discipline or a special grace your life were to continue indefinitely. What you would most likely extend into this indefinite future are the circumstances of your life, this formation you have built around yourself that is made up of people, relationships, activities, a whole collection of more or less living or inert things.
0 1960-11-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This interests me, for these things do not at all enter through the mind (he doesnt receive a thing there, hes closed there). So in his letter he says that this thing or that is necessary (he describes it in his own words), and he adds, This is why we must be so grateful to have among us the the great Mother7 (as he puts it), the great Mother who knows these things.Good! I said to myself. (It had to do with something specific concerning the capacity for discrimination in the outside world, the different qualities and different functions of different beings, all of which depends on ones inner Construction, as it were.) So I see that even this, even these physical experiences, is received (and yet I hadnt tried, I had never tried to make him receive it); it merely works like this, you see (gesture of a widespread diffusion), and the experience is veryhow should I say?drastic, with a kind of (power of radiation). Imperative.
Original English.
0 1960-12-31, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This lasted the whole time I was crossing the town. Then I came to a border, right at the beginning of another part where I was to take my packages; there, just a little below me, I saw a house under Construction the house belonging to the person to whom I had to deliver these presents (the symbolism in all this, of course, is quite clear).
As I approached the house, but still from some distance, I suddenly saw some men busy at work. Then instantly instantly this road which was so vast, sunlit and smoothso smooth to the feet oh, it became the top level of a scaffolding. And what is more, this scaffolding was not very well made, and the closer I came the more complicated it gotthere were planks jutting out, beams off balance. In short, you had to watch every single step to keep from breaking your neck. I began getting annoyed. Moreover, my packages were heavy. They were heavy and they so saddled my arms that I was unable to hold onto anything and had constantly to do a balancing act. Then I began thinking, My God, how complicated this world is! And just at that moment, I saw a young person coming along, like a young girl dressed in European clothes, with a hat on her head all black! This young person had white skin, but her clothes were black, and she wore black shoes on her small white feet. She was dressed all in blackblack, all in black. Like complete unconsciousness. She also came carrying packages (many more than me), and she came hopping along the whole length of the scaffolding, putting her feet just anywhere! My God, I said to myself, shes going to break her neck!But not at all! She was totally unconscious; she wasnt even aware that it was dangerous or complicateda total unconsciousness. But her unconsciousness is what allowed her to go on like that! I watched it all. Well, sometimes its good to be unconscious! Then she disappeared; she had only come to give me a demonstration (she neither saw me nor looked at me). And looking down at the workers, I saw that everything was getting more and more complicated, more and more, more and more and there wasnt even any ladder by which to get down. In other words, it was getting unbearable. Then something in me rebelled: Ah, no! Ive had enough of all thisits too stupid!
0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You have this experience when for some reason or other, depending on the case, you come into contact with the universal consciousness not in its limitless essence but on any level of Matter. There is an atomic consciousness, a purely material consciousness and an even more generally prevailing psychological consciousness. When, through interiorization or a sort of withdrawal from the ego you enter into contact with that zone of consciousness we can call psychological terrestrial or human collective (there is a difference: human collective is restricted, while terrestrial includes many animal and even plant vibrations; but in the present case, since the moral notion of guilt, sin and evil belongs exclusively to human consciousness, let us simply say human collective psychological consciousness); when you contact that through identification, you naturally feel or see or know yourself capable of any human movement whatsoever. To some extent, this constitutes a Truth-Consciousness, or at such times the egoistical sense of what does or doesnt belong to you, of what you can or cannot do, disappears; you realize that the fundamental Construction of human consciousness makes any human being capable of doing anything. And since you are in a truth-consciousness, you are aware at the same time that to feel judgmental or disgusted or revolted would be an absurdity, for EVERYTHING is potentially there inside you. And should you happen to be penetrated by certain currents of force (which we usually cant follow: we see them come and go but we are generally unaware of their origin and direction), if any one of these currents penetrates you, it can make you do anything.
If one always remained in this state of consciousness, keeping alive the flame of Agni, the flame of purification and progress, then after some time, not only could one prevent these movements from taking an active form in oneself and becoming expressed physically, but one could act upon the very nature of the movement and transform it. Needless to say, however, that unless one has attained a very high degree of realization it is virtually impossible to keep this state of consciousness for long. Almost immediately one falls back into the egoistic consciousness of the separate self, and all the difficulties return: disgust, the revolt against certain things and the horror they create in us, and so on.
0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday I had such a strong feeling that ALL Constructions, all habits, all ways of seeing, all ordinary reactions, were all crumbling awaycompletely. I felt I was suspended in something entirely different, something I dont know.
(silence)
--
Its one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now the whole spiritual Construction as one has lived it is becoming a total illusion! Not the same illusion, a far more serious illusion.
If That was not there. Obviously, That [divine Love] is here, like a mattress placed so you wont break your neck when you fall. Thats precisely the feeling: this experience of the vibration of divine Love is the mattress so you dont break your neck!
0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He began to understand after a year, and he understands much better now. But he is shut up in his Construction. He doesnt have the kind of personality that can see the earth as something very small. And thats basically what is needed with Sri Aurobindo: the earth must be seen as just a small field of experience within an eternity.
But that is difficult.
0 1961-06-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It didnt come from me, you understand; it didnt stem from a Construction made by me: it came from outside. Why doesnt she come here? I wondered.
The same thought came to me three or four times.
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am constantly seeing images! Not images, living thingslike answers to questions. A magnificent peacock was taking shape (its the symbol of victory here in India) and its tail opened out, and on it a Construction appeared, like this Construction of an ideal place. Its a pity this subtle world cant be photographed! There ought to be photographic plates sensitive enough to do it. It has been tried. It would be interesting because it moves, its like a movie.
All right, then. What did you want to ask?
0 1962-03-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its that old habit, the old fear of being lazy. It took me. But Sri Aurobindo cured me of that rather quickly. Thats how it was before I met him. And thats the first thing he did: he gave me a tap on the head, and all activity ceasedtotal silence, all mental Constructions and habits swept away in the blink of an eye.
I was very careful not to let it come back.
0 1962-05-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I was seeing the very IMAGE of that in this vision. A person I wont name (but I spoke to him afterwards; hes still here) came out of the room to tell me all this. In my vision I told him two things (it seems very distant nowit was back in 59and I no longer recall if I told him one thing after the other or both together). First of all, I protested against everything that fake Sri Aurobindo was saying about me, and at the same time I was going towards the person coming out of the room (its someone living here, you know, who is, who was quite close to Sri Aurobindo. Apparently he was under the influence of certain doubting thoughts, certain doubts, thats why he was there). I called him by name and spoke to him in English: But surely we have had a true spiritual relationship, a true union! Immediately he melted and said yes, and rushed headlong into my arms. In other words, that was his conversion, and thats why I spoke to him about it afterwards; I didnt tell him about the experience but I spoke of the doubt that was in him. It was truly a beginning of conversion in one part of his being, and for that reason I wont name him. And along with this, in answer to what that fake Sri Aurobindo was saying, I said forcefully (also in English): This means the negation of all spiritual experience! And immediately the whole scene, the whole Construction, everythingpoof! Vanished, dissolved. The Force swept it all away.
Later, when I had that second vision April 3, 1962, I saw that the same being was behind this would-be Sri Aurobindo (and with a whole group organized around himpeople, ceremonies and so on). So from that I concluded that the thing had been developing. But when I first encountered those people [in 1959] it was merely something in the Subconscient and the effect was only psychological (an hour or two was enough to sort things out and put them in order). It didnt affect my health. But this time.
0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, it has effectsfar and near. The people nearest to me dont seem to be the most receptive; but with them the action is much more complex and SOLIDI mean instead of a sudden experience thats almost, as I said, out of proportion to their normal condition, something is being progressively BUILT. I constantly find myself in the midst of Constructions, immense Constructions in the making. It was like that last night; I had to flounder about in something like cement, a kind of batter. And then I meet all sorts of people who are also more or less symbolic, but who sometimes have the features of a specific person. Its a whole WORLD of circumstances, symbolic down to the most minute details. I remember everything, but I would have to describe a whole world and an apparently uninteresting world, at that (outwardly uninteresting, I mean); but it gives me the key, from every point of view, to the present state of things, to the world now in the making.
Last night I spent almost all my time in such a building. And all the people who help the work were symbolized there but its always a material help, either work or money or. I remember being particularly struck by one character last night. (Again, there were a lot of aggravations, but someone or something was always on the scene when I arrived and it all sorted itself outit was the exact opposite of the dreams I was talking about the other day: all the difficulties sorted themselves out when I arrived.) Then I came to a rather difficult place to cross (you had to flounder about on slippery scaffoldings) and suddenly, facing me, there was a man (of course, it was probably a symbol rather than a man, but it might really be someone physical). He was one of the workers, a master mason (when I woke up this morning, I thought of the symbolism of Freemasonry and wondered if it might give a clue to the experience). Nearby, people were coming to supervise, observe, direct, people who thought themselves highly superior but they were never any help in solving practical problems! They were creating more problems than they were helping to solve. Anyway, this master mason appeared to be around fifty, with a beautiful facea workers face, beautiful and concentrated. There was a difficult place to cross, and he had worked the thing out very efficiently, with a lot of care. Then, when it was all done and I was able to go on my way, I felt a great surge of love go out to him, with neither gesture nor word and he received it, he felt and received it. His face lit up and he implored me, with wonderful humility, Never let me forget this moment, the most beautiful moment of my life. (I dont know what language he used because it didnt come to me in words.) It was such an intense experience. His humility, his receptivity, his response were all so beautiful and pure that when I woke upwhen I came out of the experience, at any rate I was left with a most delightful impression.
0 1962-06-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, the Grace has made him an object of special attention, thrusting him into a world which, externally, was not his own. In a matter of a few years he has made a journey of several lifetimes, so it has been a little bit difficult. Truly, in a few years he has inwardly traveled many lifetimes. And he has had to face the necessity of an enormous progress, all the more difficult because he hadnt mentally accepted or foreseen it. So he doesnt understand any more, poor man! If I could only take him in my arms like a baby and say to him, My poor little dear, my dear little child and make him feel good, then all would be well. But its not possible theres a whole spiritual Construction. So I do it from a distance, wordlessly, in silence. But what gets through all that crust? I dont know! Over and over, I keep saying one thing: To divine Love, all human confusions and misunderstandings are unknown. There. Well, we will see. Wherever divine Love is present, human confusions and misunderstandings cannot exist, cannot enter.
Thats the only solution.
0 1962-07-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Recently, for a short part of my nights, I suddenly find a certain task set before me dealing with this ones or that ones mental Constructions. And then I feel I am facing a tremendous, destructive falsehooda TOTAL contradiction, in fact, of this endlessly unfolding creative vibration.
Some of the people concerned are here, others elsewhere that is, its the mental state (even the higher mind in some cases, not necessarily very down-to-earth) of this one or that one or. It comes individually (and the persons name along with it). And a kind of uneasiness takes hold of my body, as if I were in the presence of I dont know, in ordinary life I would say, Go away! (Mother brusquely shoos something away) But here it is presented for me to do a particular work (I know the people, some are here, others elsewhere; theyre people I am in touch with for the yoga). So I am faced with these mental formations and each one is HELD like this (Mother grips the thing with both hands) so that I dont simply brush it aside. Then (its certainly a good opportunity to go completely crazy!) I slowly bring in the divine Vibration, and I hold it like this, without moving (Mother holds this vibration tight and drives it in like a sword of light), without moving until everything fades away into silence.
--
This has never happened before, its brand-new. Before, there was always that Power transmitted through the higher mind (what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind); it was up there, dissolving, dispersing, changing, doing a whole lot of work, without any difficulty, effortlessly (gesture above the head showing the tranquil, irresistible flowing of a stream), nothing to it. That was my constant, second-to-second action, everywhere, all the time, for everything that came to me. But THIS is completely, completely new. Its a sort of imposition, almost like an imposition on the PHYSICAL brain (I presume it must be for changing the brain cells). And I am allowed to do only one thing (Mother grips the mental Construction presented to her); its right in front of me like this and wont leave me, it clings like a leech, stock-still. So I have to bring in the supreme, divine Vibration, the Vibration I experienced the other day [April 13], and hold it steadily (sometimes it takes quite a while) until all is hushed in a divine silence.
(silence)
0 1962-07-25, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Many, many things in my life have completely vanished I dont remember them any more, theyre gone from my consciousness everything that was useless. But there is a very clear vision of everything that was preparing the jiva for its action here. Even before coming and meeting Sri Aurobindo, I had realized everything needed to begin his yoga. It was all ready, classified, organized. Magnificent! A superb mental Construction which he demolished within five minutes!
How happy I was! Aah! It was really the reward for all my efforts.
0 1962-08-08, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ive had this great formative power ever since my earliest childhood, but I had channeled it and stopped it because I considered it useless. But it came back recently, along with the sure sign that it was coming from the very highest origin: This is it, this is how things will be. But thats for later, of course. To our external reason, those things seem totally unrealizable, but they will be realizable in perhaps a few hundred years, I dont knowits the future being prepared. And indeed, that vision has a tremendous power of creation and realization, and it is always felt physically (the rest is very still), its always physical. But it triggered a kind of very rapid movement of the physical consciousness (within the most material substance), and caused a dislocation. And so2 the day before yesterday, that old formation suddenly returned and made me understand one aspect of the bodys nature, the way the body is CONSTRUCTED and the usefulness of that Construction. So now things are all right. It has been one more step.
But when you receive those bad vibrations affecting your body,3 are they exhausted by your accepting them?
0 1962-08-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday I told Pavitra that all those realizations, all those yes, these powers, gifts, Constructions, manifestations, it all reminded me of the life of a traveling juggler.
He was shocked.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The first zone you encounter is the zone of painting, sculpture, architecture: everything that has a material form. It is the zone of forms, colored forms that are expressed as paintings, sculptures, and architecture. They are not forms as we know them, but rather typal forms; you can see garden types, for instance, wonderfully colored and beautiful, or Construction types.
Then comes the musical zone, and there you find the origin of the sounds that have inspired the various composers. Great waves of music, without sound. It seems a bit strange, but thats how it is.
0 1962-12-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, I understand! Because its true, you know, that an Asura is behind it allnot Christ! Sri Aurobindo considered Christ an Avatar (a minor form of Avatar). One emanation of the Divines aspect of Love, he always said. But what people have made of him! Besides, the religion was founded two hundred years after his death. And its nothing but a political Construction, a tool for domination, built with the Lord of Falsehood in the background, who, in his usual fashion, took something true and twisted it.
Its a real hodgepodge, that religion the number of sects! The only common ground is the divinity of Christ, and it became asuric when he was made out to be unique: there has been but ONE incarnation, Christ. Thats just where it all went wrong.
0 1963-06-29, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a boat being built (the symbol of the yoga, obviously), its made entirely of pink clay, and what a pink! A boat of pink clay. I was there with Sri Aurobindoa very agile Sri Aurobindo who was going about supervising the Construction; I too was going up and down with extreme ease.
Clay.
--
But clay, that was something really newand lovely! Pink. Pink, a warm, golden pink. They were cutting out [of the clay] rooms, stairways, ship decks and funnels, captains cabins. Sri Aurobindo himself is as he was, but more with a harmony of form: very, very broad here (in the chest), broad and solid. And very agile: he comes and goes, sits down, gets up, always with great majesty. His color is a sort of golden bronze, a color like the coagulation of his supramental gold, of his golden supramental being; as if it were very concentrated and coagulated to fashion his appearance; and it doesnt reflect light: it seems as if lit from within (but it doesnt radiate), and it doesnt cast any shadows. But perfectly natural, it doesnt surprise you, the most natural thing in the world: thats the way he is. Ageless; his hair has the same color as his body: he has hair, but you cant say if its hair, its the same color; the eyes too: a golden look. Yet its perfectly natural, nothing surprising. He sits down just as he used to, with his leg as he used to put it [the right leg in front], and at the same time, when he gets up, he is agile: he comes and goes. Then when he went out of the house (he had told me he would have to go, he had an appointment with someone: he had promised to see two people, he had to go), he went out into a big garden, and down to the boatwhich wasnt exactly a boat, it was a flat boatand he had to go to the captains cabin (he had to see the captain about some work), but it was with that boat that he was returning to his room elsewherehe has a room elsewhere. Then after a while I thought, Ill follow him so I can see. So I followed him; as long as I saw him in front of me I followed him. And when I came to the boat, I saw it was entirely built out of pink clay! Some workmen were working thereadmirable workmen. So Sri Aurobindo went down quite naturally, down into the ship under Construction, without (I dont think there were any stairs), and I followed him down. Then I saw him enter the captains room; as he had told me he had some work to do, I thought (laughing), I dont want to meddle in others business! Ill go back home (and I did well, I was already late in waking up!), Ill go back home. And I saw one of the workmen leaving (as Sri Aurobindo had come back to the ship, they stopped the work). He was leaving. I called him, but he didnt know my language or any of the languages I know; so I called him in thought and asked him to pull me up, as I was below and there was a sheer wall of slippery clay. Then he smiled and with his head he said, I certainly dont mind helping you, but it isnt necessary! You can climb up all by yourself. And indeed he held out his hand, I took it (I only touched him slightly), and climbed up all by myself without the slightest difficulty I was weightless! I didnt have to pull at his hand, he didnt pull me up. And as soon as I was up, I went back home I woke up and found myself in my bed five minutes later than my usual time.
But what struck me was the clayit means something very material, doesnt it? And pink! A pink, oh, lovely! A golden pink.
0 1963-07-13, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theyre caught in refined but terrible Constructions.
Yes. And also they are too aware of being intelligent. Theyre imprisoned in intellectual castles!
0 1963-07-17, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
During the part of the night reserved for the work (generally between 2 and 4:30 in the morning it varies a little), daily now I see people whom I dont know physicallyall the time, all the time, and with lots of work. The work I used to do with the people around me now seems to be spreading: I go to some places that I dont know at all. And always, always something under Constructionalways under Construction, always. Sometimes I am even testing some new Constructions, I mean I try to go this way, that way, do something, try this, try that.1 And at the same time, I am working with people who, on the other hand, arent part of those Constructions theyre on the sidelines. To such a point that when I woke up this morning I said to myself, But isnt this going to stop? Wont I get some rest! But it was always an answer (an answer not in words but in FACTS), an instantaneous answertaking no time, not gradual: instantaneous.2
And along with this, theres a vast, dead-calm rest (if you know what I mean?) in that Lightprobably the Light as it will manifest. Its a golden Light, not very intense or very pale either; a little less pale than the one that I said comes when I concentrate3; a little more intense than that, though not darka golden Light, absolutely immobile, with such an inner intensity of vibration that its beyond all perception. And then its perfect restinstantly. So as soon as I complain, the same ironic remark always comes: Oh, when one can have that in the midst of work, one ought not to complain! The two states are I cant say simultaneous (naturally its not one after the other, both are there together), but its not like two things next to each other, its two ways of looking, I could say, two pointsnot points of view a horizontal look, and a look thats or rather, a specific look and an overall look. A specific look, that of the immediate activity, and an overall and constant look, that of the whole; and as soon as you look at the whole, its (dead-calm gesture) immutable peace, unvarying rest. And then things seem to become swollenswollen with an infinite content.
--
A few days afterwards, as Satprem was referring to these " Constructions," Mother interrupted him with this observation: "Last night, it wasn't that way! I spent more than an hour in all the possible theosophical groups, and they had magnificent buildings! They were rather old (!), but magnificent anyway, with gardens, halls, auditoriumsmagnificent places. But there was no sign of any new Construction. It was solid with hundreds and hundreds of very busy people. I was there for more than two hours. Which means there are places where no Construction is going onpeople live in what has already been built."
Mother is referring to her own answer in the form of help or action.
0 1963-07-24, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
About the present civilisation, it is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine or in the way that they imagine. The present must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new Construction on the basis of a greater Truth, is the issue. The Mother has left (Mother laughs) this question hanging and I can only do the same.
(September 1945)
0 1963-07-31, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had observed lately that the body was getting much stronger, much more solid, that it was even putting on weight (!), which is almost abnormal. Then, I had a first vision (not vision: an activity, but very clear), then another, and then a third. Last night, I was fed a subtle food, as if to tell me that I would need it because I wouldnt take any physical food2 (not that I thought about it, I simply noticed I had been fed, given certain foods). And with the visions I had the two preceding nights, I knew that at issue were certain elements forming part of the bodys Construction (psychological Construction), and that they had to be eliminated. So I worked hard for their elimination. And today, the battle was waged.
But then, as I had worked hard for the elimination, the battle was quite formidablewhen it exceeds a certain measure, the heart has trouble, and then I need to rest. Thats how it happened. But it was so clear, so obvious! And the entire process was SEEN from the beginning, every single step of it, its a marvel! A marvel of consciousness, of measure, of dosage, to allow the purification and transformation to take place without disrupting the balance, so that dissolution does not occur. Its based on the capacity to endure and withstand (naturally, if the body were unable to endure, that work couldnt be done).
0 1963-08-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its giving me the same kind of nights again. But its odd, I dont know what it means, last night there were buildings made of a kind of red granite, and many Japanese. Japanese women sewing and making ladies dresses and fabrics; Japanese youths climbing up and down the buildings with great agility; and everybody was very nice. But it was always the same thing (gesture of a collapse or a fall into a hole): you know, a path opens up, you walk on it, and after a while, plop! it all collapses. And there was a young Japanese man who was climbing up and down the place absolutely like a monkey, with extraordinary ease: Oh, I thought, but thats what I should do! But when I approached the spot, the things he used to climb up and down vanished! Finally, after a while, I made a decision: I will go just the same, and found myself downstairs. There I met some people and all sorts of things took place. But what I found interesting was that all the buildings (there were a great many of them, countless buildings!) were made of a kind of red porphyry. It was very beautiful, Granite or porphyry, there were both. Wide stairs, big halls, large gardenseven in the gardens there were Constructions.
But outwardly, difficulties are coming back, in the sense that the Chinese seem to be seized again with a zeal to conquer they are massing troops at the border.
0 1963-09-07, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For them, all the experiences men have are the result of a mental phenomenon: we have reached a progressive mental development (they are at a loss to explain why or how!), anyhow it was Matter that developed Life, Life that developed Mind, and all of mens so-called spiritual experiences are mental Constructions (they use other words, but I believe thats their idea). It is, at any rate, a denial of all spiritual existence in itself and of a Being or Force or Something superior which governs everything.
As I said, I dont know what their position is today, what point they have reached, but I was in the presence of a conviction of that type.
0 1963-10-05, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was a Constructiona huge Construction. It resembled one of those huge hotels they build nowadays, with inner courtyards and all sorts of things. And I had my room right at the top. (It called to my mind an old experience I had had. Do you remember that big hotel?1 It was somewhat like that.) And everyone there was APPARENTLY full of respect, of obedience, of thoughtfulness but everyone was going his own sweet way thats nothing new. At first, I was downstairs (my room was way upstairs, I dont know how many floors there were), and there I met some people, people whom I know. But each and every detail was so revealing, it was marvelous! And it was time for me to have my bath (I dont know what time it was!), so I wanted to go back upstairs to do so, but I needed someone to prepare the bath (its symbolic; I dont know yet, I havent yet understood the symbol of that bath, because it occurs very often; but there may be some meaning hidden in that symbol). But then one person was too old (someone who had offered to prepare the bath, but he was too old), another wasnt strong enough, anotherto be able to prepare the bath required VERY special qualities. It isnt the first time; it has happened two or three times before: to be able to prepare that bath took absolutely exceptional qualities of courage, strength, physical power, endurance. And the people downstairs (gesture expressing incapacity). So I said to myself, All right, Ill go upstairs and see what happens.
On the way, the same thing happened again: I went the usual wayplop! cut off, nothing left, I cant get through; I come back, start another wayplop! cut off, I cant get through. Yet I kept going up (how, I dont know). Then I reached a sort of square terrace-balcony, perfectly square, and ALL its doors were closed. There was no way of going farther: all the doors were closed. Then I see water rising, rising, rising in the ENTIRE building, except the places where the doors were closed. Downstairs (I dont know, I was very high up, maybe on the fourth or fifth floor) the doors were closed, so naturally water could not get in. All the courtyards (large, immense courtyards) were turned into swimming pools. What water! I kept watching it, admiring it; I said to myself, What wonderful water! So clear, so clear, clearer than any I ever saw. Water that was I cant say, it was transparent like like purity itself, it was marvelous. It was rising and rising and rising. I saw in one of the courtyards on my left (a very large courtyard: it had become an immense swimming pool!), I saw a person in a bathing suit come out of the water, as if he had taken his bath in it, and wrap himself up (a very tall person, very tall, who was neither a man nor a woman), he wrapped himself up in a bathrobe, then walked away on the water (!) I was watching this till suddenly I realized that the water was beginning to reach my feet. Then I KNEW: Ah, yes! Theyve decided to do this. I was a little upset: They really could have told me they were going to do this! I thought. Its something they must do regularly. Did they inform some people? (All this in my head, of course.)
--
The worlds Construction as they built it?
But then, that water rising and rising and rising??
0 1963-10-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Listen, the night before, in the middle of the night, someone came to me (someone who was dark blue, which means a mental formation) with a plan of action, and told me, Its all arranged: on such and such a day and at such and such a time (it was meant for next year), you will have this work to do, you will have to come downstairs, and here is how everything will be arranged for you to come downthis, that, that. And I played the game very well, I answered, Oh, no! That wont do, you have to arrange it this way and that way. Then when it was all over, something suddenly made me go within (gesture of return inward), I looked at the whole thing, saw the person, saw the plan, saw everything (I was in the midst of an action), and said, Yes, all this is very well, but you see, the snag is that I am not going downstairs! And at one stroke, frrt! goneit was a Construction, as if there were an entire organization, even a governmental one (!), to make me come downstairs. And when I woke up (that is, in the morning when I came out of my activity of the night), I thought, Could it be what showed itself (it was a mental formationfrom whom, from where? I didnt bother about that), could it be what showed itself to X and made him declare with the authority of a clairvoyant: Mother will come downstairs next year? I found it very amusing.
Things are increasingly AS THEY ARE: exact, without complications. I have noticed that with people, even the most sincere and straightforward, there is always a kind of coating, an emotive coating (even with the coldest and driest), something that belongs to the vital; an emotive coating that makes things fuzzy, uncertain and allows a game that gives them a feeling of all sorts of mysterious forces at playthings are very clear, very simple, very, oh, very simple, and that coating brings along a sort of confusion. Its not sentiment, not emotion either, its something something that LOVES uncertainty, the unknown, the unexpectednot positively chance (its not so strong), but which loves to live in that, in in fact, in Ignorance! Which loves not to know whats going to happen. Even the simplest things, the most obvious, have all that coating over them.
0 1963-12-21, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Which means there are movements of elimination, of rejection, movements (for a second) of transformation, and also movements of Constructionit seems the time has come to step into the movement of Construction.
The body consciousness is still very timid, very timid in the sense that it doesnt have confidence in itself. It feels that if it isnt constantly vigilant, watching, watching, observing, discerning, some things (gesture below) may get through that shouldnt get through. Thats what hinders. And that is why this certainty comes more and more: no criticism, no criticism at all, none at all, dont see what shouldnt besee only WHAT SHOULD BE.
0 1964-01-15, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And this field of experience also includes the physical mindall the mental Constructions that have a direct action on life and on the body; there is there an almost unlimited field of experiences. And everything takes the form not of a speculation or a thought, but of an experience. Ill give you an example to make myself understood. I wont tell you the thing as it occurred, but as I now know it to be. There is in France someone very devoted, born Catholic, and who was seriously ill. He wrote to me asking what he should do; he said that people around him naturally wanted him to receive extreme unction (they thought he was about to die), and he wrote to ask me if it had any influence on the progress of his inner being and whether he should refuse categorically. I knew none of this [as Mother had not yet received the letter], but I had an experience here, in which a priest and altar boys came to give me extreme unction! (Thats how it presented itself to me.) They wanted to give me extreme unction, so I watched I watched, I wanted to see; I thought, Well, before dismissing them abruptly, lets see what it is. (I had no idea why they had come, you understand; someone had sent them to give me extreme unctionnot that I felt particularly sick! But anyhow thats how it was.) So before dismissing them, I watched carefully to find out if really it had a power of action, if extreme unction had the power to disturb the progress of the soul and tie it down to old religious formations. I watched and I saw how thin and tenuous it was, without force; I saw clearly that it could have some force only if the priest who performed it was a conscious soul and did it consciously, in relationship with an inner power or force (vital or other), but that if it was an ordinary man doing his job and giving the sacraments with the ordinary belief and nothing more, it was perfectly harmless.
Once I had seen that, suddenly (it was as if on a screen) the whole story vanished and it was over. It had come only to make me see it, thats all. But it presented itself in that way in order to make me watch intently, seriously, not as a mental consideration: a vision and an experience.
0 1964-03-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Your vision obviously its mental Constructions standing in the way of the takeoff thats obvious. But it isnt an individual experience: its a collective thing.
It was very black, and it was a church like a church steeple. But the gold ciborium, what is that? It was very pretty, besides; it was beautiful, but hidden.
0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The one safety for man lies in learning to live from within outward, not depending on institutions and machinery to perfect him, but out of his growing inner perfection availing to shape a more perfect form and frame of life; for by this inwardness we shall best be able both to see the truth of the high things which we now only speak with our lips and form into outward intellectual Constructions, and to apply their truth sincerely to all our outward living. If we are to found the kingdom of God in humanity, we must first know God and see and live the diviner truth of our being in ourselves; otherwise how shall a new manipulation of the Constructions of the reason and scientific systems of efficiency which have failed us in the past, avail to establish it? It is because there are plenty of signs that the old error continues and only a minority, leaders perhaps in light, but not yet in action, are striving to see more clearly, inwardly and truly, that we must expect as yet rather the last twilight which divides the dying from the unborn age than the real dawning. For a time, since the mind of man is not yet ready, the old spirit and method may yet be strong and seem for a short while to prosper; but the future lies with the men and nations who first see beyond both the glare and the dusk the gods of the morning and prepare themselves to be fit instruments of the Power that is pressing towards the light of a greater ideal.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1964-09-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It had rather seemed to me that they should be kept at a distance. With Thon, the adverse forces and hostile beings were often mentioned, they occupied a big place in self-development and in action. As for Sri Aurobindo, he used to say that that notion was useful mostly from the psychological and personal standpoint, because struggling with difficulties is easier when you see them as coming from outside, as an attack from outside, than if you think they are part of your own nature. Not that he denied their existence, far from it, but the path depends a lot on the attitude you take and on the mental Construction you have, naturally.
Sri Aurobindo insisted rather on Oneness: he used to say that even what we consider to be the worst adversaries are still a form of the Supreme, which, deliberately or not, consciously or not, helps in the general transformation. This seems to me vaster, deeper, more comprehensive.
0 1964-10-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The best one can do is not to have any prejudices or preconceived ideas or principlesoh, moral principles, fixed codes of conduct, what must be done and what must not be done, and preconceived ideas with regard to morals, with regard to progress, and then all the social and mental conventions theres no obstacle worse than that. I know people who wasted dozens of years trying to overcome one of those mental Constructions!
If one can be like this, opentruly open in a simplicity you know, the simplicity of ignorance that knows its ignorant like this (gesture, hands open), ready to receive all that comes then, perhaps, something will happen.
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its amusing: all the mental Constructions men have tried to live and realize on earth come to me, like this, from every side, to be ordered, clarified, put in their own place, arranged, organized, synthesized. So all those supposedly great problems come to me, and immediately there is an indulgent smile, as at a childs fumblings; but not at all with a sense of superiority, nothing like that, theres only the feeling that an instrument is used that cannot solve the problem. And a kind of certainty, deep down in Matter, that the solution lies THEREthis is very strong, very strong. Oh, what fuss, what fuss, how vainly you have tried!go deep enough within, stay quiet enough, and then THAT will be. And you cannot understand it: it only has to BE.
You cannot understand it, because you are using instruments that cannot understand. But it cannot be understood: it has to BE.
0 1965-06-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As regards the Construction, it will depend on R.s plasticity. I am not concerned about the details at all, there is only that pavilion that I would like to be very pretty I see it. Because I saw it, I had a vision of it, so Ill try to make him understand what I saw. The park, too, I sawthose are old visions I had repeatedly. But thats not difficult.
The biggest difficulty is water, because there is no nearby river up there; but they are already trying to harness rivers. There is even a project to divert water from the Himalayas and bring it across the whole of India (L. had made a plan and discussed it in Delhi; of course, they objected that it would be a little costly!). But anyway, without going into such grandiose things, something has to be done to bring water; that will be the biggest difficulty, thats what will take the longest time. As for the restlight, powerit will be made on the spot in the industrial section but you cant manufacture water! The Americans have given serious thought to a way of using sea water, because the earth no longer has enough drinking water for people (the water they call fresh5 its ironical); the amount of water is insufficient for peoples use, so they have already started chemical experiments on a big scale to transform sea water and make it usableobviously that would be the solution to the problem.
0 1965-06-30, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, something curious happened two nights ago. I was with Sri Aurobindo, it was in a room oh, what a room. Well, it was magnificent, very high-ceilinged, very large, and without anything at all in it; but it was a very large room, and there were kinds of French windows opening out on a balcony or a terrace (it overlooked a town), and those windows, from top to bottom, were a single pane of glass: it gave a magnificent light. He was there. Then for some reason or other I felt he wanted a cup of tea. So I set out in search of his cup of tea, and went through rooms, halls, even Construction sites (!), looking for a cup of tea for him; and they were all large roomsall the rooms were large but contrary to the one in which he was, which was so clear, the others were dark. And there was a large hall which was like a dining hall, with a table and everything needed to serve meals, but dark and also there wasnt anything left. There were people (people I know) who said, Ah, (in a sorry tone) its all finished they had finished everything, they had eaten up everything! (Mother laughs) They had swallowed up everything, there was nothing left. Finally, I found someone in a sort of kitchen down below (someone whom I wont name, I know her), who told me, Yes, yes, Ill bring you that right now, right now! And she brought me a pot, saying, Here. I went off with my pot, then I felt somewhat suspicious, and once outside, I lifted the lid and the first thing I see is earth! Red earth. I scratched off the red earth with my fingers, and underneath (laughing), there was a slice of bread!
Anyway, there was a lot like that, I had all sorts of adventures. Then I looked to see if Sri Aurobindo really needed his cup of tea because it seemed so difficult! I saw him, there was that wonderful French window, so clear, and then as if recessed into the wall (I dont know) a sort of platform couch, a place to sit, but it was very pretty, and he was seated or half-reclining on it, and very comfortable. And there was a boy (or a boy had come to ask him something), and there were kinds of stairs leading up to the couch; the boy was reclining on the stairs, asking questions, and Sri Aurobindo was explaining something. I recognized the boy. I thought, Ah, (laughing) hes no longer thinking of his cup of tea, fortunately! Then I woke up. But I thought, If this is how he sees us having gobbled up everything, you understand.
0 1965-07-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Not necessarily. But what kind of Construction or imagination is it, then?
I will tell you.
0 1965-09-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The conscious perception of the two elements (the body is becoming a representative object; not just symbolic: representative), the perception of the state of consciousness of those elements that belong to the past, to the past evolutionary movement, and of those that are open to the new method, if I may say so, is clearer and clearer; its perceptible as clearly as, more clearly than external physical things, than the external form (this distinction is physical, but it belongs to the inner Construction). Outwardly, it results in fever. Its a battle. And not a battle of ill wills, its not that: its a sort of incapacity. And its not with violence that we will succeed. You know, the only thing that can triumph is this supreme Vibration of Love, but there is an incapacity to receive, and then (its a strange phenomenon), this incapacity to receive causes a sort of sifting, and its only elements that are as if watered down that can pass through the Thing in itself in its true essence cannot. If you look at it from below, you feel as if That refuses to give itself, but its not true, because when you ARE That (laughing), there is no sense of being watered down: That manifests in its plenitude. And see what happens [the sifting]!
And its clear (you can see it in very small details) that if there were direct contact, something would be as if shatteredit would cause something to be shattered. Yes, too abrupt, too sudden a change, like something thats shattered.
0 1966-02-11, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Just last night, I must have been going about for some time among all human Constructions, but those of a higher quality, not the ordinary Constructions (those Sri Aurobindo refers to here: the philosophical, religious, spiritual Constructions ). And they were symbolized by huge buildingshuge that were so high as if men were as tall as the edge of this stool, quite tiny, in comparison with those huge thingshuge, huge. I was going about, and each person came (I saw now one come, now another), each person came saying, Mine is the true path. So I would go with him to an open door through which an immense landscape could be seen, and just when we came to the door, it would close!
It was really very interesting. With all sorts of diverse details, each one with his own habits. I have forgotten the details now, but when I came out of that place last night, in the middle of the night, I was quite amused, I said to myself, Its quite amusing! You know, when they spoke you could see through a door vast expanses before you, in full light, it was superb; then I would go with that person towards the door and the door was closed. It was really interesting.
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The curve showed itself along with an adage: What begins must end. That seems to be one of those human mental Constructions that arent necessarily true.
But the interesting point subjectively is that the problem loses its acuteness as you look at it from a higher and higher standpoint (or a more central point, to tell the truth).
0 1966-09-21, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I see all kinds of very amusing things pass by; just now, this reflection: Ah, its a Tower of Babel in reverse. (Mother laughs) Thats interesting! They united and divided in the Construction, so now, they come together to unite in the Construction. Thats it: a Tower of Babel in reverse!
(Mother stops for an instant, as if she saw something)
0 1966-09-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oddly, these last few days again, this has been the subject of my meditations (not willed ones: they are imposed from above). Because in all the transition from plant to animal and from animal to man (especially from animal to man), the differences of form are, ultimately, minor: the true transformation is the intervention of another agent of consciousness. All the differences between the life of the animal and the life of man stem from the intervention of the Mind; but the substance is essentially the same and it obeys the same laws of formation and Construction. There isnt much difference, for instance, between the calf being formed in a cows womb and the child being formed in its mothers womb. There is one difference: that of the Minds intervention. But if we envisage a PHYSICAL being, that is, as visible as the physical now is and with the same density, for instance a body that wouldnt need blood circulation and bones (especially these two things: the skeleton and blood circulation) its very hard to imagine. And as long as it is like this, with this blood circulation, this functioning of the heart, we could imaginewe can imagine the renewal of strength, of energy through a power of the Spirit, through other means than food. Its conceivable. But the rigidity, the solidity of the body, how is it possible without a skeleton? So it would be an infinitely greater transformation than that from animal to man; it would be a transition from man to a being that would no longer be built in the same way, that would no longer function in the same way, that would be like a densification or concretization of something. Up till now, it doesnt correspond to anything we have seen physically, unless the scientists have found something I am not aware of.
We may conceive of a new light or force giving the cells a sort of spontaneous life, a spontaneous strength.
--
I can very well conceive of a being who could, through spiritual power, the power of his inner being, absorb the necessary forces, renew himself and remain ever young; thats quite easily conceivable; even providing for a certain suppleness so as to be able to change the form if necessary. But the complete disappearance of this system of Construction right awayfrom one to the other right away, that seems It appears to require stages.
Obviously, unless something happens (which we are forced to call a miracle because we cant understand how it could happen), how can a body like ours become a body entirely built and driven by a higher force, and without a material support? How can this (Mother pinches the skin of her hands), how can this change into that other thing? It appears impossible.
--
I dont know if its nonphysical, but its a physical I am unaware of! And its not substance as we now know it, and especially not the Construction we now know.
I dont know, but if it has to be a PHYSICAL body (as Sri Aurobindo said it would), it seemed to me (but that may be a daydream) that it could be like a lotus bud, for example: our present body is like a small, closed, hard lotus bud, and it blossoms out, it becomes a flower.
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Whats specific to each language (apart from a few differences in words) is the order in which ideas are presented: the Construction of sentences. The Japanese (and especially the Chinese) have solved the problem by using only the sign of the idea. Now, under the influence from outside, they have added phonetic signs to build a sentence; but even now the order in the Construction of the ideas is different. Its different in Japan and different in China. And unless you FEEL this, you can never know a foreign language really well. So we speak according to our very old habit (and basically its more convenient for us simply because it comes automatically). But when I receive, for instance, its not even a thought: its Sri Aurobindos formulated consciousness; then, there is a sort of progressive approximation of the expression, and sometimes it comes very clearly; but very often its a spontaneous mixture of French and English forms and I feel it is something else trying to be expressed. At times (it follows the notation), it makes me correct something; at other times it comes perfectly wellit depends. Oh, it depends on the limpidity. If you are very tranquil, it comes very well. And there, too, I see its not really French and not really English. Its not so much the words (words are nothing) as the ORDER in which things come up. And when afterwards I look at it objectively, I see its in part the order in which they come in French, and in part the order in which they come in English. And the result is a mixture, which is neither one language nor the other, and endeavours to express what might be called a new way of consciousness.
It leads me to think that something will be worked out that way, and that any too strict, too narrow attachment to the old rules is a hindrance to the evolution of expression. From that point of view, French is a long way behind EnglishEnglish is much more supple. But the languages in countries like China and Japan that use ideograms seem to be infinitely more supple than our own.
0 1967-05-03, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So I thought there may be You know, sometimes theres a very small gap (we have many layers of consciousness that interpenetrate like that), if there is just a gap, a lacuna, a void between the two, it is enough to not know. Thats what Thon explained to me: All your states of being are there in the fourth dimension, one inside the other; what you lack is a very small level. Its nothing, you know, in your consciousness you dont notice it, but in its Construction something is undeveloped, and so whats on the other side cant come through; its lost between this and that. Its lost. So I asked him, What can be done? He told me, You must develop it. And I did the experiment (he told me and I did it). And indeed I had a nervous subdegree (he used to call the vital the nervous), a nervous subdegree that wasnt developed, not sufficiently conscious. And for a year, day after day after day, a concentration to develop it, applying the consciousness, applying the consciousness absolutely no result. For at leastat leastsix months continuously, a concentration every day; I kept an hour for thatabsolutely no result.
Only, I didnt doubt. I simply thought, How very stupid of me, I dont know how to do it I was living in Paris; come summer, I left on holidays. I went to some friends who had a property by the sea. There was a small wood, large meadows, it was pretty. And after lunch, I go and lie down on the grass and all of a sudden, everythingfrom the air, the earth, the water, from everywhereeverything came. Everything, but everything I wanted to have came like that. Suddenly. Like that, effortlessly. The result of six months of work.
0 1967-05-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, mon petit, Ive received a clipping from the Figaro. In early April, the cultural attach to the Indian Embassy in Paris said that the Soviet government had expressed a desire to participate in the Construction of Auroville. I havent yet got the confirmation, but its there in the Figaro. In that case, if its correct, it may not be the right time to publish Karl Marxs fallacy! (Mother laughs) It might be better to wait a little! I hesitated a lot to publish it because its a letter, and Sri Aurobindo always told me that in his letters he had expressed himself very frankly from the political and social viewpoint, but that he didnt want them to be published. So for a long time I refused to publish them. We are more flexible now; but it may be that that newspaper clipping has come just to tell me it would be wiser to wait a little.
Yes, theres no need to upset them.
0 1967-07-12, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now and then, two or three notes are very good, but the rest is mental Construction. I can no longer listen to music.
Except for Sunils music thats all right. Still, there are stopgaps, but not too many, not a lot.
0 1967-09-13, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Well, it ended up in nothing. I told her, I am not closing my door on you, but I am putting you face to face with what it all means. I said, The ABC of yoga is precisely to demolish all those Constructions. But she told me, Christ is the Supermind! I said, No, its not like that!
(Mother laughs) It didnt leave any trace?
0 1967-09-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In terms of a Church and of power over people to keep them shut in their Construction.
Yes, exactly.
0 1967-10-11, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All degrees are there, of course. When its refusal or incapacity, then the person HIMSELF flees, saying, Theyre fools, they are trying to do something impossible and unrealizable. (I know many such people, they think they have superior intelligence.) But even to place themselves, its they themselves who do it. She came with the idea of a hierarchy. I said yes, everything is always according to hierarchy, especially all conscious individuals, but there is no arbitrary will that classes them: its the people themselves who spontaneously take their place without knowing it, the place they must have. Its not, I told her, its not a decision, we dont want categories: this category, that category, and so this person will go here, that person will go thereall that I said, is mental Constructions, its worthless! The true thing is that NATURALLY, according to his receptivity, his capacity, his inner mission, everyone takes up the post which in the hierarchy he truly and spontaneously occupies, spontaneously without any decision.
What can be done to facilitate the organization is a sort of plan or general map, so that everyone need not build his position but will find it all ready for him thats all.
--
Oh, they want to build a mental Construction, like that, square like a prison, its awful.
But you know when she comes, she is very nice, very kind, very receptive and open, and quite ready to receive and listen, at least in her outer attitude, but it seems she has a group over there, and in that group (I heard it through some sincere people who went there) its terrible! Harsh judgments, you know. And a crushing superiority.
--
And that was the artistic Constructionmental, artisticwhich was more beautiful than reality. Thats it, the guiding idea of the person in question. Thats it you see; Isnt this more beautiful than real nature? There.
It was very beautiful, a beautiful thing, but its the mental fossilization of the Thing. It was very interestingunexpected, I didnt expect to see that: a shape of a coiled snake, in bronze, with bronze inlays, but magnificently wrought! And the burning lamps, the burning light superior to reality: Isnt this superior?
0 1967-11-08, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I met you, spoke to you, explained things to you, and we did things together: all the precise, meticulous details were there. When I wake up, if I remained perfectly still I would remember, but otherwise I only retain an impression, also a few images which come like that (scattered gesture, as if Mother touched various points of a scene, which are the hits of images that remain), and the impression or memory of the kind of work. And then Its a place which is clearly related to the Construction of the future on earth.
But I came out of there with a great satisfaction, noting that things were going much better. One could see, you understand: the future was clearer.
0 1968-02-17, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To be precise, its really a mental Construction.
Oh, yes.
--
Yes, its entirely a Construction.
There isnt a flame, theres nothing in it.
0 1968-04-13, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
R. [Aurovilles architect] has come for five days, and he wants to make what he calls a district of Auroville, that is to say, instead of tackling the problem of ten or twenty thousand people at once, he wants to start with two or three thousand, on the level of infrastructure, but above all to see how it will work: the experiment of life in Auroville. I had thought about it, and when I spoke to you last time, thats what came: in what direction should the experiment be carried out? You see, Y. has ideas in the field of education (I am not intervening); as for R., he has ideas in the field of Construction (I am not intervening); but no one has studied the problem on the level of administration or organization, and of money, and that was precisely what I spoke of to you about last time.
So if you could read me what I told you, if it does Ill give them the text. There is also this communist Russian architect, who has become quite enthusiastic: to him Auroville is the ideal realization. He is a very strong boy, with some power (also a power of conviction over people). So it would be interesting if he could have a glimpse of the direction in which were going.
0 1968-08-28, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Constructions.
Cities.
--
Many, a great many Constructions, immense cities being built.
Yes, the world being built, the future world being built. I couldnt hear anymore, couldnt see anymore, couldnt speak anymore: I was living inside that all the time, all the time, night and day. So, as soon as I could write a note, I noted that.
--
A body without mind and without vital. It was in that state. There were only those perceptions [cities, Constructions, temples], it was living in soul states: there were others soul states, the soul states of the earth, the soul states Those soul states were expressed in pictures. It was interesting. I cant say it wasnt interestingit was but there was no contact with material life, very little: I could hardly eat and couldnt walk. Anyway it had become something others had to look after.
And through the contact with A., the body began to be interested in all that, asking questions quite spontaneously, without knowing why. It asked and asked, Oh, so this is how were made. And it began to be amused.
0 1968-12-11, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All those Constructionsreligions, philosophies all those Constructionsare a need of the mind to play the game. It wants to play the game well. While the body is so simple, so simple, so obvious! So obvious, so simple: Why, it wonders, Why, why have they been seeking all kinds of complications when its so simple? The very fact of saying, The Divine is deep within you (it remembers its own experience, you understand) is so complicated, while its so simple!
It cant explain, cant express, there are no words, but it has a sort of conscious perception of (Mother makes a slight twisting gesture with the tips of her fingers) what distorts and veils. And thats what has become reality for all human consciousnesses.
0 1969-01-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Personally, I remember, in my case, thats what completely opened the door. Thats what made me Ah! And I entered a new thing (with all the Western mental Constructions, you understand).
It will be interesting.
0 1969-05-03, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So then, for instance, these two I mentioned [P. and his sister, the two captains], from a human standpoint, you would say theyre really insensitiveits because theyre insensitive and too egocentric that the accident took place. In other words, a reproach. In this light, Oh, these are good instruments, one can lean on them5 (solid gesture), they wont sag, theyre strong enough for one to lean on them. And all that is shown to the body, which is really beginning (laughing) to know things no body had ever learned beforeever. And to see life quite differently It feels (laughing) you know, it feels stupid, that is, consciously its in one way, and then out of atavism, out of Construction, its tied down in the other way. So it feels very silly, very silly. But the Consciousness held it (with yesterdays event), it HELD it in its Consciousness like that, present, until it had really understood everything in detail, and once it had really understood, poff! the thing was gone, finished. So it understands that when something is held like that, it means theres something to understand, it has a lesson to learn, and when the lesson has been learned, when it has understood, seen clearlyonce it has seen clearly and its all simple and very clear thats it, poff! its gone, finished (gesture showing the Consciousness letting go of the body), as though the thing were quite taken away That was taking place at night, while I am not disturbed (the night hours are the only ones when I am not disturbed every minute; I can carry on with my work untroubled), and then I saw. And that night was so peaceful, but with such peace! Its ten rungs above the ordinary material peace, completely You know, the peace of a psychic will so powerful (Mother stretches her arms in a sovereign gesture), so tranquil that all our emotions, our reactions, all that absolutely looks like childishness. But the body understands very well (since this Consciousness came it has begun to understand lots of things), it understands that all that [emotions, reactions] was a necessary path to prepare receptive instruments.
Its really interesting.
0 1969-05-10, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The mind has imagined all kinds of magnificent reasons, it builds Constructions that seems like childishness. Why?
Theres the whole side of Buddhism, nihilism and so on, according to which (we can give a translation for children) the Supreme Lord made a mistake! (Mother laughs) He blundered, so And then well help Him get out of his blunder!
0 1969-05-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was art and it was lovely, it was fine. And how to make houses pleasant and beautiful, with what principle of Construction. And cooking too, it was very amusing! There were the different manners of presenting a dish; take a fish, for instance, with the different ways of preparing it, and everyone came with his own invention. It went on for more than three hours (three hours of the night, thats huge). I woke up at 4 oclock with that (4 oclock, and I had gone back to bed at I oclock: I to 4 is three hours I can still calculate!). Very interesting.
Yet the conditions on earth seem very far from all that.
0 1969-11-01, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And as soon as I wanted to touch his Construction a little, it caused a dreadful drama!
Yes, thats it. He wants to find, but he wants to find WITHIN his Construction.
Well see. It will keep on working! (Mother laughs) Well see.
0 1969-12-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He says that for a few years, energies in Auroville have been scattered: they are egoistic, everyone wants to build his own little hut, his own little story, or, at best, hopes to build a supercity, which will only be an improvement on all the existing cities of the world. In this Auroville, an axis, a center is missing. Whats missing is a unification of the consciousnesses around a center, an axis. So he said that in the past, they built pyramids, they built cathedrals, and around those symbolic Constructions, consciousnesses could unify
(Mother nods approvingly)
and rise and purify themselves. Well, what should be built in Auroville is an axis, a center, a symbolic temple of the new world we want to create, and all the consciousnesses should unite in the Construction of this pyramid of the new world, or this temple of the new worldwhich will at the same time help to bring down what must express itself there.
Its very good, that was the first idea: there was the center, and the city was organized around it. Now theyre doing the opposite! They want to build the city and put the center afterwards .
--
But Mother, what I think, and what Paolo too has put his finger on, is that if these say, twenty or fifty Aurovilians sincerely unite their hearts in the Construction of this pyramid or temple of the new world, it will ATTRACT money, the millions.
It should.
0 1970-01-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
On a practical level, Ill try to make R. understand. But I saw, it seems to me that we should do When R. is here, he looks after Auromodel, the practical side, all that (its quite necessary, its very good), but for this Construction of the center, Id like Paolo to do it, and so Id like Paolo to stay here when R. is gone: let Paolo be here when R. is away, and with Paolo we could do that. Only, I dont want either of them to feel that its one against the other (!). They must understand that its to complement each other.
I think Paolo will understand.
0 1970-01-10, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I told you that I saw the central Construction of Auroville. I have a plan. Would you like to see it? There are three scrolls there (Mother unrolls the plan while explaining):
There will be twelve facets. Its a circle. And, at the same distance from the center, twelve columns. At the center, on the floor, my symbol, and at the center of my symbol, there are four symbols of Sri Aurobindo, upright, forming a square. And atop the square, a translucent globe (we dont yet know what substance it will be made of). Then, from the top of the roof, when the sun shines, a ray of sunlight will fall on the globe (only there, nowhere else); when there is no sunlight, electric spotlights will shine a beam (ONE beam again, not a diffuse light) just there, on the globe.
0 1970-01-17, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The idea is primarily the collective Construction of this underground passage as a symbol.
(long silence)
--
N. and Paolo realized that if Auroville or the Construction of this Center is left to Aurovilles people as separate from the Ashram, it will never work: the true force will never be there, those who are there arent receptive enough to do the work. If there is that break between the Ashram and Auroville, it will never work, it will be one more Construction but not something new. According to them, the only hope is for that Center to be built not by Aurovilians but by all the Ashram people, without distinction between Aurovilians and non-Aurovilians; for the whole force to be united in the Construction of this Center, rather than abandon the Aurovilians to an outer break. Just as the disciples built Golconde [a guest-house at the Ashram], in the same way all the disciples should build Aurovilles Center, without outside manpower.
At Golconde there was outside manpower.
--
But thats not what he meant, he didnt mean at all a problem of Construction: he meant the problem of having the disciples work with the Aurovilians. N., as an engineer, would look after the Construction with the money collected, but the whole manpower would have to be provided by all the Ashram people mingling with the Aurovilians. Thats the idea.
Thats not possible. All the Ashram people young enough to work are working, they all have their occupation.
--
When they say that all the disciples here should take part in Auroville s Construction, as was done for Golconde, they mean that you are the one who gives the disciples the impulse to come and participate in the work. That was the idea. But you say there should be a separation on the contraryno mixture.
(Laughing) If you knew things as they are! Auroville people bring drugs here, they bring all kinds of things.
0 1970-02-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are troublesome moments. Because mental convictions, mental Constructions help the body a lot, and now it no longer has any, so it no longer has that facility. For instance, when you have a mental faithwhats called faithit helps you a lot, because it remains without budging through all difficulties but thats not there anymore! Its only the Consciousness, but then the Consciousness (smiling) the Consciousness makes no fuss. The Consciousness doesnt talk nonsense, it doesnt tell you stories at the desired moment in order to help youits like this, as it is (gesture like an immutable presence), in its absolute simplicity and sincerity. So you see very well, you know very well, but
The body sees very well, it also sees that its sensations are evidently almost made up, which means that they dont really correspond to the truth but (laughing) that doesnt help it much! At times it really feels ill at ease.
0 1970-03-14, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like R., the same thing: a relapse. And it looks so much like Its this effort against, yes, what Sri Aurobindo calls barbarism (Mother makes a gesture covering the whole earth atmosphere). It seems to be I dont know if its a refusal or an incapacity to emerge from the mental Construction. And the action of this Consciousness (how shall I put it?), it almost pitilessly shows the extent to which the entire mental Construction is falseeverything, even apparently spontaneous reactions, all of it is the result of an extremely complex mental Construction.
But this Consciousness is pitiless.
--
What Sri Aurobindo says here about diseases is just the point: the power of habit, of all Constructions, of what appears inescapable and irrevocable in diseases. With all that, experiences seem to multiply in order to show in order for one to learn that its simply a question of attitude the attitude of going beyond beyond this mental prison humanity has locked itself in, and of breathing up above.
Its the BODYS experience. Before, those who had inner experiences would say, Yes, up above, thats the way it is, but here Now the but here will soon cease to be. This tremendous change is whats being conquered, so physical life may be ruled by the higher consciousness and not by the mental world. Its the change of authority. Its difficult. Its hard. Its painful. There is some damage done, naturally, but But truly, one can seeone can see. And thats the REAL CHANGE, thats what will enable the new Consciousness to express itself. And the body is learning, its learning its lessonall bodies, all bodies.
0 1970-05-20, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, I see too clearly, too many people who have a scrap of experience, with that experience (gesture of winding a huge ball of yarn) they make a whole mental Construction, and then You know, when the mind meddles
(silence)
0 1970-05-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Concentrated but what we call concentrated is something more and more material, whereas thats not material. You see, we are told: You have to eat solid food because of the way youre built. Now turn the problem around: If you dont eat solid food, this Construction would be unnecessary! (laughter) There would be no need anymore of a stomach, of this and that. What could replace that?
We would have to be able to absorb vital energies directly.
0 1970-05-30, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
See Conversations with Pavitra of 11 January 1926: "In spiritual life, one should always be ready to reject every system and every Construction. Any one form is helpful, then becomes harmful. In my spiritual life, since the age of forty, three or four times I have completely laid bare and broken the system I had reached."
***
0 1970-07-29, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, Mother. What happened is that before she left for Europe, she had a complete collapse of all mental Constructions.
Yes, that I know.
--
And now youre read me this letter. This man is very mentalvery mental but And what he wants to see isnt me: its a mental Construction he has made (but that doesnt matter, one can work through anything). But there was in this letter something MORE than I thought. I always thought he was a very mental man with a vital power of attraction there may be something else. But they are caught in vital formations. P. L. too, I always got a feeling he had to be protected.
Did Z say when she intends to leave?
0 1971-11-10, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For example, he says he wrote you a month ago, in October, and you answered him in writing. He wrote you this: I have made a detailed study of the work to be done, and I have reached the conclusion that we [Aurovillians] can take upon ourselves the responsibility for the excavation and Construction work of the four pillars; then a commercial firm such as EEC [I dont know what it is, its in Madras, I think] would agree to take over the Construction of the Matrimandir itself , etc. It therefore appears that the work of the Aurovillians is not an obstacle to the rest of the work being handled by a specialized firm. Then you answered, Thats very good, I am fully in agreement. The safety and solidity of the work should come BEFORE PERSONAL QUESTIONS. I am counting on you to see that everything goes harmoniously.
And then I realized. Afterwards, the others told me that he had written that without consulting them.
03.04 - Towardsa New Ideology, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Still some kind of hierarchy seems tobe the natural and inevitable form of collective life. A dead level, however high that may possibly be, appears to be rather a condition of malaise and not that of a stable equilibrium. The individual man cannot with impunity be brains alonehe becomes then what is called "a barren intellectualist", "an ineffectual angel" ; nor can he rest satisfied with being a mere hewer of wood and drawer of waterhe is no more than a bushman then. Like-wise a society cannot be made of philosophers alone, nor can it be a monolithic Construction of the proletariat and nothing but the proletariat-if the proletariat choose to remain literally proletarian. As the body individual is composed of limbs that rise one upon another from the inferior to the superior, even so a healthy body social also should consist of similar hierarchical ranges. Only this distinction should not mean and it does not necessarily meana difference in moral values, as it was pointed out long ago by Aesop in his famous fable. The distinction is functional and spiritual. In the spirit, all differences and distinctions are based upon and are instinct with an inviolable and inalienable unity, even identity. Differences here do not mean invidious distinction, they are not the sources of inequality, conflict, strife, but make for a richer harmony, a greater organisation.
However the crucial point arises herehow is the collective life, the group existence to be made soul-conscious? One can understand the injunction upon individuals to seek and find their souls; but how can a society be expected to act from its soul and according to the impulsions of its soul? And then, has a collectivity at all a soul? What is usually spoken of as the group-soul does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an euphemism for herd instinct, the flair of the pack.
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
India art is not in truth unreal and unnatural, though it may so appear to the eye of the ordinary man or to an eye habituated to the classical tradition of European art. Indian art, too, does hold the mirror up to Nature; but it is a different kind of Nature, not altogether this outward Nature that the mere physical eye envisages. All art is human creation; it is man's review of Nature; but the particular type of art depends upon the particular 'view-point that the artist takes for his survey. The classical artist surveys his field with the physical eye, from a single point of observation and at a definite angle; it is this which gives him the sine qua non of his artistic composition, anatomy and perspective. And the genius of the artist lies very much in the selection of a vantage ground from which his survey would throw into relief all the different parts of the objective in the order and gradation desired; to this vantage ground the entire Construction is organicallyone could even say, in this case, geometricallycorrelated.
Indian art, too, possesses a perspective and an anatomy; it, too, has a focus of observation which governs and guides the composition, in the ensemble and in detail. Only, it is not the physical eye, but an inner vision, not the angle given by the retina, but the angle of a deeper perception or consciousness. To understand the difference, let us ask ourselves a simple question: when we call back to memory a landscape, how does the picture form itself in the mind? Certainly, it is not an exact photograph of the scenery observed. We cannot, even if we try, re-form in memory the objects in the shape, colour and relative positions they had when they appeared to the physical eye. In the picture represented to the mind's eye, some objects loom large, others are thrown into the background and others again do not figure at all; the whole scenery is reshuffled and rearranged in deference to the stress of the mind's interest. Even the structure and build of each object undergoes a change; it does not faithfully re-copy Nature, but gives the mind's version of it, aggrandizing certain parts, suppressing others, reshaping and recolouring the whole aspect, metamorphosing the very contour into something that may not be "natural" or anatomical figure at all. Only we are not introspective enough to observe this phenomenon of the mind's alchemy; we think we are representing with perfect exactitude in the imagination whatever is presented to the senses, whereas in fact we do nothing of the kind; our idea that we do it is a pure illusion.
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Humanity as a race will then present the figure of a homogeneous unitit will be a unity of many diversified elements, not simply, however, a composition of discrete individuals, but of varied aggregations of individualseven as the body is not merely composed of cells, but also these cells are collected in aggregates forming various limbs and systems, each again with its own identity and function. Indeed, the cosmic or global humanity is very likely to be pyramidal in structurenot a flat and level Construction. There will be an overall harmony and integration containing a rich variety of gradationsgradations of consciousness, as even now there are: only the whole will be more luminous, that is to say, more conscious and more concordant; for at the top, on the higher levels, new lights will show themselves and men embodying those lights. They will radiate and spread out, infiltrate into the lower ranges something of their enlightenment and harmony and happiness which will bring about a global purification and a new dispensation; even the material world, the vegetable and mineral domains too may be taken up into this luminous consummation and earth become the Garden of Eden that it once was, suffused with a new glory.
***
05.04 - The Measure of Time, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is very little sense in the common notion that everything is predetermined as to the time when it will happen, that the universal scheme has been all unalterably arranged and mapped out from beforehand, that nothing can change it, all goes according to plan. This is only a human conception, a Construction of the mind, a wrong translation in the brain of some fact which is otherwise and elsewhere. The mind divides where there is no division, puts things against each other where there is perfect compatibility and harmony. Determinism and Indeterminism, Free-Will and Mechanism are contradictions set up by the mind and have no real objective existence. From a certain view-point, on a certain level of consciousness things appear to move in a rigid frame of mechanistic determinism; from another view-point, on another level, things seem to possess absolute freedom.
Looked at from the higher source of things, the time-factor itself appears as an illusion. What is true is a certain set of conditions in which forces work themselves out. And in this pattern of conditions, time (along with space) does not give the absolute and fixed frame of reference, as is usually taken for granted, but is a varying background, even if it is not a side-issue or a by-product. The conscious force at work in the world aims at a change in the conditions; it is a work primarily of rearrangement and order. The state of Nature, of actualityof ignorance and inertiais one of chaos. What the Divine Will behind, the Consciousness standing over, does is to develop a cosmos out of that chaos. Things are placed wrongly, at random, pell-mell: they have to be assorted, arranged, docketed, each item in its own place. We know, for example, of the material particle in which the atoms are huddled together, each pointing to a different direction, but when they are arranged in such a way that one half points in one way and the other half the contrary way, we have what is called a magnetised body.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The difficulty that modern Science encounters is not, how-ever, at all a difficulty: it may be so to the philosopher, but not to the mystic, the difficulty, that is to say, of positing a real objective world when all that we know or seize of it seems to be our own mental Constructions that we impose upon it. Science has come to such a pass that it can do no more than take an objective world on trust.
Things need not, however, be so dismal looking. The difficulty arises because of a fundamental attitude the attitude of a purely reasoning being. But Reason or Mind is only one layer or vein of the reality, and to see and understand and explain that reality through one single track of approach will naturally bias the view, it will present only what is real or immediate to it, and all the rest will appear as secondary or a formation of it. That is, of course, a truth that has been clearly brought out by the anti-intellectualist. But the vitalist's view is also likewise vitiated by a similar bias, as he contacts reality only through this prism of vital force. It is the old story of the Upanishad in which the seeker takes the Body, the Life and the Mind one after another and declares each in its turn to be the only and ultimate reality, the Brahman.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Once again, to repeat in other terms the distinction which may sometimes appear to carry no difference. First, the subjective objective in which the subject assumes the preponderant position, not denying or minimising the reality of the object. The external world, in this view, is a movement in and of the consciousness of a universal subject. It is subjective in the sense that it is essentially a function of the subject and does not exist apart from it or outside it; it is objective in the sense that it exists really and is not a figment or imaginative Construction of any individual consciousness, although it exists in and through the individual consciousness in so far as that consciousness is universalised, is one with the universal consciousness (or the transcendental, the two can be taken together in the present connection). Instead of the Kantian transcendental idealism we can name it transcendental realism.
In the other case the world exists here below in its own reality, outside all apprehending subject; even the universal subject is in a sense part of it, immanent in itit embraces the subject in its comprehending consciousness and posits it as part of itself or a function of its apprehension. The many Purushas (conscious beings or subjects) are imbedded in the universal Nature, say the Sankhyas. Kali, Divine Nature, is the manifest Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent reality holding within her the transcendent divine Purusha who supports, sanctions and inspires secretly, yet is dependent on the Mahashakti and without her is nothing, unyam. That is how the Tantriks put it. We may mention here, among European philosophers, the rather interesting conclusion of Leibnitz (to which Russell draws our attention): space is subjective to the view of each monad (subject unit) separately, it is objective when it consists of the assemblage of the view-points of all the monads.
05.13 - Darshana and Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The procedure of European philosophy is different. There the reason or the mental light is the starting-point. That light is cast about: one collects facts, one observes things and happenings and then proceeds to find out a general trutha law, a hypothesisjustified by such observations. But as a matter of fact this is the ostensible method: it is only a make-believe. For mind and reason are not normally so neutral and impersonal, a tabula rasa. The observer already comes into the field with a definite observational angle and a settled viewpoint. The precise sciences of today have almost foundered on this question of the observer entering inextricably into his observations and vitiating them. So in philosophy too as it is practised in Europe, on a closer observation, if the observer is carefully observed, one finds not unoften a core of suppositions, major premises taken for granted hidden behind the logical apparatus. In other words, even a hardened philosopher cherishes at the back of his mind a priorijudgments and his whole philosophy is only a rationalisation of an inner prejudgment, almost a window-dressing of a perception that came to him direct and in other secret ways. That was what Kant meant when he made the famous distinction between the Pure and the Practical Reason and their categories. Only the direct perceptions, the spiritual realisations are so much imbedded behind, covered so much with the mist of mind's struggle and tension and imaginative Construction that it is not always easy to disengage the pure metal from the ore.
We shall take the case of one such philosopher and try to illustrate our point. We are thinking of Whitehead. The character of European philosophical mind is well exemplified in this remarkable modern philosopher. The anxiety to put the inferences into a strict logical frame makes a naturally abstruse and abstract procedure more abstruse and abstract. The effort to present suprarational truths in terms of reason and syllogism clouds the issues more than it clarifies them. The fundamental perception, the living intuition that is behind his entire philosophy and world outlook is that of an Immanent God, a dynamic evolving Power working out the growth and redemption of mankind and the world {the apotheosis of the World, as he puts it). It is the theme which comes last in the development of his system, as the culminating conclusion of his philosophy, but it is the basic presupposition, the first principle that inspires his whole outlook, all the rest is woven and extended around this central nucleus. The other perception intimate to this basic -original perception and inseparable from it is a synthetic view in which things that are usually supposed to be contraries find their harmony and union, viz.,God and the World, Permanence and Flux, Unity and Multiplicity, the Universal and the Individual. The equal reality of the two poles of an integral truth is characteristic of many of the modern philosophical systems. In this respect Whitehead echoes a fundamental conclusion of Sri Aurobindo.
07.17 - Why Do We Forget Things?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are many reasons, of course. First and the most important is that we use the faculty of memory in order to remember. Memory is a mental instrument depending upon the formation and growth of the brain. Your brain is developing constantly unless, of course, it is already degenerating; the development can continue for a long time, longer than that of the body. In the process there are necessarily things replaced by others; and as the instrument grows, elements that were useful in one state are no longer so in a subsequent state and have to give place to others more suitable. The net result of our acquisitions remains there in essence, but all that had led to it, the intermediary steps are suppressed. Indeed, a good memory means nothing more than that that is to say, to remember the results only, so that the fundamentals are sifted and stored, namely, those alone that are useful for further Construction. This is more important than just trying to retain some particular items in a rigid manner.
There is another thing. Apart from the fact that memory by itself in its very nature is a defective organ, there is the other fact that I there are different states of consciousness one following another. Each state faithfully records the phenomena of that moment, whatever they may be. Now, if your mind is calm and clear, wide and strong, you can by concentrating your consciousness on that moment bring out of it and recall in your present active state what is recorded there of your movements then; you can, that is to say, go back to the particular state of consciousness at a given moment and live it again. What is registered in your consciousness is never obliterated and hence not really forgotten. You can live a thousand years and you will not have forgotten that. Therefore, if you do not want to forget a thing, you must retain it through your consciousness, and not through your mental memory. As I have said, the mental memory fades away, new things, things of today replace old things, things of yesterday. But that of which you are conscious in your conscious-ness, you can never forget. It lies somewhere in the background, returns to you at your bidding. You have only to withdraw to that state of the consciousness where it lies imbedded. In this way you can recall things that you knew perhaps centuries ago. It is how you remember your past lives. For, a movement of consciousness never dies out, it is only the impressions on the surface brain-mind that are fugitive. What you have learnt with this superficial instrument laboriouslyonly read, heard, noted, underlinedleaves no lasting mark, but what is imbibed, breathed in into the stuff of consciousness remains. The brain is being constantly renewed and reformed. Old cells, cells that have become weak and atrophied are replaced by younger and stronger ones or the old cells combine differently or enter into other organisations. Thus the old impressions or memories they carried are obliterated.
07.31 - Images of Gods and Goddesses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Well when a little child draws a picture of an object, is there any likeness? It is about the same or even worse here. For the child is simple and sincere, while the image-maker is full of prejudices and preconceived ideas, stuffed with things he has heard or read. And he is tied to his Constructions. But at times, here and there, very rarely indeed, artists appear with an inner vision, with a great aspiration and a great purity of soul; they do things that are acceptable. But they are exceptions, the contrary is the rule.
I have seen some of these forms in the vital world and also in the mental world; they are truly creations of man. There is a Power from beyond that manifests, but in this triple world of Ignorance man creates God Himself in his own image and beings that appear there are more or less the outcome of the creative human thought. So at times we do have things that are truly frightful. I have seen formations that are so obscure, so un-understandable, so inexpressive! There are some divine beings that are treated worse than the others. Take, for example, this poor Mahakali. What has man made of her, wildly terrible, a nightmare beyond imagination! Such creations however live in a very inferior world, in the lowest vital world; and if there is anything there of the original being, it is such a far off reflection that it is hardly recognisable. And yet it is that which is pulled by the human consciousness. When, for example, an image is made and installed and the priest calls down into it a form, an emanation of a god, through an inner invocation there is usually a whole ceremony in this connectionif the priest is someone having the power of evocation, then the thing succeeds (what Ramakrishna did in the Kali temple). But generally priests are people with the commonest ideas and the most traditional training and education; when they think of the gods they give them attributes and appearances which are popular, which belong normally to entities of the vital world, at best to mental formations but which do not represent in any way the truth of the beings behind. All the idols in temples or the household gods worshipped by the many are inhabited by beings who know only how to lead you to unhappiness and disaster. They are so far away from the divinity that one means to worship. There are certain family Kalis that are real monsters. I have even advised some to throw such an image into the Ganges to get rid of the evil influence emanating from it. But of course it is always the fault of man and not of the divinity. For man wishes so much to make his gods in his own image.
08.13 - Thought and Imagination, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The mind has its own power of vision; it is not the vision of the physical eyes, but it is yet vision, perception through forms. It is not imagination which is a quite different faculty. Suppose you figure to yourself an ideal being to whom you attribute all conceptions of ideality you have. You say he must be like this, he must be like that, his thoughts are like this, his character like that; you fill up all the details and build up the being. Well, that is the work of imagination. Literary men, novel-writers, always do this kind of Construction. Of course, there are writers who take up things from life; but there are others who imagine things and impose them upon life. A character, a concourse of circumstances, a whole chain of events, they spin out of their head. And if they are powerful and possess sufficient creative force, it is quite possible there may be one day actually a physical human being embodying the type imagined.
You can make use of imagination for a high purpose. With its help you can recreate your inner and outer life. You can wholly build your life if you know how to use it and have the power. As a matter of fact, it is the most ordinary and primary way of creating and forming things in the world. I had always the impression that if one had not the capacity of imagination, one would not make any progress. Your imagination always goes ahead of your life. When you think of yourself, usually you imagine what you would like to become that comes first, the prevision, and then you follow it up; you continue to imagine and realise, realise and imagine. Imagination opens the way to realisation." It is very difficult to move unimaginative people. They see only what is just in front of their nose, they feel only what is there at a given moment. They cannot advance, they are blocked by the immediate present. It is imagination that makes the whole difference.
08.28 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In all religions people who declared that the consequences of Karma are rigorous and who gave these absolute rules, must have done so, I believe, to put themselves in place of Nature, to pull the strings that move ordinary men. For these rules are mental Constructions, more or less sincere perhaps, cutting things into bits and telling you: "Do this, do that; it is not this, it is that." People are confused, frightened, they do not know what to do at the end.
What they must do is to get to an upper floor. And they must be given the key to open the door. The key is (1) a sufficiently sincere aspiration, or (2) a sufficiently intense prayer. I said or, but it may not be so; there are people who like the one and there are people who prefer the other. But in both magic power and one must know to use them.
09.14 - Education of Girls, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What we want is precisely to bring into the world something which is not there. But if we keep to all the habits of the world, all its preferences and prejudices, all its Constructions, how shall we come out of the rut and do something new?
I have told you, my children, I have repeated in all kinds of tone and temper: if you wish truly to benefit by your stay here, try to look at things and understand them with a new eye and a new perception based on something higher, deeper, truer, something which is yet not there, but will be one day. And it is to build up this future that we have taken a special attitude.
10.06 - Beyond the Dualities, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are no unitary solutions to these problems; the unitary solutions are Constructions of the mind that lead nowhere except in a merry-go-round. We have to rise out of the mind and go beyond and realise that unity in plurality or plurality in unity is a self-evident fact, somewhere else than in the mind.
***
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Much thought has gone into the Construction of your Motto. "I will become" can be turned neatly enough as "Let there be;" by avoiding the First Pronoun one gets the idea of "the absorption of the Self in the Beloved," which is exactly what you want.
"The creative Force of the Universe" is quite ready-made.
--
P.S. Please study this letter, and these explanatory figures and meditate upon them until you have fully assimilate not only the matter under immediate consideration, but the general method of Qabalistic research and Construction. Note how new cognate ideas arise to enrich the formula.
666
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
e. By the withdrawal of the life, the form should gradually dissipate. The reflex action here is interesting to note, for the greater Builders and Devas who are the [133] active agents during manifestation, and who hold the form in coherent shape, transmuting, applying and circulating the pranic emanations, likewise lose their attraction to the matter of the form, and turn their attention elsewhere. On the path of out-breathing (whether human, planetary or logoic) these building devas (on the same Ray as the unit desiring manifestation, or on a complementary Ray) are attracted by his will and desire, and perform their office of Construction. On the path of in-breathing (whether human, planetary or logoic) they are no longer attracted, and the form begins to dissipate. They withdraw their interest and the forces (likewise entities) who are the agents of destruction, carry on their necessary work of breaking up the form; they scatter itas it is occultly expressedto "The four winds of Heaven," or to the regions of the four breaths,a fourfold separation and distribution. A hint is here given for careful consideration.
Though no pictures have been drawn of death bed scenes nor of the dramatic escape of the palpitating etheric body from the centre in the head, as might have been anticipated, yet some of the rules and purposes governing this withdrawal have been mentioned. We have seen how the aim of each life (whether human, planetary or solar) should be the effecting and the carrying out of a definite purpose. This purpose is the development of a more adequate form for the use of the spirit; and when this purpose is achieved then the Indweller turns his attention away, and the form disintegrates, having served his need. This is not always the case in every human life nor even in each planetary cycle. The mystery of the moon is the mystery of failure. This leads, when comprehended, to a life of dignity and offers an aim worthy of our best endeavour. When this angle of truth is universally recognised, as it will be when the intelligence of the race suffices, then evolution will proceed with certainty, and the failures be less numerous.
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The spheres or atoms of any form whatsoever, from the form logoic, which we have somewhat dealt with, down to the ultimate physical atom and the molecular matter that goes to the Construction of the physical body, show similar correspondences and analogies.
All these spheres conform to certain rules, fulfil certain conditions and are characterised by the same fundamental qualifications. Later we will consider these conditions, [154] but must now continue with the effect of rotary action.
10.15 - The Evolution of Language, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet poets, mystic poets have always sought to express themselves, to express something of their experience and illumination through the word, the human tongue. It is extremely interesting to see how a material, constructed or formed to satisfy the requirements of an ordinary physical life is being turned into an instrument for luminous and effective communication and expression of other truths and realities in the hands of these seer-creators (kavi-kratu). They take the materials from ordinary normal life, familiar objects and happenings but use them as images and allegories putting into them a new sense and a new light. Also they give a new, unfamiliar turn to their utterance, a new syntax, sometimes uncommon Construction and novel vocabulary to the language itself so that it has even the appearance of something very irregular and twisted and obscure. Indeed obscurity itself in the expression, in the form of the language has often been taken as the very sign of the higher and hidden experience and illumination.
The Vedic rishis speak of the different levels of speech the human language is only one form of speech, its lowest, in fact the crudest formulation. There are other forms of speech that are subtler and subtler as one rises in the scale of consciousness. The highest formulation of language, the supreme Word vkis 'OM'ndaabda-brahma. That is the supreme speech-vibration, the rhythmic articulation of the Supreme Consciousness Sachchidananda; the expression there is nearest to silence, almost merges into silence.
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a mans building his own house that there is in a birds building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of Construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.
Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another _may_ also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
We shall therefore beginwith the evidence and not with idealistic Constructions; in the face of present-day weapons of annihilation, such Constructions have less chance of survival than ever before. But as we shall see, weapons and nuclear fission are not the only realities to be dealt with; spiritual reality in its intensified form is also becoming effectual and real. This new spiritual reality is without question our only security that the threat of material destruction can be averted. Its realization alone seems able to guarantee mans continuing existence in the face of the powers of technology, rationality, and chaotic emotion. If our consciousness, that is, the individual persons awareness, vigilance, and clarity of vision, cannot master the new reality and make possible its realization, then the prophets of doom will have been correct. Other alternatives are an illusion; consequently, great demands are placed on us, and each one of us have been given a grave responsibility, not merely to survey but to actually traverse the path opening before us.
There are surely enough historical instances of the catastrophic downfall of entire peoples and cultures. Such declines were triggered by the collision of deficient and exhausted attitudes that were insufficient for continuance with those more recent, more intense and, in some respects, superior. One such occurrence vividly exemplifies the decisive nature of such crises: the collision of the magical, mythical, and unperspectival culture of the Central American Aztecs with the rational-technological, perspectival attitude of the sixteenthcentury Spanish conquistadors. A description of this event can be found in the Aztec chronicle of Frey Bernardino de Sahagun, written eight years after Cortez conquest of Mexico on the basis of Aztec accounts. The following excerpt forms the beginning of the thirteenth chapter of the chronicle which describes the conquest of Mexico City:
--
In summary, it should be said that our description does not deal with a new image of the world, nor with a new Weltanschauung, nor with a new conception of the world. A new Image would be no more than the creation of a myth, since all imagery has a predominantly mythical nature. A new Weltanschauung wouldbe nothing else than a new mysticism and irrationality, as mythical characteristics are inherent in all contemplation to the extent that it is merely visionary; and a new conception of the world would be nothing else than yet another standard rationalistic Construction of the present, for conceptualization has an essentially rational and abstract nature.
Our concern is with a new reality - a reality functioning and effectual integrally, in which intensity and action, the effective and the effect co-exist; one where origin, by virtue of presentiation, blossoms forth anew; and one in which the present is all-encompassing and entire. Integral reality is the worlds transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both.
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Doctrine et Rituel de la Haute Magie, in which we find clear and unmistakable symptoms of an understanding of the underlying basis of the Qabalah- its ten Sephiros and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet as a suitable framework for the Construction of a workable system for philosophical comparison and synthesis. It is said that he published this work at a time when information on all occult matters was strictly prohibited, for various reasons of its own, by the Esoteric School to which he belonged.
We find, then, a companion volume issued but a short while after, La Histoire de la Magie, wherein - undoubtedly to protect himself from the censure levelled at him, and throw unsuspecting enquirers off the track - he contradicts his former conclusions and theorizations.
--
Mage ; Madame Blavatsky, that lion-hearted woman who brought Eastern esoteric philosophy to the attention of western students ; Arthur Edward Waite, who made available expository summaries of various of the Qabalistic works ; and the poet Aleister Crowley to whose Liber 777 and Sepher Sephiroth, among many other fine philosophic writings, I am in no little degree indebted - all these have provided a wealth of vital information which could be utilized for the Construction of a philosophical alphabet.
1.01 - Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
3 Shankara reads the line, "Thus in thee - it is not otherwise than thus - action cleaves not, a man." He interprets karman.i in the first line in the sense of Vedic sacrifices which are permitted to the ignorant as a means of escaping from evil actions and their results and attaining to heaven, but the second karma in exactly the opposite sense, "evil action". The verse, he tells us, represents a concession to the ignorant; the enlightened soul abandons works and the world and goes to the forest. The whole expression and Construction in this rendering become forced and unnatural. The rendering I give seems to me the simple and straightforward sense of the Upanishad.
4 We have two readings, asurya, sunless, and asurya, Titanic or undivine. The third verse is, in the thought structure of the Upanishad, the starting-point for the final movement in the last four verses. Its suggestions are there taken up and worked out. The prayer to the Sun refers back in thought to the sunless worlds and their blind gloom, which are recalled in the ninth and twelfth verses. The sun and his rays are intimately connected in other Upanishads also with the worlds of Light and their natural opposite is the dark and sunless, not the Titanic worlds.
1.01 - The Corporeal Being of Man, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The difference in the structure of minerals, plants, and animals corresponds with these three forms of existence. And it is this structure, this shape which one perceives through the senses, and which alone one can call body. But the human body is different from that of the animal. This difference everybody must recognize whatever may be his opinion in other respects regarding the relationship of man to animals. Even the most radical materialist who denies all soul will not be able to avoid agreeing with the following sentence which Carus utters in his "Organon der Natur and des Geistes". "The finer, inner Construction of the nervous system, and especially of the brain, remains as yet an unsolved problem to the
p. 17
physiologist and the anatomist; but that this concentration of the structure increases more and more in the animal, and in man reaches a stage unequaled in any other being, is a fully established fact, a fact which is of the deepest significance in regard to the spiritual evolution of man, of which, indeed, we may frankly say it is a sufficient explanation. Where, therefore, the structure of the brain has not developed properly, where its smallness and poverty show themselves, as in the case of microcephali and idiots, it goes without saying that one can as little expect the appearance of original ideas and of knowledge, as one can expect propagation of species in persons with completely stunted organs of generation. On the other hand, a strong and beautiful Construction of the whole person, especially of the brain, will certainly not in itself take the place of genius, but it will at any rate supply the first and indispensable requirement for higher knowledge." Just as one ascribes to the human body the three forms of existence, mineral, plant, animal, one must now ascribe to it yet a fourth, the distinctively human form. Through his mineral form of existence man
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1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
our cosmological Constructions became instantaneous sections of
indefinite temporal fibres. To our opened eyes each element
1.01 - What is Magick?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
(Illustration: Man has used the idea of God to dictate his personal conduct, to obtain power over his fellows, to excuse his crimes, and for innumerable other purposes, including that of realizing himself as God. He has used the irrational and unreal conceptions of mathematics to help him in the Construction of mechanical devices. He has used his moral force to influence the actions even of wild animals. He has employed poetic genius for political purposes.)
15. Every force in the Universe is capable of being transformed into any other kind of force by using suitable means. There is thus an inexhaustible supply of any particular kind of force that we may need.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
knowledge, is Construction or update of patterns of behavior and representation, such that the unknown is
transformed from something terrifying and compelling into something beneficial (or, at least, something
--
The goal, writ large, towards which our higher systems work must therefore be Construction of a state
where all our needs and the needs of others are simultaneously met. This higher goal, to which we
--
I decide to take the stairs to the cafeteria. If the stairs are blocked by Construction, I am in more serious
trouble. My original fantasy go down to the cafeteria and eat was predicated on an implicit
--
parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes), is responsible for the Construction of the separate worlds of our
sensory systems (primarily sight, hearing and touch) and for their integration into the unified perceptual
--
is metaphor; generation of metaphor (key to the Construction of narratives dreams, dramas, stories and
myth) might well be regarded as the first stage of hypothesis Construction. As situation-specific adaptive
behaviors are generated, as a consequence of exploration, this provisional labelling or hypothesis (or
--
representational schema. Each of these two purposes appears served by the Construction of a specific form
of knowledge, and its subsequent storage in permanent memory. The first form has been described as
--
subject and the object in question. This new sensory input constitutes grounds for the Construction,
elaboration and update of a permanent but modifiable four-dimensional (spatial and temporal)
--
myth appears as an essential precondition for social Construction and subsequent regulation of complexly
civilized individual presumption, action and desire.
--
and level of maturation). This process can in fact be observed during the spontaneous Construction (and
then codification) of childrens games.180 It is the organization of such games and their elaboration,
through repeated communication that constitutes the basis for the Construction of culture itself.
Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth
--
Such internalization constitutes Construction of a value (dominance) hierarchy determination of the
relative contextual propriety (morality) of imitated or otherwise incorporated patterns of action. Such
Construction inevitably precedes episodic or semantic representation of the basis of the Construction,
although such second-order representation, once established, becomes capable (indirectly) of modifying
--
and they overlap. The Construction of proper sets is possible obviously, since they exist and the ability
to construct and use such sets has proved useful, in a broad variety of manners. Nonetheless, the capability
that underlies such Construction appears relatively new, phylogenetically speaking and seems at
dependent at least in part on the ability to think empirically and to regard things objectively. In the absence
--
manner to the Construction and establishment of experience as such. It is impossible to understand why the
Judeo-Christian tradition has had such immense power or to comprehend the nature of the relationship
--
objective external world. It is tempting, therefore, to regard such beings as imaginative Constructions as
personifications of subjective affective or emotional states or drives; as the incarnated form of subjective
--
(as it is historically-elaborated Construction and shared imaginative experience). The primitive deity
nonetheless serves as accurate representation of the ground of being, however, because it is affect and
--
Something must exist, prior to the Construction of identifiable things (something that cannot be imagined,
in the absence of a subject). That thing might usefully be portrayed as the all-devouring mother of
--
and the Construction of the universe from its body parts, is symbolic (metaphorical) representation of the
central, adaptive process of heroic encounter with the undifferentiated unknown, and the Construction or
generation of differentiated order as a consequence. It is this process, emulated by the emperor of
--
imagination), and, finally and only much later an abstract Construction of rules describing the explicit
rights and responsibilities of the citizenry (an entity of words, the body of law). This increasingly
abstract and detailed Construction develops from imitation to abstract representation, and comprises rules
and schemas of interpretations useful for maintaining stability of interpersonal interaction. It is the
--
prior to the dawn of experience. This general symbolic Construction takes many particular forms, each of
115
--
potent enough to drive the Construction of culture, the net that constrains the unknowable source of all
things. The impetus for representation of the domain of the unexpected arose (and arises) as consequence of
--
their identification with Christ, the eternally dying and resurrecting (sun) god. Construction of this awful
ritual meant furtherance of the abstract conceptualization of a permanent structural aspect of (every) human
--
The fundamental act of creativity in the human realm, in the concrete case, is the Construction of a
pattern of behavior which produces emotionally-desirable results in a situation that previously reeked of
--
from contact with the unknown means the Construction of experience itself; the destruction of previous
modes of adaptation and representation (previous worlds) means return of explored territory to the
--
behavioral output. Rank-ordering of these warring strategies that is, Construction of a context-specific
behavioral dominance-hierarchy (which corresponds to the nested narrative model proposed earlier)
--
constructing schema from the outset. The initial Constructions are being done biologically, and only at some
time later does the child schematize the reflexive patterns already underway.325
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portrayals of the unknown. Mythological representation of the hero and his cultural Construction are, by
contrast, examination and portrayal of who or what it is that knows, and of what it is that is known. The
--
conflict (between temptation and moral purity, for example) requires the Construction of an abstract
moral system, powerful enough to allow what an occurrence signifies for the future to govern reaction to
what it signifies now. Even that Construction is, however, necessarily incomplete, when considered only as
153
--
sufficient to give impetus to the Construction of megaliths massive stone testaments to the past in a
geographical zone stretching from western and northern Europe, through the Middle East, into Tibet and
--
By virtue of the megalithic Constructions, the dead enjoy an exceptional power; however, since
communication with the ancestors is ritually assured, this power can be shared by the living.... What
--
the world of experience. Emergence of heroism meant Construction of culture: historically-determined
procedural knowledge and communicable description thereof. Construction of culture is creation of the
mythic Great and Terrible Father, tyrant and wise king, as intermediary between the vulnerable individual
1.02 - Shakti and Personal Effort, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3.2:rejection of the movements of the lower nature - rejection of the mind's ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, Constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, - rejection of the vital nature's desires, demands, cravings, sensations, passions, selfishness, pride, arrogance, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, hostility to the Truth, so that the true power and joy may pour from above into a calm, large, strong and consecrated vital being, - rejection of the physical nature's stupidity, doubt, disbelief, obscurity, obstinacy, pettiness, laziness, unwillingness to change, tamas, so that the true stability of Light, Power, Ananda may establish itself in a body growing always more divine;
3.3:surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti.
1.02 - Taras Tantra, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
achieve this result. They only add new Constructions
to the preceding ones. It is true, however, that in the
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
all Constructions of the outward surface Nature, Dharmas,
and take refuge in the Divine alone, he will write in The
1.02 - The Magic Circle, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
The diagram, that is the drawing by which the Divinity is expressed within the circle, is subject to the religious concepts of the magician. The procedure followed by an oriental magician when forming a magic circle is of no use to an occidental magician, because his ideas of the Divine and the Infinite are quite different from those of the magician from the East. If an occidental initiate drew a magic circle according to oriental instructions, with all divine names appertaining to it, it would be ineffective and completely fall short of its purpose. A Christian magician must therefore never draw a magic circle according to an Indian or any other religion if he wants to save himself from an unnecessary effort. The Construction of the magic circle depends, from the beginning, on one's individual ideas and beliefs and one's individual conception of the qualities of the Divine, who is to be symbolized graphically by this circle. This is the reason why a genuine magician will never draw a circle, carry out rituals, or follow instructions concerning ceremonial magic to which he himself is not identified in his individual practice. For this would be similar to wearing oriental clothes in the occident.
Bearing these facts in mind, it comes natural that the magic circle has to be drawn in complete accordance with the views of life and maturity of the magician. The initiate who is conscious about the Harmony of the Universe and its exact hierarchy will, of course, make use of his knowledge when drawing the magic circle. Such a magician may, if he likes, and if the circumstances permit it, draw into his magic circle diagrams representing the whole hierarchy of the universe and thus come into contact with, and awake his consciousness of, the universe much more rapidly. He is free to draw, if necessary, several circles at a certain distance from each other in order to use them for representing the hierarchy of the universe in the form of divine names, genii, princes, angels and other powers. One must, of course, meditate appropriately and take the concept of the divine aspects in question into consideration when drawing the circle. The true magician must know that divine names are symbolic designations of divine qualities and powers. It stands to reason that while drawing the circle and entering the divine names the magician must also consider the analogies corresponding to the power in question, such as colour, number and direction, if he does not want to allow a breach in his consciousness to come into existance because he has not presented the universe in its complete analogy.
--
The books dealing with the Construction of the magic circle clearly state that during the act of invocation the magician must not leave the circle, which, in its magic sense, means nothing else but that the consciousness of, or contact with, the Absolute, (i. e. the macrocosm), must not be interrupted. Needless to say that the magician, during his magic operation with the help of a magic circle and with the being standing in front of him, must not step out of the circle with his physical body, unless he has finished his experiment and dismissed the relevant being.
All this clearly shows that a true magic circle is really the best means to practice ceremonial magic. The magician will always find that the magic circle is, in every respect, the highest symbol in his hand.
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
The early years of the Renaissance, which one might even characterize as being dramatic, are the source of further writings in the wake of Cennini's treatise. Of equally epochal importance are the three volumes of Leon Battista Alberti'sDellapittura of 1436,which, besides a theory of proportions and anatomy based anVitruvius, contain a first systematic attempt at a theory of perspectival Construction (the chapter "Della prospettiva"). Earlier, Brunelleschi had achieved a perspectival Construction in his dome for the cathedral of Florence, and Manetti justifiably calls him the "founder of perspectival drawing." But it was Alberti who first formulated an epistemological description of the new manner of depiction, stated, still in very general terms, in the words: "Accordingly, the painting is a slice through the visual pyramid corresponding to a particular space or interval with its Center and specific hues rendered an a given surface by lines and colors." What Vitruvius in his Architettura still designated as "scenografia" has become for Alberti a "prospettiva", a clearly depicted visual pyramid.
Some dozen years later, the three Commentarii of Lorenzo Ghiberti also treat of this same perspective; but despite his attempt to remain within the tradition, his treatises describe in a novel way not only perspective but also anatomy and a theory of drawing (teorica del disegno). It is significant that he corrects his principal model, Vitruvius, by inserting a chapter an "perspective" where Vitruvius would have included a chapter an the "knowledge of rules," and consequently intentionally 'elevates perspectivity to a basic axiom of his time.
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
and of our Constructions velocity does not seem to change the
nature of matter. None the less, we now know that at the extreme
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
means inevitable Construction of human groups and human moral systems with centrally identifiable
features and processes of generation. The Construction of a successful group the most difficult of feats
means establishment of a society composed of individuals who act in their own interest (at least enough to
--
the semantic system. This process results in Construction of a story, or narrative. Any narrative contains,
implicit in it, a set of moral assumptions. Representation of this (primarily social) moral code in form of
--
own identity and status as Construction of an individual (a son), capable of transcending the restrictions
of the group.
1.03 - Invocation of Tara, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
without mental Construction, and free of distractions.
It is then equivalent to the Mahamudra meditation.
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: In Europe they have always tried for democracy. Real democracy has always failed, and failed because it is against human nature. There are certain men who are bound to govern. One must be prepared to face facts. Even in the democracies those men manage to rule, and one knows only too well the villagers do not. Only, those people govern in their name, and it sometimes makes them more free and reckless. In Russia one does not know the exact situation the attempt was for creating real rule of the people, i.e. of the village. You see in what it has ended? It has established again an oligarchy of the Lenin-party. One may even ask: What has Russia created? It has tried to destroy capital and thus tried to destroy and perhaps succeeded in destroying city life. It is trying mechanically to equalise men. But it is not a success. The Western social life rests on interests and rights. It depends upon the vitalistic existence of man which is largely governed by his rational mind helped by scientific inventions. Reason gives man the rigid methods of classification and mental Construction and theory to justify his interests and rights, and science gives him the required efficiency, force and power. Thus he is sure of his goal. But one may say that, though organised and effective, European life is not organic. The view that it takes of man is a very imperfect view, and the ideal it sets before man an incomplete ideal. That is why you find there class-war and struggle for rights governed by the rational intellect. European life is very powerful because it can put the whole force of its life at once in operation by a coordination of all its members. In old times the ideal was different. They the ancients based their society on the structure of religion. I do not mean narrow religion but the highest law of our being. The whole social fabric was built up to fulfil that purpose. There was no talk in those days of individual liberty in the present sense of the term. But there was absolute communal liberty. Every community was completely free to develop its own Dharma, the law of its being. Even the selection of the line was a matter of free choice for the individual.
I do not believe that because a man is governed by another man, or one class by another class, there is always oppression; for instance, the Brahmins never ruled but they were never oppressed by others, rather they oppressed other people. The government becomes useless and bad when one class or one nation keeps another down and governs it for its own benefit and does not allow the class or nation to follow its own Dharma.
--
Now the problem is how to organise the future life of the country. I myself am a communist in a certain sense but I cannot agree with the Russian method. One may ask: After all what has Russia created? Even among our present workers in India there is a lack of that definite idea as to what they are about and what kind of thing they want. That is the reason why men like Dr. Bhagwandas propose some mental Constructions like asking men to go in for politics after 50 years of age and so on. That does not seem to me to be the correct method, and I believe whoever pursues it will encounter complete failure.
Question: Anything would be better than the present condition.
--
But ordinarily, we have not to do philanthropic work from the same motives. Philanthropy has an egoistic motive, however high it may be. We have to look beyond. For instance, we need not start schools for the Depressed Classes in order to serve humanity. We have to work as a sacrifice to God and we have therefore to go beyond mental ideals and Constructions. When men begin work with these mental or ethical motives, they find them to be true and therefore they are not willing to leave them behind and go beyond. We have to take up the work from the yogic point of view. For example, it is necessary to spread our literature because it spreads the new thought. Some men may receive it correctly and some incorrectly. A movement is set up on the universal mental plane. So also in social work the whole frame is shaken by the new thought and in-as-much as it moves men out of the old groove it is useful. But we have to act from the inner motives.
9 AUGUST 1923
--
So, our first task is to find God and base life on that Consciousness; In that process what is necessary for humanity will naturally be done. But that is not our direct aim. Ours is a tremendous task. It is an adventure in which one must be prepared to leave behind his desires and passions, intellectual preferences and mental Constructions in order to enable the Higher Power to do its work. You have to see whether you can give your consent to the radical transformation that is inevitable.
Athavale: Yes, I am prepared for the gamble.
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
and developed a system of internal Constructions that could
not have escaped our observation. In consequence it is denied
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The fourth to the ninth Sephiros inclusive are known as the Sephiros habinyon - the Potencies of Construction, and
Myers holds that they symbolize the dimensions of matter, be it an atom or an universe : the four directions of space
1.03 - Time Series, Information, and Communication, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
In such Constructions, the example of the Fourier developments
suggests that such expansions as Expression 3.44 are convenient
--
accuracy as we like. The details of its Construction are more for
the specialist in electrical engineering than for the reader of this
--
gested its importance in the Construction of muscles. Substances
with high resonance very generally have an abnormal capacity
1.04 - Body, Soul and Spirit, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
Man can enlighten himself in a correct way concerning himself only when he grasps the significance of thinking within his being. The brain is the bodily instrument for thinking. Just as man can only see colors with a properly constructed eye, so the suitably constructed brain serves him for thought. The whole body of man is so formed that it receives its crown in the organ of the spirit, the brain. One can understand the Construction of the human brain only by observing it in relation to its task, which consists in being the instrument or tool for the thinking spirit. This is borne out by a comparative survey of the animal world. Among amphibians we find the brain small in comparison with the spinal cord, in mammals it is proportionately larger, in man it is largest in comparison with the
p. 23
--
The human body has a Construction adapted to thinking. The same materials and forces which are present in the mineral kingdom are
p. 24
so combined in the human body that by means of these combinations thought can manifest itself. This mineral Construction, formed as a suitable instrument for its work, will be called in the following pages the physical body of man. (In theosophical literature it is called "Sthula sharira.")
This organized mineral Construction with the brain as its center comes into existence by propagation, and reaches its developed form through growth. Propagation and growth man has in common with plants and animals. Propagation and growth distinguish what is living from the lifeless mineral. What lives comes forth from the living by means of the germ. The descendant follows the forefa thers in the succession of the living. The forces through which a mineral originates we must look for in the materials themselves which compose it. A quartz crystal is formed by the forces united in it, and inherent in the silicon and oxygen. The forces which shape an oak tree we must look for in a roundabout way in the germ in the mother and father plants. The form of the oak is preserved through propagation from forefa thers to
p. 25
--
In order to comprehend the whole man, one must think of him as formed of the components above mentioned. The body builds itself up out of the world of physical matter in such a way that the Construction is adapted
p. 53
1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
7:But again we find that we are being misled by words, deceived by the trenchant oppositions of our limited mentality with its fond reliance on verbal distinctions as if they perfectly represented ultimate truths and its rendering of our supramental experiences in the sense of those intolerant distinctions. NonBeing is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception. We erect a fiction of nothingness in order to overpass, by the method of total exclusion, all that we can know and consciously are. Actually when we examine closely the Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite Constructions, but is in fact the only true Existence.3
8:And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time. For what was that portentous date in the history of eternal Nothing on which Being was born out of it or when will come that other date equally formidable on which an unreal all will relapse into the perpetual void? Sat and Asat, if they have both to be affirmed, must be conceived as if they obtained simultaneously. They permit each other even though they refuse to mingle. Both, since we must speak in terms of Time, are eternal. And who shall persuade eternal Being that it does not really exist and only eternal Non-Being is? In such a negation of all experience how shall we find the solution that explains all experience?
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
The evolutionary Construction of an adaptive social structure, simultaneously extant in behavior and in
semantic/episodic representation of that behavior, means abstraction and hierarchical organization of
--
heightened the danger of this partially pathological tendency. The Construction of a powerful and accurate
representation of the objective or shared world a logical conclusion of the interpersonal exchange of
--
intrapsychic ideal, abstract symbolic Construction and utopian state, creation of generations of autonomous
fantasy, following its own rules, governed by its own denizens, with its own non-individual transcendent
--
through action of culture. Construction of self-consciousness requires elaboration of a self-model;
extension of the notion of the independent other to the self; internalization of a socially-determined
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Take, for instance, the Construction of Golconde. I am not going to enter into an elaborate description of its development. Considering that our resources in men and money were then limited, how such a magnificent building was erected is a wonder. An American architect with his Japanese and Czechoslovakian assistants foregathered. Old buildings were demolished, our sadhaks along with the paid workers laboured night and day and as if from a void, the spectacular mansion rose silently and slowly like a giant in the air. It is a story hardly believable for Pondicherry of those days. But my wonder was at the part the Mother played in it, not inwardly which is beyond my depth but in the daylight itself. She was in constant touch with the work through her chosen instruments. As many sadhaks as possible were pressed into service there; to anyone young or old asking for work, part time, whole time, her one cry: "Go to Golconde, go to Golconde." It was one of her daily topics with Sri Aurobindo who was kept informed of the difficulties, troubles innumerable, and at the same time, of the need of his force to surmount "them. Particularly when rain threatened to impede or spoil some important part of the work, she would invoke his special help: for instance, when the roof was to be built. How often we heard her praying to Sri Aurobindo, "Lord, there should be no rain now." Menacing clouds had mustered strong, stormy west winds blowing ominously, rain imminent, and torrential Pondicherry rain! We would look at the sky and speculate on the result of the fight between the Divine Force and the natural force. The Divine Force would of course win: slowly the Fury would leash her forces and withdraw into the cave. But as soon as the intended object was achieved, a deluge swept down as if in revenge. Sri Aurobindo observed that that was often the rule. During the harvesting season too, S.O.S. signals would come to Sri Aurobindo through the Mother to stop the rain. He would smile and do his work silently. If I have not seen any other miracle, I can vouch for this one repeated more than once. During the roof- Construction, work had to go on all night long and the Mother would mobilise and marshal all the available Ashram hands and put them there. With what cheer and ardour our youth jumped into the fray at the call of the Mother, using often Sri Aurobindo's name to put more love and zeal into the strenuous enterprise! We felt the vibration of a tremendous energy driving, supporting, inspiring the entire collective body. This was how Golconde, an Ashram guest house, was built, one of the wonders of modern architecture lavishly praised by many visitors. Let me quote the relevant portion of a letter from Sri Aurobindo, written in 1945 with regard to Golconde:
"...It is on this basis that she (Mother) planned the Golconde. First, she wanted a high architectural beauty, and in this she succeeded architects and people with architectural knowledge have admired it with enthusiasm as a remarkable achievement; one spoke of it as the finest building of its kind he had seen, with no equal in all Europe or America; and a French architect, pupil of a great master, said it executed superbly the idea which his master had been seeking for but failed to realise..."2
--
All this, however, is by the way. My point was to demonstrate the Mother's method of working. As soon as the plot was acquired, she went about the work in her usual one-pointed manner. And what a job it was! To build a long rampart against the surges of the sea was itself a gigantic enterprise for a private institution like our Ashram without any income of its own. But I shall confine myself to the Construction of the tennis courts only. She did not count the expense; men and money were freely employed, for the courts had to be made ready within a minimum period of time. We have observed that when the Mother feels the need for a work to be done, she goes ahead, confident that the required resources will come. In the present case, there was also the question of the right worker to see the project through. The Mother said to Sri Aurobindo, "I know there is one man who can do it." It was Monoranjan Ganguli, a sadhak. I saw him at this work and was really amazed at his wonderful devotion to the Mother, his determination to fulfil the trust she had placed in him. He supervised the operation with unfailing love and duty and cool temper, making the tennis ground his home and passing many sleepless nights sitting on a stool. When I asked him why he should be in such a hurry, he replied, "Mother wants it so. I must finish it within the appointed time." "Is it possible? Only a few days are left!" I voiced my doubt. "Oh, I must!" and he did. A singular feat indeed, and again the Mother's right choice.
When the courts were ready, there followed a change in our programme. Henceforth Sri Aurobindo's noon meal was served earlier so that the Mother could go out by 5.00 p.m. She would come to Sri Aurobindo's room dressed in her specially designed tennis costume. She played for about an hour with a number of young people in turn, even took part in tournaments. From there she came to the Playground and, after another bout of crowded activities, returned to the Ashram at about 8.00 or 9.00 p.m.
1.04 - The Silent Mind, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Mental Constructions The first stage in Sri Aurobindo's yoga, and the major task that opens the door to many realizations, is mental silence. Why mental silence,
one may ask? Clearly, if we wish to discover a new country within us,
--
complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations an amalgam of many small self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations. 30 By the age of eighteen we are set, one might say, with our major vibrations established. Then the deposits of the same perpetual thing with a thousand different faces we call culture or "our" self will ceaselessly settle around this primary structure in ever thicker layers, increasingly refined and polished. We are in fact shut in a Construction, which may be like lead, without even a small opening, or as graceful as a minaret;
but whether in a granite skin or a glass statue, we are nonetheless confined, forever buzzing and repetitive. The first task of yoga is to brea the freely, to shatter that mental screen, which allows only one type of vibration to get through, in order to discover the multicolored infinity of vibrations; that is, the world and people as they really are,
--
nothing outside or inside. Here is where we must be very careful, once we have demolished our outer mental Constructions, not to become confined in another Construction of false profundity, an absurd,
illusionist or skeptical, perhaps even rebellious, Construction. We must go farther. Once we have begun yoga, we must go to the end, no matter what, because if we let go of the thread, we may never find it again. There, indeed, is the trial. The seeker must understand that he is being born to another life, and his new eyes, his new senses are not yet formed; he is like a newborn child just coming into the world. There is not a lessening of consciousness but, in reality, a passage to a new consciousness: The cup [has to be] left clean and empty for the divine liquor to be poured into it.34 The only resource in these circumstances is to cling to our aspiration and, precisely because everything is so terribly lacking, allow it to grow like a fire into which we throw all our old clothes, our old life, our old ideas and old feelings; we have to have an unshakable faith that behind this transition, a door will open.
And our faith is not foolish; it is not a credulous stupidity but a foreknowledge, something within us that knows before we do, sees 34
--
Having started from a small mental Construction in which he felt 40
On Himself, 26:83
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
may be, this is certain that there is not only no Construction
here without destruction, no harmony except by a poise of
1.05 - Computing Machines and the Nervous System, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
in money and in the effort of Construction, goes to the simple
problem of recording numbers clearly and accurately. The sim-
--
machine is determined by the accuracy of Construction of the
scale; and those, like the ordinary desk adding and multiply-
--
cal or electrical Construction of computing machines, there are
a few maxims which deserve consideration. One is that mech-
1.05 - Mental Education, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, as the child grows older and progresses in his studies, his mind too ripens and becomes more and more capable of forming general ideas, and with them almost always comes a need for certitude, for a knowledge that is stable enough to form the basis of a mental Construction which will permit all the diverse and scattered and often contradictory ideas accumulated in his brain to be organised and put in order. This ordering is indeed very necessary if one is to avoid chaos in one's thoughts. All contradictions can be transformed into complements, but for that one must discover the higher idea that will have the power to bring them harmoniously together. It is always good to consider every problem from all possible standpoints so as to avoid partiality and exclusiveness; but if the thought is to be active and creative, it must, in every case, be the natural and logical synthesis of all the points of view adopted. And if you want to make the totality of your thoughts into a dynamic and constructive force, you must also take great care as to the choice of the central idea of your mental synthesis; for upon that will depend the value of this synthesis. The higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise.
It goes without saying that this work of organisation cannot be done once and for all. The mind, if it is to keep its vigour and youth, must progress constantly, revise its notions in the light of new knowledge, enlarge its frame-work to include fresh notions and constantly reclassify and reorganise its thoughts, so that each of them may find its true place in relation to the others and the whole remain harmonious and orderly.
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the next hymn the word ritam does not occur, but the continual refrain of its strophes is the cognate word ritunpibartun, Medhatithi cries to each of the gods in turn,ritun yajnam sh the .. ritubhir ishyata, pibatam ritun yajnavhas, ritun yajnanr asi. Ritu is supposed to have here & elsewhere its classical & modern significance, a season of the year; the ritwik is the priest who sacrifices in the right season; the gods are invited to drink the soma according to the season! It may be so, but the rendering seems to me to make all the phrases of this hymn strangely awkward & improbable. Medhatithi invites Indra to drink Soma by the season, Mitra & Varuna are to taste the sacrifice, this single sacrifice offered by this son of Kanwa, by the season; in the same single sacrifice the priests or the gods are to be impelled by the seasons, by many seasons on a single sacrificial occasion! the Aswins are to drink the Soma by the sacrifice-supporting season! To Agni it is said, by the season thou art leader of the sacrifice. Are such expressions at all probable or even possible in the mouth of a poet using freely the natural language of his age? Are they not rather the clumsy Constructions of the scholar drawn to misinterpret his text by the false clue of a later & inapplicable meaning of the central word ritu? But if we suppose the sacrifice to be symbolic &, as ritam means ideal truth in general, so ritu to mean that truth in its ordered application, the ideal law of thought, feeling or action, then this impossible awkwardness vanishes & gives place to a natural Construction & a lucid & profound significance. Indra is to drink the wine of immortality according to or by the force of the ideal law, by that ideal law Varuna &Mitra are to enjoy the offering of Ananda of the human mind & the human activity, the gods are to be impelled in their functioning ritubhih, by the ideal laws of the truth,the plural used, in the ordinary manner of the Veda, to express the particular actions of the law of truth, the singular its general action. It is the ideal law that supports the human offering of our activities to the divine life above us, ritun yajnavhas; by the force of the law of Truth Agni leads the sacrifice to its goal.
In this suggestive & significant hymn packed full of the details of the Vedic sacrificial symbolism we again come across Daksha in close connection with Mitra, Varuna & the Truth.
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In sum, it may be safely affirmed that no solution offered can be anything but provisional until a supramental Truth-Consciousness is reached by which the appearances of things are put in their place and their essence revealed and that in them which derives straight from the spiritual essence. In the meanwhile our only safety is to find a guiding law of spiritual experience -- or else to liberate a light within that can lead us on the way until that greater direct Truth-Consciousness is reached above us or born within us. For all else in us that is only outward, all that is not a spiritual sense or seeing, the Constructions, representations or conclusions of the intellect, the suggestions or instigations of the Life-force, the positive necessities of physical things are sometimes half-lights, sometimes false lights that can at best only serve for a while or serve a little and for the rest either detain or confuse us. The guiding law of spiritual experience can only come by an opening of human consciousness to the Divine Consciousness; there must be the power to receive in us the working and comm and and dynamic presence of the Divine shakti and surrender ourselves to her control; it is that surrender and that control which bring the guidance. But the surrender is not sure, there is no absolute certitude of the guidance so long as we are besieged by mind formations and life impulses and instigations of ego which may easily betray us into the hands of a false experience. This danger can only be countered by the opening of a now nine-tenths concealed inmost soul or psychic being that is already there but not commonly active within us. That is the inner light we must liberate; for the light of this inmost soul is our one sure illumination so long as we walk still amidst the siege of the Ignorance and the Truth-Consciousness has not taken up the entire control of our Godward endeavour. The working of the Divine Force in us under the conditions of the transition and the light of the psychic being turning us always towards a conscious and seeing obedience to that higher impulsion and away from the demands and instigations of the Forces of the Ignorance, these between them create an ever progressive inner law of our action which continues till the spiritual and supramental can be established in our nature. In the transition there may well be a period in which we take up all life and action and offer them to the Divine for purification, change and deliverance of the truth within them, another period in which we draw back and build a spiritual wall around us admitting through its gates only such activities as consent to undergo the law of the spiritual transformation, a third in which a free and all-embracing action, but with new forms fit for the utter truth of the Spirit, can again be made possible. These things, however, will be decided by no mental rule but in the light of the soul within us and by the ordaining force and progressive guidance of the Divine Power that secretly or overtly first impels, then begins clearly to control and order and finally takes up the whole burden of the Yoga.
In accordance with the triple character of the sacrifice we may divide works too into a triple order, the works of Knowledge, the works of Love, the works of the Will-in-Life, and see how this more plastic spiritual rule applies to each province and effects the transition from the lower to the higher nature.
--
These two changes are the signs of a first effectuation in which the activities of the mental nature are lifted up, spiritualised, widened, universalised, liberated, led to a consciousness of their true purpose as an instrumentation of the Divine creating and developing its manifestation in the temporal universe. But this cannot be the whole scope of the transformation; for it is not in these limits that the integral seeker can cease from his ascension or confine the widening of his nature. For, if it were so, knowledge would still remain a working of the mind, liberated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must be, comparatively restricted, relative, imperfect in the very essence of its dynamism; it would reflect luminously great Constructions of Truth, but not move in the domain where Truth is au thentic, direct, sovereign and native. There is an ascension still to be made from this height, by which the spiritualised mind will exceed itself and transmute into a supramental power of knowledge. Already in the process of spiritualisation it will have begun to pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind and next into the gloaming belts of a still greater free intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself, true in itself, no longer entirely mental and therefore subjected to the abundant intrusion of error. Here too is not an end, for it must rise beyond into the very domain of that untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self-awareness of essential Being and, beyond it, attain that from which this light comes. For there is an overmind behind Mind, a Power more original and dynamic which supports Mind, sees it as a diminished radiation from itself, uses it as a transmitting belt of passage downward or an instrument for the creations of the Ignorance. The last step of the ascension would be the surpassing of overmind itself or its return into its own still greater origin, its conversion into the supramental light of the Divine Gnosis. For there in the supramental Light is the seat of the divine Truth-Consciousness that has native in it, as no other consciousness below it can have, the power to organise the works of a Truth which is no longer .tarnished by the shadow of the cosmic Inconscience and Ignorance. There to reach and thence to bring down a supramental dynamism that can transform the Ignorance is the distant but imperative supreme goal of the integral Yoga.
As the light of each of these higher powers is turned upon the human activities of knowledge, any distinction of sacred and profane, human and divine, begins more and more to fade until it is finally abolished as otiose; for whatever is touched and thoroughly penetrated by the Divine Gnosis is transfigured and becomes a movement of its own Light and Power, free from the turbidity and limitations of the lower intelligence. It is not a separation of some activities, but a transformation of them all by the change of the informing consciousness that is the way of liberation, an ascent of the sacrifice of knowledge to a greater and ever greater light and force. All the works of mind and intellect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, then again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the overmind radiance, and these transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
then, becomes the set of circumstances that allow the process of moral Construction to flourish or
becomes the process of moral Construction itself. The problem what then is evil? must be addressed
similarly.
--
clear understanding as equivalent to the Construction of a proper set, and assume that the reality of a
thing can be clearly defined. Ideas about evil, however, do not form a proper set. They form a natural
--
through envy, to revenge480 to the ultimate Construction of a character possessed by infinite hatred and
envy:
--
refused to wash the socks of the free bachelor Construction supervisor, Treivish. (His fellow brigade
members tried to persuade him: Come on now, isnt it all the same, the kind of work you do? But no, it
--
game and then by acting in that imaginary world. This game Construction, playing and modifying is a
form of practice, for real-world activity. As games increase in complexity, in fact, it becomes increasingly
--
procedural schema capable of underlying Construction of all complex culturally-determined hierarchies of
specific behavior. This schematic pattern matches the innate, instinctual, neuropsychologically-predicated
--
in the Old Testament in a number of vitally important manners. First, its Construction was a matter of
voluntarily chosen alteration in personal attitude and outlook, rather than a culmination of material labour
--
then there is a reciprocal and simultaneous Construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on
the other.595
--
one thing of unknown and known. This construct and act of Construction typically had twin final aims,
insofar as it constituted the pursuit of perfection: First: union of the feminine, maternal background of the
1.05 - Vishnu as Brahma creates the world, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[10]: The text is, ### which is, as rendered in the text, 'creation preceded by, or beginning with Buddhi, intelligence.' The rules of euphony would however admit of a mute negative being inserted, or 'preceded by ignorance;' that is, by the chief principle, crude nature or Pradhāna, which is one with ignorance: but this seems to depend on notions of a later date, and more partial adoption, than those generally prevailing in our authority; and the first reading therefore has been preferred. It is also to be observed, that the first unintellectual creation was that of immovable objects (as in p. 35), the original of which is, ### and all ambiguity of Construction is avoided. The reading is also established by the text of the Li
ga Purāṇa, which enumerates the different series of creation in the words of the Viṣṇu, except in this passage, which is there transposed, with a slight variation of the reading. Instead of ### it is ### 'The first creation was that of Mahat: Intellect being the first in manifestation.' The reading of the Vāyu P. is still more tautological, but confirms that here preferred: See also n. 12.
1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To the sixth Rik the commentator gives a very awkward and abrupt Construction and trivial turn of thought which breaks entirely the flow of the verse. "That good (in the shape of varied wealth) which thou shalt effect for the giver, thine is that. This is true, O Angiras," that is to say, there can be no doubt about this fact, for if Agni does good to the giver by providing him with wealth, he in turn will perform fresh sacrifices to Agni, and thus the good of the sacrificer becomes the good of the god. Here again it would be better to render, "The good that thou wilt do for the giver, that is that truth of thee, O Angiras," for we thus get at once a simpler sense and Construction and an explanation of the epithet, satya, true, as applied to the god of the sacrificial fire. This is the truth of Agni that to the giver of the sacrifice he surely gives good in return.
The seventh verse offers no difficulty to the ritualistic interpretation except the curious phrase, "we come bearing the prostration." Sayana explains that bearing here means simply doing and he renders, "To thee day by day we, by night and by day, come with the thought performing the prostration." In the eighth verse he takes r.tasya in the sense of truth and explains it as the true fruit of the ritual. "To thee shining, the protector of the sacrifices, manifesting always their truth (that is, their inevitable fruit), increasing in thy own house." Again, it would be simpler and better to take r.tam in the sense of sacrifice and to render, "To thee shining out in the sacrifices, protector of the rite, ever luminous, increasing in thy own house." The "own house" of Agni, says the commentator, is the place of sacrifice and this is indeed called frequently enough in Sanskrit, "the house of Agni".
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
and religious paradigm and the Construction of a new one
would result in revolt as the precondition of a new world.
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
unanimity in a common spirit. The Construction of molecules ensues
through atomic affinity. Similarly, on a higher level, it is through
1.06 - Quieting the Vital, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
impregnable Construction, and to refuse to budge from there. For the individual as for the world, these rather ungracious forces are instruments of progress. "By what men fall, by that they rise," says the Kularnava Tantra in its wisdom. We protest against the apparently useless and arbitrary "catastrophe" that strikes our heart or our flesh,
and we blame the "Enemy," but is it not possible that the soul itself
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and Construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the
Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing
1.07 - On Dreams, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
However, especially in those who have unlearnt the habit of always directing their thoughts towards themselves, there are cases where we can observe events outside ourselves, events which are not the reflection of our personal mental Constructions. And if we know how to translate into intellectual language the more or less inadequate images into which the brain has translated these events, we can learn many things that our too limited physical faculties do not allow us to perceive.
Some people, by a special culture and training, are even able to become and remain conscious of the deeper activities of their inner being, independently of their own cerebral transcription, and thus to evoke them and know them in the waking state with the full range of their faculties.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
20:No individual rises to these heights except in intense moments, no society yet created satisfies this ideal. And in the present state of morality and of human development none perhaps can or ought to satisfy it. Nature will not allow it, Nature knows that it should not be. The first reason is that our moral ideals are themselves for the most part ill-evolved, ignorant and arbitrary, mental Constructions rather than transcriptions of the eternal truths of the spirit. Authoritative and dogmatic, they assert certain absolute standards in theory, but in practice every existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable or is in fact a constant coming short of the absolute standard to which the ideal pretends. If our ethical system is a compromise or a makeshift, it gives at once a principle of justification to the further sterilising compromises which society and the individual hasten to make with it. And if it insists on absolute love, justice, right with an uncompromising insistence, it soars above the head of human possibility and is professed with lip homage but ignored in practice. Even it is found that it ignores other elements in humanity which equally insist on survival but refuse to come within the moral formula. For just as the individual law of desire contains within it invaluable elements of the infinite whole which have to be protected against the tyranny of the absorbing social idea, the innate impulses too both of individual and of collective man contain in them invaluable elements which escape the limits of any ethical formula yet discovered and are yet necessary to the fullness and harmony of an eventual divine perfection.
21:Moreover, absolute love, absolute justice, absolute right reason in their present application by a bewildered and imperfect humanity come easily to be conflicting principles. Justice often demands what love abhors. Right reason dispassionately considering the facts of nature and human relations in search of a satisfying norm or rule is unable to admit without modification either any reign of absolute justice or any reign of absolute love. And in fact man's absolute justice easily turns out to be in practice a sovereign injustice; for his mind, one-sided and rigid in its Constructions, puts forward a one-sided partial and rigorous scheme or figure and claims for it totality and absoluteness and an application that ignores the subtler truth of things and the plasticity of life. All our standards turned into action either waver on a flux of compromises or err by this partiality and unelastic structure. Humanity sways from one orientation to another; the race moves upon a zigzag path led by conflicting claims and, on the whole, works out instinctively what Nature intends, but with much waste and suffering, rather than either what it desires or what it holds to be right or what the highest light from above demands from the embodied spirit.
22:The fact is that when we have reached the cult of absolute ethical qualities and erected the categorical imperative of an ideal law, we have not come to the end of our search or touched the truth that delivers. There is, no doubt, something here that helps us to rise beyond limitation by the physical and vital man in us, an insistence that overpasses the individual and collective needs and desires of a humanity still bound to the living mud of Matter in which it took its roots, an aspiration that helps to develop the mental and moral being in us: this new sublimating element has been therefore an acquisition of great importance; its workings have marked a considerable step forward in the difficult evolution of terrestrial Nature. And behind the inadequacy of these ethical conceptions something too is concealed that does attach to a supreme Truth; there is here the glimmer of a light and power that are part of a yet unreached divine Nature. But the mental idea of these things is not that light and the moral formulation of them is not that power. These are only representative Constructions of the mind that cannot embody the divine spirit which they vainly endeavour to imprison in their categorical formulas. Beyond the mental and moral being in us is a greater divine being that is spiritual and supramental; for it is only through a large spiritual plane where the mind's formulas dissolve in a white flame of direct inner experience that we can reach beyond mind and pass from its Constructions to the vastness and freedom of the supramental realities. There alone can we touch the harmony of the divine powers that are poorly mispresented to our mind or framed into a false figure by the conflicting or wavering elements of the moral law. There alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and the illumined mental man becomes possible in that supramental Spirit which is at once the secret source and goal of our mind and life and body. There alone is there any possibility of an absolute justice, love and right - far other than that which we imagine - at one with each other in the light of a supreme divine knowledge. There alone can there be a reconciliation of the conflict between our members.
23:In other words there is, above society's external law and man's moral law and beyond them, though feebly and ignorantly aimed at by something within them, a larger truth of a vast unbound consciousness, a law divine towards which both these blind and gross formulations are progressive faltering steps that try to escape from the natural law of the animal to a more exalted light or universal rule. That divine standard, since the godhead in us is our spirit moving towards its own concealed perfection, must be a supreme spiritual law and truth of our nature. Again, as we are embodied beings in the world with a common existence and nature and yet individual souls capable of direct touch with the Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have a double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great spiritualised collective life and determines perfectly our relations with each being and all beings in Nature's varied oneness. It must be at the same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment the rhythm and exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine in the soul, mind, life, body of the individual creature.1 And we find in experience that this supreme light and force of action in its highest expression is at once an imperative law and an absolute freedom. It is an imperative law because it governs by immutable Truth our every inner and outer movement. And yet at each moment and in each movement the absolute freedom of the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity of our conscious and liberated nature.
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26:The older religions erected their rule of the wise, their dicta of Manu or Confucius, a complex Shastra in which they attempted to combine the social rule and moral law with the declaration of certain eternal principles of our highest nature in some kind of uniting amalgam. All three were treated on the same ground as equally the expression of everlasting verities, sanatana dharma. But two of these elements are evolutionary and valid for a time, mental Constructions, human readings of the will of the Eternal; the third, attached and subdued to certain social and moral formulas, had to share the fortunes of its forms. Either the Shastra grows obsolete and has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a rigid barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The Shastra erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable. The unrestrained indulgence of his outer impulses leads to anarchy and dissolution, but the suppression and coercion of his soul's freedom by a fixed and mechanical rule spells stagnation or an inner death. Not this coercion or determination from outside, but the free discovery of his highest spirit and the truth of an eternal movement is the supreme thing that he has to discover.
27:The higher ethical law is discovered by the individual in his mind and will and psychic sense and then extended to the race. The supreme law also must be discovered by the individual in his spirit. Then only, through a spiritual influence and not by the mental idea, can it be extended to others. A moral law can be imposed as a rule or an ideal on numbers of men who have not attained that level of consciousness or that fineness of mind and will and psychic sense in which it can become a reality to them and a living force. As an ideal it can be revered without any need of practice. As a rule it can be observed in its outsides even if the inner sense is missed altogether. The supramental and spiritual life cannot be mechanised in this way, it cannot be turned into a mental ideal or an external rule. It has its own great lines, but these must be made real, must be the workings of an active Power felt in the individual's consciousness and the transcriptions of an eternal Truth powerful to transform mind, life and body. And because it is thus real, effective, imperative, the generalisation of the supramental consciousness and the spiritual life is the sole force that can lead to individual and collective perfection in earth's highest creatures. Only by our coming into constant touch with the divine Consciousness and its absolute Truth can some form of the conscious Divine, the dynamic Absolute, take up our earth-existence and transform its strife, stumbling, sufferings and falsities into an image of the supreme Light, Power and Ananda.
1.07 - The Ego and the Dualities, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
16:We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being in the totality of physical Nature as the foundation of human existence in the material universe. We have the emergence of that Conscious Being in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution which has enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will enable him progressively to manifest God in the body, - the universal Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and decisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out of that indeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call the subconscient, - hr.dya samudra, the ocean heart in things of the Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the first formations of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome of its attempt to realise unity in an artificial Construction of itself exclusive of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe. We have the dissolution of this egoistic Construction by the self-opening of the individual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme fulfilment to which egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life was only a prelude to the human. We have the realisation of the All in the individual by the transformation of the limited ego into a conscious centre of the divine unity and freedom as the term at which the fulfilment arrives. And we have the outflowing of the infinite and absolute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of being on the Many in the world as the divine result towards which the cycles of our evolution move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in herself; of this she strives to be delivered.
1.07 - THE GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
That the Construction of superorganisms is a hazardous opera-
tion (like all Life's major transformations) is something of which we
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Slayer of the Real. Let the disciple slay the Slayer." The theory here is that the mind is but a mechanism for dealing symbolically with impressions, though its Construction tempts one to take these impressions for Reality. Conscious thought, hence, is fundamentally false, preventing one from perceiving reality.
There is but one simple fundamental essential to medita- tion, beyond all dogma and morality, viz. to stop thinking.
1.08 - Independence from the Physical, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
We are only prisoners of ourselves; the whole world is waiting at our door, if only we would consent to pull aside the screen of our small Constructions. To this capacity for expansion of the consciousness must naturally be added a capacity for concentration, so that the expanded consciousness may silently and quietly focus on the desired object, and become that object. But concentration and expansion are spontaneous consequences of inner silence. In inner silence, the consciousness sees.
Independence from Illnesses Once we are freed from the tension and constant buzz of the thinking mind, from the tyranny and restlessness and endless demands of the vital mind, from the stupidity and fears of the physical mind, we begin to appreciate what the body is without all these exhausting encumbrances, and we discover that it is a marvelous instrument
1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
the Construction of a system of interlocking signals for a railway
signal tower. The real problem is intermediate: to construct a
1.08 - Origin of Rudra: his becoming eight Rudras, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[1]: The sacrifice of Dakṣa is a legend of some interest, from its historical and archeological relations. It is obviously intended to intimate a struggle between the worshippers of Śiva and of Viṣṇu, in which at first the latter, but finally the former, acquired the ascendancy. It is also a favourite subject of Hindu sculpture, at least with the Hindus of the Śaiva division, and makes a conspicuous figure both at Elephanta and Ellora. A representation of the dispersion and mutilation of the gods and sages by Vīrabhadra, at the former, is published in the Archæologia, VII. 326, where it is described as the Judgment of Solomon! a figure of Vīrabhadra is given by Niebuhr, vol. II. tab. 10: and the entire group in the Bombay Transactions, vol. I. p. 220. It is described, p. 229; but Mr. Erskine has not verified the subject, although it cannot admit of doubt. The groupe described, p. 224, probably represents the introductory details given in our text. Of the Ellora sculptures, a striking one occurs in what Sir C. Malet calls the Doomar Leyna cave, where is "Veer Budder, with eight hands. In one is suspended the slain Rajah Dutz." A. R. VI. 396. And there is also a representation of 'Ehr Budr,' in one of the colonades of Kailas; being, in fact, the same figure as that at Elephanta. Bombay Tr. III. 287. The legend of Dakṣa therefore was popular when those cavern temples were excavated. The story is told in much more detail in several other Purāṇas, and with some variations, which will be noticed: but the above has been selected as a specimen of the style of the Vāyu Purāṇa, and as being a narration which, from its inartificial, obscure, tautological, and uncircumstantial Construction, is probably of an ancient date. The same legend, in the same words, is given in the Brāhma P.
[2]: Or this may he understood to imply, that the original story is in the Vedas; the term being, as usual in such a reference, ###. Ga
1.08 - RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
With cerebrotonia, the temperament that is correlated with ectomorphic physique, we leave the genial world of Pickwick, the strenuously competitive world of Hotspur, and pass into an entirely different and somewhat disquieting kind of universe that of Hamlet and Ivan Karamazov. The extreme cerebrotonic is the over-alert, over-sensitive introvert, who is more concerned with what goes on behind his eyeswith the Constructions of thought and imagination, with the variations of feeling and consciousness than with that external world, to which, in their different ways, the viscerotonic and the somatotonic pay their primary attention and allegiance. Cerebrotonics have little or no desire to dominate, nor do they feel the viscerotonics indiscriminate liking for people as people; on the contrary they want to live and let live, and their passion for privacy is intense. Solitary confinement, the most terrible punishment that can be inflicted on the soft, round, genial person, is, for the cerebrotonic, no punishment at all. For him the ultimate horror is the boarding school and the barracks. In company cerebrotonics are nervous and shy, tensely inhibited and unpredictably moody. (It is a significant fact that no extreme cerebrotonic has ever been a good actor or actress.) Cerebrotonics hate to slam doors or raise their voices, and suffer acutely from the unrestrained bellowing and trampling of the somatotonic. Their manner is restrained, and when it comes to expressing their feelings they are extremely reserved. The emotional gush of the viscerotonic strikes them as offensively shallow and even insincere, nor have they any patience with viscerotonic ceremoniousness and love of luxury and magnificence. They do not easily form habits and find it hard to adapt their lives to the routines, which come so naturally to somatotonics. Owing to their over-sensitiveness, cerebrotonics are often extremely, almost insanely sexual; but they are hardly ever tempted to take to drink for alcohol, which heightens the natural aggressiveness of the somatotonic and increases the relaxed amiability of the viscerotonic, merely makes them feel ill and depressed. Each in his own way, the viscerotonic and the somatotonic are well adapted to the world they live in; but the introverted cerebrotonic is in some sort incommensurable with the things and people and institutions that surround him. Consequently a remarkably high proportion of extreme cerebrotonics fail to make good as normal citizens and average pillars of society. But if many fail, many also become abnormal on the higher side of the average. In universities, monasteries and research laboratorieswherever sheltered conditions are provided for those whose small guts and feeble muscles do not permit them to eat or fight their way through the ordinary rough and tumble the percentage of outstandingly gifted and accomplished cerebrotonics will almost always be very high. Realizing the importance of this extreme, over-evolved and scarcely viable type of human being, all civilizations have provided in one way or another for its protection.
In the light of these descriptions we can understand more clearly the Bhagavad Gitas classification of paths to salvation. The path of devotion is the path naturally followed by the person in whom the viscerotonic component is high. His inborn tendency to externalize the emotions he spontaneously feels in regard to persons can be disciplined and canalized, so that a merely animal gregariousness and a merely human kindliness become transformed into charitydevotion to the personal God and universal good will and compassion towards all sentient beings.
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Within the general population, as we have seen, variation is continuous, and in most people the three components are fairly evenly mixed. Those exhibiting extreme predominance of any one component are relatively rare. And yet, in spite of their rarity, it is by the thought-patterns characteristic of these extreme individuals that theology and ethics, at any rate on the theoretical side, have been mainly dominated. The reason for this is simple. Any extreme position is more uncompromisingly clear and therefore more easily recognized and understood than the intermediate positions, which are the natural thought-pattern of the person in whom the constituent components of personality are evenly balanced. These intermediate positions, it should be noted, do not in any sense contain or reconcile the extreme positions; they are merely other thought-patterns added to the list of possible systems. The Construction of an all-embracing system of metaphysics, ethics and psychology is a task that can never be accomplished by any single individual, for the sufficient reason that he is an individual with one particular kind of constitution and temperament and therefore capable of knowing only according to the mode of his own being. Hence the advantages inherent in what may be called the anthological approach to truth.
The Sanskrit dharmaone of the key words in Indian formulations of the Perennial Philosophyhas two principal meanings. The dharma of an individual is, first of all, his essential nature, the intrinsic law of his being and development. But dharma also signifies the law of righteousness and piety. The implications of this double meaning are clear: a mans duty, how he ought to live, what he ought to believe and what he ought to do about his beliefs these things are conditioned by his essential nature, his constitution and temperament. Going a good deal further than do the Catholics, with their doctrine of vocations, the Indians admit the right of individuals with different dharmas to worship different aspects or conceptions of the divine. Hence the almost total absence, among Hindus and Buddhists, of bloody persecutions, religious wars and proselytizing imperialism.
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In the course of history it has often happened that one or other of the imperfect religions has been taken too seriously and regarded as good and true in itself, instead of as a means to the ultimate end of all religion. The effects of such mistakes are often disastrous. For example, many Protestant sects have insisted on the necessity, or at least the extreme desirability, of a violent conversion. But violent conversion, as Sheldon has pointed out, is a phenomenon confined almost exclusively to persons with a high degree of somatotonia. These persons are so intensely extraverted as to be quite unaware of what is happening in the lower levels of their minds. If for any reason their attention comes to be turned inwards, the resulting self-knowledge, because of its novelty and strangeness, presents itself with the force and quality of a revelation and their metanoia, or change of mind, is sudden and thrilling. This change may be to religion, or it may be to something else for example, to psycho-analysis. To insist upon the necessity of violent conversion as the only means to salvation is about as sensible as it would be to insist upon the necessity of having a large face, heavy bones and powerful muscles. To those naturally subject to this kind of emotional upheaval, the doctrine that makes salvation dependent on conversion gives a complacency that is quite fatal to spiritual growth, while those who are incapable of it are filled with a no less fatal despair. Other examples of inadequate theologies based upon psychological ignorance could easily be cited. One remembers, for instance, the sad case of Calvin, the cerebrotonic who took his own intellectual Constructions so seriously that he lost all sense of reality, both human and spiritual. And then there is our liberal Protestantism, that predominantly viscerotonic heresy, which seems to have forgotten the very existence of the Father, Spirit and Logos and equates Christianity with an emotional attachment to Christs humanity or, (to use the currently popular phrase) the personality of Jesus, worshipped idolatrously as though there were no other God. Even within all-comprehensive Catholicism we constantly hear complaints of the ignorant and self-centred directors, who impose upon the souls under their charge a religious dharma wholly unsuited to their naturewith results which writers such as St. John of the Cross describe as wholly pernicious. We see, then, that it is natural for us to think of God as possessed of the qualities which our temperament tends to make us perceive in Him; but unless nature finds a way of transcending itself by means of itself, we are lost. In the last analysis Philo is quite right in saying that those who do not conceive God purely and simply as the One injure, not God of course, but themselves and, along with themselves, their fellows.
The way of knowledge comes most naturally to persons whose temperament is predominantly cerebrotonic. By this I do not mean that the following of this way is easy for the cerebrotonic. His specially besetting sins are just as difficult to overcome as are the sins which beset the power-loving somatotonic and the extreme viscerotonic with his gluttony for food and comfort and social approval. Rather I mean that the idea that such a way exists and can be followed (either by discrimination, or through non-attached work and one-pointed devotion) is one which spontaneously occurs to the cerebrotonic. At all levels of culture he is the natural monotheist; and this natural monotheist, as Dr. Radins examples of primitive theology clearly show, is often a monotheist of the tat tvam asi, inner-light school. Persons committed by their temperament to one or other of the two kinds of extraversion are natural polytheists. But natural polytheists can, without much difficulty, be convinced of the theoretical superiority of monotheism. The nature of human reason is such that there is an intrinsic plausibility about any hypothesis which seeks to explain the manifold in terms of unity, to reduce apparent multiplicity to essential identity. And from this theoretical monotheism the half-converted polytheist can, if he chooses, go on (through practices suitable to his own particular temperament) to the actual realization of the divine Ground of his own and all other beings. He can, I repeat, and sometimes he actually does. But very often he does not. There are many theoretical monotheists whose whole life and every action prove that in reality they are still what their temperament inclines them to bepoly theists, worshippers not of the one God they sometimes talk about, but of the many gods, nationalistic and technological, financial and familial, to whom in practice they pay all their allegiance.
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The word vja, usually rendered by Sayana, food or ghee,a sense which he is swift to foist upon any word which will at all admit that Construction, as well as on some which will not admit it,has in other passages another sense assigned to it, strength, bala. It is the latter significance or its basis of substance & solidity which I propose to attach to vja in every line of the Rigveda where it occursand it occurs with an abundant frequency. There are a number of words in the Veda which have to be rendered by the English strength,bala, taras, vja, sahas, avas, to mention only the most common expressions. Can it be supposed that all these vocables rejoice in one identical connotation as commentators and lexicographers would lead us to conclude, and are used in the Veda promiscuously & indifferently to express the same idea of strength? The psychology of human language is more rich and delicate. In English the words strength, force, vigour, robustness differ in their mental values; force can be used in offices of expression to which strength and vigour are ineligible. In Vedic Sanscrit, as in every living tongue, the same law holds and a literary and thoughtful appreciation of its documents, whatever may be the way of the schools, must take account of these distinctions. In the brief list I have given, bala answers to the English strength, taras gives a shade of speed and impetuosity, sahas of violence or force, avas of flame and brilliance, vja of substance and solidity. In the philological appendix to this work there will be found detailed reasons for concluding that strength is in the history of the word vja only a secondary sense, like its other meanings, wealth and food; the basic idea is a strong sufficiency of substance or substantial energy. Vja is one of the great standing terms of the Vedic psychology. All states of being, whether matter, mind or life and all material, mental & vital activities depend upon an original flowing mass of Energy which is in the vivid phraseology of the Vedas called a flood or sea, samudra, sindhu or arnas. Our power or activity in any direction depends first on the amount & substantiality of this stream as it flows into, through or within our own limits of consciousness, secondly, on our largeness of being constituted by the wideness of those limits, thirdly, on our power of holding the divine flow and fourthly on the force and delight which enter into the use of our available Energy. The result is the self-expression, ansa or vyakti, which is the objective of Vedic Yoga. In the language of the Rishis whatever we can make permanently ours is called our holding or wealth, dhanam or in the plural dhanni; the powers which assist us in the getting, keeping or increasing of our dhanni, the yoga, s ti & vriddhi, are the gods; the powers which oppose & labour to rob us of this wealth are our enemies & plunderers, dasyus, and appear under various names, Vritras, Panis, Daityas, Rakshasas, Yatudhanas. The wealth itself may be the substance of mental light and knowledge or of vital health, delight & longevity or of material strength & beauty or it may be external possessions, cattle, progeny, empire, women. A close, symbolic and to modern ideas mystic parallelism stood established in the Vedic mind between the external & the internal wealth, as between the outer sacrifice which earned from the gods the external wealth & the inner sacrifice which brought by the aid of the gods the internal riches. In this system the word vja represents that amount & substantial energy of the stuff of force in the dhanam brought to the service of the sacrificer for the great Jivayaja, our daily & continual life-sacrifice. It is a substantial wealth, vjavad dhanam that the gods are asked to bring with them. We see then in what sense Saraswati, a goddess purely mental in her functions of speech and knowledge, can be vjebhir vjinvat. Vjin is that which is composed of vja, substantial energy; the plural vj h or vj ni the particular substantialities of various composed. For the rest, to no other purpose can a deity of speech & knowledge be vjebhir vjinvat. In what appropriateness or coherent conceivable sense can the goddess of knowledge be possessed of material wealth or full-stored with material food, ghee & butter, beef & mutton? If it be suggested that Speech of the mantras was believed by these old superstitious barbarians to bring them their ghee & butter, beef & mutton, the answer is that this is not what the language of the hymns expresses. Saraswati herself is said to be vjinvat, possessed of substance of food; she is not spoken of as being the cause of fullness of food or wealth to others.
This explanation of vjebhir vjinvat leads at once to the figurative sense of maho arnas. Arnas or samudra is the image of the sea, flood or stream in which the Vedic seers saw the substance of being and its different states. Sometimes one great sea, sometimes seven streams of being are spoken of by the Rishis; they are the origin of the seven seas of the Purana. It cannot be doubted that the minds of the old thinkers were possessed with this image of ocean or water as the very type & nature of the flux of existence, for it occurs with a constant insistence in the Upanishads. The sole doubt is whether the image was already present to the minds of the primitive Vedic Rishis. The Europeans hold that these were the workings of a later imagination transfiguring the straightforward material expressions & physical ideas of the Veda; they admit no real parentage of Vedantic ideas in the preexistent Vedic notions, but only a fictitious derivation. I hold, on the contrary, that Vedantic ideas have a direct & true origin & even a previous existence in the religion & psychology of the Vedas. If, indeed, there were no stuff of high thinking or moral sensibility in the hymns of the Vedic sages, then I should have no foundation to stand upon and no right to see this figure in the Vedic arnas or samudra. But when these early minds,early to us, but not perhaps really so primitive in human history as we imagine,were capable of such high thoughts & perceptions as these three Riks bear on their surface, it would be ridiculous to deny them the capacity of conceiving these great philosophical images & symbols. A rich poetic imagery expressing a clear, direct & virgin perception of the facts of mind and being, is not by any means impossible, but rather natural in these bright-eyed sons of the morning not yet dominated in their vision by the dry light of the intellect or in their speech & thought by the abstractions & formalities of metaphysical thinking. Water was to them, let us hold in our hypothesis, the symbol of unformed substance of being, earth of the formed substance. They even saw a mystic identity between the thing symbolised & the symbol.
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Sayanas interpretation there is a miracle of ritualism & impossibility which it is best to ignore. ach means in the Veda power, sumati, right thought or right feeling, as we have seen, vjadvan, strength-giving,strength in the sense of steadfast substance whether of moral state or quality or physical state or quality. Yuvku in such a connection & Construction cannot mean mixed. The word is in formation the root yu and the adjectival ku connected by the euphonic v. It is akin therefore to yuv, youth, & yavas, energy, plenty or luxuriance; the common idea is energy & luxuriance. The adjective yuvku, if this connection be correct, would mean full of energy or particularly of the energy of youth. We get, therefore, a subjective sense for yuvku which suits well with ach, sumati & vjadvan and falls naturally into the structure & thought of Medhatithis rik. Bhyma may mean become in the state of being or like the Greek (bh) it may admit a transitive sense, to bring about in oneself or attain; yuvku achnm will mean the full energy of the powers & we get this sense forMedhatithis thought: Let us become or For we would effect in ourselves the full energy of the powers, the full energy of the right thoughts which give substance to our inner state or faculties.
We have reached a subjective sense for yuvku. But what of vriktabarhishah? Does not barhih always mean in the Veda the sacred grass strewn as a seat for the gods? In the Brahmanas is it not so understood and have [we] not continually the expression barhishi sdata? I have no objection; barhis is certainly the seat of the Gods in the sacrifice, stritam nushak, strewn without a break. But barhis cannot originally have meant Kusha grass; for in that case the singular could only be used to indicate a single grass and for the seat of the Gods the plural barhnshi would have to be used,barhihshu sdata and not barhishi sdata.We have the right to go behind the Brahmanas and enquire what was the original sense of barhis and how it came to mean kusha grass. The root barh is a modified formation from the root brih, to grow, increase or expand, which we have in brihat. From the sense of spreading we may get the original sense of seat, and because the material spread was usually the Kusha grass, the word by a secondary application came to bear also that significance. Is this the only possible sense of barhis? No, for we find it interpreted also as sacrifice, as fire, as light or splendour, as water, as ether. We find barhana & barhas in the sense of strength or power and barhah or barham used for a leaf or for a peacocks tail. The base meaning is evidently fullness, greatness, expansion, power, splendour or anything having these attri butes, an outspread seat, spreading foliage, the outspread or splendid peacocks tail, the shining flame, the wide expanse of ether, the wide flow of water. If there were no other current sense of barhis, we should be bound to the ritualistic explanation. Even as it is, in other passages the ritualistic explanation may be found to stand or be binding; but is it obligatory here? I do not think it is even admissible. For observe the awkwardness of the expression, sut vriktabarhishah, wine of which the grass is stripped of its roots. Anything, indeed, is possible in the more artificial styles of poetry, but the rest of this hymn, though subtle & deep in thought, is sufficiently lucid and straightforward in expression. In such a style this strained & awkward expression is an alien intruder. Moreover, since every other expression in these lines is subjective, only dire necessity can compel us to admit so material a rendering of this single epithet. There is no such necessity. Barhis means fundamentally fullness, splendour, expansion or strength & power, & this sense suits well with the meaning we have found for yuvkavah. The sense of vrikta is very doubtful. Purified (cleared, separated) is a very remote sense of vrij or vrich & improbable. They can both mean divided, distributed, strewn, outspread, but although it is possible that vriktabarhishah means their fullness outspread through the system or distributed in the outpouring, this sense too is not convincing. Again vrijana in the Veda means strong, or as a noun, strength, energy, even a battle or fight. Vrikta may therefore [mean] brought to its highest strength. We will accept this sense as a provisional conjecture, to be confirmed or corrected by farther enquiry, and render the line The Soma distillings are replete with energy and brought to their highest fullness.
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In the ninth rik, I take vahnayah in its natural sense, those who bear or support; it is the application of the general function, charshanidhrit to the particular activity of the sacrifice, medham jushanta vahnayah. I cannot accept the sense of priest for vahni; it may have this meaning in some passages, but the ordinary significance is clearly fixed by Medhatithis collocation, vahanti vahnayah, in the [fourteenth] sukta; for to suppose such a collocation to have been made without any reference to the common significance of the two words, is to do violence to common sense & to language. In the same rik we have the word asridhah rendered by Sayana, undecaying or unwithering, and ehimysah, in which he takes ehi to be -ha, pervading activity & my in the sense of prajn, intelligence. We have no difficulty in rejecting these Constructions. Ehi is a modified form, by gunation, from the root h, and must mean like h, wish, attempt, effort or activity; my from m, to contain or measure (mt, mna) or m, to contain, embrace, comprehend, know, may mean either capacity, wideness, greatness or comprehending knowledge. The sense, therefore, is either that the Visvadevas put knowledge into all their activities or else that they have a full capacity, whether in knowledge or in any other quality, for all activities. The latter sense strikes me as the more natural & appropriate in the context. Sridhah, again, means enemies in the Veda, and asridhah may well mean, not hostile, friendly. It will then be complementary to adruhah,asridhah adruhah, unhostile, unharmful, and the two epithets will form an amplification of omsas, kindly, the first of the characteristics applied to these deities. Yet such a purposeless negative amplification of a strong positive & sufficient epithet is not in the style of the Sukta, of Madhuchchhandas hymns generally or of any Vedic Rishi; nor does it go well with the word ehimysah which inappropriately divides the two companion epithets. Sridh has the sense of enemy from the idea of the shock of assault. The root sri means to move, rush, or assail; sridh gives the additional idea of moving or rushing against some object or obstacle. I suggest then that asridhah means unstumbling, unfailing (cf the English to slide). The sense will then be that the Visvadevas are unstumbling & unfaltering in the effectuation of their activities because they have a full capacity for all activities, and for the same reason they cause no hurt to the work or the human worker. We have a coherent meaning & progression of related ideas and a good reason for the insertion of ehimysah between the two negative epithets asridhah & adruhah.
We can now examine the functioning of the Visvadevas as they are revealed to us in these three riks of the ancient Veda: Come, says the Rishi, O Visvadevas who in your benignity uphold the activities of men, come, distributing the nectar-offering of the giver. O Visvadevas, swift to effect, come to the nectar-offering, hastening like mornings to the days (or, like lovers to their paramours). O Visvadevas, who stumble not in your work, for you are mighty for all activity and do no hurt, cleave in heart to the sacrifice & be its upbearers. The sense is clear & simple. The kindly gods who support man in his action & development, are to arrive; they are to give abroad the nectar-offering which is now given to them, to pour it out on the world in joy-giving activities of mind or body, for that is the relation of gods & men, as we see in the Gita, giving out whatever is given to them in an abundant mutual helpfulness. Swiftly have they to effect the many-sided action prepared for them, hastening to the joy of the offering of Ananda as a lover hastens to the joy of his mistress. They will not stumble or fail in any action entrusted to them, for they have full capacity for their great world-functions, nor, for the like reason, will they impair the force of the joy or the strength in the activity by misuse, therefore let them put their hearts into the sacrifice of action and upbear it by this unfaltering strength. Swiftness, variety, intensity, even a fierce intensity of joy & thought & action is the note throughout, but yet a faultless activity, fixed in its variety, unstumbling in its swiftness, not hurting the strength, light & joy by its fierceness or violent expenditure of energydhishnya, asridhah, adruhah. That which ensures this steadiness & unfaltering gait, is the control of the mental power which is the agent of the action & the holder of the joy by the understanding. Indra is dhiyeshita. But what will ensure the understanding itself from error & swerving? It is the divine inspiration, Saraswati, rich with mental substance & clearness, who will keep the system purified, uphold sovereignly the Yajna, & illumine all the actions of the understanding, by awakening with the high divine perception, daivyena ketun, the great sea of ideal knowledge above. For this ideal knowledge, as we shall see, is the satyam, ritam, brihat; it is wide expansion of being & therefore utmost capacity of power, bliss & knowledge; it is the unobscured light of direct & unerring truth, and it is the unstumbling, unswerving fixity of spontaneous Right & Law.
We have gathered much from this brief hymn, one of the deepest in thought in the Veda. If our Construction is correct, then this at least appears that the Veda is no loose, empty & tawdry collection of vague images & shallow superstitions, but there are some portions of it at least which present a clear, well-knit writing full of meaning & stored with ideas. We have the work of sages & thinkers, rishayah, kavayah, manshinah, subtle practical psychologists & great Yogins, not the work of savage medicine-men evolving out of primitive barbarism the first glimpses of an embryonic culture in the half-coherent fumble, the meaningless ritual of a worship of personified rain, wind, fire, sun & constellations. The gods of the Veda have a clear & fixed personality & functions & its conceptions are founded on a fairly advanced knowledge & theory at least of our subjective nature. Nor when we look at the clearness, fixity & frequently psychological nature of the functions of the Greek gods, Apollo, Hermes, Pallas, Aphrodite, [have we] the right to expect anything less from the ancestors of the far more subtle-minded, philosophical & spiritual Indian nation.
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1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1:IN THE light of this progressive manifestation of the Spirit, first apparently bound in the Ignorance, then free in the power and wisdom of the Infinite, we can better understand the great and crowning injunction of the Gita to the Karmayogin, "Abandoning all dharmas, all principles and laws and rules of conduct, take refuge in me alone." All standards and rules are temporary Constructions founded upon the needs of the ego in its transition from Matter to Spirit. These makeshifts have a relative imperativeness so long as we rest satisfied in the stages of transition, content with the physical and vital life, attached to the mental movement, or even fixed in the ranges of the mental plane that are touched by the spiritual lustres. But beyond is the unwalled wideness of a supramental infinite consciousness and there all temporary structures cease. It is not possible to enter utterly into the spiritual truth of the Eternal and Infinite if we have not the faith and courage to trust ourselves into the hands of the Lord of all things and the Friend of all creatures and leave utterly behind us our mental limits and measures. At one moment we must plunge without hesitation, reserve, fear or scruple into the ocean of the free, the infinite, the Absolute. After the Law, Liberty; after the personal, after the general, after the universal standards there is something greater, the impersonal plasticity, the divine freedom, the transcendent force and the supernal impulse. After the strait path of the ascent the wide plateaus on the summit.
2:There are three stages of the ascent, - at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings discover their own intimate significance. In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are halflights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process. In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas, opinions, Constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that flows through him and moves him for ever.
3:Whoever sincerely enters the path of works, must leave behind him the stage in which need and desire are the first law of our acts. For whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he accepts the high aim of Yoga, put them away from him into the hands of the Lord within us. The supreme Power will deal with them for the good of the sadhaka and for the good of all. In effect, we find that once this surrender is done, - always provided the rejection is sincere, - egoistic indulgence of desire may for some time recur under the continued impulse of past nature but only in order to exhaust its acquired momentum and to teach the embodied being in his most unteachable part, his nervous, vital, emotional nature, by the reactions of desire, by its grief and unrest bitterly contrasted with calm periods of the higher peace or marvellous movements of divine Ananda, that egoistic desire is not a law for the soul that seeks liberation or aspires to its own original god-nature. Afterwards the element of desire in those impulsions will be thrown away or persistently eliminated by a constant denying and transforming pressure. Only the pure force of action in them (pravr.tti) justified by an equal delight in all work and result that is inspired or imposed from above will be preserved in the happy harmony of a final perfection. To act, to enjoy is the normal law and right of the nervous being; but to choose by personal desire its action and enjoyment is only its ignorant will, not its right. Alone the supreme and universal Will must choose; action must change into a dynamic movement of that Will; enjoyment must be replaced by the play of a pure spiritual Ananda. All personal will is either a temporary delegation from on high or a usurpation by the ignorant Asura.
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6:There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and intangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights, will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion or drive of propensity in us (rajogun.a) and is extinguished with the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something profounder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher and deeper state that may perhaps be called "soulhood", - for the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the more dignified Constructions of the larger ideative reason that imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the limited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind's partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul's supreme fulfilment.
7:At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (gunas) that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside.
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14:If this is the truth of works, the first thing the sadhaka has to do is to recoil from the egoistic forms of activity and get rid of the sense of an "I" that acts. He has to see and feel that everything happens in him by the plastic conscious or subcon- scious or sometimes superconscious automatism of his mental and bodily instruments moved by the forces of spiritual, mental, vital and physical Nature. There is a personality on his surface that chooses and wills, submits and struggles, tries to make good in Nature or prevail over Nature, but this personality is itself a Construction of Nature and so dominated, driven, determined by her that it cannot be free. It is a formation or expression of the Self in her, - it is a self of Nature rather than a self of Self, his natural and processive, not his spiritual and permanent being, a temporary constructed personality, not the true immortal Person. It is that Person that he must become. He must succeed in being inwardly quiescent, detach himself as the observer from the outer active personality and learn the play of the cosmic forces in him by standing back from all blinding absorption in its turns and movements. Thus calm, detached, a student of himself and a witness of his nature, he realises that he is the individual soul who observes the works of Nature, accepts tranquilly her results and sanctions or withholds his sanction from the impulse to her acts. At present this soul or Purusha is little more than an acquiescent spectator, influencing perhaps the action and development of the being by the pressure of its veiled consciousness, but for the most part delegating its powers or a fragment of them to the outer personality, - in fact to Nature, for this outer self is not lord but subject to her, ansa; but, once unveiled, it can make its sanction or refusal effective, become the master of the action, dictate sovereignly a change of Nature. Even if for a long time, as the result of fixed association and past storage of energy, the habitual movement takes place independent of the Purusha's assent and even if the sanctioned movement is persistently refused by Nature for want of past habit, still he will discover that in the end his assent or refusal prevails, - slowly with much resistance or quickly with a rapid accommodation of her means and tendencies she modifies herself and her workings in the direction indicated by his inner sight or volition. Thus he learns in place of mental control or egoistic will an inner spiritual control which makes him master of the Nature-forces that work in him and not their unconscious instrument or mechanic slave. Above and around him is the Shakti, the universal Mother and from her he can get all his inmost soul needs and wills if only he has a true knowledge of her ways and a true surrender to the divine Will in her. Finally, he becomes aware of that highest dynamic Self within him and within Nature which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance, the source of the rejection. This is the Lord, the Supreme, the One-in-all, Ishwara-Shakti, of whom his soul is a portion, a being of that Being and a power of that Power. The rest of our progress depends on our knowledge of the ways in which the Lord of works manifests his Will in the world and in us and executes them through the transcendent and universal Shakti.
15:The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience. But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the original Shakti, the transcendent Mother the supreme Will can then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping and inhabiting Divine.
1.09 - Equality and the Annihilation of Ego, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
15:Thus are made possible the final steps when the veil of Nature is withdrawn and the seeker is face to face with the Master of all existence and his activities are merged in the action of a supreme Energy which is pure, true, perfect and blissful for ever. Thus can he utterly renounce to the supramental Shakti his works as well as the fruits of his works and act only as the conscious instrument of the eternal Worker. No longer giving the sanction, he will rather receive in his instruments and follow in her hands a divine mandate. No longer doing works, he will accept their execution through him by her unsleeping Force. No longer willing the fulfilment of his own mental Constructions and the satisfaction of his own emotional desires, he will obey and participate in an omnipotent Will that is also an omniscient Knowledge and a myterious, magical and unfathomable Love and a vast bottomless sea of the eternal Bliss of Existence.
1.09 - Sleep and Death, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
or go into a rage, or feel a movement of rebellion inside us, or a sexual impulse, etc., or even, to take another example of a seemingly different nature, we may trip on the stairs two or three times and almost fall headlong, or contract a violent fever; then we notice that each of these small, very trivial daytime incidents corresponds exactly to another incident, most often symbolic in nature (symbolic, because it is not the fact itself, but a mental transcription when we wake up in the morning), which we experienced the night before: either we were attacked in a "dream" by an enemy, or we were involved in an unhappy turn of event, or else we saw, sometimes very precisely, all the details surrounding the psychological scene that would take place the next day. It would seem that "someone" is perfectly awake in us and very concerned with helping us identify all the why's and hidden mechanisms of our psychological life, all the reasons for our falls as well as progress. For, conversely, we may have a premonition of all the happy psychological movements that will translate the next day into a progress, an opening of consciousness, a feeling of lightness, an inner widening; we remember that the night before we saw a light, an ascent, or a wall or house crumbling (symbolic of our resistance or the mental Constructions that were confining us). We are also very struck by the realization that these premonitions are usually not associated with events we deem important on our physical plane, such as the death of a parent or some worldly achievement (although these premonitions also may occur), but with very trivial details, bearing no external importance, yet always very meaningful for our inner progress. This is a sign of the development of our consciousness.
Instead of unconsciously accepted mental, vital or other vibrations,
1.09 - The Absolute Manifestation, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
That is indeed what happens in the internal life of an ego as between all the different elements which constitute it. It is this which allows the Construction of ever higher syntheses of individuality by the coordination and concentration of innumerable elementary consciousnesses into a single sheaf.
At each moment there is thus accomplished in the consciousness of the individual being the same wonderful mystery of perfect reciprocity, of incessant participation which identifies in one conscious individuality the whole sum of mutually interested relativities of consciousness, internal persons, of which each human personality is composed. The result is an absolute ego, and this absolute is the same in the consciousness of the individual and in the consciousness of the unknowable Existence.
1.10 - Conscious Force, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
13:Materialism indeed insists that, whatever the extension of consciousness, it is a material phenomenon inseparable from our physical organs and not their utiliser but their result. This orthodox contention, however, is no longer able to hold the field against the tide of increasing knowledge. Its explanations are becoming more and more inadequate and strained. It is becoming always clearer that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. There are even abnormal instances which go to prove that our organs are not entirely indispensable instruments, - that the heart-beats are not absolutely essential to life, any more than is breathing, nor the organised brain-cells to thought. Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than the Construction of an engine causes or explains the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.
14:Momentous logical consequences follow. In the first place we may ask whether, since even mental consciousness exists where we see inanimation and inertia, it is not possible that even in material objects a universal subconscient mind is present although unable to act or communicate itself to its surfaces for want of organs. Is the material state an emptiness of consciousness, or is it not rather only a sleep of consciousness - even though from the point of view of evolution an original and not an intermediate sleep? And by sleep the human example teaches us that we mean not a suspension of consciousness, but its gathering inward away from conscious physical response to the impacts of external things. And is not this what all existence is that has not yet developed means of outward communication with the external physical world? Is there not a Conscious Soul, a Purusha who wakes for ever even in all that sleeps?
1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
into the Construction and functioning of what I have called its
"Brain." As in the case of all the organisms preceding it, but on an
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But in spite of this great downfall the ancient tradition, the ancient sanctity survived. The people knew not what Veda might be; but the old idea remained fixed that Veda is always the fountain of Hinduism, the standard of orthodoxy, the repository of a sacred knowledge; not even the loftiest philosopher or the most ritualistic scholar could divest himself entirely of this deeply ingrained & instinctive conception. To complete the degradation of Veda, to consummate the paradox of its history, a new element had to appear, a new form of intelligence undominated by the ancient tradition & the mediaeval method to take possession of Vedic interpretation. European scholarship which regards human civilisation as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander and ending today with Haeckel and Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily primitive culture and primitive culture as necessarily half-savage culture, has turned the light of its Comparative Philology & Comparative Mythology on the Veda. The result we all know. Not only all vestige of sanctity, but all pretension to any kind of spiritual knowledge or experience disappears from the Veda. The old Rishis are revealed to us as a race of ignorant and lusty barbarians who drank & enjoyed and fought, gathered riches & procreated children, sacrificed and praised the Powers of Nature as if they were powerful men & women, and had no higher hope or idea. The only idea they had of religion beyond an occasional sense of sin and a perpetual preoccupation with a ritual barbarously encumbered with a mass of meaningless ceremonial details, was a mythology composed of the phenomena of dawn, night, rain, sunshine and harvest and the facts of astronomy converted into a wildly confused & incoherent mass of allegorical images and personifications. Nor, with the European interpretation, can we be proud of our early forefa thers as poets and singers. The versification of the Vedic hymns is indeed noble and melodious,though the incorrect method of writing them established by the old Indian scholars, often conceals their harmonious Construction,but no other praise can be given. The Nibelungenlied, the Icelandic Sagas, the Kalewala, the Homeric poems, were written in the dawn of civilisation by semi-barbarous races, by poets not superior in culture to the Vedic Rishis; yet though their poetical value varies, the nations that possess them, need not be ashamed of their ancient heritage. The same cannot be said of the Vedic poems presented to us by European scholarship. Never surely was there even among savages such a mass of tawdry, glittering, confused & purposeless imagery; never such an inane & useless burden of epithets; never such slipshod & incompetent writing; never such a strange & almost insane incoherence of thought & style; never such a bald poverty of substance. The attempt of patriotic Indian scholars to make something respectable out of the Veda, is futile. If the modern interpretation stands, the Vedas are no doubt of high interest & value to the philologist, the anthropologist & the historian; but poetically and spiritually they are null and worthless. Its reputation for spiritual knowledge & deep religious wealth, is the most imposing & baseless hoax that has ever been worked upon the imagination of a whole people throughout many millenniums.
Is this, then, the last word about the Veda? Or, and this is the idea I write to suggest, is it not rather the culmination of a long increasing & ever progressing error? The theory this book is written to enunciate & support is simply this, that our forefa thers of early Vedantic times understood the Veda, to which they were after all much nearer than ourselves, far better than Sayana, far better than Roth & Max Muller, that they were, to a great extent, in possession of the real truth about the Veda, that that truth was indeed a deep spiritual truth, karmakanda as well as jnanakanda of the Veda contains an ancient knowledge, a profound, complex & well-ordered psychology & philosophy, strange indeed to our modern conception, expressed indeed in language still stranger & remoter from our modern use of language, but not therefore either untrue or unintelligible, and that this knowledge is the real foundation of our later religious developments, & Veda, not only by historical continuity, but in real truth & substance is the parent & bedrock of all later Hinduism, of Vedanta, Sankhya, Nyaya, Yoga, of Vaishnavism & Shaivism&Shaktism, of Tantra&Purana, even, in a remoter fashion, of Buddhism & the later unorthodox religions. From this quarry all have hewn their materials or from this far-off source drawn unknowingly their waters; from some hidden seed in the Veda they have burgeoned into their wealth of branchings & foliage. The ritualism of Sayana is an error based on a false preconception popularised by the Buddhists & streng thened by the writers of the Darshanas,on the theory that the karma of the Veda was only an outward ritual & ceremony; the naturalism of the modern scholars is an error based on a false preconception encouraged by the previous misconceptions of Sayana,on the theory of the Vedas [as] not only an ancient but a primitive document, the production of semi-barbarians. The Vedantic writers of the Upanishads had alone the real key to the secret of the Vedas; not indeed that they possessed the full knowledge of a dialect even then too ancient to be well understood, but they had the knowledge of the Vedic Rishis, possessed their psychology, & many of their general ideas, even many of their particular terms & symbols. That key, less & less available to their successors owing to the difficulty of the knowledge itself & of the language in which it was couched and to the immense growth of outward ritualism, was finally lost to the schools in the great debacle of Vedism induced by the intellectual revolutions of the centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era.
1.10 - The Three Modes of Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Another action becomes possible, commences, grows, culminates, a working more truly right, more luminous, natural and normal to the deepest divine interplay of Purusha and Prakriti although supernatural and supernormal to our present imperfect nature. The body conditioning the physical mind insists no longer on its tamasic inertia that repeats always the same ignorant movement: it becomes a passive field and instrument of a greater force and light, it responds to every demand of the spirit's force, holds and supports every variety and intensity of new divine experience. Our kinetic and dynamic vital parts, our nervous and emotional and sensational and volitional being, expand in power and admit a tireless action and a blissful enjoyment of experience, but learn at the same time to stand on a foundation of wide self-possessed and self-poised calm, sublime in force, divine in rest, neither exulting and excited nor tortured by sorrow and pain, neither harried by desire and importunate impulses nor dulled by incapacity and indolence. The intelligence, the thinking, understanding and reflective mind, renounces its sattwic limitations and opens to an essential light and peace. An infinite knowledge offers to us its splendid ranges, a knowledge not made up of mental Constructions, not bound by opinion and idea or dependent on a stumbling uncertain logic and the petty support of the senses, but self-sure, au thentic, all-penetrating, all-comprehending; a boundless bliss and peace, not dependent on deliverance from the hampered strenuousness of creative energy and dynamic action, not constituted by a
The Three Modes of Nature
1.10 - THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
found in the concept "church," and in the Construction, the system
and the practice of the church!--My recreation, my predilection, my
11.14 - Our Finest Hour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But may we not pause a little and consider whether that is the only choice, or the best choice the rush for destruction? The whole past Construction that now stands against man, against his farther progress, it is agreed, has to be broken down, thrown aside, but in what way? By mere physical force, brute force, by pushing and dashing and ramming from outsidewell, perhaps the thing can be done, but destruction of form is not elimination of the life or spirit behind it. The past still in its present form continues because it maintains its own inner life and spirit. So long as that inner spirit is there you may break one form but another or many others will appear inspired by the same spirit. That is why the French proverb says: "The more it changes, the more it remains the same;"1 For the truth is that destruction is not the aim, not even the destruction of what should be destroyed, the aim is the creation of a new spirit, change of the inner nature. Our attention should be focussed not on the outward form but on the inner norm. If there is a new norm within and a change of nature, the outer change of form will follow automatically. The old leaves will fall off, the dead branches break away and new leaves and flowers appear with a new sap flowing in. The shell breaks off automatically when the living creature within grows and is mature enough to come out.
On the contrary, the prison need not be altogether a prison, it may be an occasion, an opportunity for the human consciousness to make a break-through to create a new dimension. Here is then our immediate workto conquer inner domains, the inner truths: for all truths are found first within the consciousness, established there before they become facts. So then let us harness our power and prowess, our aspiration and sincerity, all our life energy to the labour of the inner conquest. Let us stop awhile from the temptation and the urge for destruction and turn it round towards a higher inner adventure that of Construction. Yes, the truth that we want to see established in the outer world, let us establish it in ourselves, in each one of us, in our consciousness, in our impulses and activities. We always wanted liberty and equality and fraternity in the world at large, the ideal has not been realised because we did not care to realise it in the consciousness and life of each one of us. In the collective life of mankind that truth will alone become a fact which is a fact in the inner existence and consciousness of every human being.
The inner discovery is indeed a battle and here too a victory has to be won. It needs more than in any physical battle a complete contingent of courage and bravery, calm strength and persevering endurance, skill and energy to gain an absolute success. And there the field is free and vast, one can deploy oneself as largely as possible, move in any direction to any distance as one likes. It is no longer a prison,it is a region where one meets one's soul.
1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There are gradations in this last integralising movement; for it cannot be done at once or without long approaches that bring it progressively nearer and make it at last possible. The first attitude to be taken is to cease to regard ourselves as the worker and firmly to realise that we are only one instrument of the cosmic Force. At first it is not the one Force but many cosmic forces that seem to move us; but these may be turned into feeders of the ego and this vision liberates the mind but not the rest of the nature. Even when we become aware of all as the working of one cosmic Force and of the Divine behind it, that too need not liberate. If the egoism of the worker disappears, the egoism of the instrument may replace it or else prolong it in a disguise. The life of the world has been full of instances of egoism of this kind and it can be more engrossing and enormous than any other; there is the same danger in Yoga. A man becomes a leader of men or eminent in a large or lesser circle and feels himself full of a power that he knows to be beyond his own ego-Force; he may be aware of a Fate acting through him or a Will mysterious and unfathomable or a Light within of great brilliance. There are extraordinary results of his thoughts, his actions or his creative genius. He effects some tremendous destruction that clears the path for humanity or some great Construction that becomes its momentary resting-place. He is a scourge or he is a bringer of light and healing, a creator of beauty or a messenger of knowledge. Or, if his work and its effects are on a lesser scale and have a limited field, still they are attended by the strong sense that he is an instrument and chosen for his mission or his labour. Men who have this destiny and these powers come easily to believe and declare themselves to be mere instruments in the hand of God or of Fate: but even in tile declaration we can see that there can intrude or take refuge an intenser and more exaggerated egoism than ordinary men have the courage to assert or the strength to house within them. And often if men of this kind speak of God, it is to erect all image of him which is really nothing but a huge shadow of themselves or their own nature, a sustaining Deific Essence of their own type of will and thought and quality and force. This magnified image of their ego is the Master whom they serve. This happens only too often in Yoga to strong but crude vital natures or minds too easily exalted when they allow ambition, pride or the desire of greatness to enter into their spiritual seeking and vitiate its purity of motive; a magnified ego stands between them and their true being and grasps for its own personal purpose the strength from a greater unseen Power, divine or undivine, acting through them of which they become vaguely or intensely aware. An intellectual perception or vital sense of a Force greater than ours and of ourselves as moved by it is not sufficient to liberate from the ego.
This perception, this sense of a greater Power in us or above and moving us, is not a hallucination or a megalomania. Those who thus feel and see have a larger sight than ordinary men and have advanced a step beyond the limited physical intelligence, but theirs is riot the plenary vision or the direct experience. For, because they are not clear in mind and aware in the soul, because their awakening is more in the vital parts than into the spiritual substance of Self, they cannot be the conscious instruments of the Divine or come face to face with the Master, but are used through their fallible arid imperfect nature. The most they see of the Divinity is a Fate or a cosmic Force or else they give his name to a limited Godhead or, worse, to a titanic or demoniac Power that veils him. Even certain religious founders have erected the image of the God of a sect or a national God or a Power of terror and punishment or a Numen of sattwic love and mercy and virtue and seem not to have seen the One and Eternal. The Divine accepts the image they make of him and does his work in them through that medium, but, since the one Force is felt and acts in their imperfect nature but more intensely than in others, the motive principle of egoism too can be more intense in them than in others. An exalted rajasic or sattwic ego still holds them and stands between them and the integral Truth. Even this is something, a beginning, although far from the true and perfect experience. A much worse thing may befall those who break something of the human bonds but have not purity and have not -- the knowledge, for they may become instruments, but not of the Divine; too often, using his name, they serve unconsciously his masks and black Contraries, the Powers of Darkness. Our nature must house the cosmic Force but not in its lower aspect or in its rajasic or sattwic movement; it must serve the universal Will, but in the light of a greater liberating knowledge. There must be no egoism of any kind in the attitude of the instrument, even when we are fully conscious of the greatness of the Force within us. Every man is knowingly or unknowingly the instrument of a universal Power and, apart from the inner Presence, there is no such essential difference between one action and another, one kind of instrumentation and another as would warrant the folly of an egoistic pride. The difference between knowledge and ignorance is a grace of the Spirit; the breath of divine Power blows where it lists and fills today one and tomorrow another with the word or the puissance. If the potter shapes one pot more perfectly than another, the merit lies not in the vessel but the maker. The attitude of our mind must not be "This is my strength" or "Behold God's power in me", but rather "A Divine Power works in this mind and body and it is the same that works in all men and in the animal, in the plant and in the metal, in conscious and living things and in things appearing to be inconscient arid inanimate." This large view of the One working in all and of the whole world as the equal instrument of a divine action and gradual self-expression, if it becomes our entire experience, will help to eliminate all rajasic egoism out of us and even the sattwic ego-sense will begin to pass away from our nature.
1.1.1 - The Mind and Other Levels of Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The less pet ideas are petted and cherished, the better for the supramental Yoga. The mind is always building up ideas, some of which are wrong, some a mixture of truth and error, some true in their way, but true only in a certain field or in certain conditions or for some people, and it proceeds not only to make pets of them, but to try to impose them as universal and absolute truths or general standards which everybody must follow. The mind is a rigid instrument: it finds it difficult to adapt itself to the greater plasticity of the play of life or the freedom of the play of the Spirit. It wants to catch hold of either or both of these spontaneous powers and cut them into its own measures. It poses as the mediator and interpreter between life and the spirit; but it knows neither; it only knows itself and its own Constructions out of life and its own deformations or half reflections of the truth of the Spirit. Only the supermind can be a true mediator and interpreter. But if you want the supramental Light, you must not tie yourself to mental ideas, but draw back from them and observe them with an impartial equality in the silence of the spirit. When the supramental Light touches them, it will put them in their place and finally replace them by the true truth of things.
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1.11 - The Seven Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Construction upon such expressions. Obviously these are the waters of the Truth and the Bliss that flow from the supreme ocean. These rivers flow not upon earth, but in heaven; they are prevented by Vritra the Besieger, the Coverer from flowing down upon the earth-consciousness in which we mortals live till Indra, the god-mind, smites the Coverer with his flashing lightnings and cuts out a passage on the summits of that earth-consciousness down which they can flow. Such is the only rational, coherent and sensible explanation of the thought and language of the
Vedic sages. For the rest, Vasishtha makes it clear enough to us; for he says that these are the waters which Surya has formed by his rays and which, unlike earthly movements, do not limit or diminish the workings of Indra, the supreme Mind. They are, in other words, the waters of the Vast Truth, r.tam br.hat and, as we have always seen that this Truth creates the Bliss, so here we find that these waters of the Truth, r.tasya dharah., as they are plainly called in other hymns (e.g. V.12.2, "O perceiver of the Truth, perceive the Truth alone, cleave out many streams of the Truth"), establish for men the supreme good and the supreme good2 is the felicity, the bliss of the divine existence.
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
power of mental Construction.
All creation is expression by the Word; but the form which is
--
its Constructions of will and opinion and emotion dependent
on egoism, division and ignorance, he cannot rise beyond this
1.12 - Delight of Existence - The Solution, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
13:Pain of mind and body is a device of Nature, that is to say, of Force in her works, meant to subserve a definite transitional end in her upward evolution. The world is from the point of view of the individual a play and complex shock of multitudinous forces. In the midst of this complex play the individual stands as a limited constructed being with a limited amount of force exposed to numberless shocks which may wound, maim, break up or disintegrate the Construction which he calls himself. Pain is in the nature of a nervous and physical recoil from a dangerous or harmful contact; it is a part of what the Upanishad calls jugupsa, the shrinking of the limited being from that which is not himself and not sympathetic or in harmony with himself, its impulse of self-defence against "others". It is, from this point of view, an indication by Nature of that which has to be avoided or, if not successfully avoided, has to be remedied. It does not come into being in the purely physical world so long as life does not enter into it; for till then mechanical methods are sufficient. Its office begins when life with its frailty and imperfect possession of Matter enters on the scene; it grows with the growth of Mind in life. Its office continues so long as Mind is bound in the life and body which it is using, dependent upon them for its knowledge and means of action, subjected to their limitations and to the egoistic impulses and aims which are born of those limitations. But if and when Mind in man becomes capable of being free, unegoistic, in harmony with all other beings and with the play of the universal forces, the use and office of suffering diminishes, its raison d'etre must finally cease to be and it can only continue as an atavism of Nature, a habit that has survived its use, a persistence of the lower in the as yet imperfect organisation of the higher. Its eventual elimination must be an essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind.
14:This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. The reason for this imperfection and this perversion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa. If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach. We attain to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and Poetry, so that we enjoy there the Rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even the horrible or repellent;2 and the reason is because we are detached, disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsa), but only of the thing and its essence. Certainly, this aesthetic reception of contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which is supramental and supra-aesthetic; for the latter would eliminate sorrow, terror, horror and disgust with their cause while the former admits them: but it represents partially and imperfectly one stage of the progressive delight of the universal Soul in things in its manifestation and it admits us in one part of our nature to that detachment from egoistic sensation and that universal attitude through which the one Soul sees harmony and beauty where we divided beings experience rather chaos and discord. The full liberation can come to us only by a similar liberation in all our parts, the universal aesthesis, the universal standpoint of knowledge, the universal detachment from all things and yet sympathy with all in our nervous and emotional being.
1.12 - God Departs, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
On 9th December, the Light faded and signs of discoloration here and there were visible. Then, according to the Mother's direction, the body was put into a specially prepared rosewood casket lined with silver sheet and satin and the bottom made comfortable with cushions. Sri Aurobindo's body was wrapped in a gold-embroidered cloth. At 5 p.m. the body was carried by the sadhaks to the Ashram courtyard under the Service tree where a cement vault had been under Construction from 5th December. Udar climbed down into the vault to receive the casket and put it in its proper position. As the box was lowered a friend of mine said that a prayer sprang spontaneously from his heart: "Now that you have gone physically, assure us that your work will be done." Something made him look up at the Service tree and suddenly he saw against it Sri Aurobindo; his undraped upper body was of a golden colour. He said firmly with great energy and power in Bengali, "Habe, habe, habe" "It will be done, it will be done, it will be done." Then, as wished by the Mother, Champaklal came first to place a potful of earth upon the slate of the vault, followed by Moni, Nolini and other sadhaks. The ceremony was quiet and solemn. The Mother watched it from the terrace above Dyuman's room. Hundreds of sadhaks stood in the courtyard in silent prayer and consecration. The most blessed Service tree amply fulfils its name by offering the Samadhi day and night, a cool shade and sweet-scented flowers.
Thus came to a close the physical life of the One who, without the world knowing it, worked unceasingly for the world and will continue doing so, careless of human reward of any kind and accepting the success of his mission as the only recompense. Of the latter he was absolutely sure, but were it to end in failure, he said that he would still go on unperturbed, because "I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I had to do, and what is so done counts always in the economy of the universe." Was it the sacrifice that he called, "paying here God's debt to earth and man"? Never has there been recorded in earth-history a phenomenon where a person of Sri Aurobindo's supreme eminence has lived secluded from the world-gaze and quietly and unobtrusively passed away. Such a complete self-effacement can be thought of only of one who is a god or has become a god. It is certain that one day the world will wake up to realise who he was and what it owes to him as it becomes more and more enlightened in its consciousness. Already, some faint glimmerings of that recognition are visible in the Eastern sky, "a long lone line of hesitating hue". His Birth Centenary is knocking at our door. Rabindranath's salutation to him in his political days will turn into a salutation of the whole of humanity as its lover and saviour. The long lone hue will be transformed into a full blaze of the living Sun.
1.1.2 - Intellect and the Intellectual, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The intellect can be as great an obstacle as the vital when it chooses to prefer its own Constructions to the Truth.
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--
It is the ordinary unenlightened activity of the intellect that is an obstacle to spiritual experience, just as the ordinary unregenerated activity of the vital or the obscure stupidly obstructive consciousness of the body is an obstacle. What the sadhak has to be specially warned against in the wrong processes of the intellect is, first, any mistaking of mental ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of the mere mind, cacala mana, which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully touches the human mental plane. There are also of course the usual vices of the intellect,its leaning towards sterile doubt instead of luminous reception and calm enlightened discrimination; its arrogance claiming to judge things that are beyond it, unknown to it, too deep for it by standards drawn from its own limited experience; its attempts to explain the supraphysical by the physical or its demand for the proof of higher and occult things by the criterions proper to Matter and to mind in Matter; others also too many to enumerate here. Always it is substituting its own representations and Constructions and opinions for the true knowledge. But if the intellect is surrendered, open, quiet, receptive, there is no reason why it should not be a means of reception of the light or an aid to the experience of spiritual states and to the fullness of an inner change.
***
1.12 - The Divine Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
his work be one of Construction or of destruction; whether he
supports or restores an old order or labours to replace it by
--
the Divine and not be formed by an edifying Construction of the
mental thought and will, the practical reason or the social sense.
--
our own superficial mental Constructions. Egoism renounced,
the nature purified, action will come from the soul's dictates,
--
action, all fixed and external rules of conduct, all Constructions
of the outward or surface Nature, dharmas, and take refuge in
1.12 - The Herds of the Dawn, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thought they set the powers of the Delight to work. But even over the heavenly waters they cross, for the power of the Soma helps them to dissolve all mental Constructions, and they cast aside even this veil; they go beyond Mind and the last attaining is described as the crossing of the rivers, the passage through the heaven of the pure mind, the journey by the path of the Truth to the other side. Not till we reach the highest supreme, parama paravat, do we rest at last from the great human journey.
We shall see that not only in this hymn, but everywhere
1.12 - The Office and Limitations of the Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If the reason is not the sovereign master of our being nor even intended to be more than an intermediary or minister, it cannot succeed in giving a perfect law to the other estates of the realm, although it may impose on them a temporary and imperfect order as a passage to a higher perfection. The rational or intellectual man is not the last and highest ideal of manhood, nor would a rational society be the last and highest expression of the possibilities of an aggregate human life,unless indeed we give to this word, reason, a wider meaning than it now possesses and include in it the combined wisdom of all our powers of knowledge, those which stand below and above the understanding and logical mind as well as this strictly rational part of our nature. The Spirit that manifests itself in man and dominates secretly the phases of his development, is greater and profounder than his intellect and drives towards a perfection that cannot be shut in by the arbitrary Constructions of the human reason.
Meanwhile, the intellect performs its function; it leads man to the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places him with unbandaged eyes on that wide threshold where a more luminous Angel has to take him by the hand. It takes first the lower powers of his existence, each absorbed in its own urge, each striving with a blind self-sufficiency towards the fulfilment of its own instincts and primary impulses; it teaches them to understand themselves and to look through the reflecting eyes of the intelligence on the laws of their own action. It enables them to discern intelligently the high in themselves from the low, the pure from the impure and out of a crude confusion to arrive at more and more luminous formulas of their possibilities. It gives them self-knowledge and is a guide, teacher, purifier, liberator. For it enables them also to look beyond themselves and at each other and to draw upon each other for fresh motives and a richer working. It streng thens and purifies the hedonistic and the aesthetic activities and softens their quarrel with the ethical mind and instinct; it gives them solidity and seriousness, brings them to the support of the practical and dynamic powers and allies them more closely to the strong actualities of life. It sweetens the ethical will by infusing into it psychic, hedonistic and aesthetic elements and ennobles by all these separately or together the practical, dynamic and utilitarian temperament of the human being. At the same time it plays the part of a judge and legislator, seeks to fix rules, provide systems and regularised combinations which shall enable the powers of the human soul to walk by a settled path and act according to a sure law, an ascertained measure and in a balanced rhythm. Here it finds after a time that its legislative action becomes a force for limitation and turns into a bondage and that the regularised system which it has imposed in the interests of order and conservation becomes a cause of petrifaction and the sealing up of the fountains of life. It has to bring in its own saving faculty of doubt. Under the impulse of the intelligence warned by the obscure revolt of the oppressed springs of life, ethics, aesthetics, the social, political, economic rule begin to question themselves and, if this at first brings in again some confusion, disorder and uncertainty, yet it awakens new movements of imagination, insight, self-knowledge and self-realisation by which old systems and formulas are transformed or disappear, new experiments are made and in the end larger potentialities and combinations are brought into play. By this double action of the intelligence, affirming and imposing what it has seen and again in due season questioning what has been accomplished in order to make a new affirmation, fixing a rule and order and liberating from rule and order, the progress of the race is assured, however uncertain may seem its steps and stages.
--
This truth is hidden from the rationalist because he is supported by two constant articles of faith, first that his own reason is right and the reason of others who differ from him is wrong, and secondly that whatever may be the present deficiencies of the human intellect, the collective human reason will eventually arrive at purity and be able to found human thought and life securely on a clear rational basis entirely satisfying to the intelligence. His first article of faith is no doubt the common expression of our egoism and arrogant fallibility, but it is also something more; it expresses this truth that it is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man his action and his hope and the faith that is in him and to give him that idea and knowledge, however restricted, and that dynamic conviction, however narrow and intolerant, which he needs in order that he may live, act and grow in the highest light available to him. The reason cannot grasp all truth in its embrace because truth is too infinite for it; but still it does grasp the something of it which we immediately need, and its insufficiency does not detract from the value of its work, but is rather the measure of its value. For man is not intended to grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but to move towards it through a succession of experiences and a constant, though not by any means a perfectly continuous self-enlargement. The first business of reason then is to justify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith and conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings. It justifies to him now this, now that, the experience of the moment, the receding light of the past, the half-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its value. It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the same individual, except at moments of awakening and transition, but in the collective body of men and in the successions of Time that is its whole business. For so man moves towards the infinity of the Truth by the experience of its variety; so his reason helps him to build, change, destroy what he has built and prepare a new Construction, in a word, to progress, grow, enlarge himself in his self-knowledge and world-knowledge and their works.
The second article of faith of the believer in reason is also an error and yet contains a truth. The reason cannot arrive at any final truth because it can neither get to the root of things nor embrace the totality of their secrets; it deals with the finite, the separate, the limited aggregate, and has no measure for the all and the infinite. Nor can reason found a perfect life for man or a perfect society. A purely rational human life would be a life baulked and deprived of its most powerful dynamic sources; it would be a substitution of the minister for the sovereign. A purely rational society could not come into being and, if it could be born, either could not live or would sterilise and petrify human existence. The root powers of human life, its intimate causes are below, irrational, and they are above, suprarational. But this is true that by constant enlargement, purification, openness the reason of man is bound to arrive at an intelligent sense even of that which is hidden from it, a power of passive, yet sympathetic reflection of the Light that surpasses it. Its limit is reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until there is only my own luminous veil between you and him. Remove that and make the soul of man one in fact and nature with this Divine; then you will know yourself, discover the highest and widest law of your being, become the possessors or at least the receivers and instruments of a higher will and knowledge than mine and lay hold at last on the true secret and the whole sense of a human and yet divine living.
1.12 - The Sociology of Superman, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
It is therefore probable that for a long time this City under Construction will be a place where negative possibilities will be exacerbated as much as the positive ones, under the relentless pressure of the beacon of Truth. And falsehood is skilled at holding on to insignificant details, resistance at sticking to everyday trifles, which become the very sign of refusal. Falsehood knows how to make great sacrifices. It can follow a discipline, extol an ideal, collect merit badges and Brownie points, but it betrays itself in the insignificant that is its last refuge. It is really in matter that the game is played out. This City of the Future is a battlefield, a difficult adventure. What is decided over there with machine guns, guerrilla warfare and glorious deeds is decided here with sordid details and an invisible warfare against falsehood. But a single victory won over petty human egoism is more pregnant with consequences for the earth than the rearranging of all the frontiers of Asia, for this frontier and this egoism are the original barbed wire that divides the world.
For that matter, the apprentice superman could begin his battle very early, not just in himself but in his children, and not just from their birth but right from their conception.
1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
We must dismiss all mental Constructions that at every moment try to steal the shining thread. We must remain in a constant state of openness and be too great for ideas for it is not ideas that we need, but space. We must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state. . . . Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit itself to any form or expression; always we must keep ourselves open to the higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites. 175
Then, one day, because of our burning need, after being like a mass of compressed gas, the doors will finally burst open: The consciousness rises, says the Mother, breaking the kind of hard carapace, there, at the top of the head, and one emerges into the light.
1.1.3 - Mental Difficulties and the Need of Quietude, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is necessary to curb the minds impatience a little. Knowledge is progressiveif it tries to leap up to the top at once, it may make a hasty Construction which it will have afterwards to undo. The knowledge and experience must come by degrees and step by step.
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You stick to your intellectual-ethical version of the inner self-vision? Dry? policeman? criminal? Great Lord! If it were that, it would cease to be self-vision at all for in the true self-vision there is no policemanship and no criminaldom at all. All that belongs to the intellectual-ethical virtue-and-sin dodge which is only a mental Construction of practical value for the outward life but not a truth of real inner values. In the true self-vision we see only harmonies and disharmonies and set the wrong notes right and replace them by the true notes. But I say that for the sake of truth, not to persuade you to start the self-vision effort; for if you did with these ideas of it, you would inevitably start it on the policeman basis and get into trouble. Besides, evidently, you prefer in the Yoga to be the piano and not the pianist, which is all right but involves total self-giving and the intervention of the supreme musician and harmonist. May it be so.
I am glad to know that your vital has been frightened into acquiescence in self-givingeven if only by the imaginary horror of being obliged to become the policeman of yourself. But to explain why these contradictions existed in you one has to have recourse to this very business of harmonies and disharmonies and the inner knowledge. You were in fact a piano played on by several pianists at a time each with his own different musical piece to play! In plain words and without images, every man is full of these contradictions because he is one person, no doubt, but made up of different personalities the perception of multiple personality is becoming well-known to psychologists nowwho very commonly disagree with each other. So long as one does not aim at unity in a single dominant intention, like that of seeking and self-dedication to the Divine, they get on somehow together, alternating or quarrelling or muddling through or else one taking the lead and compelling the others to take a minor part but once you try to unite them in one aim, then the trouble becomes evident. One element wanted the Divine from the first, another wanted music, literature, poetry, a third wanted life at its best, a fourth wanted lifewell, not at its best. Finally there was another element which wanted life not at all, but was rather disgusted with it and wanted either a better (diviner) life or something better than life. It was this element evidently that created the vairgya and in the struggle between that and the life-partisans, a black element stole in (not one of the personalities, but a formation, a dark intrusion from outside), which wanted to turn the whole thing into a drama or tragedy of despairdespair of life but despair of the Divine also. That has to be rejected, the rest changed and harmonised. That is the only true explanation of the whole difficulty in your nature.
1.13 - (Plot continued.) What constitutes Tragic Action., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible. A tragedy, then, to be perfect according to the rules of art should be of this Construction. Hence they are in error who censure Euripides just because he follows this principle in his plays, many of which end unhappily. It is, as we have said, the right ending. The best proof is that on the stage and in dramatic competition, such plays, if well worked out, are the most tragic in effect; and Euripides, faulty though he may be in the general management of his subject, yet is felt to be the most tragic of the poets.
In the second rank comes the kind of tragedy which some place first.
1.13 - THE HUMAN REBOUND OF EVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
social Construction of the Noosphere and the development within
it of new powers for the arrangement of matter. From the "mate-
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fault in its Construction, that evolutionary irreversibility and per-
sonalization (despite their implied anticipation of the future) are
1.13 - The Pentacle, Lamen or Seal, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
Many magicians make use of the Pentacle Salomonis as a symbol of coercion for all beings. The magician surely will not choose a symbol the Construction of which he would not find analogous to the universal laws, for with such a symbol he could not make obvious the authority he needs for his purposes. Only by completely understanding the meaning of his symbol and by being able to take the right attitude towards it will the magician get true magical results. A magician should always think of this. He should only use symbols which are clear to him in meaning and which represent the idea of his power.
A seal, contrary to the pentacle, is the graphic representation of a being, power or sphere which is expressed by its symbolism.
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2. There also exist universal seals which not only symbolize the qualities and range of action of beings but also their other characteristics. By applying the laws of analogy one may produce graphic Constructions of such seals and charge them with the qualities of the relevant spirits by force of imagination. The being will have to react to such seals without resistance.
3. The magician may also produce seals entirely according to his own ideas, without following any analogous relations. He must, however, have such seals approved by the being concerned. The being's approval of such a seal or sign can be established as follows: the magician wanders with his spirit into the being's own sphere and has the being swear mentally to his seal, its shape, or representation, that it will always react to it.
1.14 - Descendants of Prithu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[1]: The text of the Vāyu and Brāhma (or Hari Vaṃśa) read, like that of the Viṣṇu, ###. Mons. Langlois understands the two last words as a compound epithet; "Se jouirent dupouvoir de se rendre invisibles." The Construction would admit of such a sense, but it seems more probable that they are intended for names. The lineage of Prithu is immediately continued through one of them, Antarddhāna, which is the same as Antarddhi; as the commentator states with regard to that appellation, ###, and as the commentator on the Hari Vaṃśa remarks of the succeeding name, 'one of the brothers being called Antarddhāna or Antarddhi,' leaves no other sense for Pālin but that of a proper name. The Bhāgavata gives Prithu five sons, Vijitāswa, Haryyakṣa, Dhumrakésa, Vrika, and Dravina, and adds that the elder was also named Antarddhāna, in consequence of having obtained from Indra the power of making himself invisible.
[2]: The Bhāgavata, as usual, modifies this genealogy; Antarddhāna has by Sikhaṇḍiṇī three sons, who were the three fires, Pāvaka, Pavamāna, and Suchi, condemned by a curse of Vaśiṣṭha to be born again: by another wife, Nabhasvatī, he has Havirddhāna, whose sons are the same as those of the text, only giving another name, Varhiṣad as well as Prācīnaverhis, to the first. According to the Mahābhārata (Mokṣa Dharma), which has been followed by the Padma P., Prācinavarhis was born in the family of Atri.
1.14 - The Limits of Philosophical Knowledge, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
Cantor, it has appeared that the impossibility of infinite collections was a mistake. They are not in fact self-contradictory, but only contradictory of certain rather obstinate mental prejudices. Hence the reasons for regarding space and time as unreal have become inoperative, and one of the great sources of metaphysical Constructions is dried up.
The mathematicians, however, have not been content with showing that space as it is commonly supposed to be is possible; they have shown also that many other forms of space are equally possible, so far as logic can show. Some of Euclid's axioms, which appear to common sense to be necessary, and were formerly supposed to be necessary by philosophers, are now known to derive their appearance of necessity from our mere familiarity with actual space, and not from any _a priori_ logical foundation. By imagining worlds in which these axioms are false, the mathematicians have used logic to loosen the prejudices of common sense, and to show the possibility of spaces differing--some more, some less--from that in which we live. And some of these spaces differ so little from Euclidean space, where distances such as we can measure are concerned, that it is impossible to discover by observation whether our actual space is strictly Euclidean or of one of these other kinds.
1.14 - The Structure and Dynamics of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
21 Since the whole Shadow Quaternio is a symmetrical Construction, the "good
Wise Man" must here be contrasted with a correspondingly dark, chthonic figure.
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proved that its purely logical Constructions which transcend all
experience subsequently coincided with the behaviour of things.
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to all appearances- purely speculative Construction is not a new
invention, but is prefigured on earlier levels of thought. Gen-
1.14 - The Suprarational Beauty, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But again this is true only in restricted bounds or, if anywhere entirely true, then only on a middle plane of our aesthetic seeking and activity. Where the greatest and most powerful creation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed and left behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the reason. The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us; creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power which must work always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration. It may use the intellect for certain of its operations, but in proportion as it subjects itself to the intellect, it loses in power and force of vision and diminishes the splendour and truth of the beauty it creates. The intellect may take hold of the influx, moderate and repress the divine enthusiasm of creation and force it to obey the prudence of its dictates, but in doing so it brings down the work to its own inferior level, and the lowering is in proportion to the intellectual interference. For by itself the intelligence can only achieve talent, though it may be a high and even, if sufficiently helped from above, a surpassing talent. Genius, the true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and its instrumentation even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of the mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical process of intellectual Construction. Art-creation which accepts the canons of the reason and works within the limits laid down by it, may be great, beautiful and powerful; for genius can preserve its power even when it labours in shackles and refuses to put forth all its resources: but when it proceeds by means of the intellect, it constructs, but does not create. It may construct well and with a good and faultless workmanship, but its success is formal and not of the spirit, a success of technique and not the embodiment of the imperishable truth of beauty seized in its inner reality, its divine delight, its appeal to a supreme source of ecstasy, Ananda.
There have been periods of artistic creation, ages of reason, in which the rational and intellectual tendency has prevailed in poetry and art; there have even been nations which in their great formative periods of art and literature have set up reason and a meticulous taste as the sovereign powers of their aesthetic activity. At their best these periods have achieved work of a certain greatness, but predominantly of an intellectual greatness and perfection of technique rather than achievements of a supreme inspired and revealing beauty; indeed their very aim has been not the discovery of the deeper truth of beauty, but truth of ideas and truth of reason, a critical rather than a true creative aim. Their leading object has been an intellectual criticism of life and nature elevated by a consummate poetical rhythm and diction rather than a revelation of God and man and life and nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty. But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit. This it seizes and expresses by form and idea, but a significant form, which is not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious reproduction of outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which is merely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reason and taste. Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truth of beauty,not, again, the formal beauty alone or the beauty of proportion and right process which is what the sense and the reason seek, but the soul of beauty which is hidden from the ordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can seize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms he has created.
The art-creation which lays a supreme stress on reason and taste and on perfection and purity of a technique constructed in obedience to the canons of reason and taste, claimed for itself the name of classical art; but the claim, like the too trenchant distinction on which it rests, is of doubtful validity. The spirit of the real, the great classical art and poetry is to bring out what is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to bring out what is striking and individual and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms. In truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and a romantic as well as a realistic element,understanding realism in the sense of the prominent bringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse inverted romanticism of the real which brings into exaggerated prominence the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life. The type of art to which a great creative work belongs is determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the others into subordination to its reigning spirit. But classical art also works by a large vision and inspiration, not by the process of the intellect. The lower kind of classical art and literature,if classical it be and not rather, as it often is, pseudo-classical, intellectually imitative of the external form and process of the classical,may achieve work of considerable, though a much lesser power, but of an essentially inferior scope and nature; for to that inferiority it is self-condemned by its principle of intellectual Construction. Almost always it speedily degenerates into the formal or academic, empty of real beauty, void of life and power, imprisoned in its slavery to form and imagining that when a certain form has been followed, certain canons of Construction satisfied, certain rhetorical rules or technical principles obeyed, all has been achieved. It ceases to be art and becomes a cold and mechanical workmanship.
This predominance given to reason and taste first and foremost, sometimes even almost alone, in the creation and appreciation of beauty arises from a temper of mind which is critical rather than creative; and in regard to creation its theory falls into a capital error. All artistic work in order to be perfect must indeed have in the very act of creation the guidance of an inner power of discrimination constantly selecting and rejecting in accordance with a principle of truth and beauty which remains always faithful to a harmony, a proportion, an intimate relation of the form to the idea; there is at the same time an exact fidelity of the idea to the spirit, nature and inner body of the thing of beauty which has been revealed to the soul and the mind, its svarpa and svabhva. Therefore this discriminating inner sense rejects all that is foreign, superfluous, otiose, all that is a mere diversion distractive and deformative, excessive or defective, while it selects and finds sovereignly all that can bring out the full truth, the utter beauty, the inmost power. But this discrimination is not that of the critical intellect, nor is the harmony, proportion, relation it observes that which can be fixed by any set law of the critical reason; it exists in the very nature and truth of the thing itself, the creation itself, in its secret inner law of beauty and harmony which can be seized by vision, not by intellectual analysis. The discrimination which works in the creator is therefore not an intellectual self-criticism or an obedience to rules imposed on him from outside by any intellectual canons, but itself creative, intuitive, a part of the vision, involved in and inseparable from the act of creation. It comes as part of that influx of power and light from above which by its divine enthusiasm lifts the faculties into their intense suprarational working. When it fails, when it is betrayed by the lower executive instruments rational or infrarational, and this happens when these cease to be passive and insist on obtruding their own demands or vagaries,the work is flawed and a subsequent act of self-criticism becomes necessary. But in correcting his work the artist who attempts to do it by rule and intellectual process, uses a false or at any rate an inferior method and cannot do his best. He ought rather to call to his aid the intuitive critical vision and embody it in a fresh act of inspired creation or recreation after bringing himself back by its means into harmony with the light and law of his original creative initiation. The critical intellect has no direct or independent part in the means of the inspired creator of beauty.
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We see this in the history of the development of literary and artistic criticism. In its earliest stages the appreciation of beauty is instinctive, natural, inborn, a response of the aesthetic sensitiveness of the soul which does not attempt to give any account of itself to the thinking intelligence. When the rational intelligence applies itself to this task, it is not satisfied with recording faithfully the nature of the response and the thing it has felt, but it attempts to analyse, to lay down what is necessary in order to create a just aesthetic gratification, it prepares a grammar of technique, an artistic law and canon of Construction, a sort of mechanical rule of process for the creation of beauty, a fixed code or Shastra. This brings in the long reign of academic criticism superficial, technical, artificial, governed by the false idea that technique, of which alone critical reason can give an entirely adequate account, is the most important part of creation and that to every art there can correspond an exhaustive science which will tell us how the thing is done and give us the whole secret and process of its doing. A time comes when the creator of beauty revolts and declares the charter of his own freedom, generally in the shape of a new law or principle of creation, and this freedom once vindicated begins to widen itself and to carry with it the critical reason out of all its familiar bounds. A more developed appreciation emerges which begins to seek for new principles of criticism, to search for the soul of the work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul or to study the creator himself or the spirit, nature and ideas of the age he lived in and so to arrive at a right understanding of his work. The intellect has begun to see that its highest business is not to lay down laws for the creator of beauty, but to help us to understand himself and his work, not only its form and elements but the mind from which it sprang and the impressions its effects create in the mind that receives. Here criticism is on its right road, but on a road to a consummation in which the rational understanding is overpassed and a higher faculty opens, suprarational in its origin and nature.
For the conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and intelligent understanding of it,these things are only a preliminary clarifying of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,but by an exaltation of the soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities. For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence.
1.15 - In the Domain of the Spirit Beings, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
The analogies and the hierarchy of each zone are dealt with in the next chapter. Each sphere lying above the zone girdling the earth, between the Moon and Saturn, has a threefold effect: firstly on the mental, secondly on the astral and thirdly on the physical world. Depending on the question in which sphere of the earthzone a certain effect should be caused, the creation of the cause for such an effect must be considered in that zone. Since the zones mentioned above have certain individual influences on our earthzone the magician operating with beings of such zones must have a clear picture of the analogy of the laws of each zone regarding his own microcosm and the microcosm of any other human being. Each analogy of the zones to the micro- and macrocosm must be quite clear to him and he must know how to create the cause corresponding to the analogies with the help of the beings. In the magician's conception each zone will not be a limited plane beyond the earth-zone, but all zones run into one another in the microcosm as well as in the macrocosm. The zones bear astrological names, but do not have directly to do with the Constructions of the stars of the universe, although there exists some relation between the stars and their constellations, enabling the astrologers to draw their conclusions for mantic purposes or to find out unfavourable influences. I have already given some hints about the synthesis of astrology.
Each zone is inhabited in just the same way as the earth-zone already known to us. The beings of the zones have their special commissions and are subject to the laws of their zone, as far as causes and effects are concerned. In our opinion there exist millions of beings in each zone. It is impossible to grade these beings categorically. Each of these beings has reached a certain degree in its spiritual development, a certain degree of maturity, and a commission has been transferred upon it according to this degree.
1.15 - The Suprarational Good, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is in our ethical being that this truest truth of practical life, its real and highest practicality becomes most readily apparent. It is true that the rational man has tried to reduce the ethical life like all the rest to a matter of reason, to determine its nature, its law, its practical action by some principle of reason, by some law of reason. He has never really succeeded and he never can really succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences of the intellect building elegant and empty Constructions with words and ideas, mere conventions of logic and vamped-up syntheses, in sum, pretentious failures which break down at the first strenuous touch of reality. Such was that extraordinary system of utilitarian ethics discovered in the nineteenth century the great century of science and reason and utilityby one of its most positive and systematic minds and now deservedly discredited. Happily, we need now only smile at its shallow pretentious errors, its substitution of a practical, outward and occasional test for the inner, subjective and absolute motive of ethics, its reduction of ethical action to an impossibly scientific and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive enough to the reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole instinct and intuition of the ethical being. Equally false and impracticable are other attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle and phenomena,the hedonistic theory which refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the sociological which supposes ethics to be no more than a system of formulas of conduct generated from the social sense and a ruled direction of the social impulses and would regulate its action by that insufficient standard. The ethical being escapes from all these formulas: it is a law to itself and finds its principle in its own eternal nature which is not in its essential character a growth of evolving mind, even though it may seem to be that in its earthly history, but a light from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine.
Not that all these errors have not each of them a truth behind their false Constructions; for all errors of the human reason are false representations, a wrong building, effective mis Constructions of the truth or of a side or a part of the truth. Utility is a fundamental principle of existence and all fundamental principles of existence are in the end one; therefore it is true that the highest good is also the highest utility. It is true also that, not any balance of the greatest good of the greatest number, but simply the good of others and most widely the good of all is one ideal aim of our outgoing ethical practice; it is that which the ethical man would like to effect, if he could only find the way and be always sure what is the real good of all. But this does not help to regulate our ethical practice, nor does it supply us with its inner principle whether of being or of action, but only produces one of the many considerations by which we can feel our way along the road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall into the hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose whole method is alien to the ethical. Moreover, the standard of utility, the judgment of utility, its spirit, its form, its application must vary with the individual nature, the habit of mind, the outlook on the world. Here there can be no reliable general law to which all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such as it is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can ethics at all or ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one safe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good and to govern by that his conduct. He may err, but he will be on his right road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be faithful to the law of his nature. The saying of the Gita is always true; better is the law of ones own nature though ill-performed, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is the pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility.
Neither is its law the pursuit of pleasure high or base, nor self-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle or even spiritual. It is true, here too, that the highest good is both in its nature and inner effect the highest bliss. Ananda, delight of being, is the spring of all existence and that to which it tends and for which it seeks openly or covertly in all its activities. It is true too that in virtue growing, in good accomplished there is great pleasure and that the seeking for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of virtue. But for practical purposes this is a side aspect of the matter; it does not constitute pleasure into a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary, virtue comes to the natural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature and is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification of strength by suffering. We do not embrace that pain and struggle for the pleasure of the pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for that higher strenuous delight, though it is felt by the secret spirit in us, is not usually or not at first conscious in the conscient normal part of our being which is the field of the struggle. The action of the ethical man is not motived by even an inner pleasure, but by a call of his being, the necessity of an ideal, the figure of an absolute standard, a law of the Divine.
1.1.5 - Thought and Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The one thing always is to let the Peace and Power work and not allow the mind to seek after things and get disturbed. All the values of the mind are Constructions of ignoranceit is only when your psychic being comes forward that you have the true knowledge for your psychic being knows.
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1.17 - Legend of Prahlada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[3]: This is the purport of the sentence apparently, and is that which the comment in part confirms. Literally it is, 'A blow is the pleasure of those whose eyes are darkened by ignorance, whose limbs, exceedingly benumbed, desire pleasure by exercise: The commentator divides the sentence, however, and reads it, 'As fatigue would be like pleasure to paralyzed limbs; and a blow is enjoyment to those who are blinded by delusion; that is, by love; for to them a slap, or even a kick, from a mistress would be a favour.' It is not improbably an allusion to some such venerable pastime as blindman's buff. This interpretation, however, leaves the Construction of the first half of the sentence imperfect, unless the nominative and verb apply to both portions.
[4]: They are so far from being sources of pleasure in themselves, that, under different p. 131 contrasts, they become sources of pain. Heat is agreeable in cold weather: cold is agreeable in hot weather; heat would then be disagreeable. Drink is pleasant to a thirsty man: thirst is agreeable to one who has drunk too much; and more drink would be painful. So of food, and of other contrasts.
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[8]: The Construction of the text is elliptical and brief, but the sense is sufficiently clear. The order of the last pāda is thus transposed by the commentator: 'Whence (from feeling pleasure) the abandonment of enmity is verily the consequence.'
[9]: The original rather unpoetically specifies some of these, or fever, ophthalmia, dysentery, spleen, liver, &c. The whole of these defects are the individuals of the three species of pain alluded to before.
1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
by one who is blind," said the Upanishad long ago. 393 Perhaps the time has come to look beyond all our small Constructions and to begin the Play? Instead of playing with shovels, bulldozers, gospels, and neutrons, let us clear the consciousness and cast that seed to the winds of time, that life may truly begin.
O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
1.18 - THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Let it be noted that by its Construction OR is not a half-
measure, a compromise between Heaven and Earth, but a resul-
1.19 - ON THE PROBABLE EXISTENCE AHEAD OF US OF AN ULTRA-HUMAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
dous biological significance: prevision of the future, Construction
of ordered systems, power of planned invention, regulation (and
1.20 - Death, Desire and Incapacity, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:Death is imposed on the individual life both by the conditions of its own existence and by its relations to the All-Force which manifests itself in the universe. For the individual life is a particular play of energy specialised to constitute, maintain, energise and finally to dissolve, when its utility is over, one of myriad forms which all serve, each in its own place, time and scope, the whole play of the universe. The energy of life in the body has to support the attack of the energies external to it in the universe; it has to draw them in and feed upon them and is itself being constantly devoured by them. All Matter according to the Upanishad is food, and this is the formula of the material world that "the eater eating is himself eaten". The life organised in the body is constantly exposed to the possibility of being broken up by the attack of the life external to it or, its devouring capacity being insufficient or not properly served or there being no right balance between the capacity of devouring and the capacity or necessity of providing food for the life outside, it is unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and therefore wasted away or broken; it has to go through the process of death for a new Construction or renewal.
7:Not only so but, again in the language of the Upanishad, the life-force is the food of the body and the body the food of the life-force; in other words, the life-energy in us both supplies the material by which the form is built up and constantly maintained and renewed and is at the same time constantly using up the substantial form of itself which it thus creates and keeps in existence. If the balance between these two operations is imperfect or is disturbed or if the ordered play of the different currents of life-force is thrown out of gear, then disease and decay intervene and commence the process of disintegration. And the very struggle for conscious mastery and even the growth of mind make the maintenance of the life more difficult. For there is an increasing demand of the life-energy on the form, a demand which is in excess of the original system of supply and disturbs the original balance of supply and demand, and before a new balance can be established, many disorders are introduced inimical to the harmony and to the length of maintenance of the life; in addition the attempt at mastery creates always a corresponding reaction in the environment which is full of forces that also desire fulfilment and are therefore intolerant of, revolt against and attack the existence which seeks to master them. There too a balance is disturbed, a more intense struggle is generated; however strong the mastering life, unless either it is unlimited or else succeeds in establishing a new harmony with its environment, it cannot always resist and triumph but must one day be overcome and disintegrated.
1.22 - The Problem of Life, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:The second difficulty is that man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity of sympathy a rough mental Construction about them; but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge, - existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself, the rest is hidden; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us. But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in which we are one with them, the universal; and the fullness of the universal exists consciently only in that which is superconscient to us, in the Supermind: for here in our normal being the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego in all its activities, chained triply to the stake of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity.
10:The third difficulty is the division between force and consciousness in the evolutionary existence. There is, first, the division which has been created by the evolution itself in its three successive formations of Matter, Life and Mind, each with its own law of working. The Life is at war with the body; it attempts to force it to satisfy life's desires, impulses, satisfactions and demands from its limited capacity what could only be possible to an immortal and divine body; and the body, enslaved and tyrannised over, suffers and is in constant dumb revolt against the demands made upon it by the Life. The Mind is at war with both: sometimes it helps the Life against the Body, sometimes restrains the vital urge and seeks to protect the corporeal frame from life's desires, passions and over-driving energies; it also seeks to possess the Life and turn its energy to the mind's own ends, to the utmost joys of the mind's own activity, to the satisfaction of mental, aesthetic, emotional aims and their fulfilment in human existence; and the Life too finds itself enslaved and misused and is in frequent insurrection against the ignorant, half-wise tyrant seated above it. This is the war of our members which the mind cannot satisfactorily resolve because it has to deal with a problem insoluble to it, the aspiration of an immortal being in a mortal life and body. It can only arrive at a long succession of compromises or end in an abandonment of the problem either by submission with the materialist to the mortality of our apparent being or with the ascetic and the religionist by the rejection and condemnation of the earthly life and withdrawal to happier and easier fields of existence. But the true solution lies in finding the principle beyond Mind of which Immortality is the law and in conquering by it the mortality of our existence.
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Being unlimited it includes the leaders, the men, the world, the forces of destruction and of Construction. There is no differentiation. You speak of contact because you are thinking of the embodied beings as spiritual leaders. The spiritual men are not bodies; they are not aware of their bodies. They are only spirit, limitless and formless. There is always unity among them and all others; nay, they comprise all.
The spirit is the Self. If the Self is realised, these questions cannot arise at all.
1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:Still there is one aspect of this problem which must be immediately considered; it is the gulf created between Mind as we know it and the supramental Truth-Consciousness of which we have found Mind in its origin to be a subordinate process. For this gulf is considerable and, if there are no gradations between the two levels of consciousness, a transition from one to the other, either in the descending involution of Spirit into Matter or the corresponding evolution in Matter of the concealed grades leading back to the Spirit, seems in the highest degree improbable, if not impossible. For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental Constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind formations, sense formations, - as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality were all that it could achieve. Supermind, on the contrary, is in actual and natural possession of the Truth and its formations are forms of the Reality, not Constructions, representations or indicative figures. No doubt, the evolving Mind in us is hampered by its encasement in the obscurity of this life and body, and the original Mind principle in the involutionary descent is a thing of greater power to which we have not fully reached, able to act with freedom in its own sphere or province, to build more revelatory Constructions, more minutely inspired formations, more subtle and significant embodiments in which the light of Truth is present and palpable. But still that too is not likely to be essentially different in its characteristic action, for it too is a movement into the Ignorance, not a still unseparated portion of the Truth-Consciousness. There must be somewhere in the descending and ascending scale of Being an intermediate power and plane of consciousness, perhaps something more than that, something with an original creative force, through which the involutionary transition from Mind in the Knowledge to Mind in the Ignorance was effected and through which again the evolutionary reverse transition becomes intelligible and possible. For the involutionary transition this intervention is a logical imperative, for the evolutionary it is a practical necessity. For in the evolution there are indeed radical transitions, from indeterminate Energy to organised Matter, from inanimate Matter to Life, from a subconscious or submental to a perceptive and feeling and acting Life, from primitive animal mentality to conceptive reasoning Mind observing and governing Life and observing itself also, able to act as an independent entity and even to seek consciously for self-transcendence; but these leaps, even when considerable, are to some extent prepared by slow gradations which make them conceivable and feasible. There can be no such immense hiatus as seems to exist between supramental Truth-Consciousness and the Mind in the Ignorance.
3:But if such intervening gradations exist, it is clear that they must be superconscient to human mind which does not seem to have in its normal state any entry into these higher grades of being. Man is limited in his consciousness by mind and even by a given range or scale of mind: what is below his mind, submental or mental but nether to his scale, readily seems to him subconscious or not distinguishable from complete inconscience; what is above it is to him superconscious and he is almost inclined to regard it as void of awareness, a sort of luminous Inconscience. Just as he is limited to a certain scale of sounds or of colours and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit. He has no sufficient means of communication even with the animal who is his mental congener, though not his equal, and he is even capable of denying mind or real consciousness to it because its modes are other and narrower than those with which in himself and his kind he is familiar; he can observe submental being from outside but cannot at all communicate with it or enter intimately into its nature. Equally the superconscious is to him a closed book which may well be filled only with empty pages. At first sight, then, it would appear as if he had no means of contact with these higher gradations of consciousness: if so, they cannot act as links or bridges and his evolution must cease with his accomplished mental range and cannot exceed it; Nature in drawing these limits has written finis to his upward endeavour.
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7:It is in the latter alternative that we find the secret we are seeking, the means of the transition, the needed step towards a supramental transformation; for we perceive a graduality of ascent, a communication with a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it. We are aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which assumes the nature of Thought but has a different character from the process of thought to which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental Construction, no labour of speculation or difficult discovery; it is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge in a single view; it has a cosmic character, not the stamp of an individual thinking. Beyond this Truth-Thought we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truthaction, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance.
8:In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
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10:Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary Constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual worldformula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its selfexpression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe.
11:In this simultaneous development of multitudinous independent or combined Powers or Potentials there is yet - or there is as yet - no chaos, no conflict, no fall from Truth or Knowledge. The Overmind is a creator of truths, not of illusions or falsehoods: what is worked out in any given overmental energism or movement is the truth of the Aspect, Power, Idea, Force, Delight which is liberated into independent action, the truth of the consequences of its reality in that independence. There is no exclusiveness asserting each as the sole truth of being or the others as inferior truths: each God knows all the Gods and their place in existence; each Idea admits all other ideas and their right to be; each Force concedes a place to all other forces and their truth and consequences; no delight of separate fulfilled existence or separate experience denies or condemns the delight of other existence or other experience. The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, - although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.
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13:And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cosmic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation, tucchyena,5 into the material Inconscience, - the Inconscient Ocean of the Rig Veda, - and if the One is born from that by its own greatness, it is still at first concealed by a fragmentary separative existence and consciousness which is ours and in which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete Constructions, ever-changing approximations. The higher ranges of spiritual Mind have to open upon our being and consciousness and also that which is beyond even spiritual Mind must appear in us if we are to fulfil the divine possibility of our birth into cosmic existence.
14:Overmind in its descent reaches a line which divides the cosmic Truth from the cosmic Ignorance; it is the line at which it becomes possible for Consciousness-Force, emphasising the separateness of each independent movement created by Overmind and hiding or darkening their unity, to divide Mind by an exclusive concentration from the overmental source. There has already been a similar separation of Overmind from its supramental source, but with a transparency in the veil which allows a conscious transmission and maintains a certain luminous kinship; but here the veil is opaque and the transmission of the Overmind motives to the Mind is occult and obscure. Mind separated acts as if it were an independent principle, and each mental being, each basic mental idea, power, force stands similarly on its separate self; if it communicates or combines with or contacts others, it is not with the catholic universality of the Overmind movement, on a basis of underlying oneness, but as independent units joining to form a separate constructed whole. It is by this movement that we pass from the cosmic Truth into the cosmic Ignorance. The cosmic Mind on this level, no doubt, comprehends its own unity, but it is not aware of its own source and foundation in the Spirit or can only comprehend it by the intelligence, not in any enduring experience; it acts in itself as if by its own right and works out what it receives as material without direct communication with the source from which it receives it. Its units also act in ignorance of each other and of the cosmic whole except for the knowledge that they can get by contact and communication, - the basic sense of identity and the mutual penetration and understanding that comes from it are no longer there. All the actions of this Mind Energy proceed on the opposite basis of the Ignorance and its divisions and, although they are the results of a certain conscious knowledge, it is a partial knowledge, not a true and integral self-knowledge, nor a true and integral world-knowledge. This character persists in Life and in subtle Matter and reappears in the gross material universe which arises from the final lapse into the Inconscience.
1.29 - What is Certainty?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The prime function of intellect is differentiation; it deals with marks, with limits, with the relations of what is not identical; in Neschamah all this work has been carried out so perfectly that the "rough working" has passed clean out of mind; just so, you say "I" as if it were an indivisible Unity, unconscious of the inconceivably intricate machinery of anatomical, physiological, psychological Construction which issues in this idea of "I."
We may then with some confidence reaffirm that our certainties do assert our limitations; but this kind of limitation is not necessarily harmful, provided that we view the situation in its proper perspective, that we understand that membership of the of-all-Truth class does not (as one is apt to think at first sight) deepen the gulfs which separate mind from mind, but on the contrary put us in a position to ignore them. Our acts of "love under will," which express our devotion to Nuit, which multiply the fulfillments of our possibilities, become continually more efficacious, and more closely bound up with our Formula of Initiation; and we progressively become aware of deeper and vaster Images of the of-all-Truth class, which reconcile, by including within themselves, all apparent antinomies.
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Being unlimited it includes the leaders, the men, the world, the forces of destruction and of Construction. There is no differentiation. You speak of contact because you are thinking of the embodied beings as spiritual leaders. The spiritual men are not bodies; they are not aware of their bodies. They are only spirit, limitless and formless. There is always unity among them and all others; nay, they comprise all.
The spirit is the Self. If the Self is realised, these questions cannot arise at all.
1.3.5.03 - The Involved and Evolving Godhead, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Or if an experimenting, external and therefore limited Creator were the inventor of the animal's suffering life and man's fumbling mind and this huge mainly unused and useless universe, there was no reason why he should not have stopped short with the Construction of a mental intelligence in his creatures, content with the difficult ingenuity of his labour. Even if he were all-powerful and all-wise, he might well pause there, - for if he went farther, the creature would be in danger of rising too near to the level of his Maker.
But if this is the truth of things that an infinite Spirit, an eternal Divine Presence and Consciousness and Force and Bliss is involved and hidden here and slowly emerges, then is it inevitable that its powers or the ascending degrees of its one power should emerge too one after the other till the whole glory is manifested, a mighty divine Fact embodied and dynamic and visible.
1.4.01 - The Divine Grace and Guidance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- a regular Abyssinia. It is why we always express depreciation of mental Constructions and vital formations - because they are the defence works mind and vital throw up against their capture by the Divine. However the first thing is to become conscious of all that as you have now become, - the next thing is to be firm in knocking it all down and making a tabula rasa, a foundation of calm, peace, happy openness for the true building.
No Insistence on the Grace
1.53 - Mother-Love, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
P.S. "Mother-Love" is, of course, a branch of family affection about which I have already written to you in no uncertain terms. Of all its sub-sections this is the worst because it is the strongest, the most natural, that is to say, the most brutish. You have complained pathetically on more than one occasion that I do not seem to know my own mind about Nature; that I am always contradicting myself. Sometimes I tell you that everything is in Nature; that everything moves by Nature: that to oppose Nature is to provoke endothermic reaction, and then I leap headlong through the hoop of my own Construction and want you to defy nature, to attack her, to overcome her. Really, dear Master, it is too bad of you!
I know it sounds bad but there is not really the opposition that on the surface there seems to be. Perhaps it is that we are talking about two kinds of Nature. In one sense it might be asserted that the final for- mula of Nature is Inertia; in other words, that the dyad of manifested existence is an arbitrary and artificial development of the Zero to which everything must always cancel out.
1.81 - Method of Training, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The Construction of this Record is, incidentally, the first step in the practice called Sammasati, and leads to the acquisition of the Magical Memory the memory of your previous incarnations. So there is another reason, terrifically cogent, for writing this Magical Record as clearly and as fully as you can.
This best explanation of how to set about the task is given in Liber Thisharb
1.83 - Epistola Ultima, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
On the whole therefore I continue to regard the discipline of Yoga as its most valuable feature. The results attained by pushing Yoga to its end are on their own showing worthless, whereas the attainment of Magick, however lofty, is still immune to all criticism and at every period of its Construction has been perfectly sympathetic with the normal consciousness of man.
On this view indeed, one might laughingly remark that Yoga at its best is a smoke-screen thrown out by a battleship in self-protection.
1913 12 16p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Pure and disinterested love, Thy love in what we are able to perceive and manifest of it, is the sole key that can open all hearts that seek for Thee. Those who follow the path of the intellect may have a very high and true conception; they may have all the information about the true life, the life One with Thee, but they do not know it; they have no inner experience of that life and are ignorant of all contact with Thee. These men whose knowledge is intellectual and whose action is confined to a Construction which they believe to be the best, are the most difficult of all to convert; it is harder to awaken the consciousness of the Divine in them than in any other person of goodwill. Love alone can work this miracle, for love opens all doors, penetrates every wall, clears every obstacle. And a little true love does more than the most beautiful speeches.
Lord, let this pure flower of love blossom in me, that it may give its fragrance to all those who come near us, and that this fragrance may sanctify them.
1914 01 06p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thou art the one and only goal of my life and the centre of my aspiration, the pivot of my thought, the key of the synthesis of my being. And as Thou art beyond all sensation, all feeling and all thought, Thou art the living but ineffable experience, the Reality lived in the depths of the being but untranslatable in our poor words; and it is because human intelligence is powerless to reduce Thee to a formula that some, a little disdainfully, label sentiment the knowledge that it is possible to have of Thee, but it is surely as far from sentiment as it is from thought. So long as one has not attained this supreme Knowledge, one has no solid basis or lasting centre for ones mental and emotional synthesis, and all other intellectual Constructions can only be arbitrary, artificial and vain.
Thou art eternal silence and perfect peace in what we are able to perceive of Thee.
1914 04 01p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I feel we have entered the very heart of Thy sanctuary and grown aware of Thy very will. A great joy, a deep peace reign in me, and yet all my inner Constructions have vanished like a vain dream and I find myself now, before Thy immensity, without a frame or system, like a being not yet individualised. All the past in its external form seems ridiculously arbitrary to me, and yet I know it was useful in its own time.
But now all is changed: a new stage has begun.
1914 12 04p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So Thou didst break all my forms of thought, and I found myself before Thee stripped of all mental Constructions, as ignorant about this as a new-born child; and in the darkness of this void lay once again the sovereign peace of something which is not expressed in words but which IS. And I wait without impatience and without fear, for Thee to construct once again from the heart of the unfathomable depths the intellectual form which seems to Thee the most suitable for manifesting Thee in this instrument moulded out of surrender and ardent faith.
And before this immense night full of promise, I feel, more than I have ever felt before, free and vast, infinitely.
1914 12 10p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is it not a great folly to become identified with one form of thought, one mental Construction, however vast and powerful it may be, to the point of making it the living centre of ones being, ones experience and activity? Truth is eternally beyond all that we can think or say of it. To endeavour to find the most suitable expression, the one best adapted to this truth, is of course a useful task, even an indispensable one for the integrality of ones own development and that of all humanity; but one must always feel free in front of this expression, have ones centre of consciousness above it, in the reality which, despite the grandeur, the beauty, the perfection of a mental formula, always eludes every formula. The world is not what we think it to be. The importance of the idea we have of it lies in its effect on our attitude towards action; and this attitude may come from a much deeper, truer, more unchanging inspiration than that resulting from a mental Construction, however powerful it may be. To feel in oneself the will to express for men the eternal Truth in a completer, higher, more exact form than all those which have preceded it, is good; but on condition that one does not identify ones self with this work to the point of being its slave and losing before it all independence and self-control. It is just an activity and nothing more, whatever may be its importance from the earthly point of view; but it must not be forgotten that it is relative like all activities and that we should not allow it to disturb our deep peace and that immutable calm which alone lets the divine forces manifest through us without any deformation.
O Lord, my prayer is not formulated, but Thou hearest it.
1915 05 24p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One day, O Lord, Thou didst teach my mind that it could act fully as an instrument of manifestation of Thy divine truth, as an intermediary of Thy eternal will, without being limited in its realising Constructions by the narrow field of possibilities of the external being. Till then this mind, except very rarely, was in the habit of coming out of its mute ecstasy, its silent contemplation before Thy ineffable infinity, only to concentrate its effort on the centre of action represented by the external being; and this was a sort of bondage within too narrow a frame; there was a contradiction between the powers of mental realisation and the instrument through which they were striving to make their way out; the most immediate result was the wastage and limitation of mental energies, which not finding any satisfaction in activity, quite naturally returned to merge into Thy eternity.
Suddenly Thou didst put an end to this disorder; Thou didst liberate the mind from its last fetters; Thou didst teach it to be freely active through all forms and no longer exclusively through those it considered till then as its own, that is, as its natural means of expression.
1929-04-21 - Visions, seeing and interpretation - Dreams and dreaml and - Dreamless sleep - Visions and formulation - Surrender, passive and of the will - Meditation and progress - Entering the spiritual life, a plunge into the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are what in appearance are false visions. There are, for instance, hundreds or thousands of people who say that they have seen the Christ. Of that number those who have actually seen Him are perhaps less than a dozen, and even with them there is much to say about what they have seen. What the others saw may be an emanation; or it may be a thought or even an image remembered by the mind. There are, too, those who are strong believers in the Christ and have had a vision of some Force or Being or some remembered image that is very luminous and makes upon them a strong impression. They have seen something which they feel belongs to another world, to a supernatural order, and it has created in them an emotion of fear, awe or joy; and as they believe in the Christ, they can think of nothing else and say it is He. But the same vision or experience if it comes to one who believes in the Hindu, the Mahomedan or some other religion, will take a different name and form. The thing seen or experienced may be fundamentally the same, but it is formulated differently according to the different make-up of the apprehending mind. It is only those that can go beyond beliefs and faiths and myths and traditions who are able to say what it really is; but these are few, very few. You must be free from every mental Construction, you must divest yourself of all that is merely local or temporal, before you can know what you have seen.
Spiritual experience means the contact with the Divine in oneself (or without, which comes to the same thing in that domain). And it is an experience identical everywhere in all countries, among all peoples and even in all ages. If you meet the Divine, you meet it always and everywhere in the same way. Difference comes in because between the experience and its formulation there is almost an abyss. Directly you have spiritual experience, which takes place always in the inner consciousness, it is translated into your external consciousness and defined there in one way or another according to your education, your faith, your mental predisposition. There is only one truth, one reality; but the forms through which it may be expressed are many.
1929-05-05 - Intellect, true and wrong movement - Attacks from adverse forces - Faith, integral and absolute - Death, not a necessity - Descent of Divine Consciousness - Inner progress - Memory of former lives, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In all, in some part of our consciousness, there is a remembrance. But this is a dangerous subject, because the human mind is too fond of romance. As soon as it comes to know something of this truth of rebirth, it wants to build up beautiful stories around it. Many people would tell you wonderful tales of how the world was built and how it will proceed in the future, how and where you were born in the past and what you will be hereafter, the lives you have lived and the lives you will still live. All this has nothing to do with spiritual life. The true remembrance of past births may indeed be part of an integral knowledge; but it cannot be got by that way of imaginative fancies. If it is on one side an objective knowledge, on the other it depends largely on personal and subjective experience, and here there is much chance of invention, distortion or false building. To reach the truth of these things, your experiencing consciousness must be pure and limpid, free from any mental interference or any vital interference, liberated from your personal notions and feelings and from your minds habit of interpreting or explaining in its own way. An experience of past lives may be true, but between what you have seen and your minds explanation or Construction about it there is bound to be always a great gulf. It is only when you can rise above human feelings and get back from your mind, that you can reach the truth.
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1929-05-19 - Mind and its workings, thought-forms - Adverse conditions and Yoga - Mental constructions - Illness and Yoga, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1929-05-19 - Mind and its workings, thought-forms - Adverse conditions and Yoga - Mental Constructions - Illness and Yoga
class:chapter
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It is not an absolute rule; and much depends upon the person. Adverse conditions come to many as a test for the weak points in their nature. The indispensable basis for Yoga, which must be well established before you can walk freely on the path, is equanimity. Naturally, from that point of view, all disturbances are tests which you have to pass. But they are necessary too in order to break down the limits which your mental Constructions have built around you and which prevent your opening to the Light and the Truth. The whole mental world in which you live is limited, even though you may not know or feel its limitations, and something must come and break down this building in which your mind has shut itself and liberate it. For instance, you have some fixed rules, ideas or principles to which you attribute an absolute importance; most often it is an adherence to certain moral principles or precepts, such as the commandment Honour thy father and mother or Thou shalt not kill and the rest. Each man has some fad or one preferred shibboleth or another, each thinks that he is free from this or that prejudice from which others suffer and is willing to regard such notions as quite false; but he imagines that his is not like theirs, it is for him the truth, the real truth. An attachment to a rule of the mind is an indication of a blindness still hiding somewhere. Take, for example, the very universal superstition, prevalent all over the world, that asceticism and spirituality are one and the same thing. If you describe someone as a spiritual man or a spiritual woman, people at once think of one who does not eat or sits all day without moving, one who lives in a hut in great poverty, one who has given away all he had and keeps nothing for himself. This is the picture that immediately arises in the minds of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, when you speak of a spiritual man; the one proof of spirituality for them is poverty and abstinence from everything that is pleasant or comfortable. This is a mental Construction which must be thrown down if you are to be free to see and follow the spiritual truth. For you come to the spiritual life with a sincere aspiration and you want to meet the Divine and realise the Divine in your consciousness and in your life; and then what happens is that you arrive in a place which is not at all a hut and meet a Divine One who is living a comfortable life, eating freely, surrounded by beautiful or luxurious things, not distributing what he has to the poor, but accepting and enjoying all that people give him. At once with your fixed mental rule you are bewildered and cry, Why, what is this? I thought I was to meet a spiritual man! This false conception has to be broken down and disappear. Once it is gone, you find something that is much higher than your narrow ascetic rule, a complete openness that leaves the being free. If you are to get something, you accept it, and if you are to give up the very same thing, you with an equal willingness leave it. Things come and you take them up; things go and you let them pass, with the same smile of equanimity in the taking or the leaving.
Or, again, you have adopted as your golden rule, Thou shalt not kill, and have a horror for cruelty and slaughter. Do not be surprised if you are immediately put in the presence of killing, not only once but repeatedly, until you understand that your ideal is no more than a mental principle and that a seeker of the spiritual truth should not be bound and attached to a mental rule. And when once you are free from it, you will find perhaps that all these scenes which troubled youand were indeed sent in order to trouble you and shake you out of your mental buildinghave, singularly enough, ceased altogether to happen in your presence.
1929-06-23 - Knowledge of the Yogi - Knowledge and the Supermind - Methods of changing the condition of the body - Meditation, aspiration, sincerity, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Although it may be true in a general way and in a certain sense that a Yogi can know all things and can answer all questions from his own field of vision and consciousness, yet it does not follow that there are no questions whatever of any kind to which he would not or could not answer. A Yogi who has the direct knowledge, the knowledge of the true truth of things, would not care or perhaps would find it difficult to answer questions that belong entirely to the domain of human mental Constructions. It may be, he could not or would not wish to solve problems and difficulties you might put to him which touch only the illusion of things and their appearances. The working of his knowledge is not in the mind. If you put him some silly mental query of that character, he probably would not answer. The very common conception that you can put any ignorant question to him as to some super-schoolmaster or demand from him any kind of information past, present or future and that he is bound to answer, is a foolish idea. It is as inept as the expectation from the spiritual man of feats and miracles that would satisfy the vulgar external mind and leave it gaping with wonder.
Moreover, the term Yogi is very vague and wide. There are many types of Yogis, many lines or ranges of spiritual or occult endeavour and different heights of achievement, there are some whose powers do not extend beyond the mental level; there are others who have gone beyond it. Everything depends on the field or nature of their effort, the height to which they have arrived, the consciousness with which they have contact or into which they enter.
1929-08-04 - Surrender and sacrifice - Personality and surrender - Desire and passion - Spirituality and morality, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you have understood this, you will be ready to understand the difference, the great difference between spirituality and morality, two things that are constantly confused with each other. The spiritual life, the life of Yoga, has for its object to grow into the divine consciousness and for its result to purify, intensify, glorify and perfect what is in you. It makes you a power for manifesting of the Divine; it raises the character of each personality to its full value and brings it to its maximum expression; for this is part of the Divine plan. Morality proceeds by a mental Construction and, with a few ideas of what is good and what is not, sets up an ideal type into which all must force themselves. This moral ideal differs in its constituents and its ensemble at different times and different places. And yet it proclaims itself as a unique type, a categoric absolute; it admits of none other outside itself; it does not even admit a variation within itself. All are to be moulded according to its single ideal pattern, everybody is to be made uniformly and faultlessly the same. It is because morality is of this rigid unreal nature that it is in its principle and its working the contrary of the spiritual life. The spiritual life reveals the one essence in all, but reveals too its infinite diversity; it works for diversity in oneness and for perfection in that diversity. Morality lifts up one artificial standard contrary to the variety of life and the freedom of the spirit. Creating something mental, fixed and limited, it asks all to conform to it. All must labour to acquire the same qualities and the same ideal nature. Morality is not divine or of the Divine; it is of man and human. Morality takes for its basic element a fixed division into the good and the bad; but this is an arbitrary notion. It takes things that are relative and tries to impose them as absolutes; for this good and this bad differ in differing climates and times, epochs and countries. The moral notion goes so far as to say that there are good desires and bad desires and calls on you to accept the one and reject the other. But the spiritual life demands that you should reject desire altogether. Its law is that you must cast aside all movements that draw you away from the Divine. You must reject them, not because they are bad in themselves,for they may be good for another man or in another sphere,but because they belong to the impulses or forces that, being unillumined and ignorant, stand in the way of your approach to the Divine. All desires, whether good or bad, come within this description; for desire itself arises from an unillumined vital being and its ignorance. On the other hand you must accept all movements that bring you into contact with the Divine. But you accept them, not because they are good in themselves, but because they bring you to the Divine. Accept then all that takes you to the Divine. Reject all that takes you away from it, but do not say that this is good and that is bad or try to impose your outlook on others; for, what you term bad may be the very thing that is good for your neighbour who is not trying to realise the Divine Life.
Let us take an illustration of the difference between the moral and the spiritual view of things. The ordinary social notions distinguish between two classes of men,the generous, the avaricious. The avaricious man is despised and blamed, while the generous man is considered unselfish and useful to society and praised for his virtue. But to the spiritual vision, they both stand on the same level; the generosity of the one, the avarice of the other are deformations of a higher truth, a greater divine power. There is a power, a divine movement that spreads, diffuses, throws out freely forces and things and whatever else it possesses on all the levels of nature from the most material to the most spiritual plane. Behind the generous man and his generosity is a soul-type that expresses this movement; he is a power for diffusion, for wide distribution. There is another power, another divine movement that collects and amasses; it gathers and accumulates forces and things and all possible possessions, whether of the lower or of the higher planes. The man you tax with avarice was meant to be an instrument of this movement. Both are important, both needed in the entire plan; the movement that stores up and concentrates is no less needed than the movement that spreads and diffuses. Both, if truly surrendered to the Divine, will be utilised as instruments for its divine work to the same degree and with an equal value. But when they are not surrendered both are alike moved by impulses of ignorance. One is pushed to throw away, the other is pulled towards keeping back; but both are driven by forces obscure to their own consciousness, and between the two there is little to choose. One could say to the much-praised generous man, from the higher point of vision of Yoga, All your impulses of generosity are nothing in the values of the spirit, for they come from ego and ignorant desire. And, on the other hand, among those who are accused of avarice, you can see sometimes a man amassing and hoarding, full of a quiet and concentrated determination in the work assigned to him by his nature, who, once awakened, would make a very good instrument of the Divine. But ordinarily the avaricious man acts from ego and desire like his opposite; it is the other end of the same ignorance. Both will have to purify themselves and change before they can make contact with the something higher that is behind them and express it in the way to which they are called by their nature.
1951-03-10 - Fairy Tales- serpent guarding treasure - Vital beings- their incarnations - The vital being after death - Nightmares- vital and mental - Mind and vital after death - The spirit of the form- Egyptian mummies, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are people who spend their life organising their mind. I have known some who had made of their mind a kind of fortress, a huge Construction (I am speaking of people who had uncommon mental capacities). They had made of their mind quite a big edifice, very powerful and of such a fixity, with such solid walls that they had lost all contact with the outer mental world: they lived completely within their own Construction and all the phenomena of their consciousness were of their own making they had no longer any contact with the outside mental world. They retained contact with their own vital and their body, in a way, but all the phenomena of their consciousness were lodged within their mental Construction they could no longer get out of it. Well, this happens very strongly to people who seek for a spiritual life through the classical methods of a renunciation of the material consciousness, a concentration on their inner being and identification with it. If I gave you the names of some, you would be quite astonished. They construct for themselves a conception in which one finds all the gradations of the mind, a Construction so solid and so fixed that they become imprisoned within it and when they believe they have reached the supreme Truth, they have only reached the centre of their own mental Construction.
And they have all the experiences they used to foresee: the experience of liberation, the experience of going out of the body, the experience of identification with the Supreme, all, all, but all of their own making; this has no contact with the universal reality. Then if someone touches it, if for some reason or other someone has the power to touch it or simply to make a breach in one of the walls, at first they are completely upset, then they come to regard the force that could do this as a force of terrible destruction, a manifestation of a hostile force of the worst kind!
1951-03-12 - Mental forms - learning difficult subjects - Mental fortress - thought - Training the mind - Helping the vital being after death - ceremonies - Human stupidities, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What is it that makes the mental Construction?
It is the mental ego which makes the Construction and it clings to it desperately.
Are the I and the ego the same thing?
1951-03-29 - The Great Vehicle and The Little Vehicle - Choosing ones family, country - The vital being distorted - atavism - Sincerity - changing ones character, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Are all religions mental Constructions?
All religions were perhaps not that in their beginning, but they have certainly become that with time.
1951-04-07 - Origin of Evil - Misery- its cause, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When one makes a Construction, one doesnt begin by saying, I dont want this, I dont want that, else you will never make your Construction. You must say what it ought to be, not what it ought not to be. To begin with, what it ought not to be we know already: that is what it is! We dont need to go very farsuch as it is, we dont want it. So, what should it be?
A garden where one plays an eternal game with the Divine.
1951-04-12 - Japan, its art, landscapes, life, etc - Fairy-lore of Japan - Culture- its spiral movement - Indian and European- the spiritual life - Art and Truth, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now, I ought to say, to complete my picture, that the four years I was there I found a dearth of spirituality as entire as could be. These people have a wonderful morality, live according to quite strict moral rules, they have a mental Construction even in the least detail of life: one must eat in a certain way and not another, one must bow in a certain way and not another, one must say certain words but not all; when addressing certain people one must express oneself in a certain way; when speaking with others, one must express oneself in another. If you go to buy something in a shop, you must say a particular sentence; if you dont say it, you are not served: they look at you quizzically and do not move! But if you say the word, they wait upon you with full attention and bring, if necessary, a cushion for you to sit upon and a cup of tea to drink. And everything is like that. However, not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain. And what energy they have! Their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. If one does not submit oneself to rules there, one may live as Europeans do, who are considered barbarians and looked upon altogether as intruders, but if you want to live a Japanese life among the Japanese you must do as they do, otherwise you make them so unhappy that you cant even have any relation with them. In their house you must live in a particular way, when you meet them you must greet them in a particular way. I think I have already told you the story of that Japanese who was an intimate friend of ours, and whom I helped to come into contact with his soul and who ran away. He was in the countryside with us and I had put him in touch with his psychic being; he had the experience, a revelation, the contact, the dazzling inner contact. And the next morning, he was no longer there, he had taken flight! Later, when I saw him again in town after the holidays, I asked him, But what happened to you, why did you go away?Oh! You understand, I discovered my soul and saw that my soul was more powerful than my faith in the country and the Mikado; I would have had to obey my soul and I would no longer have been a faithful subject of my emperor. I had to go away. There you are! All this is au thentically true.
Why are great artists born at the same time in the same country?
1951-05-05 - Needs and desires - Discernment - sincerity and true perception - Mantra and its effects - Object in action- to serve - relying only on the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One does not have the discernment because one does not care to have it! Listen, I dont think there is a single instance in which one does not find within oneself something very clear, but you must sincerely want to knowwe always come back to the same thingyou must sincerely want it. The first condition is not to begin thinking about the subject and building all sorts of ideas: opposing ideas, possibilities, and entering into a formidable mental activity. First of all, you must put the problem as though you were putting it to someone else, then keep silent, remain like that, immobile. And then, after a little while you will see that at least three different things may happen, sometimes more. Take the case of an intellectual, one who acts in accordance with the indications of his head. He has put the problem and he waits. Well, if he is indeed attentive, he will notice that there is (the chronological order is not absolute, it may come in a different order) at first (what is most prominent in an intellectual) a certain idea: If I do that in this way, it will be all right; it must be like that, that is to say, a mental Construction. A second thing which is a kind of impulse: That will have to be done. That is good, it must be done. Then a third which does not make any noise at all, does not try to impose itself on the others, but has the tranquillity of a certitudenot very active, not giving a shock, not pushing to action, but something that knows and is very quiet, very still. This will not contradict the others, will not come and say, No, thats wrong; it says simply, See, it is like this, thats all, and then it does not insist. The majority of men are not silent enough or attentive enough to be aware of it, for it makes no noise. But I assure you it is there in everybody and if one is truly sincere and succeeds in being truly quiet, one will become aware of it. The thinking part begins to argue, But after all, this thing will have this consequence and that thing will have that consequence, and if one does this and this, and that and its noise begins again. The other (the vital) will say, Yes, it must be done like that, it must be done, you dont understand, it must, it is indispensable. There! Then you will know. And according to your nature you will choose either the vital impulse or the mental leading, but very seldom do you say quite calmly, Good, it is this I am going to do, whatever happens, and even if you dont like it very much. But it is always there. I am sure that it is there even in the murderer before he kills, you understand, but his outer being makes such a lot of noise that it never even occurs to him to listen. But it is always there, always there. In every circumstance, there is in the depth of every being, just this little (one cant call it voice, for it makes no sound) this little indication of the divine Grace, and sometimes to obey it requires a tremendous effort, for all the rest of the being opposes it violently, one part with the conviction that what it thinks is true, another with all the power, the strength of its desire. But dont tell me that one cant know, for that is not true. One can know. But one does not always know what is necessary, and sometimes, if one knows what is to be done, well, one finds some excuse or other for not doing it. One tells oneself, Oh! I am not so sure, after all, of this inner indication; it does not assert itself with sufficient force for me to trust it. But if you were quite indifferent, that is, if you had no desire, either mental or vital or physical desire, you would know with certainty that it is that which must be done and nothing else. What comes and gets in the way is preferencepreferences and desires. Every day one may have hundreds and hundreds of examples. When people begin to say, Truly I dont know what to do, it always means that they have a preference. But as here in the Ashram they know there is something else and as at times they have been a little attentive, they have a vague sensation that it is not quite that: It is not quite that, I dont feel quite at ease. Besides, you were saying a while ago that it is the result which gives you the indication; it has even been said (it has been written in books) that one judges the divine Will by the results! All that succeeds has been willed by the Divine; all that doesnt, well, He has not willed it! This is yet again one of those stupidities big as a mountain. It is a mental simplification of the problem, which is quite comic. Thats not it. If one can have an indication (in proportion to ones sincerity), it is uneasiness, a little uneasinessnot a great uneasiness, just a little uneasiness.
Here, you know, you have another means, quite simple (I dont know why you do not use it, because it is quite elementary); you imagine I am in front of you and then ask yourself, Would I do this before Mother, without difficulty, without any effort, without something holding me back? That will never deceive you. If you are sincere you will know immediately. That would stop many people on the verge of folly.
1953-06-03, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not absolute. These are still mental Constructions, more or less sincere, which cut things into small bits like that, quite neatly cut, and tell you: Do this or do that. If it is not this, it will be that. Oh! what a nuisance is this kind of life. And so people go mad, they are frightened! Is it like that or rather this? And they want it to be neither this nor that, what should they do?They have only to climb to a higher storey. They must be given the key to open the door. There is a door to the staircase, a key is needed. The key, as I told you just now, is the sufficiently sincere aspiration or the sufficiently intense prayer. I said or, but I do not think it is or. There are people who like one better and others, the other. But in both there is a magical power, you must know how to make use of it.
There is something very beautiful in both, I shall speak to you about it one day, I shall tell you what there is in aspiration and what in prayer and why both of them are beautiful. Some dislike prayer; if they entered deep into their heart, they would find it was prideworse than that, vanity. And then there are those who have no aspiration, they try and they cannot aspire; it is because they do not have the flame of the will, it is because they do not have the flame of humility.
1953-07-15, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is not an absolute rule; and much depends upon the person. Adverse conditions come to many as a test for the weak points in their nature. The indispensable basis for Yoga, which must be well established before you can walk freely on the path, is equanimity. Naturally, from that point of view, all disturbances are tests which you have to pass. But they are necessary too in order to break down the limits which your mental Constructions have built around you and which prevent your opening to the Light and the Truth.
Questions and Answers 1929-1931 (19 May 1929)
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"Take, for example, the universal superstition, prevalent all over the world, that asceticism and spirituality are one and the same thing. If you describe someone as a spiritual man or a spiritual woman, people at once think of one who does not eat or sits all day without moving, one who lives in a hut in great poverty, one who has given away all he had and keeps nothing for himself. This is the picture that immediately arises in the minds of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, when you speak of a spiritual man; the one proof of spirituality for them is poverty and abstinence from everything that is pleasant or comfortable. This is a mental Construction which must be thrown down if you are to be free to see and follow the spiritual truth.... Once it is gone, you find something that is much higher than your narrow ascetic rule, a complete openness that leaves the being free. If you are to get something, you accept it, and if you are to give up the very same thing, you with an equal willingness leave it. Things come and you take them up; things go and you let them pass, with the same smile of equanimity in the taking or the leaving."
Questions and Answers 1929-1931 (19 May 1929)
1953-09-30, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"Although it may be true in a general way and in a certain sense that a Yogi can know all things and can answer all questions from his own field of vision and consciousness, yet it does not follow that there are no questions whatever of any kind to which he would not or could not answer. A Yogi who has the direct knowledge, the knowledge of the true truth of things, would not care or perhaps would find it difficult to answer questions that belong entirely to the domain of human mental Constructions. It may be, he could or would not wish to solve problems and difficulties you might put to him which touch only the illusions of things and their appearances. The working of his knowledge is not in the mind; if you put him some silly mental query of that character, he probably would not answer. The very common conception that you can put any ignorant question to him as to some superschoolmaster or demand from him any kind of information past, present or future and that he is bound to answer, is a foolish idea. It is as inept as the expectation from the spiritual man of feats and miracles that would satisfy the vulgar external mind and leave it gaping with wonder."
Questions and Answers 1929-1931 (23 June 1929)
1954-02-10 - Study a variety of subjects - Memory -Memory of past lives - Getting rid of unpleasant thoughts, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah! I suppose there are several reasons. First, because one makes use of the memory to remember. Memory is a mental instrument and depends on the formation of the brain. Your brain is constantly growing, unless it begins to degenerate, but still its growth can continue for a very, very long time, much longer than that of the body. And in this growth, necessarily some things will take the place of others. And as the mental instrument develops, things which have served their term or the transitory moment in the development may be wiped out to give place to the result. So the result of all that you knew is there, living in itself, but the road traversed to reach it may be completely blurred. That is, a good functioning of the memory means remembering only the results so as to be able to have the elements for moving forward and a new Construction. That is more important than just retaining things rigidly in the mind.
Now, there is another aspect also. Outside the mental memory, which is something defective, there are states of consciousness. Each state of consciousness in which one happen to be registers the phenomena of that moment, whatever they may be. If your consciousness remain limpid, wide and strong, you can at any moment whatsoever, by concentrating, call into the active consciousness what you did, thought, saw, observed at any time before; all this you can remember by bringing up in yourself the same state of consciousness. And that, that is never for gotten. You could live a thousand years and you would remember it. Consequently, if you dont want to forget, it must be your consciousness which remembers and not your mental memory. Your mental memory will perforce be wiped out, get blurred, and new things will take the place of the old ones. But things of which you are conscious you do not forget. You have only to bring up the same state of consciousness again. And thus one can remember circumstances one has lived thousands of years ago, if one knows how to bring up the same state of consciousness. It is in this way that one can remember ones past lives. This never gets blotted out, while you dont have any more the memory of what you have done physically when you were very young. You would be told many things you no longer remember. That gets wiped off immediately. For the brain is constantly changing and certain weaker cells are replaced by others, which are much stronger, and by other combinations, other cerebral organisations. And so, what was there before is effaced or deformed.
1954-02-17 - Experience expressed in different ways - Origin of the psychic being - Progress in sports -Everything is not for the best, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It all depends on what meaning you put into the word God. It is a word (I have told you this at least four or five times) to express something you do not know but are trying to attain. Well, if you have received a religious education, you are accustomed to call this God. If you have received a more positivist and also a more philosophical education, you are accustomed to call this by all sorts of names, and you may at the same time have the idea that it is the supreme truth. If one wants to speak of God and describe him, one is obliged to make use of things which are the most inaccessible to our consciousness, and to call God what is beyond anything we know and can grasp and beall that is too far for us to be able to understand, we call God. Only some religions (there are some) give a precise form to the godhead; and sometimes they give several forms and they have several gods; sometimes they give one form and have only one God; but all this is human fabrication. There is something, there is a reality which is beyond all our expressions, but which we can succeed in contacting by practising a discipline. We can identify ourselves with it. Once one is identified with it one knows what it is, but one cannot express it, for words cannot say it. So, if you use one kind of vocabulary, if you have a particular mental conviction, you will use the vocabulary corresponding to that conviction. If you belong to another group which has another way of speaking, you will call it or even think about it in that way. I am telling you this to give you the true impression, that there is something there which cannot be graspedgrasped by thought but which exists. But the name you give it matters little, thats of no importance, it exists. And so the only thing to do is to enter into contact with itnot to give it a name or describe it. In fact, there is hardly any use giving it a name or describing it. One must try to enter into contact, to concentrate upon it, live it, live that reality, and whatever the name you give it is not at all important once you have the experience. The experience alone counts. And when people associate the experience with a particular expression and in so narrow a way, so closed up in itself that apart from this formula one can find nothing that is an inferiority. One must be able to live that reality through all possible paths, all occasions, all formations; one must live it, for that indeed is true, for that is supremely good, that is all-powerful, that knows all, that Yes, one can live that, but one cannot speak about it. And if one does speak, all that one says about it has no great importance. It is only one way of speaking that is all. There is an entire line of philosophers and people who have replaced the notion of God by the notion of an impersonal Absolute or by a notion of Truth or a notion of justice or even by a notion of progressof something eternally progressive; but for one who has within him the capacity of identifying himself with that, what has been said about it hasnt much importance. Sometimes one may read a whole book of philosophy and not progress a step farther. Sometimes one may be quite a fervent devotee of a religion and not progress. There are people who have spent entire lifetimes seated in contemplation and attained nothing. There are people (we have well-known examples) who used to do the most modest of manual works, like a cobbler mending old shoes, and who had an experience. It is altogether beyond what one thinks and says of it. It is some gift thats there, that is all. And all that is needed is to be thatto succeed in identifying oneself with it and live it. At times you read one sentence in a book and that leads you there. Sometimes you read entire books of philosophy or religion and they get you nowhere. There are people, however, whom the reading of philosophy books helps to go ahead. But all these things are secondary. There is only one thing thats important: that is a sincere and persistent will, for these things dont happen in a twinkling. So one must persevere. When someone feels that he is not advancing, he must not get discouraged; he must try to find out what it is in the nature that is opposing, and then make the necessary progress. And suddenly one goes forward. And when you reach the end you have an experience. And what is remarkable is that people who have followed altogether different paths, with altogether different mental Constructions, from the greatest believer to the most unbelieving, even materialists, have arrived at that experience, it is the same for everyone. Because it is truebecause it is real, because it is the sole reality. And it is quite simply that. I do not say anything more. This is of no importance, the way one speaks about it, what is important is to follow the path, your path, no matter whichyes, to go there.
I did not understand the explanation of the psychic you have given: One could say, for example, that the creation of an individual being is the result of the projection, in time and space, of one of the countless possibilities latent in the supreme origin of all manifestation which, through the medium of the one and universal consciousness, takes concrete form in the law or the truth of an individual and so, by a progressive development, becomes his soul or psychic being.
1954-05-19 - Affection and love - Psychic vision Divine - Love and receptivity - Get out of the ego, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One does not exist? This I dont know if one can succeed in anything by trying mentally, because this is a kind of mental effort. So one makes mental Constructions and does not achieve anything very much. No, what is necessary is something spontaneous, intense, a flame burning in the being, a flame of aspiration, something I dont know how to put it.
If the thing goes on in the head, nothing, nothing happens.
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I believe there is a vast difference between an effort for transformations which, precisely, comes from the psychic centre of the being and a kind of mental Constructions to obtain something.
I dont know, it is very difficult to make oneself understood, but so long as the thing goes on in the head in this way (Mother turns a finger near her forehead), it has no power. It has a very little force that is extremely limited. And all the time it belies itself. One thinks that with great difficulty one collects a will, artificial enough, besides, and one tries to catch something, and the very next minute it has all vanished. And one doesnt even realise it; one asks oneself, How does it happen to turn out like that?
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In the body there are invaluable and unknown treasures. In all its cells, there is an intensity of life, of aspiration, of the will to progress, which one does not usually even realise. The body-consciousness would have to be completely warped by the action of the mind and vital for it not to have an immediate will to re-establish the equilibrium. When this will is not there, it means that the entire body-consciousness has been spoilt by the intervention of the mind and vital. In people who cherish their malady more or less subconsciously with a sort of morbidity under the pretext that it makes them interesting, it is not their body at allpoor body!it is something they have imposed upon it with a mental or vital perversion. The body, if left to itself, is remarkable, for, not only does it aspire for equilibrium and well-being but it is capable of restoring the balance. If one leaves ones body alone without intervening with all those thoughts, all the vital reactions, all the depressions, and also all the so-called knowledge and mental Constructions and fearsif one leaves the body to itself, spontaneously it will do what is necessary to set itself right again.
The body in its natural state likes equilibrium, likes harmony; it is the other parts of the being which spoil everything.
1954-07-28 - Money - Ego and individuality - The shadow, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One needs years of very attentive, very careful, very reasonable, very coherent work, organisation, selection, Constructions, in order to succeed simply in forming, oh, simply this little thing, ones own way of thinking!
One believes he has his own way of thinking. Not at all. It depends totally upon the people one speaks with or the books he has read or on the mood he is in. It depends also on whether you have a good or bad digestion, it depends on whether you are shut up in a room without proper ventilation or whether you are in the open air; it depends on whether you have a beautiful landscape before you; it depends on whether there is sunshine or drain! You are not aware of it, but you think all kinds of things, completely different according to a heap of things which have nothing to do with you!
And for this to become a coordinated, coherent, logical thought, a long thorough work is necessary. And then, the best of the business is that when you have succeeded in making a beautiful, well-formed, very strong, very powerful mental Constructions, the first thing you will be told is, You must break this so that you can unite with the Divine! But so long as you havent made it, you cannot unite with the Divine because you have nothing to give to the Divine except a mass of things which are not yourself! One must first exist in order to be able to give oneself. I am repeating what I said a while ago.
Truly, in the present state of the world, the only thing one can give the Divine is ones body. But thats what one doesnt give Him. Yes, one can try to consecrate ones work! But still, here there are so many elements which are not true!
1954-08-18 - Mahalakshmi - Maheshwari - Mahasaraswati - Determinism and freedom - Suffering and knowledge - Aspects of the Mother, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The universe is a mass of elements which form a certain compound, and in accordance with this compound all things are organisedas in an internal organisation, you see (Mother makes a movement as of holding a globe between her hands), quite strictly. But this is not a culmination; it is something in the course of Construction. And at any moment at all, through a certain kind of action, one or several new elements may be introduced into the whole, and immediately necessarily, all the internal combination change. Well, the universe is something like that.
I am speaking of the material universe. The material universe is a concretisation of a certain aspect, a certain emanation of the Supreme. But this concretisation is progressive and not necessarily constant, not necessarily regular, but answering to a much more subtle law of freedom.
1954-09-15 - Parts of the being - Thoughts and impulses - The subconscient - Precise vocabulary - The Grace and difficulties, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All educated people do it. Only the barbarian doesnt do it. This is the very substance of education, you know, for it is understood that if one lives in societyindeed even if one lives quite alone, but still much more so if one lives in societyone cannot do all that his impulses drive him to do. It is altogether impossible, you know. From the time you are quite young, the work of your educators is to teach you to control your impulses and obey only those which are in conformity with the laws under which you live or with the ideal you wish to follow or the customs of the environment in which you are. The value of this mental Construction which will govern your impulses depends a great deal on the surroundings in which you live and the character of the parents or people who educate you. But whether it be good or bad, mediocre or excellent, it is always the result of a mental control over the impulses. When your parents tell you, You should not do this, or when they say, You have to do that, this is a beginning of education for the minds control over the impulses.
So the man of real merit or the more civilised man has a whole mental Construction to which he must conform in order to be in harmony with the ideal of the environment in which he lives. But someone who does not conform at least to the smallest part of this Construction would be considered a savage and would be thrown out of the society immediately. In fact, people who are criminals or half-mad are those who obey their impulses without any mental control. There isnt a single person among you who gives way without control to all the impulses that get hold of him. You have only to observe yourselves living, you spend your time saying, No, this I cant do, or This I can, or in restraining one movement or encouraging another. This is mental control.
I think it is only the savage who doesnt have it, one who lives in a jungle, you know, who is not in contact with anybody. And yet, even he should control himself, for something will go terribly wrong with him if he doesnt control himself. In his case too the mind must act to prevent him from doing things which will cause him serious trouble. This is the nature of the human being: to have a kind of mental activity in him which governs the rest of his being, more or less. And his level of civilisation depends exactly on the point this control has reached, and naturally, as I said, on the value of the controlling mental Construction.
Sweet Mother, is the physical mind the same as the mechanical mind?
1954-10-06 - What happens is for the best - Blaming oneself -Experiences - The vital desire-soul -Creating a spiritual atmosphere -Thought and Truth, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, it depends on many things Some people have experiences quite spontaneously and it is understood that this depends on their former lives or the way in which they were formed, the forces which presided over the Constructions of their present physical being, and the influence they came under even before their birth. These people have experiences spontaneously. There are not many of these, but there are some. There are others for whom it is the result of a very sustained effort. They aspire to have experiences and impose a discipline upon themselves or adopt a discipline so as to be able to have them. Sometimes it takes very long to obtain something. It depends altogether upon the way one is built. I knew people who were ignorant, yes, and who had quite remarkable experiences of clairvoyance, of inner perception. They understood nothing of what was happening to them or of what they saw. But they had the gift.
But then this has no effect on their outer life, has it?
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But when one wants to have a pure, correct information, to be in contact with the truth of things, and see in advancenot according to ones petty mental Constructions, but how things are decreed, in the place where they are decreed and the time when they are decreed then that requires a very great mental purity, a very great vital equilibrium, an absence of desire, of preference. One must never want anything to be of one kind or another, for this falsifies your vision immediately.
All who have visions usually deform them, all, almost without exception. I dont think there is one in a million who doesnt deform his vision, because the minute it touches the brain it touches the domain of preferences, desires, attachments, and this indeed is enough to give a colouring, a special look to what you have seen. Even if you have seen correctly, you translate it wrongly in your consciousness. This truly asks for a great perfection. But you can have perfection without the gift of vision. And the perfection can be as great without the gift as with it. If it interests you specially, you can make an effort to obtain it. But only if it interests you specially. If you lay great store by knowing certain things, you can undertake a discipline; you may undertake a discipline also in order to change the functioning of your sees. I think I have already explained to you how one can hear at a distance, see at a distance, even physically; but this means considerable effort, which perhaps is not always in proportion to the result, because these are side issues, not the central, the most important thing. These are side issues which may be interesting, but in itself this is not the spiritual life; one may have a spiritual life without this. Now, the two together can give you perhaps a greater capacity. But for this too you must tell yourself, If I ought to have itif I take the true attitude of surrender to the Divine and of complete consecrationif I ought to have it I shall have it. As, if I ought to have the gift of speech, I shall have it. And in fact, if one is truly surrendered, in the true way and totally, at every minute one is what he ought to be and does what he ought to do and knows what he ought to know. This but naturally, for this one should have overcome the petty limitations of the ego, and this does not happen overnight. But it can happen.
1954-11-10 - Inner experience, the basis of action - Keeping open to the Force - Faith through aspiration - The Mothers symbol - The mind and vital seize experience - Degrees of sincerity -Becoming conscious of the Divine Force, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The mind and vital have a very bad habit: when one has succeeded through aspiration in having an experience, being in contact with the divine force, immediately they rush forward to make it their own property, you see, like that (gesture), as a cat jumps on a mouse. And then they catch it and say, It is for me. And then the mind turns it into all kinds of speculations and affirmations and Constructions and takes great pride in it, and the vital uses the power to fulfil its own desires.
So, in order to avoid this it is said that they must be clear, quiet, peaceful, and must not rush at the force which is trying to manifest and make of it a tool for their personal use. For the mind to be clear it must be silentat least to a certain extent, and for the vital to be clear it must give up its desires, have no desires and impulses and passions. This indeed is the essential condition. Later, if one goes into details, neither of them should have any preferences, attachments, any particular way of being or particular set of ideas.
1955-05-18 - The Problem of Woman - Men and women - The Supreme Mother, the new creation - Gods and goddesses - A story of Creation, earth - Psychic being only on earth, beings everywhere - Going to other worlds by occult means, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are beings of the mental world which are also sexless, not all, but many. There are many of them. There are some of these mental formations which are persistent, you see, which are very well made, very well harmonised, persistent, some kind of mental Constructions, mental formations which are living beings, but which pass indifferently from a masculine to a feminine body when they incarnate. It is all the same to them, to them it makes no difference.
Thats all, or you still have something?
1955-05-25 - Religion and reason - true role and field - an obstacle to or minister of the Spirit - developing and meaning - Learning how to live, the elite - Reason controls and organises life - Nature is infrarational, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Each time, for example, that one has some kind of vital disorder, of the passions, desires, impulses and all these things, if one calls the reason and looks at these things from the point of view of reason, one can put them back into order. It is truly the role of reason to organise and regulate all the movements of the vital and the mind. For instance, you can call the reason in order to see whether two ideas can go together or whether they contradict each other, whether two theories can stand side by side in your mental Construction or one demolishes the other. It belongs to the domain of reason to judge and organise all these things, and also perhaps still more it is the work of reason to see whether the impulses are reasonable or not, whether they will lead to a catastrophe or can be tolerated and will not disturb anything in the life. So, this is its full domain; thats what Sri Aurobindo says.
But in order to know the value of a religion, whether it truly has the power to put you into contact with the Divine, with the spiritual life, to lead you to it, how can the reason judge, since it is beyond its domain? It knows nothing about it. It is not its field, it understands nothing there. We must use other means. Naturally, thats how he begins, at the end he will say what means one can use; I dont know whether it is at the end of these chapters, but in any case he always gives an indication. Thats what this means; he says: Dont use reason, you cannot judge with it thats all.
1955-06-01 - The aesthetic conscience - Beauty and form - The roots of our life - The sense of beauty - Educating the aesthetic sense, taste - Mental constructions based on a revelation - Changing the world and humanity, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1955-06-01 - The aesthetic conscience - Beauty and form - The roots of our life - The sense of beauty - Educating the aesthetic sense, taste - Mental Constructions based on a revelation - Changing the world and humanity
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In fact, people who are interested in general questions, those who come out of their little daily preoccupations of being born, living and dying, living as well as possible there are people not satisfied with this, who try to have general ideas and look at world problems these people make an inner effort or a mental effort, and in one way or another enter into contact with the great currents of forces, at first currents of mental force, of the higher light and sometimes of spiritual force. Then they receive a kind of drop of that within their consciousness, and this produces in them the illumination of a revelation, and they feel that they have grasped the truth. They have a revelation and so naturally are very happy and immediately think, My happiness I am going to pass on to others; for they are very fine people, they have very good intentions. Then, to pass on their happiness to others they begin by making a Construction around their revelation; they must make it into a system; otherwise how to preach to others? So they make a system, like this gentleman. I have met hundreds like this in the world. Now, each one had had a revelation and had constructed something which seemed to him to be the solution to all problems. They wanted to apply it to everything. So they gathered people around them; according to the strength of their influence, their power, they gathered more people or less, from three or four to some hundreds; sometimes they had groups and they said, Here we are, if everyone does what we do, well, the world will be transformed. Unfortunately it was only a spark of light, and their Construction was purely mental and not free from the ordinary laws of life. And so the people in the groups who were to have preached to the world harmony, beauty, happiness, joy and peace, etc., quarrelled among themselves. This took away all power from their teaching. It is like this, and in fact it is true.
It is only when something absolutely new and absolutely superior enters the earth atmosphere and changes it by a kind of spiritual coercion, it is only at that moment that human consciousness will change sufficiently for circumstances also to change.
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The methods of Nature are like that. Before our solar system could exist, there was chaos. Well, in passing from this artistic Construction which had reached a kind of summit, before passing from this to a new creation, it seems to me still the same thing, evidently a chaos. And the impression I have when I look at these things is that they are not sincere, and thats what is annoying. It is not sincere: either it is someone who has amused himself by being as mad as possible or perhaps it is someone who wanted to deceive others or maybe deceive even himself, or again, a kind of incoherent fantasy in which one puts a blot of paint in one place and then says immediately, Why, it would be funny to put it there, and if one put it here, like this, and again if one put this like that, and again There, for the moment this is the impression it gives me, and I dont feel that it is something sincere.
But there is a sincere creative spirit behind, which is trying to manifest, which, for the moment, does not manifest, but is strong enough to destroy the past. That is, there was a time when I used to look at the pictures of Rembrandt, of Titian, of Tintoretto, the pictures of Renoir and Monet, I felt a great aesthetic joy. This aesthetic joy I dont feel any more. I have progressed because I follow the whole movement of terrestrial evolution; therefore, I have had to overpass this cycle, I have arrived at another; and this one seems to me empty of aesthetic joy. From the point of view of reason one may dispute this, speak of all the beautiful and good things which have been done, all that is a different affair. But this subtle something, precisely, which is the true aesthetic joy, is gone, I dont feel it any longer. Of course I am a hundred miles away from having it when I look at the things they are now doing. But still it is something which is behind this that has made the other disappear. So perhaps by making just a little effort towards the future we are going to be able to find the formula of the new beauty. That would be interesting. It is quite recently that this impression came to me; it is not old. I have tried with the most perfect goodwill, by abolishing all kinds of preferences, preconceived ideas, habits, past tastes, all that; all that eliminated, I look at their pictures and I dont succeed in getting any pleasure; it doesnt give me any, sometimes it gives me a disgust, but above all the impression of something thats not true, a painful impression of insincerity.
1955-06-15 - Dynamic realisation, transformation - The negative and positive side of experience - The image of the dry coconut fruit - Purusha, Prakriti, the Divine Mother - The Truth-Creation - Pralaya - We are in a transitional period, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ah, my child, you have certain faults, you know, things which prevent you from progressing. So, the negative side is to try and get rid of your defects. There are things which you have to be, to become, qualities which you must build in yourself in order to realise; so this side of Construction is the positive side.
You have a defect, for example, a tendency not to speak the truth. Now this habit of falsehood, of not seeing or not speaking the truth, you fight against it by rejecting falsehood from your consciousness and endeavouring to eliminate that habit of not speaking the truth. For the thing to be done, you must build in yourself the habit of speaking only the truth. For the thing to be done, you must build in yourself the habit of perceiving and always telling the truth. One is negative: you reject a fault. The other is positive: you build the quality. It is like that.
1955-06-22 - Awakening the Yoga-shakti - The thousand-petalled lotus- Reading, how far a help for yoga - Simple and complicated combinations in men, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental Construction and risks greatly living in his mental Construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental Construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesnt have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothinghow things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come aboutif one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within ones being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had. It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done itafterwards. Like that it is sure.
One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.
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This phenomenon is very real, concrete, it is felt with all the reality and intensity of even a physical phenomenon. But each person describes it with a form particular to himself, except as I say, when he has read and studied, and his brain is full of all that is written in books; then automatically what he has read gives a form to his experience, and this takes away from it something of the spontaneity which gives such an impression of being sincere and truthful; it becomes a mental Construction. If you have read and read much that it is like a serpent which is coiled up, well, quite naturally when you concentrate and try to awaken it, you see a serpent which is coiled, because you think about it like that. If you are told about a thousand-petalled lotus, you see a thousand-petalled lotus. But it is a mental superimposition upon the fact of the experience itself. But the feeling of something thats innumerable, thats one and innumerable at the same time, and that kind of impression of something opening, awakening, beginning to vibrate, responding to the forces and giving you an intensity of light, of understanding, of opening to higher regions, this is the substance of the experience. Yet when you begin to describe it with images which you have found in books, it is as though suddenly you were making it either superficialfossilised, so to sayor artificial or even insincere.
Always the most interesting cases for me have been those of people who had read nothing but had a very ardent aspiration and came to me saying, Something funny has happened to me, I had this extraordinary experience, what can it mean truly? And then they describe a movement, a vibration, a force, a light, whatever it might be, it depends on each one, and they describe this, that it happened like that and came like that, and then this happened and then that, and what does it all mean, all this? Then here one is on the right side. One knows that it is not an imagined experience, that it is a sincere, spontaneous one, and this always has a power of transformation much greater than the experience that was brought about by a mental knowledge.
1955-06-29 - The true vital and true physical - Time and Space - The psychics memory of former lives - The psychic organises ones life - The psychics knowledge and direction, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is as when you push your fist into a heap of iron filings or saw-dust, all the infinitesimal little elements of the iron filings or saw-dust are organised to take on the form of your fist, but they do not do this either deliberately or consciously. It is through the work of the consciousness which pushes that this kind of thing happens. There is no decision that each element is going to be exactly in this place, like that; it is the effect of the energy which has pushed the fist that organises the elements. But thats how it is. There is the psychic consciousness at work in life, organising all the circumstances of your life but not with a deliberate choice of the details; and in fact very few things are deliberate and conscious in the organisation of the physical life of human beings. Most of the time thats what happens. If you ask someone, Why have you done this?Thats how it happened. It is always like that: Thats how it happened. At least seventy-five times out of a hundred. Only, one is so used to going, moving, and doing things like that that one doesnt even notice it. But if one begins to observe himself, he sees that it is true. There are very few things which were the result of a clear and willed decision, very few, only what one considers important things, and even here there is a wide margin. The amount of inconscience thats mixed with the physical consciousness is tremendous, but because we are used to it we do not notice it. But as soon as you begin to analyse, look, study, you are terrified. How many times you are just faced with a question. You see, you do things automatically, by habit, perhaps sometimes by choice sometimes, but suddenly you find yourself facing an absolutely insignificant detail: Should I do this or should I do that? Simply this. You can take very small things like you are in the course of eating, and you ask yourself, Should I continue eating or should I stop? How many times can you take a motivated and conscious decision? And you suddenly realise, Why, I know nothing about it, and I dont know; I can do this, I can do that; I can do that and that and that. But what will choose in me? Unless you have mental Constructions. But then if you have mental Constructions ruling your life, you dont even ask yourself these questions, you live like an automaton, in a habitual routine you have made for yourself. But its not just once, it happens a thousand times daily.
For example, you are in contact with someone, you have very good feelings for this person; you find yourself in a slightly difficult circumstance and want to do the best possible. If you act spontaneously, there is no problem before you because you act like that, one thing trailing another, and without reflecting. And you consciously want to do the best On what will you base your judgment? What knowledge will allow you to decide: I must do this or I must do that, I must say this or I must say that or I must not say anythingall the countless possibilities which come before you? And on what will you base your judgment? If you look at it sincerely, you will find out that at each step you do not know.
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There is only one thing which knows in you, thats your psychic; it makes no mistake, it will immediately, instantaneously tell you, if you obey it without a word and without your ideas and arguments, it will make you do the right thing. But all the rest you are lost. And for everything: what are you going to study, what are you not going to study, what work are you going to do, what path are you going to take? But then there are all the possibilities which come in, all that you have either studied or met in life, all the suggestions you have received from all sides, which are there, like that, dancing around you. And with what will you decide? I am speaking of people who are absolutely sincere and have no preconceived ideas, prejudices, established rules which they follow in a mechanical routine, without endeavouring to know the truth at all, and for whom their mental Construction is the truth. Then it is so simple, one goes straight on his path, bumps his nose against the wall but doesnt notice it until the nose is smashed. But otherwise it is terribly difficult.
This was what Sri Aurobindo meant when he said that one lived constantly in ignorance and that unless the mind of ignorance is replaced by the mind of light one could not follow the true path, and that this was the indispensable preparation before any integral transformation could take place.
1955-07-13 - Cosmic spirit and cosmic consciousness - The wall of ignorance, unity and separation - Aspiration to understand, to know, to be - The Divine is in the essence of ones being - Realising desires through the imaginaton, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, as I said, there are two things. First, as regards desires, personal circumstances, one is not very persistent or very steady, and after some time what interested you very strongly doesnt interest you any longer. You think of something else, have another desire, and make another formation. But now the first thing one imagined is very well formed; after following its curve in space it is realised. But by then the person has started another Construction because for some reason or other the thing doesnt interest him any more, and he is face to face with the realisation of his first desire, while having already embarked upon the second, the third or the fourth. So he is absolutely annoyed: But why, I dont want this any longer, why does it come? without his being conscious that quite simply it is the result of a previous deed. If, however, instead of being desires they are aspirations for spiritual things and one continues his line with a regular progress, then one is absolutely sure to obtain one day what he has imagined. The day may be slightly far-off if there are many obstacles on the path, for example if the formation that you have made is still very alien to the state of the earth atmosphere; well, it takes some time to prepare the conditions for its advent. But if it is something which has already been realised several times on earth and does not imply too categorical a transformation, you may have it quite quickly, provided that you follow the same line persistently. And if you add to this the ardour of a faith and trust in the divine Grace and that kind of self-giving to the Grace which makes you expect everything from It, then it can become tremendous; you can see things being realised more and more, and the most surprising ones can be realised one after another. But for this there are conditions to be fulfilled.
One must have a great purity and a great intensity in ones self-giving, and that absolute trust in the supreme wisdom of the divine Grace, that It knows better than we do what is good for us, and all that. Then if one offers ones aspiration to It, truly gives it with enough intensity, the results are marvellous. But one must know how to see them, for when things are realised most people find it absolutely natural, they dont even see why and how it has happened, and they tell themselves, Yes, naturally it had to be like that. So they lose the joy of the joy of gratitude, because, in the last analysis, if one can be filled with gratitude and thanksgiving for the divine Grace, it puts the finishing touch, and at each step one comes to see that things are exactly what they had to be and the best that could be.
1956-05-16 - Needs of the body, not true in themselves - Spiritual and supramental law - Aestheticised Paganism - Morality, checks true spiritual effort - Effect of supramental descent - Half-lights and false lights, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In sum, it may be safely affirmed that no solution offered can be anything but provisional until a supramental Truth-Consciousness is reached by which the appearances of things are put in their place and their essence revealed and that in them which derives straight from the spiritual essence. In the meanwhile our only safety is to find a guiding law of spiritual experienceor else to liberate a light within that can lead us on the way until that greater direct Truth-Consciousness is reached above us or born within us. For all else in us that is only outward, all that is not a spiritual sense or seeing, the Constructions, representations or conclusions of the intellect, the suggestions or instigations of the Life-force, the positive necessities of physical things are sometimes half-lights, sometimes false lights that can at best only serve for a while or serve a little and for the rest either detain or confuse us.
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 128-29
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Sri Aurobindo is speaking of the mental Constructions, representations or conclusions of the intellect, of the suggestions and instigations of the Life-force, of the needs of the body. Now, all this, these half-lights or false lights can serve a little on the path, can help us a little, and only for a while. And all that is not this, all the rest, that is to say, all the countless thoughts and movements, sensations and feelings one has, well, all this is of no use at all. And worse than being quite useless, it detains us on the way, thats all. It confuses us. That is to say, it creates an inner confusion and must be altogether ignored.
All the countless things one thinks, experiences, feels, sees, does all that is of no use at all. Naturally, if one looks at it from the point of view of yoga.
1956-07-25 - A complete act of divine love - How to listen - Sports programme same for boys and girls - How to profit by stay at Ashram - To Women about Their Body, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And when they put this argument in my way, they couldnt tell me anything that appears more utterly stupid to me. It is done everywhere? That is just the reason for not doing it; for if we do what others do, it is not worth the trouble doing anything at all. We want precisely to introduce into the world something which is not there; but if we keep all the habits of the world, all the preferences of the world, all the Constructions of the world, I dont see how we can get out of the rut and do something new.
My children, I have told you, repeated it in every tone, in every way: if you really want to profit by your stay here, try to look at things and understand them with a new vision and a new understanding based on something higher, something deeper, vaster, something more true, something which is not yet but will be one day. And it is because we want to build this future that we have taken this special stand.
1956-08-29 - To live spontaneously - Mental formations Absolute sincerity - Balance is indispensable, the middle path - When in difficulty, widen the consciousness - Easiest way of forgetting oneself, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am going to give you two examples to make you understand what true spontaneity is. Oneyou all know about it undoubtedlyis of the time Sri Aurobindo began writing the Arya,1 in 1914. It was neither a mental knowledge nor even a mental creation which he transcribed: he silenced his mind and sat at the typewriter, and from above, from the higher planes, all that had to be written came down, all ready, and he had only to move his fingers on the typewriter and it was transcribed. It was in this state of mental silence which allows the knowledge and even the expressionfrom above to pass through that he wrote the whole Arya, with its sixty-four printed pages a month. This is why, besides, he could do it, for if it had been a mental work of Construction it would have been quite impossible.
That is true mental spontaneity.
1956-10-17 - Delight, the highest state - Delight and detachment - To be calm - Quietude, mental and vital - Calm and strength - Experience and expression of experience, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is obvious that when I tell someone, Be calm, I mean many different things according to the person. But the first indispensable calm is mental quietude, for generally that is the one thats most lacking. When I tell someone, Be calm, I mean: Try not to have restless, excited, agitated thoughts; try to quieten your mind and to stop turning around in all your imaginations and observations and mental Constructions.
One could justifiably add a question: You tell us Be calm, but what should we do to be calm? The answer is always more or less the same: you must first of all feel the need for it and want it, and then aspire, and then try! For trying, there are innumerable methods which have been prescribed and attempted by many. These methods are generally long, arduous, difficult; and many people get discouraged before reaching the goal, for, the more they try, the more do their thoughts start whirling around and being restless in their heads.
1956-10-24 - Taking a new body - Different cases of incarnation - Departure of soul from body, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The only thing I can say is that it is possible things sometimes happen like that. Quite probablyat least I hope so the person who described this may have observed a phenomenon of this kind; I hope it is not a mere mental Construction of his occult imagination. It raises a few practical problems! But still, of course, there is nothing impossible. Only, it is difficult to imagine the soul entering the rain, which enters the seed, which makes the plant sprout up, and then entering the fathers stomach in the form of food, more or less cooked (!) and finally proceeding to the conception of the child. I dont say it is impossible, but it is very, very, very complicated!
I may say that I have been present at innumerable incarnations of evolved souls in beings either preparing to be born or already born. As I said, the cases are quite different; it depends more on psychological conditions than on material ones, but it also depends on material conditions. It depends on the state of development of the soul which wants to reincarnatewe take the word soul here in the sense of the psychic being, what we call the psychic beingit depends on its state of development, on the milieu in which it is going to incarnate, on the mission it has to fulfil that makes many different conditions. It depends very largely on the state of consciousness of the parents. For it goes without saying that there is a stupendous difference between conceiving a child deliberately, with a conscious aspiration, a call to the invisible world and a spiritual ardour, and conceiving a child by accident and without intending to have it, and sometimes even without wanting it at all. I dont say that in the latter case there cannot also be an incarnation, but it usually takes place later, not at the conception.
1956-11-21 - Knowings and Knowledge - Reason, summit of mans mental activities - Willings and the true will - Personal effort - First step to have knowledge - Relativity of medical knowledge - Mental gymnastics make the mind supple, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And you will notice that this is perhaps the most difficult thing to do; it is the most difficult step, for, when you study general subjects like science, the different branches of science or philosophy and all such activities, when you study them a little seriously and deeply, you very easily come to the sense of the relativity of this knowledge. But when you come down a step again, just to the next level of mental activity and look at the different problems of life for example, what should be done in this or that case, the conditions for realising something, a skill one wants to learn, or even the different necessities of life, the conditions of living, of healthyou will find that generally a rational being, or somebody about to become one, forms a set of ideas for himself, which are really knowings: such a thing will produce such an effect, or in order to obtain this thing, that other must be done, etc. And you have a whole mental Construction in yourself, made of observations, studies, experiments; and the more you advance in age, the greater becomes the number of experiments and results of study and observation. You make for yourself a sort of mental structure in which you live. And unless you are powerfully intelligent, with an opening to the higher worlds, you have an innate, spontaneous, unshakable conviction of the absolute worth of your observations, and even without your having to think, it acts automatically in your being: by a sort of habit this thing inevitably brings that particular result. So for you, when this has happened quite often, the habit of associating the two movements naturally gives rise within you to the feeling of the absolute value of your ideas or your knowings about yourself and your life. And there it is infinitely more difficult to come to an understanding of the relativity the uncertainty bordering on illusionof that knowledge. You find this out only if, with a will for spiritual discipline and progress, you look at these things with a deep critical sense and see the kind of bondage into which you have put yourself, which acts without any need of intervention from you, automatically, with the support of the subconscious and that kind of automatism of reflexes which makes causes and effects follow each other in a habitual order without your being in the least aware of it.
Well, if you want to attain knowledge, the first thing, the first indispensable step is not to believe in the validity of those things. And if you observe yourself, you will realise that this belief in the validity of these observations and deductions is almost absolute in you. It expresses itself through all sorts of ideas which reasonably enough appear evident to you, yet are exactly the limitations which prevent you from reaching knowledge by identity. For instance, if a man plunges into the water without knowing how to swim, he will be drowned; if there is a fairly powerful wind, it will upset things; when it rains, you get wet, etc.you see, there are instances like this at every second, it is like that. And this seems so obvious to you that when you are told, Well, but no, this is a relative knowledge, it is like that but it could be different, the one who tells you this seems to you a priori half-mad. And you say, But still, these things are concrete! These are things we can see, touch, feel, these are proofs our senses give to us every minute, and if we do not take our stand on them, we are sure to go astray and enter the irrational.
1956-12-12 - paradoxes - Nothing impossible - unfolding universe, the Eternal - Attention, concentration, effort - growth capacity almost unlimited - Why things are not the same - will and willings - Suggestions, formations - vital world, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, never come to me saying, I am no good at this subject, I shall never understand philosophy or I shall never be able to do mathematics or It is ignorance, it is sheer ignorance. There is nothing you cannot understand if you give your brain the time to widen and perfect itself. And you can s from one mental Construction to another: this corresponds to studies; from one subject to another: and each subject of study means a language; from one language to another, and build up one thing after another within you, and contain all that and many more things yet, very harmoniously, if you do this with care and take your time over it. For each one of these branches of knowledge corresponds to an inner formation, and you can multiply these formations indefinitely if you give the necessary time and care.
I do not believe at all in limits which cannot be crossed.
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When a being is born upon earth, he is inevitably born in a certain country and a certain environment. Due to his physical parents he is born in a set of social, cultural, national, sometimes religious circumstances, a set of habits of thinking, of understanding, of feeling, conceiving, all sorts of Constructions which are at first mental, then become vital habits and finally material modes of being. To put things more clearly, you are born in a certain society or religion, in a particular country, and this society has a collective conception of its own and this nation has a collective conception of its own, this religion has a collective Construction of its own which is usually very fixed. You are born into it. Naturally, when you are very young, you are altogether unaware of it, but it acts on your formation that formation, that slow formation through hours and hours, through days and days, experiences added to experiences, which gradually builds up a consciousness. You are underneath it as beneath a bell-glass. It is a kind of Construction which covers and in a way protects you, but in other ways limits you considerably. All this you absorb without even being aware of it and this forms the subconscious basis of your own Construction. This subconscious basis will act on you throughout your life, if you do not take care to free yourself from it. And to free yourself from it, you must first of all become aware of it; and the first step is the most difficult, for this formation was so subtle, it was made when you were not yet a conscious being, when you had just fallen altogether dazed from another world into this one (laughing) and it all happened without your participating in the least in it. Therefore, it does not even occur to you that there could be something to know there, and still less something you must get rid of. And it is quite remarkable that when for some reason or other you do become aware of the hold of this collective suggestion, you realise at the same time that a very assiduous and prolonged labour is necessary in order to get rid of it. But the problem does not end there.
You live surrounded by people. These people themselves have desires, stray wishes, impulses which are expressed through them and have all kinds of causes, but take in their consciousness an individual form. For example, to put it in very practical terms: you have a father, a mother, brothers, sisters, friends, comrades; each one has his own way of feeling, willing, and all those with whom you are in relation expect something from you, even as you expect something from them. That something they do not always express to you, but it is more or less conscious in their being, and it makes formations. These formations, according to each ones capacity of thought and the strength of his vitality, are more or less powerful, but they have their own little strength which is usually much the same as yours; and so what those around you want, desire, hope or expect from you enters in this way in the form of suggestions very rarely expressed, but which you absorb without resistance and which suddenly awaken within you a similar desire, a similar will, a similar impulse. This happens from morning to night, and again from night to morning, for these things dont stop while you are sleeping, but on the contrary are very often intensified because your consciousness is no longer awake, watching and protecting you to some extent.
1956-12-19 - Preconceived mental ideas - Process of creation - Destructive power of bad thoughts - To be perfectly sincere, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, Sri Aurobindo says at the beginning of the sentence: Thought thus smitten awakes What he says is that in order to progress one must break up old Constructions, buffet, demolish all preconceived ideas. Preconceived ideas are the habitual mental Constructions in which one lives, and which are fixed, which become rigid fortresses and cannot progress because they are fixed. Nothing that is fixed can progress. So the advice is to break down, that is, destroy all preconceived ideas, all fixed mental Constructions. And this is the true way to give birth to new ideas or to thoughtactive thoughtthought which is creative.
And a little further on Sri Aurobindo says that you must first be conscious of yourself, then think, and then act. The vision of the inner truth of the being must precede all action; first the vision of the truth, then this truth formulating itself into thought, then the thought creating the action. That is the normal process.
1957-02-20 - Limitations of the body and individuality, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Individuality is a conquest. And, as Sri Aurobindo says here, this first conquest is only a first stage, and once you have realised within you something like a personal independent and conscious being, then what you have to do is to break the form and go farther. For example, if you want to progress mentally, you must break all your mental forms, all your mental Constructions to be able to make new ones. So, to begin with, a tremendous labour is required to individualise oneself, and afterwards one must demolish all that has been done in order to progress. But as you do not watch yourself doing things and as it is the customnot everywhere, of course; let us say here the custom to work, to read, to develop yourself, to try to do something, to form yourself a little, you do it quite naturally and without even watching yourself, as I said.
And only when these external forms come into a mutual friction you begin to feel that you are different from others. Otherwise you are this person or that, according to the name you bear. It is only when there is a friction, when something does not go smoothly, that you become aware of a difference, then you see that you are different, otherwise you are not aware of it and you are not different. In fact, you are very, very little different from one another.
1957-06-19 - Causes of illness Fear and illness - Minds working, faith and illness, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, it is not in the mental field that the victories are won. It is impossible. It is open to all influences, all contradictory currents. All the mental Constructions one makes carry their own contradiction with them. One can try to overrule it or make it as harmless as possible, but it exists, it is there, and at the slightest weakness or lack of vigilance or inadvertance, it enters, and destroys all the work. Mentally, one arrives at very few results, and they are always mixed. Something else is needed. One must pass from the mind into the domain of faith or of a higher consciousness, to be able to act with safety.
It is quite obvious that one of the most powerful means for acting on the body is faith. People who have a simple heart, not a very complicated mindsimple people, you seewho dont have a very great, very complicated mental development but have a very deep faith, have a great power of action over their bodies, very great. That is why one is quite surprised at times: Heres a man with a great realisation, an exceptional person, and he is a slave of all the smallest physical things, while this man, well, he is so simple and looks so uncouth, but he has a great faith and goes through difficulties and obstacles like a conqueror!
1957-07-03 - Collective yoga, vision of a huge hotel, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is certainly not an arbitrary structure like those made by men, in which they put everything pell-mell, without order or reality, and the whole thing is held together only by illusory links, which were symbolised here by the walls of the hotel, and which, in fact, in ordinary human Constructionsif we take as an example a religious communityare symbolised by the monastery building, identical clothes, identical activities, even identical movements Ill make it more clear: everybody wears the same uniform, everybody rises at the same hour, eats the same things, offers the same prayers together, etc., there is a general uniformity. And naturally, inside, there is a chaos of consciousnesses, each one going according to its own mode, for this uniformity which goes as far as an identity of belief and dogma, is an altogether illusory identity.
This is one of the most usual types of human collectivity: to be grouped, linked, united around a common ideal, a common action, a common realisation, but in a completely artificial way. As opposed to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true communitywhat he calls a gnostic or supramental communitycan exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of its members, each one realising his real, concrete unity and identity with all the other members of the community, that is, each one should feel not like just one member united in some way with all the others, but all as one, within himself. For each one the others must be himself as much as his own body, and not mentally and artificially, but by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realisation.
1958-02-19 - Experience of the supramental boat - The Censors - Absurdity of artificial means, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The supramental world exists permanently and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I had the proof of this even today when my earth-consciousness went there and remained there consciously between two and three oclock in the afternoon. Now, I know that what is lacking for the two worlds to unite in a constant and conscious relation, is an intermediate zone between the physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is. This zone remains to be built, both in the individual consciousness and the objective world, and it is being built. When I used to speak of the new world which is being created, it was of this intermediary zone that I was speaking. And similarly, when I am on this side, that is, in the field of the physical consciousness, and I see the supramental power, the supramental light and substance constantly penetrating matter, it is the Construction of this zone which I see and in which I participate.
I was on a huge boat which was a symbolic representation of the place where this work is going on. This boat, as large as a city, is fully organised, and it had certainly already been functioning for some time, for its organisation was complete. It is the place where people who are destined for the supramental life are trained. These peopleor at least a part of their beinghad already undergone a supramental transformation, for the boat itself and everything on board was neither material nor subtle-physical nor vital nor mentalit was a supramental substance. This substance was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance which is closest to the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a mixture of gold and red, forming a uniform substance of a luminous orange. Everything was like that the light was like that, the people were like thateverything had that colour, although with various shades which made it possible to distinguish things from each other. The general impression was of a world without shadows; there were shades but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything went on regularly and in silence. And at the same time one could see all the details of an education, a training in all fields, by which the people on board were being prepared.
1958-04-30 - Mental constructions and experience, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1958-04-30 - Mental Constructions and experience
class:chapter
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You want to make me speak and mentalise the experience until a new system is established and you can sit down comfortably in your new mental Construction. I am sorry to have to disappoint you but this is absolutely impossible. And if you want to understand what I have written, well, make an effort to have a supramental consciousness.
That is all I have to say to you.
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Well, a mental Construction will never be true, and I refuse to make one. I was obliged to use words which men understand, but I did it in the most incoherent way possible! in order not to be too mental, and I refuse to be coherent in the mental fashion; and that, not only for the questions I have here or those I have received in letters, but for all those that are still to come on the same subject. So it will be useless to ask me any.
I would advise the same thing to everyone: Make an effort, work, open yourself, give yourself up entirely to the new Force, and a day will come when you will have the experience.
1958-09-03 - How to discipline the imagination - Mental formations, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How many times you sit and become aware that the thought is beginning to form images for itself, to tell itself a story; and so, when you have become a little expert at it, not only do you see unfolding before you the history of what you would like to happen in life, in your own life, but you can take something away, add a detail, perfect your work, make a really fine story in which everything conforms with your highest aspiration. And once you have made a complete harmonious Construction, as perfect as you can make it, then you open your hands and let the bird fly away.
If it is well made, it always realises itself in the end. And that is what one doesnt know.
1958-10-29 - Mental self-sufficiency - Grace, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And it is only when one understands that all external things, all mental Constructions, all material efforts are vain, futile, if they are not entirely consecrated to this Light and Force from above, to this Truth which is trying to express itself, that one is ready to make decisive progress. So the only truly effective attitude is a perfect, total, fervent giving of our being to That which is above us and which alone has the power to change everything.
When you open to the Spirit within you it brings you a first foretaste of that higher life which alone is worth living, then comes the will to rise to that, the hope of reaching it, the certitude that this is possible, and finally the strength to make the necessary effort and the resolution to go to the very end.
1963 08 11? - 94, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have come to this conclusion: in principle, it is the consciousness and the union with the Divine that bring rapturethis is the principle therefore, the consciousness and the union with the Divine, whether in the world as it is or in the Construction of a future world, must be the samein principle. That is what I repeat to myself all the time: How is it that you do not have this rapture?
I have itwhen the whole consciousness is centralised in union; at any time, in the midst of anything, with this movement of concentration of the consciousness on union, the rapture comes. But I must say that it disappears when I am working. It is a worlda very chaotic world of work, where I act on everything around me; and necessarily, I am obliged to receive what is around me, so as to be able to act on it. I have reached a state in which all that I receive, even the things that are considered most painful, leave me absolutely calm and indifferentindifferent, not an inactive indifference: without any painful reaction of any kind, absolutely neutral (gesture turned towards the Eternal), with perfect equality. But in this equality there is a precise knowledge of what is to be done, of what is to be said, of what is to be written, of what is to be decided, in short, everything that action entails. All that happens in a state of perfect neutrality, with the sense of Power at the same time: the Power flows, the Power acts, and the neutrality remains but there is no rapture. I do not have the enthusiasm, the delight, the fullness of action.
1965 12 26?, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
With the curve also came an adage, What has a beginning must have an endthis seems to be one of those human mental Constructions that are not necessarily true. But subjectively, what is interesting is that the problem gradually becomes less acute as one views it from higher up, or from a more central point, to be more exact.
It seems that it is the same not principle, because it is not a principle the same law for the individual as for worlds and universes.
1970 04 12, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let us beware of all mental Constructions that limit and distort. Let us strive to keep the contact pure.
12 April 1970
1.dd - So priceless is the birth, O brother, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by K. N. Upadhyaya So priceless is the birth, O brother, That in it, the Supreme Lord can be met. The human body is the Door to salvation. If the meeting is not accomplished while alive, If the contact is not made while alive, If the Lord of the universe is not found while alive, Then one is simply drowned. The One who has made this temple of our hearts, He alone dwells in this temple. None else but our Beloved is in our hearts. With thee is thy Friend. Let thyself recognize Him. Look not at a distance. Know Him as thy reflection, O Dadu. God is within all beings. He accompanies all and is close by. Musk is in the musk deer, and yet it goes around smelling grass. The self knows not God, although God is with the self. Being deaf to the Holy Sound of the Master, sadly does he wander. He for whom thou searchest in the world dwells within thyself. Thou knowest Him not, because the veil of 'mine' and 'thine' is there. He dwells within all beings, yet rarely anyone knows Him. He alone who is a devotee of God will know Him. A true Master unites us with God And shows all within the body. Within the body is the Creator, And within the body is Onkar [divinity of the second heaven]. The sky is within the body, and close by Is the earth within the body. Air and light are within the body. So is water contained within the body. Within the body are the Sun and the Moon. And the Bagpipe is played within the body. By rendering service within the heart, See thou the One who is indestructible and boundless, Having no limit either on this end or on that end, sayeth Dadu. After entering within, let one, O Dadu, bolt the doors of the house. Let one, O Dadu, serve the Lord at the Door of Eternity. God is within the self, His worship alone is to be done. Search thou for the Beloved close to the place Wherefrom the Sound emerges, and thou shalt find Him, sayeth Dadu. There is solitude there, and there is luster of Light. One who, turning the attention inward, Brings it within the self, And fixes it on the Radiant Form of the Master, Is indeed wise, O Dadu. Where the self is, there is God; all is filled with Him. Fix thine attention within, O valiant servant. So does Dadu proclaim. Fix thine attention within, and sing always within the self. This mind then dances with ecstasy, and beats with pleasure the rhythm. God is within the self; He is close to the worshipper. But leaving Him aside, men serve external Constructions, lamenteth Dadu. This is the true mosque, this is the true temple. So hath the Master shown. The service and worship are performed within. Destroy delusion, O mind, by means of the Name of God and the Word bestowed by the Guru. The mind is then united with the One untouched by karmas. Liquidate thereby thy karmas, O Dadu. If the mind stays with the Name of the Supreme Lord even for a moment, O Dadu, All its karmas will be destroyed then and there, within the twinkling of an eye. The aspirant who fills his pot with drops of Celestial Melody, alone survives. How can he die, O Dadu? He drinks the divine Nectar. The artistic Creator is playing the instrument in perfect harmony. Melody is the essence of the five [elements], and through the self is the Melody expressed, O Dadu. By enabling people to hear the Sound, the Master can awaken them at His will. He may, at His pleasure, speak within them, and merge them in his own form. The knowledge of the Sound Current imparted by the Guru merges one easily into Truth. It carries me to the abode of my Beloved, says Dadu. [bk1sm.gif] -- from Dadu: The Compassionate Mystic, Translated by K. N. Upadhyaya <
1f.lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp Construction we profited
by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant
--
Constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or
circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one
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entered the massive Constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent
ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the
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the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and Constructional
nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realised from
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land Construction. As we studied the architecture of all these
sculptured palaeogean cities, including that whose aeon-dead corridors
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the Construction according to the best methods. These workers brought
with them all that was necessary to establish the new
--
style; and all the Construction and carving were marvellously well
preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus
1f.lovecraft - In the Walls of Eryx, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
that one must turn to the idea of native Construction. Did a forgotten
race of highly evolved beings precede the man-lizards as masters of
1f.lovecraft - The Curse of Yig, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Construction of a cabin.
The region was flat, drearily windy, and sparse of natural vegetation,
1f.lovecraft - The Electric Executioner, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Mexican railroading, owing to the European Construction interests back
of the first lines; and in 1889 the Mexican Central was still running a
1f.lovecraft - The Mound, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
obscure or archaic word or Construction. There was a sense of ineffable
strangeness in thus being thrown back nearly four centuries in the
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into sizeable caves or chains of caves. Very little human Construction,
it was plain, had gone into this part of the tunnel; though
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and circular chamber of human Construction; wholly covered with
horrible carvings, and revealing at the farther end an arched
1f.lovecraft - The Shadow out of Time, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous Constructions of black
or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight
--
Construction.
The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously
1f.lovecraft - The Shadow over Innsmouth, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
It was a town of wide extent and dense Construction, yet one with a
portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots
1f.lovecraft - The Shunned House, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
street. Its Construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed
the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity;
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trace of the sinister either about its Construction or about the
prosperous and honourable family who built it. Yet from the first a
1f.lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
The three things were damnably clever Constructions of their kind, and
were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic
1f.lovecraft - Under the Pyramids, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
peculiar and elaborate Construction of Egyptian sepulchres; and the
exceedingly singular and terrific doctrines which determined this
Construction.
All these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a
1.poe - Eureka - A Prose Poem, #Poe - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Not only is this Divine adaptation, however, mathematically accurate, but there is that about it which stamps it as divine, in distinction from that which is merely the work of human constructiveness. I allude to the complete mutuality of adaptation. For example; in human Constructions a particular cause has a particular effect; a particular intention brings to pass a particular object; but this is all; we see no reciprocity. The effect does not re-act upon the cause; the intention does not change relations with the object. In Divine Constructions the object is either design or object as we choose to regard it -and we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse -so that we can never absolutely decide which is which.
To give an instance: -In polar climates the human frame, to maintain its animal heat, requires, for combustion in the capillary system, an abundant supply of highly azotized food, such as train-oil. But again: -in polar climates nearly the sole food afforded man is the oil of abundant seals and whales. Now, whether is oil at hand because imperatively demanded, or the only thing demanded because the only thing to be obtained? It is impossible to decide. There is an absolute reciprocity of adaptation.
The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in the ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity. In the Construction of plot, for example, in fictitious literature, we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any one other or upholds it. In this sense, of course, perfection of PL0, is really, or practically, unattainable -but only because it is a finite intelligence that constructs. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.
And now we have reached a point at which the intellect is forced, again, to struggle against its propensity for analogical inference against its monomaniac grasping at the infinite. Moons have been seen revolving about planets; planets about stars; and the poetical instinct of humanity -its instinct of the symmetrical, if the symmetry be but a symmetry of surface: -this instinct, which the Soul, not only of Man but of all created beings, took up, in the beginning, from the geometrical basis of the Universal irradiation -impels us to the fancy of an endless extension of this system of cycles. Closing our eyes equally to de duction and in duction, we insist upon imagining a revolution of all the orbs of the Galaxy about some gigantic globe which we take to be the central pivot of the whole. Each cluster in the great cluster of clusters is imagined, of course, to be similarly supplied and constructed; while, that the "analogy" may be wanting at no point, we go on to conceive these clusters themselves, again, as revolving about some still more august sphere; -this latter, still again, with its encircling clusters, as but one of a yet more magnificent series of agglomerations, gyrating about yet another orb central to them -some orb still more unspeakably sublime -some orb, let us rather say, of infinite sublimity endlessly multiplied by the infinitely sublime. Such are the conditions, continued in perpetuity, which the voice of what some people term "analogy" calls upon the Fancy to depict and the Reason to contemplate, if possible, without becoming dissatisfied with the picture. Such, in general, are the interminable gyrations beyond gyration which we have been instructed by Philosophy to comprehend and to account for, at least in the best manner we can. Now and then, however, a philosopher proper one whose frenzy takes a very determinate turn -whose genius, to speak more reverentially, has a strongly-pronounced washer-womanish bias, doing every thing up by the dozen -enables us to see precisely that point out of sight, at which the revolutionary processes in question do, and of right ought to, come to an end.
1.sig - Thou art One, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Bernard Lewis Original Language Hebrew Thou art One, the beginning of all computation, the base of all Construction. Thou art One, and in the mystery of Thy Oneness the wise of heart are astonished, for they know not what it is. Thou art One, and Thy Oneness neither diminishes nor increases, neither lacks nor exceeds. Thou art One, but not as the One that is counted or owned, for number and change cannot reach Thee, nor attribute, nor form. Thou art One, but my mind is too feeble to set Thee a law or a limit, and therefore I say: "I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue." Thou art One, and Thou art exalted high above abasement and falling -- not like a man, who falls when he is alone. [1568.jpg] -- from The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, by Joseph Dan <
2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But still these have the appearance of gathered acquisitions and Constructions of a seeking Ignorance which tries to know, to understand, to discover, to change slowly and strugglingly into knowledge. As Life here establishes and maintains its operations with difficulty on a foundation and in an environment of general Death, first in infinitesimal points of life, in quanta of life-form and life-energy, in increasing aggregates that create more and more complex organisms, an intricate life-machinery, Consciousness also establishes and maintains a growing but precarious light in the darkness of an original Nescience and a universal Ignorance.
Moreover the knowledge gained is of phenomena, not of the reality of things or of the foundations of existence. Wherever our consciousness meets what seems to be a foundation, that foundation wears the appearance of a blank, - when it is not a void, - an original state which is featureless and a multitude of consequences which are not inherent in the origin and which nothing in it seems to justify or visibly to necessitate; there is a mass of superstructure which has no clear native relation to the fundamental existence. The first aspect of cosmic existence is an Infinite which is to our perception an indeterminate, if not indeterminable. In this Infinite the universe itself, whether in its aspect of Energy or its aspect of structure, appears as an indeterminate determination, a "boundless finite", - paradoxical but necessary expressions which would seem to indicate that we are face to face with a suprarational mystery as the base of things; in that universe arise - from where? - a vast number and variety of general and particular determinates which do not appear to be warranted by anything perceptible in the nature of the Infinite, but seem to be imposed or, it may be, self-imposed upon it.
--
Overmind consciousness is such a state or principle beyond individual mind, beyond even universal mind in the Ignorance; it carries in itself a first direct and masterful cognition of cosmic truth: here then we might hope to understand something of the original working of things, get some insight into the fundamental movements of cosmic Nature. One thing indeed becomes clear; it is self-evident here that both the individual and the cosmos come from a transcendent Reality which takes form in them: the mind and life of the individual being, its self in nature must therefore be a partial self-expression of the cosmic Being and, both through that and directly, a self-expression of the transcendent Reality, - a conditional and half-veiled expression it may be, but still that is its significance. But also we see that what the expression shall be is also determined by the individual himself: only what he can in his nature receive, assimilate, formulate, his portion of the cosmic being or of the Reality, can find shape in his mind and life and physical parts; something that derives from the Reality, something that is in the cosmos he expresses, but in the terms of his own self-expression, in the terms of his own nature. But the original question set out for us by the phenomenon of the universe is not solved by the Overmind knowledge, - the question, in this case, whether the building of thought, experience, world of perceptions of the mental Person, the mind Purusha, is truly a self-expression, a self-determination proceeding from some truth of his own spiritual being, a manifestation of that truth's dynamic possibilities, or whether it is not rather a creation or Construction presented to him by Nature, by Prakriti, and only in the sense of being individualised in his personal formation of that Nature can it be said to be his own or dependent on him; or, again, it might be a play of a cosmic Imagination, a fantasia of the Infinite imposed on the blank indeterminable of his own eternal pure existence. These are the three views of creation that seem to have an equal chance of being right, and mind is incapable of definitely deciding between them; for each view is armed with its own mental logic and its appeal to intuition and experience.
Overmind seems to add to the perplexity, for the overmental view of things allows each possibility to formulate itself in its own independent right and realise its own existence in cognition, in dynamic self-presentation, in substantiating experience.
--
It is important to observe here the sense that is acquired in such a total cognition of cosmic being by the phenomenon of the Ignorance, its assigned place in the spiritual economy of the universe. If all that we experience were an imposition, an unreal creation in the Absolute, both cosmic and individual existence would be in their very nature an Ignorance; the sole real knowledge would be the indeterminable self-awareness of the Absolute. If all were the erection of a temporal and phenomenal creation over against the reality of the witnessing timeless Eternal and if the creation were not a manifestation of the Reality but an arbitrary self-effective cosmic Construction, that too would be a sort of imposition. Our knowledge of the creation would be the knowledge of a temporary structure of evanescent consciousness and being, a dubious Becoming that passes across the vision of the Eternal, not a knowledge of Reality; that too would be an Ignorance. But if all is a manifestation of the Reality and itself real by the constituting immanence, the substantiating essence and presence of the Reality, then the awareness of individual being and world-being would be in its spiritual origin and nature a play of the infinite self-knowledge and all-knowledge: ignorance could be only a subordinate movement, a suppressed or restricted cognition or a partial and imperfect evolving knowledge with the true and total self-awareness and all-awareness concealed both in it and behind it. It would be a temporary phenomenon, not the cause and essence of cosmic existence; its inevitable consummation would be a return of the spirit, not out of the cosmos to a sole supracosmic self-awareness, but even in the cosmos itself to an integral self-knowledge and all-knowledge.
It might be objected that the supramental cognition is, after all, not the final truth of things. Beyond the supramental plane of consciousness which is an intermediate step from overmind and mind to the complete experience of Sachchidananda, are the greatest heights of the manifested Spirit: here surely existence would not at all be based on the determination of the One in multiplicity, it would manifest solely and simply a pure identity in oneness. But the supramental truth-consciousness would not be absent from these planes, for it is an inherent power of Sachchidananda: the difference would be that the determinations would not be demarcations, they would be plastic, interfused, each a boundless finite. For there all is in each and each is in all radically and integrally, - there would be to the utmost a fundamental awareness of identity, a mutual inclusion and interpenetration of consciousness: knowledge as we envisage it would not exist, because it would not be needed, since all would be direct action of consciousness in being itself, identical, intimate, intrinsically self-aware and all-aware. But still relations of consciousness, relations of mutual delight of existence, relations of self-power of being with self-power of being would not be excluded; these highest spiritual planes would not be a field of blank indeterminability, a vacancy of pure existence.
2.01 - THE ADVENT OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
among the other Constructions of matter, the cell, like everything
else in the world, cannot be understood (i.e. incorporated in a
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disappearing in the higher Constructions of life.
Perhaps a word of explanation is needed.
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surviving residue of some particular stage in the Construction
of terrestrial matter.
2.01 - The Attributes of Omega Point - a Transcendent God, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
able? So long as our Constructions rest with all their weight
on the earth, they will vanish with the earth. The radical de-
2.01 - The Object of Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:The traditional Way of Knowledge proceeds by elimination and rejects successively the body, the life, the senses, the heart, the very thought in order to merge into the quiescent Self or supreme Nihil or indefinite Absolute. The way of integral knowledge supposes that we are intended to arrive at an integral self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the Ignorance. Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity of the life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical round of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of the Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate the falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows and to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can open through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply to it. Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions and desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open with its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity of the thought with its imperfect mental Constructions, its arrogant assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive concentrations; a greater faculty of Knowledge is behind that can open to the true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the universe. An integral self-fulfilment, - an absolute, a culmination for the experiences of the heart, for its instinct of love, joy, devotion and worship; an absolute, a culmination for the senses, for their pursuit of divine beauty and good and delight in the forms of things; an absolute, a culmination for the life, for its pursuit of works, of divine power, mastery and perfection; an absolute, a culmination beyond its own limits for the thought, for its hunger after truth and light and divine wisdom and knowledge. Not something quite other than themselves from which they are all cast away is the end of these things in our nature, but something supreme in which they at once transcend themselves and find their own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies beyond measure.
7:Behind the traditional way of Knowledge, justifying its thought-process of elimination and withdrawal, stands an overmastering spiritual experience. Deep, intense, convincing, common to all who have overstepped a certain limit of the active mind-belt into the horizonless inner space, this is the great experience of liberation, the consciousness of something within us that is behind and outside of the universe and all its forms, interests, aims, events and happenings, calm, untouched, unconcerned, illimitable, immobile, free, the uplook to something above us indescribable and unseizable into which by abolition of our personality we call enter, the presence of an omnipresent eternal witness Purusha, the sense of an Infinity or a Timelessness that looks down on us from an august negation of all our existence and is alone the one thing Real. This experience is the highest sublimation of spiritualised mind looking resolutely beyond its own existence. No one who has not passed through this liberation can be entirely free from the mind arid its meshes, but one is not compelled to linger in this experience for ever. Great as it is, it is only the Mind's overwhelming experience of what is beyond itself and all it can conceive. It is a supreme negative experience, but beyond it is all the tremendous light of an infinite Consciousness, an illimitable Knowledge, an affirmative absolute Presence.
8:The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our individual being and its relations to the universe and it transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect Construction, an attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray. There the abstract terms of pure reason and the Constructions of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no significance, and to build separate significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge.
9:In relation to the individual the Supreme is our own true and highest self, that which ultimately we are in our essence, that of which we are in our manifested nature. A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite. The experience of Matter as the world's sole foundation and the physical brain and nerves and cells and molecules as the one truth of all things in us, the ponderous inadequate basis of materialism, is a delusion, a half-view taken for the whole, the dark bottom or shadow of things misconceived as the luminous substance, the effective figure of zero for the Integer. The materialist idea mistakes a creation for the creative Power, a means of expression for That which is expressed and expresses. Matter and our physical brain and nerves and body are the field and foundation for one action of a vital force that serves to connect the Self with the form of its works and maintains them by its direct dynamis. The material movements are an exterior notation by which the soul represents its perceptions of certain truths of the Infinite and makes them effective in the terms of Substance. These things are a language, a notation, a hieroglyphic, a system of symbols, not themselves the deepest truest sense of the things they intimate.
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13:This supreme Existence is not conditioned by the individual or by the universe. A spiritual knowledge can therefore surpass or even eliminate these two powers of the Spirit and arrive at the conception of something utterly Transcendent, something that is unnameable and mentally Unknowable, a sheer Absolute. The traditional way of knowledge eliminates individual and universe. The Absolute it seeks after is featureless, indefinable, relationless, not this, not that, neti neti. And yet we can say of it that it is One, that it is Infinite, that it is Ineffable Bliss, Consciousness, Existence. Although Unknowable to the mind, yet through our individual being and through the names and forms of the universe we can approach the realisation of the supreme Self that is Brahman, and by the realisation of the Self we come to a certain realisation also of this utter Absolute of which our true Self is the essential form in our consciousness (svarupa). These are the devices the human mind is compelled to use if it is to form to itself any conception at all of a transcendent and unconditioned Absolute. The system of negation is indispensable to it in order to get rid of its own definitions and limited experience; it is obliged to escape through a vague Indefinite into the Infinite. For it lives in a closed prison of Constructions and representations that are necessary for its action but are not the self-existent truth either of Matter or Life or Mind or Spirit. But if we can once cross beyond the Mind's frontier twilight into the vast plane of supramental Knowledge, these devices cease to be indispensable. Supermind has quite another, a positive and direct and living experience of the supreme Infinite. The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited by a qualityless void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the individual soul and all souls and more of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe. It is the cosmic and the supracosmic spirit, the supreme Lord, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha and supreme shakti, the Ever Unborn who is endlessly born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous One, the complex Simple, the many-sided Single, the Word of the Silence Ineffable, the impersonal omnipresent Person, the Mystery, translucent in highest consciousness to its own spirit, but to a lesser consciousness veiled in its own exceeding light and impenetrable for ever. These things are to the dimensional mind irreconcilable opposites, but to the constant vision and experience of the supramental Truth-Consciousness they are so simply and inevitably the intrinsic nature of each other that even to think of them as contraries is an unimaginable violence. The walls constructed by the measuring and separating Intellect have disappeared and the Truth in its simplicity and beauty appears and reduces all to terms of its harmony and unity and light. Dimensions and distinctions remain but as figures for use, not a separative prison for the self-forgetting Spirit.
14:The consciousness of the transcendent Absolute with its consequence in individual and universal is the last, the eternal knowledge. Our minds may deal with it on various lines, may build upon it conflicting philosophies, may limit, modify, overstress, understress sides of the knowledge, deduce from it truth or error; but our intellectual variations and imperfect statements make no difference to the ultimate fact that if we push thought and experience to their end, this is the knowledge in which they terminate. The object of a Yoga of spiritual knowledge can be nothing else than this eternal Reality, this Self, this Brahman, this Transcendent that dwells over all and in all and is manifest yet concealed in the individual, manifest yet disguised in the universe.
2.02 - Evolutionary Creation and the Expectation of a Revelation, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Either the whole Construction of the world presented here
is vain speculation, or somewhere around us, in one form or
2.02 - Habit 2 Begin with the End in Mind, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
Take the Construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. You try to get a very clear sense of what kind of house you want. If you want a family-centered home, you plan a family room where it would be a natural gathering place. You plan sliding doors and a patio for children to play outside. You work with ideas. You work with your mind until you get a clear image of what you want to build.
Then you reduce it to blueprint and develop Construction plans. All of this is done before the earth is touched. If not, then in the second creation, the physical creation, you will have to make expensive changes that may double the cost of your home.
The carpenter's rule is "measure twice, cut once." You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the Construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You Begin with the End in Mind.
For another example, look at a business. If you want to have a successful enterprise, you clearly
2.02 - On Letters, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The ideal relation between man and woman in this Yoga you cannot at present understand. You have, first, to make yourself fit for it. Your own ideas of married life and Shastra etc., are dangerous and if you follow these ideas there is every chance of your fall from the Yoga. All of them are mental Constructions. The first thing in a case where both man and woman are aspirants is to help each other in Sadhana. They must exchange their forces and help each other to rise into the Higher Consciousness.
Secondly, there is the question of love. What most people call 'love' is a superficial thing and mostly bound up with the vital craving of lust. That has to be completely rejected.
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I know some people make such Constructions as the Yogapitha and so on. One can always find these things, because many things from the mental plane are always trying to realise themselves here. These Constructions are generally on the mental plane and they may even have some truth behind them not in the forms and Constructions themselves. But even where there is some truth behind them it gets mixed up with many other things which sometimes falsifies the truth behind it.
Disciple: Perhaps all sorts of vital forces come and take advantage of it.
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Sri Aurobindo: At the time I had some Construction in my mind. Of course, there was something behind it which I knew to be true. Even then I was not sure that it would work out successfully. Anyway, I wanted to give it a trial and gave that idea to Motilal. Then he took up the idea and, as you know, he took it up with all his vital being and in an egoistic way. So the vital forces found their chance. They tried to take possession of the work and of the workers.
It is after several such lessons that I had to give up the idea of rushing into work. This Yoga is not a cut-out system. It is a growth by experience.
2.02 - The Circle, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
9:The names of God form a further protection. The Magician may consider what names he will use; but each name should in some way symbolise this Work in its method and accomplishment. It is impossible here to enter into this subject fully; the discovery or Construction of suitable names mught occupy the most learned Qabalist for many years.
10:These nine lamps were originally canldes made of human far, the fat of enemies1 slain by the Magician; they thus served as warnings to any hostile force of what might be expected if it caused trouble. To-day such candles are difficult to procure; and it is perhaps simpler to use beeswax. The honey has been taken by the Magician; nothing is left of the toil of all those hosts of bees but the mere shell, the fuel of light. This beeswax is also used in the Construction of the Pantacle, and this forms a link between the two symbols. The Pantacle is thefood of the Magus; and some of it he gives up in order to give light to that which is without. For these lights are only apparently hostile to intrusion; they serve to illuminate the Circle and the Names of God, and so to bring the first and outmost symbols of initiation within the view of the profane.
11:These candles stand upon pentagrams, which symbolize Geburah, severity, and give protection; but also represent the microcosm, the four elements crowned by Spirit, the Will of man perfected in its aspiration to the Higher. They are placed outside the Circle to attract the hostile forces, to give them the first inkling of the Great Work, which they too must some day perform.
2.02 - THE EXPANSION OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
By its very Construction, it is true, every organism is always
and inevitably reducible into its component parts. But it by no
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by the accentuation of certain characters. By their Construction
these lines diverge and tend to separate. Yet, so far, we have no
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extreme, types which in their agility and cranial Construction
are very progressive. We have every reason to believe that
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
declared by explicit statement or grammatical Construction. The
Upanishad has said that the Eternal has arranged all objects
2.03 - DEMETER, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
absolute or even relative value of these fragile Constructions ?
By what right, for instance, can we say that a mammal, or even
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movements and their Constructions. But we must be careful.
Looked at more closely, this perfection is conditioned by the
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Of course, there is a law. But in the beginning God respects the law of each plane even though He transcends it. When the human being is raised completely above the mind then he finds the new law. Then all Constructions of the mind break down.
Theoretically, there is no reason why Supermind should not come down soon and why one should not get it in a series of flashes in six months. But in that way the object is not attained. The object is to see the world-forces, to meet them on their own plane and defeat them there. Practically, it means a fight with the world-forces.
2.03 - Renunciation, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is in books a lot of talk about renunciation that you must renounce possessions, renounce attachments, renounce desires. But I have come to the conclusion that so long as you have to renounce anything you are not on this path; for, so long as you are not thoroughly disgusted with things as they are, and have to make an effort to reject them, you are not ready for the supramental realisation. If the Constructions of the Overmind the world which it has built and the existing order which it supportsstill satisfy you, you cannot hope to partake of that realisation. Only when you find such a world disgusting, unbearable and unacceptable, are you fit for the change of consciousness. That is why I do not give any importance to the idea of renunciation. To renounce means that you are to give up what you value, that you have to discard what you think is worth keeping. What, on the contrary, you must feel is that this world is ugly, stupid, brutal and full of intolerable suffering; and once you feel in this way, all the physical, all the material consciousness which does not want it to be that, will want it to change, crying, I will have something else something that is true, beautiful, full of delight and knowledge and consciousness! All here is floating on a sea of dark unconsciousness. But when you want the Divine with all your will, all your resolution, all your aspiration and intensity, it will surely come. But it is not merely a matter of ameliorating the world. There are people who clamour for change of government, social reform and philanthropic work, believing that they can thereby make the world better. We want a new world, a true world, an expression of the Truth-Consciousness. And it will be, it must beand the sooner the better!
It should not, however, be just a subjective change. The whole physical life must be transformed. The material world does not want a mere change of consciousness in us. It says in effect: You retire into bliss, become luminous, have the divine knowledge; but that does not alter me. I still remain the hell I practically am! The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make it an entirely new creation.
2.03 - The Altar, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
5:He should endeavour to make geometrical Constructions to symbolize cosmic measurements. For example, he may take the two diagonals as (say) the diameter of the sun. Then the side of the alter will be found to have a length equal to some other cosmic measure, a vesica drawn on the side some other, a "rood cross" within the vesica yet another. Each Magician should work out his own system of symbolism-and he need not confine himself to cosmic measurements. He might, for example, find some relation to express the law of inverse squares.
6:The top of the altar shall be covered with gold, and on this gold should be engraved some such figure as the Holy Oblation, or the New Jerusalem, or, if he have the skill, the Microcosm of Vitruvius, of which we give illustrations.
2.03 - The Christian Phenomenon and Faith in the Incarnation, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
is to say, that makes itself felt as a process of Construction and
conquest that leads up to some supreme unification of the
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mighty Constructions; and, without even venturing into the
temple to savour what sort of incense still burns within it,
2.03 - The Eternal and the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first difficulty for the reason is that it has always been accustomed to identify the individual self with the ego and to think of it as existing only by the limitations and exclusions of the ego. If that were so, then by the transcendence of the ego the individual would abolish his own existence; our end would be to disappear and dissolve into some universality of matter, life, mind or spirit or else some indeterminate from which our egoistic determinations of individuality have started. But what is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical Construction of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature - this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised, - a temporary or at least a
temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense. Normally, we go no farther in our knowledge of our individual existence.
2.04 - The Divine and the Undivine, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is not difficult by some Construction of the philosophic reason or of theological reasoning to circumvent the difficulty.
It is possible to erect a faineant Deity, like the gods of Epicurus, blissful in himself, observing but indifferent to a world conducted or misconducted by a mechanical law of Nature. It is open to us to posit a Witness Self, a silent Soul in things, a
2.05 - On Poetry, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: For the epic you require the power of architectural Construction. With most of these poets it is yet the promise and not the fulfilment of their poetic personality.
19 JANUARY 1940 (Evening)
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Sri Aurobindo: It depends. Experience as one has it is not literature; it is too matter of fact. Generally, it is divested of its local and personal character by a great writer. Imagination can only give him a mental Construction; but inspiration can give a powerful expression. In a great poem you will find it is not merely an expression, but there is an element of creation. You can't define these things rigidly, but you can describe it so as to include the most important things or factors.
[1] Example:
2.05 - Renunciation, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self-will in thought and action has, we have already seen, to be quite renounced if we would be perfect in the way of divine works; it has equally to be renounced if we are to be perfect in divine knowledge. This self-will means an egoism in the mind which attaches itself to its preferences, its habits, its past or present formations of thought and view and will because it regards them as itself or its own, weaves around them the delicate threads of "I-ness" and "my-ness" and lives in them like a spider in its web. It hates to be disturbed, as a spider hates attack on its web, and feels foreign and unhappy if transplanted to fresh viewpoints and formations as a spider feels foreign in another web than its own. This attachment must be entirely excised from the mind. Not only must we give up the ordinary attitude to the world and life to which the unawakened mind clings as its natural element; but we must not remain bound in any mental Construction of our own or in any intellectual thought-system or arrangement of religious dogmas or logical conclusions; we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from Illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state so as to reach the utmost transcendence of the Divine and its utmost universality. Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit himself to any form or expression; always we must keep ourselves open to the higher Word from above that does not confine itself to its own sense and the light of the Thought that carries in it its own opposites.
But the centre of all resistance is egoism and this we must pursue into every covert and disguise and drag it out and slay it; for its disguises are endless and it will cling to every shred of possible self-concealment. Altruism and indifference are often its most effective disguises; so draped, it will riot boldly in the very face of the divine spies who are missioned to hunt it out. Here the formula of the supreme knowledge comes to our help; we have nothing to do in our essential standpoint with these distinctions, for there is no I nor thou, but only one divine Self equal in all embodiments, equal in the individual and the group, and to realise that, to express that, to serve that, to fulfil that is all that matters. Self-satisfaction and altruism, enjoyment and indifference are not the essential thing. If the realisation, fulfilment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egoistic sense or seems egoistic enjoyment and self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment works often with great subtlety; we prefer and put on almost unconsciously the garb which will look best in the eye that regards us from outside and we allow a veil to drop over the eye within; we are impelled to drape ourselves in the vow of poverty, or in the garb of service, or in outward proofs of indifference and renunciation and a spotless sainthood because that is what tradition and opinion demand of us and so we can make best an impression on our environment. But all this is vanity and delusion. We may be called upon to assume these things, for that may be the uniform of our service; but equally it may not. The eye of man outside matters nothing; the eye within is all.
2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
At a certain point of this constant unrest and travail even the physical mind loses its conviction of objective certitude and enters into an agnosticism which questions all its own standards of life and knowledge, doubts whether all this is real or else whether all, even if real, is not futile; the vital mind, baffled by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied with all its satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment, finds that all is vanity and vexation of spirit and is ready to reject life and existence as an unreality, all that it hunted after as an illusion, Maya; the thinking mind, unbuilding all its affirmations, discovers that all are mere mental Constructions and there is no reality in them or else that the only reality is something beyond this existence, something that has not been made or constructed, something
Absolute and Eternal, - all that is relative, all that is of time is a dream, a hallucination of the mind or a vast delirium, an immense cosmic Illusion, a delusive figure of apparent existence.
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If our dreams wore like our waking life an aspect of coherence, each night taking up and carrying farther a past continuous and connected sleep experience as each day takes up again our waking world-experience, then dreams would assume to our mind quite another character. There is therefore no analogy between a dream and waking life; these are experiences quite different in their character, validity, order. Our life is accused of evanescence and often it is accused too, as a whole, of a lack of inner coherence and significance; but its lack of complete significance may be due to our lack or limitation of understanding: actually, when we go within and begin to see it from within, it assumes a complete connected significance; at the same time whatever lack of inner coherence was felt before disappears and we see that it was due to the incoherence of our own inner seeing and knowledge and was not at all a character of life. There is no surface incoherence in life, it rather appears to our minds as a chain of firm sequences, and, if that is a mental delusion, as is sometimes alleged, if the sequence is created by our minds and does not actually exist in life, that does not remove the difference of the two states of consciousness. For in dream the coherence given by an observing inner consciousness is absent, and whatever sense of sequence there is seems to be due to a vague and false imitation of the connections of waking life, a subconscious mimesis, but this imitative sequence is shadowy and imperfect, fails and breaks always and is often wholly absent. We see too that the dream-consciousness seems to be wholly devoid of that control which the waking consciousness exercises to a certain extent over life-circumstances; it has the Nature-automatism of a subconscient Construction and nothing of the conscious will and organising force of the evolved mind of the human being.
Again the evanescence of a dream is radical and one dream has no connection with another; but the evanescence of the waking life is of details, - there is no evidence of evanescence in the connected totality of world-experience. Our bodies perish but
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But it may be questioned whether our dreams are indeed totally unreal and without significance, whether they are not a figure, an image-record or a symbolic transcript or representation of things that are real. For that we have to examine, however summarily, the nature of sleep and of dream phenomena, their process of origination and their provenance. What happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from the field of its waking experiences; it is supposed to be resting, suspended or in abeyance, but that is a superficial view of the matter. What is in abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the surface mind and the normal conscious action of the bodily part of us; but the inner consciousness is not suspended, it enters into new inner activities, only a part of which, a part happening or recorded in something of us that is near to the surface, we remember. There is maintained in sleep, thus near the surface, an obscure subconscious element which is a receptacle or passage for our dream experiences and itself also a dream-builder; but behind it is the depth and mass of the subliminal, the totality of our concealed inner being and consciousness which is of quite another order. Normally it is a subconscient part in us, intermediate between consciousness and pure inconscience, that sends up through this surface layer its formations in the shape of dreams, Constructions marked by an apparent inconsequence and incoherence. Many of these are fugitive structures built upon circumstances of our present life selected apparently at random and surrounded with a phantasy of variation; others call back the past, or rather selected circumstances and persons of the past, as a starting-point for similar fleeting edifices. There are other dreams of the subconscious which seem to be pure phantasy
The Cosmic Illusion
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Inconscient, relapses towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subconscious element, antechamber or substratum, and there it finds the impressions of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences, - for all have left their mark on our subconscious part and have there a power of recurrence. In its effect on our waking self this recurrence often takes the form of a reassertion of old habits, impulses dormant or suppressed, rejected elements of the nature, or it comes up as some other not so easily recognisable, some peculiar disguised or subtle result of these suppressed or rejected but not erased impulses or elements. In the dream consciousness the phenomenon is an apparently fanciful Construction, a composite of figures and movements built upon or around the buried impressions with a sense in them that escapes the waking intelligence because it has no clue to the subconscient's system of significances. After a time this subconscious activity appears to sink back into complete inconscience and we speak of this state as deep dreamless sleep;
440
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There is in it an inner mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the concealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a Construction of the first inconscient World-Energy or a natural developed functioning of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the outside universal Nature, - and even in this Construction, these functionings, these reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a considerable influence. There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact with the universal unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch, hearing; but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being's direct consciousness of things than its informants: the subliminal is not dependent on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to its direct experience of objects; they do not, so much as in waking mind, convey forms of objects for the mind's documentation or as the starting-point or basis for an indirect constructive experience. The subliminal has the right of entry into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Superconscience.
It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities
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consciousness are a record or transcript of physical things and of our contacts with the physical universe. No doubt, all the three states can be classed as parts of an illusion, our experiences of them can be ranked together as Constructions of an illusory consciousness, our waking state no less illusory than our dream state or sleep state, since the only true truth or real reality is the incommunicable Self or One-Existence (Atman, Adwaita) which is the fourth state of the Self described by the Vedanta. But it is equally possible to regard and rank them together as three different orders of one Reality or as three states of consciousness in which is embodied our contact with three different grades of self-experience and world-experience.
If this is a true account of dream experience, dreams can no longer be classed as a mere unreal figure of unreal things temporarily imposed upon our half-unconsciousness as a reality; the analogy therefore fails even as an illustrative support for the theory of the cosmic Illusion. It may be said, however, that our dreams are not themselves realities but only a transcript of reality, a system of symbol-images, and our waking experience of the universe is similarly not a reality but only a transcript of reality, a series or collection of symbol-images. It is quite true that primarily we see the physical universe only through a system of images impressed or imposed on our senses and so far the contention is justified; it may also be admitted that in a certain sense and from one view-point our experiences and activities can be considered as symbols of a truth which our lives are trying to express but at present only with a partial success and an imperfect coherence. If that were all, life might be described as a dream-experience of self and things in the consciousness of the Infinite. But although our primary evidence of the objects of the universe consists of a structure of sense images, these are completed, validated, set in order by an automatic intuition in the consciousness which immediately relates the image with the thing imaged and gets the tangible experience of the object, so that we are not merely regarding or reading a translation or sense-transcript of the reality but looking through the senseimage to the reality. This adequacy is amplified too by the action
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see an image of things where those things are not, it is an erroneous Construction of the senses, a visual hallucination; when we take for an objective fact a thing which is a subjective structure of the mind, a constructive mental error or an objectivised imagination or a misplaced mental image, it is a mental hallucination.
An example of the first is the mirage, an example of the second is the classic instance of a rope taken for a snake. In passing we may note that there are many things called hallucinations which are not really that but symbol images sent up from the subliminal or experiences in which the subliminal consciousness or sense comes to the surface and puts us into contact with supraphysical realities; thus the cosmic consciousness which is our entry by a breaking down of our mental limitations into the sense of a vast reality, has been classed, even in admitting it, as a hallucination.
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But here the world is a non-existent form of things, an illusory Construction imposed on the bare Reality, on the sole Existent which is for ever empty of things and formless: there would be a true analogy only if our vision constructed in the void air of the desert a figure of things that exist nowhere, or else if it imposed on a bare ground both rope and snake and other figures that equally existed nowhere.
It is clear that in this analogy two quite different kinds of illusion not illustrative of each other are mistakenly put together as if they were identical in nature. All mental or sense hallucinations are really misrepresentations or misplacements or impossible combinations or false developments of things that are in themselves existent or possible or in some way within or allied to the province of the real. All mental errors and illusions are the result of an ignorance which miscombines its data or proceeds falsely upon a previous or present or possible content of knowledge. But the cosmic Illusion has no basis of actuality, it is an original and all-originating illusion; it imposes names, figures, happenings that are pure inventions on a Reality in which there never were and never will be any happenings, names or figures.
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But it has not the omniscience of an infinite Consciousness; it is limited in knowledge and has to supplement its restricted knowledge by imagination and discovery. It does not, like the infinite Consciousness, manifest the known, it has to discover the unknown; it seizes the possibilities of the Infinite, not as results or variations of forms of a latent Truth, but as Constructions or creations, figments of its own boundless imagination. It has not the omnipotence of an infinite conscious Energy; it can only realise or actualise what the cosmic Energy will accept from it or what it has the strength to impose or introduce into the sum of things because the secret Divinity, superconscient or subliminal, which uses it intends that that should be expressed in Nature. Its limitation of Knowledge constitutes by incompleteness, but also by openness to error, an Ignorance. In dealing with actualities it may misobserve, misuse, miscreate; in dealing with possibilities it may miscompose, miscombine, misapply, misplace; in its dealings with truths revealed to it it may deform, misrepresent, disharmonise. It may also make Constructions of its own which have no correspondence with the things of actual existence, no potentiality of realisation, no support from the truth behind them; but still these Constructions start from an illegitimate extension of actualities, catch at unpermitted possibilities, or turn truths to an application which is not applicable. Mind creates, but it is not an original creator, not omniscient or omnipotent, not even an always efficient demiurge. Maya, the Illusive Power, on the contrary, must be an original creator, for it creates all things out of nothing - unless we suppose that it creates out of the substance of the Reality, but then the things it creates must be in some way real; it has a perfect knowledge of what it wishes to create, a perfect power to create whatever it chooses, omniscient and omnipotent though only over its own illusions, harmonising them and linking them together with a magical sureness and sovereign energy, absolutely effective in imposing its own formations or figments passed off as truths, possibilities, actualities on the creature intelligence.
Our mind works best and with a firm confidence when it
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of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind's way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite. But, because it cannot do this with knowledge, it makes experimental Constructions of truth and possibility and a yet unrealised actuality: as its power of receiving inspirations of Truth is limited, it imagines, hypothetises, questions whether this or that may not be truths; as its force to summon real potentials is narrow and restricted, it erects possibilities which it hopes to actualise or wishes it could actualise; as its power to actualise is cramped and confined by the material world's oppositions, it figures subjective actualisations to satisfy its will of creation and delight of self-presentation. But it is to be noted that through the imagination it does receive a figure of truth, does summon possibilities which are afterwards realised, does often by its imagination exercise an effective pressure on the world's actualities. Imaginations that persist in the human mind, like the idea of travel in the air, end often by self-fulfilment; individual thought-formations can actualise themselves if there is sufficient strength in the formation or in the mind that forms it. Imaginations can create their own potentiality, especially if they are supported in the collective mind, and may in the long run draw on themselves the sanction of the cosmic Will. In fact all imaginations represent possibilities: some are able one day to actualise in some form, perhaps a very different form of actuality; more are condemned to sterility because they do not enter into the figure or scheme of the present creation, do not come within the permitted potentiality of the individual or do not accord with the collective or the generic principle or are alien to the nature or destiny of the containing world-existence.
Thus the mind's imaginations are not purely and radically illusory: they proceed on the basis of its experience of actualities or at least set out from that, are variations upon actuality, or they figure the "may-be"s or "might-be"s of the Infinite, what could be if other truths had manifested, if existing potentials had been otherwise arranged or other possibilities than those already admitted became potential. Moreover, through
2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
consciousness: the individual has only a relative value and a temporary reality. But if Matter turns out to be itself unreal or derivative and simply a phenomenon of Energy, as seems now to be the probability, then Energy remains as the sole Reality; the percipient, his perception, the perceived object are only phenomena of Energy. But an Energy without a Being or Existence possessing it or a Consciousness supplying it, an Energy working originally in the void, - for the material field in which we see it at work is itself a creation, - looks itself very much like a mental Construction, an unreality: or it might be a temporary inexplicable outbreak of motion which might cease at any time to create phenomena; the Void of the Infinite alone would be enduring and real. The Buddhist theory of the percipient and the perception and the percept as a Construction of Karma, the process of some cosmic fact of Action, gave room to such a conclusion; for it led logically to the affirmation of the NonBeing, Void or Nihil. It is possible indeed that what is at work is not an Energy, but a Consciousness; as Matter reduces itself to
Energy seizable by us not in itself but in its results and workings, so Energy could be reduced to action of a Consciousness seizable by us not in itself but in its results and workings. But if this
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Eternal's self-awareness; it would be to impose the limitations of our own consciousness on the eternal Reality. An Ignorance which occurs or intervenes in the course of manifestation as a result of a subordinate action of Consciousness and as part of a divine cosmic plan and its evolutionary meaning, is one thing and is logically conceivable; a meaningless ignorance or illusion eternal in the original consciousness of the Reality is another thing and not easily conceivable; it appears as a violent mental Construction which has no likelihood of validity in the truth of the Absolute. The dual consciousness of Brahman must be in no way an ignorance, but a self-awareness coexistent with a voluntary will to erect a universe of illusions which are held in a frontal perception aware at once of self and the illusory world, so that there is no delusion, no feeling of its reality. The delusion takes place only in the illusory world itself, and the Self or
Brahman in the world either enjoys with a free participation or witnesses, itself separate and intangible, the play which lays its magical spell only upon the Nature-mind created for her action by Maya. But this would seem to signify that the Eternal, not content with its pure absolute existence, has the need to create, to occupy itself throughout Time with a drama of names and forms and happenings; it needs, being sole, to see itself as many, being peace and bliss and self-knowledge to observe an experience or representation of mingled knowledge and ignorance, delight and suffering, unreal existence and escape from unreal existence. For the escape is for the individual being constructed by Maya; the
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A phenomenal truth of multiplicity of the One is annulled by setting up a conceptual falsehood in the One creating an unreal multiplicity. The One for ever self-aware of its pure existence entertains a perpetual imagination or illusory Construction of itself as an infinite multiplicity of ignorant and suffering beings unaware of self who have to wake one by one to awareness of self and cease individually to be.
In face of this solution of a perplexity by a new perplexity we begin to suspect that our original premiss must have been somewhere incomplete, - not an error, but only a first statement and indispensable foundation. We begin to envisage the Reality as an eternal oneness, status, immutable essence of pure existence supporting an eternal dynamis, motion, infinite multiplicity and diversity of itself. The immutable status of oneness brings out of itself the dynamis, motion and multiplicity, - the dynamis, motion and multiplicity not abrogating but bringing into relief the eternal and infinite oneness. If the consciousness of Brahman can be dual in status or action or even manifold, there seems to be no reason why Brahman should be incapable of a dual status or a manifold real self-experience of its being. The cosmic consciousness would then be, not a creative Illusion, but an experience of some truth of the Absolute. This explanation, if
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It is difficult to see why, once any reality is conceded to ourselves and to the universe, it should not be a true reality within its limits. It may be admitted that the manifestation must be on its surface a more restricted reality than the Manifested; our universe is, we may say, one of the rhythms of Brahman and not, except in its essential being, the whole reality: but that is not a sufficient reason for it to be set aside as unreal. It is no doubt so felt by mind withdrawing from itself and its structures: but this is only because the mind is an instrument of Ignorance and, when it withdraws from its Constructions, from its ignorant and imperfect picture of the universe, it is impelled to regard them as nothing more than its own fictions and formations, unfounded, unreal; the gulf between its ignorance and the supreme Truth and Knowledge disables it from discovering the true connections of the transcendent Reality and the cosmic Reality. In a higher status of consciousness the difficulty disappears, the connection
Reality and the Cosmic Illusion
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take it in the sense that reality depends on perpetual duration or that the timeless only is true, is an ideative distinction, a mental Construction; it is not binding on a substantial and integral experience. Time is not necessarily cancelled out of existence by timeless Eternity; their relation is only verbally a relation of contradiction; in fact, it is more likely to be a relation of dependence.
Similarly, the reasoning which cancels the dynamics of the
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Something that is behind the world shown to us by our mind and senses. Our cognitive action of thought, our action of life and being seem to overlay the truth, the reality; they grasp the finite but not the infinite, they deal with the temporal and not the eternal Real. It is reasoned that this is so because all action, all creation, all determining perception limits; it does not embrace or grasp the Reality, and its Constructions disappear when we enter into the indivisible and indeterminable consciousness of the Real: these Constructions are unreal in eternity, however real they may seem or be in Time. Action leads to ignorance, to the created and finite; kinesis and creation are a contradiction of the immutable Reality, the pure uncreated Existence. But this reasoning is not wholly valid because it is looking at perception and action only as they are in our mental cognition of the world and its movement; but that is the experience of our surface being regarding things from its shifting motion in Time, a regard itself superficial, fragmentary and delimited, not total, not plunging into the inner sense of things. In fact we find that action need not bind or limit, if we get out of this moment-cognition into a status of cognition of the eternal proper to the true consciousness.
Action does not bind or limit the liberated man; action does not bind or limit the Eternal: but we can go farther and say that action does not bind or limit our own true being at all. Action has no such effect on the spiritual Person or Purusha or on the psychic entity within us, it binds or limits only the surface constructed personality. This personality is a temporary expression of our self-being, a changing form of it, empowered to exist by it, dependent on it for substance and endurance, - temporary, but not unreal. Our thought and action are means for this expression of ourselves and, as the expression is incomplete and evolutive, as it is a development of our natural being in Time, thought
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Reason and finding out through spiritual experience where they meet and become one and what is the spiritual reality of their apparent divergence. In fact, in the Brahman-consciousness the divergences cannot exist, they must by our passage into it converge into unity; the divisions of the intellectual reason may correspond to a reality, but it must be then the reality of a manifold Oneness. The Buddha applied his penetrating rational intellect supported by an intuitive vision to the world as our mind and sense see it and discovered the principle of its Construction and the way of release from all Constructions, but he refused to go farther. Shankara took the farther step and regarded the suprarational Truth, which Buddha kept behind the veil as realisable by cancellation of the Constructions of consciousness but
Reality and the Cosmic Illusion
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Brahman as all these beings or as the self of all these beings, the One in all, all in the One has no secure foundation, since it reposes in one of its terms on an illusion, on a Construction of
Maya. That term, the cosmic term, has to crumble, for all these beings which we saw as the Brahman were illusions; then what is our assurance of our experience of the other term, the pure
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Self and of all existence. The Buddhists took this last step and refused reality to the Self on the ground that it was as much as the rest a Construction of the mind; they cut not only God but the eternal Self and impersonal Brahman out of the picture.
An uncompromising theory of Illusion solves no problem of our existence; it only cuts the problem out for the individual by showing him a way of exit: in its extreme form and effect, our being and its action become null and without sanction, its experience, aspiration, endeavour lose their significance; all, the one incommunicable relationless Truth excepted and the turning away to it, become equated with illusion of being, are part of a universal Illusion and themselves illusions. God and ourselves and the universe become myths of Maya; for God is only a reflection of Brahman in Maya, ourselves are only a reflection of Brahman in illusory individuality, the world is only an imposition on the Brahman's incommunicable self-existence.
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Illusionism is in occupation of a very solid ground; for, although it is in itself no more than a mental formulation, the experience it formulates into a philosophy accompanies a most powerful and apparently final spiritual realisation. It comes upon us with a great force of awakening to reality when the thought is stilled, when the mind withdraws from its Constructions, when we pass into a pure selfhood void of all sense of individuality, empty of all cosmic contents: if the spiritualised mind then looks at individual and cosmos, they may well seem to it to be an illusion, a scheme of names and figures and movements falsely imposed on the sole reality of the Self-Existent. Or even the sense of self becomes inadequate; both knowledge and ignorance disappear into sheer Consciousness and consciousness is plunged into a trance of pure superconscient existence. Or even existence ends by becoming too limiting a name for that which abides solely for ever; there is only a timeless Eternal, a spaceless Infinite, the utterness of the Absolute, a nameless Peace, an overwhelming single objectless Ecstasy. There can certainly be no doubt of the validity - complete within itself - of this experience; there can be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convincingness
- ekatma-pratyaya-saram - with which this realisation seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions; some of them - and not this alone - are so close to the Divine and the Absolute, so penetrated with the reality of Its presence or with the ineffable peace and power of the liberation from all that is less than It, that they carry with them this overwhelming sense of finality complete and decisive. There are a hundred ways of approaching the Supreme Reality and, as is the nature of the way taken, so will be the nature of the ultimate experience by which one passes into That which is ineffable, That of which no report can be given to the mind or expressed by any utterance. All these definitive culminations may be regarded as penultimates of the one Ultimate; they are steps by which the soul crosses the limits of Mind into the
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- any reason for maintaining them in continuous or recurrent existence through all Time: if it so maintains them, it is because they are based on the realities of the spirit. But, necessarily, when thus integrally seen, the phenomenal reality would take on another appearance than when it is viewed by the reason and sense of the finite being; it would have another and deeper reality, another and greater significance, another and more subtle and complex process of its movements of existence. The canons of reality and all the forms of thought created by the finite reason and sense would appear to the greater consciousness as partial Constructions with an element of truth in them and an element of error; these Constructions might therefore be described as at once real and unreal, but the phenomenal world itself would not become either unreal or unreal-real by that fact: it would put on another reality of a spiritual character; the finite would reveal itself as a power, a movement, a process of the Infinite.
An original and ultimate consciousness would be a consciousness of the Infinite and necessarily unitarian in its view of diversity, integral, all-accepting, all-embracing, all-discriminating because all-determining, an indivisible whole-vision. It would see the essence of things and regard all forms and movements as phenomenon and consequence of the essential Reality, motions and formations of its power of being. It is held by the reason that truth must be empty of any conflict of contradictions: if so, since the phenomenal universe is or seems to be the contrary of the essential Brahman it must be unreal; since individual being is the contrary of both transcendence and universality, it must be unreal. But what appear as contradictions to a reason based on the finite may not be contradictions to a vision or a larger reason based on the infinite. What our mind sees as contraries may be to the infinite consciousness not contraries but complementaries: essence and phenomenon of the essence are complementary to each other, not contradictory, - the phenomenon manifests the essence; the finite is a circumstance and not a contradiction of the infinite; the individual is a self-expression of the universal and the transcendent, - it is not a contradiction or something quite other than it, it is the universal concentrated and selective, it is
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then a status or degree of consciousness in which its acts and formations are wholly or partly unreal? If this unreality cannot be attri buted to an original cosmic Illusion, to Maya, there is still in the universe itself a power of illusion of Ignorance. It is in the power of the Mind to conceive things that are not real, it is in its power even to create things that are not real or not wholly real; its very view of itself and universe is a Construction that is not wholly real or wholly unreal. Where does this element of unreality begin and where does it stop, and what is its cause and what ensues on the removal of both the cause and the consequence? Even if all cosmic existence is not in itself unreal, cannot that description be applied to the world of Ignorance in which we live, this world of constant change and birth and death and frustration and suffering, and does not the removal of the Ignorance abolish for us the reality of the world which it creates, or is not a departure out of it the natural and only issue? This would be valid, if our ignorance were a pure ignorance without any element of truth or knowledge in it. But in fact our consciousness is a mixture of the true and the false; its acts and creations are not a pure invention, a baseless structure. The structure it builds, its form of things or form of the universe, is not a mixture of reality and the unreal so much as a half comprehension, a half expression of the real, and, since all consciousness is force and therefore potentially creative, our ignorance has the result of wrong creation, wrong manifestation, wrong action or misconceived and misdirected energy of the being. All world-existence is manifestation, but our ignorance is the agent of a partial, limited and ignorant manifestation, - in part an expression but in part also a disguise of the original being, consciousness and delight of existence. If this state of things is permanent and unalterable, if our world must always move in this circle, if some Ignorance is the cause of all things and all action here and not a condition and circumstance, then indeed the cessation of individual ignorance could only come by an escape of the individual from world-being, and a cessation of the cosmic ignorance would be the destruction of world-being.
But if this world has at its root an evolutionary principle, if
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In a manifestation in Time new realities can emerge, truths of being not yet realised can put forth their possibilities and become actual in the physical and terrestrial existence; other truths of being there may be that are supraphysical and belong to another domain of manifestation, not realised here but still real. Even what is nowhere actual in any universe, may be a truth of being, a potential of being, and cannot, because it is not yet expressed in form of existence, be taxed as unreal. But our mind or this part of it still insists on its pragmatic habit or conception of the real which admits only the factual and actual as true and is prone to regard all else as unreal. There is then for this mind an unreality which is of a purely pragmatic nature: it consists in the formulation of things which are not necessarily unreal in themselves but are not realised or perhaps cannot be realised by ourselves or in present circumstances or in our actual world of being; this is not a true unreality, it is not an unreal but an unrealised, not an unreal of being but only an unreal of present or known fact. There is, again, an unreality which is conceptual and perceptive and is caused by an erroneous conception and perception of the real: this too is not or need not be an unreality of being, it is only a false Construction of consciousness due to limitation by Ignorance. These and other secondary movements of our ignorance are not the heart of the problem, for that turns
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2.07 - On Congress and Politics, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: It seems only a mental Construction without any idea of the reality. In this way sometimes people injure the very cause for which they stand. I should be on good terms with my neighbour, but that does not mean that I should allow him to come into my house and occupy it.
Disciple: He advises the Indians to extend the hand of friendship and help Europe in its forlorn condition.
2.07 - The Knowledge and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
8 Buddha refused to consider the metaphysical problem; the process by which our unreal individuality is constructed and a world of suffering maintained in existence and the method of escape from it is all that is of importance. Karma is a fact; the Construction of objects, of an individuality not truly existent is the cause of suffering: to get rid of
Karma, individuality and suffering must be our one objective; by that elimination we shall pass into whatever may be free from these things, permanent, real: the way of liberation alone matters.
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of the nature of Mind, Illusion or Ignorance might conceivably be regarded as the source of our natural existence: for limitation of knowledge and obscuration of knowledge by Mind-nature create error and illusion, illusions created by Mind-action are among the first facts of our consciousness. It might therefore be conceivably held that Mind is the matrix of an Ignorance which makes us create or represent to ourselves a false world, a world that is nothing more than a subjective Construction of the consciousness. Or else Mind might be the matrix in which some original Illusion or Ignorance, Maya or Avidya, cast the seed of a false impermanent universe; Mind would still be the mother, - a "barren mother" since the child would be unreal, - and Maya or Avidya could be looked at as a sort of grandmo ther of the universe; for Mind itself would be a production or reproduction of Maya. But it is difficult to discern the physiognomy of this obscure and enigmatic ancestress; for we have then to impose a cosmic imagination or an illusion-consciousness on the eternal
Reality; Brahman the Reality must itself either be or have or support a constructing Mind or some constructive consciousness greater than Mind but of an analogous nature, must be by its activity or its sanction the creator and even perhaps in some sort by participation a victim, like Mind, of its own illusion and error. It would not be less perplexing if Mind were simply a medium or mirror in which there falls the reflection of an original illusion or a false image or shadow of the Reality. For the origin of this medium of reflection would be inexplicable and the origin also of the false image cast upon it would be inexplicable. An indeterminable Brahman could only be reflected as something indeterminable, not as a manifold universe. Or if it be the inequality of the reflecting medium, its nature as of rippling and restless water that creates broken images of the
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world might be a reality and only the mind's Construction of it or picture of it erroneous or imperfect. But this would imply that there is a Knowledge, other than our mental thought and perception which is only an attempt at knowing, a true cognition which is aware of the Reality and aware also in it of the truth of a real universe.
For if we found that the highest Reality and an ignorant
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To know, we have always to dissolve the rigid Constructions of the ignorant and self-willed intellect and look freely and flexibly at the facts of existence. Its fundamental fact is consciousness which is power, and we actually see that this power has three ways of operating. First, we find that there is a consciousness behind all, embracing all, within all, which is eternally, universally, absolutely aware of itself whether in unity or multiplicity or in both simultaneously or beyond both in its sheer absolute.
This is the plenitude of the supreme divine self-knowledge; it is also the plenitude of the divine all-knowledge. Next, at the other pole of things, we see this consciousness dwelling upon apparent oppositions in itself, and the most extreme antinomy of all reaches its acme in what seems to us to be a complete nescience of itself, an effective, dynamic, creative Inconscience, though we know that this is merely a surface appearance and that the divine Knowledge works with a sovereign security and sureness within the operations of the Inconscient. Between these two oppositions and as a mediary term we see Consciousness working with a partial, limited self-awareness which is equally superficial, for behind it and acting through it is the divine AllKnowledge. Here in its intermediate status, it seems to be a standing compromise between the two opposites, between the supreme Consciousness and the Nescience, but may prove rather in a larger view of our data to be an incomplete emergence of the Knowledge to the surface. This compromise or imperfect emergence we call the Ignorance, from our own point of view, because ignorance is our own characteristic way of the soul's self-withholding of complete self-knowledge. The origin of these three poises of the power of consciousness and their exact relation is what we have, if possible, to discover.
2.09 - Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
God and Self a mental Construction or an effective hallucination.
The true relation has not been seized, because these two sides of existence must always appear discordant and unreconciled to our intelligence so long as there is only a partial knowledge.
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A mind with immeasurably wider and more subtle perceptions, a life-energy with a greater dynamism, a subtle-physical substance with a larger and finer receptivity are building out of themselves our surface evolution. A psychic entity is there behind these occult activities which is the true support of our individualisation; the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical, external ego is a superficial Construction of Nature. It is only when we have seen both our self and our nature as a whole, in the depths as well as on the surface, that we can acquire a true basis of knowledge.
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
To combine the inner development with the outer would be ideal. Science, for instance, steadies reason and gives a firm grounding to the physical mind. Art I mean the appreciation of beauty pure and simple, without the sensual grasping at the object trains up the aesthetic side of the mind. The true artist has always the pure love of beauty free and impersonal. Philosophy cultivates the pure thinking power. And politics and such other departments of mental work train up the dynamic mind. All these should be duly trained with the full knowledge that they have their limited utility. Philosophy tends to become mere mental gymnastics and preference for one's own ideas and mental Constructions. So also Reason becomes the tyrant and denies anything further. But if the training is given to these parts with an understanding of their limitations, then they may serve very usefully the object of this Yoga. As I say, they must all admit a higher working in them.
A disciple related the yogic experience of a student.
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But why this haste to know what would be the forms and lines of the Truth that has not yet come down into the physical? It is just the wrong way of proceeding. It would frustrate its own aim. Supposing you fix the form with your mind and say, "Such and such shall be the lines that the Higher Truth must take whatever it be." Now this form is your own mental Construction, and whatever higher Truth comes down you will try to force it into that limited form.
As a matter of fact, the Truth that is coming down is not mental, it is an infinite Truth. The form it would take would be an organisation of that infinite Truth. But if you bind it down to a mental formula and say, for instance, that it should be democracy or communism or socialism or anything of that sort you naturally limit the Truth.
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Sri Aurobindo: The reasonings and the fanciful Constructions of the mind cease; there remains only a play of intuitions.
Disciple: Does not reason remain at all?
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Disciple: As regards mental Constructions, are they always incorrect? May not they be inspired by the Truth?
Sri Aurobindo: Mind may build on its intuitions, but there is every likelihood of its committing mistakes. Mental transformation is a gradual process. First, the reasonings and Constructions are silenced. Then the mind becomes intuitivised. Then one feels that there is something above which is much more than intuition. Intuition goes downwards and the Higher Truth takes the place of intuition. At present, you find it difficult to understand how all reasonings and Constructions of the mind can cease. That can be understood when you know what is intuition.
Disciple: I understand that reasonings and Constructions are obstacles to the coming of the Truth.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, if you go on eternally with them the Truth will not come.
2.0 - Reincarnation and Karma, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
In such observations as the preceding, the presuppositions are supplied for following the human being beyond birth and death. Within the boundaries formed by birth and death the human being belongs to the three worlds, of corporality, of soul, and of spirit. The soul forms the link between body and spirit because it penetrates the third member of the body, the soul-body, with a capacity for sensation, and because it permeates the first member of the spirit, the spirit-self, as consciousness-soul. In this way it takes part and lot during life with the body as well as with the spirit. This comes to expression in its whole existence. It will depend on the Construction of the soul-body how the sentient-soul can unfold its capabilities. And, on the other hand, it will depend on the life of the consciousness-soul to what extent the spirit-self can develop itself in it. The more highly developed the soul-body is, the more complete is the intercourse which the sentient-
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2.0 - THE ANTICHRIST, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
temporarily by this movement, formed the Construction of piles upon
which, alone, the Jewish people was able to subsist in the midst of the
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to attack this Construction was tantamount to attacking the most
profound popular instinct, the most tenacious national will to live
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scale, was the beginning, its Construction was calculated _to prove_
its worth by millenniums,--unto this day nothing has ever again been
2.1.01 - God The One Reality, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The form of that which is in Time is or appears to be evanescent, but the self, the substance, the being that takes shape in that form is eternal and is one self, one substance, one being with all that is, all that was, all that shall be. But even the form is in itself eternal and not temporal, but it exists for ever in possibility, in power, in consciousness in the Eternal. Form is manifested and withdrawn from manifestation; it may be manifested by immediate apparition or it may be manifested by Construction and withdrawn from manifestation by destruction or disaggregation, but in either case it exists beforeh and in the consciousness and being of the Eternal. If it did not so preexist in power and possibility, it could not be created in actuality. For the actual proceeds from the possible and the possible is always a possibility of the truth of the Eternal.
God: The One Reality
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The Supreme is knowable to itself but unknowable to mind, inexpressible by words, because mind can grasp and words coined by the mind can express only limited, relative and divided things. Mind gets only misleading inadequate indefinite impressions or too definite reflective ideas of things too much beyond itself. Even here in its own field it grasps not things in themselves, but processes and phenomena, significant aspects, Constructions and figures. But the Supreme is to its own absolute consciousness for ever self-known and self-aware, as also to supramental gnosis it is intimately known and knowable.
This Infinite and Eternal is the supreme Self of all, the supreme Source, Spirit and Person of all, the supreme Lord of all; there is nothing beyond it, nothing outside it. A million universes for ever persist or for ever recur because they are substantial expressions and manifestations of the supreme Infinite and Eternal.
2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Journeyman's work he can do, for man is essentially a journeyman. He is skilful in putting things [up], buildings, a job, a swindle. In pulling down he is perfect, a destroyer ne plus ultra. The world is full of his Constructions, but more pervasive is his destruction; but that leaves few traces. But still the great doers are few in number, the good doers are many, the poor doers are legion, the evil doers hardly less. All this shows that he is a transitional and evolving animal, the highly evolved are rare, the poorly evolved numerous, the ill-evolved a multitude.
Living is more difficult than doing; though it is universal, and ought to have become easy by practice, it is commonly ill done, almost universally botched or half worked out. Human society is a ramshackle affair; it is top-heavy, over-elaborate and opulent at the top, below a multitudinous level. When he tries to reform his world, he sets out to level everything down towards
2.10 - Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
idea of the object from all this evidence. Whatever is deficient in the interpretation of the image thus constructed is filled up by the intervention of the reason or the total understanding intelligence. If the first composite intuition were the result of a direct contact or if it summarised the action of a total intuitive mentality master of its perceptions, there would be no need for the intervention of the reason except as a discoverer or organiser of knowledge not conveyed by the sense and its suggestions: it is, on the contrary, an intuition working on an image, a sense document, an indirect evidence, not working upon a direct contact of consciousness with the object. But since the image or vibration is a defective and summary documentation and the intuition itself limited and communicated through an obscure medium, acting in a blind light, the accuracy of our intuitional interpretative Construction of the object is open to question or at least likely to be incomplete. Man has had perforce to develop his reason in order to make up for the deficiencies of his sense instrumentation, the fallibility of his physical mind's perceptions and the paucity of its interpretation of its data.
Our world-knowledge is therefore a difficult structure made up of the imperfect documentation of the sense image, an intuitional interpretation of it by perceptive mind, life-mind and sense-mind, and a supplementary filling up, correction, addition of supplementary knowledge, co-ordination, by the reason. Even so our knowledge of the world we live in is narrow and imperfect, our interpretations of its significances doubtful: imagination, speculation, reflection, impartial weighing and reasoning, inference, measurement, testing, a further correction and amplification of sense evidence by Science, - all this apparatus had to be called in to complete the incompleteness. After all that the result still remains a half-certain, half-dubious accumulation of acquired indirect knowledge, a mass of significant images and ideative representations, abstract thought counters, hypotheses, theories, generalisations, but also with all that a mass of doubts and a never-ending debate and inquiry. Power has come with knowledge, but our imperfection of knowledge leaves us without any idea of the true use of the power, even of the aim towards
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But since it has to live with this not-self, - for it belongs to it, depends upon it, is an inhabitant within it, - it must maintain some means of communication; it has too to make excursions out of its wall of ego and wall of self-restriction within the body in order to cater for those needs which the not-self can supply to it: it must learn to know in some way all that surrounds it so as to be able to master it and make it as far as possible a servant to the individual and collective human life and ego. The body provides our consciousness with the gates of the senses through which it can establish the necessary communication and means of observation and action upon the world, upon the not-self outside it; the mind uses these means and invents others that supplement them and it succeeds in establishing some Construction, some system of knowledge which serves its immediate purpose or its general will to master partially and use this huge alien environmental existence or deal with it where it cannot master it. But the knowledge it gains is objective; it is mainly a knowledge of the surface of things or of what is just below the surface, pragmatic, limited and insecure. Its defence against the invasion of the cosmic energy is equally insecure and partial: in spite of its notice of no entry without permission, it is subtly and invisibly invaded by the world, enveloped by the not-self and moulded by it; its thought, its will, its emotional and its life energy are penetrated by waves and currents of thought, will, passion, vital impacts, forces of all kinds from others and from universal Nature. Its wall of defence becomes a wall of obscuration which prevents it from knowing all this interaction; it knows only what comes through the gates of sense or through mental perceptions of which it cannot be sure or through what it can infer or build up from its gathered sense data; all the rest is to it a blank of nescience.
It is, then, this double wall of self-imprisonment, this self-fortification in the bounds of a surface ego, that is the cause of our limited knowledge or ignorance, and if this selfimprisonment were the whole character of our existence, the
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It should be noted, however, that owing to this complexity the action of the subliminal sense can be confusing or misleading, especially if it is interpreted by the outer mind to which the secret of its operations is unknown and its principles of sign Construction and symbolic figure-languages foreign; a greater inner power of intuition, tact, discrimination is needed to judge and interpret rightly its images and experiences. It is still the fact that they add immensely to our possible scope of knowledge and widen the narrow limits in which our sense-bound outer physical consciousness is circumscribed and imprisoned.
But more important is the power of the subliminal to enter into a direct contact of consciousness with other consciousness or with objects, to act without other instrumentation, by an essential sense inherent in its own substance, by a direct mental vision, by a direct feeling of things, even by a close envelopment and intimate penetration and a return with the contents of what is enveloped or penetrated, by a direct intimation or impact on the substance of mind itself, not through outward signs or figures, - a revealing intimation or a self-communicating impact of thoughts, feelings, forces. It is by these means that the inner being achieves an immediate, intimate and accurate spontaneous knowledge of persons, of objects, of the occult and to us intangible energies of world-Nature that surround us and impinge upon our own personality, physicality, mindforce and life-force. In our surface mentality we are sometimes aware of a consciousness that can feel or know the thoughts and inner reactions of others or become aware of objects or happenings without any observable sense-intervention or otherwise exercise powers supernormal to our ordinary capacity; but these capacities are occasional, rudimentary, vague. Their possession is proper to our concealed subliminal self and, when they emerge, it is by a coming to the surface of its powers or operations. These emergent operations of the subliminal being or some of them are now fragmentarily studied under the name of psychic phenomena, - although they have ordinarily nothing to do with the psyche, the soul, the inmost entity in us, but only with the inner mind, the inner vital, the subtle-physical parts
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We can acquire a general knowledge of the human mind and the human body and apply it to them with the aid of the many constant and habitual outer signs of the human inner movements with which we are familiar; these summary judgments can be farther eked out by our experience of personal character and habits, by instinctive application of what self-knowledge we have to our understanding and judgment of others, by inference from speech and conduct, by insight of observation and insight of sympathy. But the results are always incomplete and very frequently deceptive: our inferences are as often as not erroneous Constructions, our interpretation of the outward signs a mistaken guess-work, our application of general knowledge or our self-knowledge baffled by elusive factors of personal difference, our very insight uncertain and unreliable. Human beings therefore live as strangers to each other, at best tied by a very partial sympathy and mutual experience; we do not know enough, do not know as well as we know ourselves - and that itself is little - even those nearest to us. But in the subliminal inner consciousness it is possible to become directly aware of the thoughts and feelings around us, to feel their impact, to
558
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true knowledge. Its main character is a knowledge by the direct contact of consciousness with its object or of consciousness with other consciousness; but in the end we discover that this power is an outcome of a secret knowledge by identity, a translation of it into a separative awareness of things. For as in the indirect contact proper to our normal consciousness and surface cognition it is the meeting or friction of the living being with the existence outside it that awakens the spark of conscious knowledge, so here it is some contact that sets in action a pre-existent secret knowledge and brings it to the surface. For consciousness is one in the subject and the object, and in the contact of existence with existence this identity brings to light or awakens in the self the dormant knowledge of this other self outside it. But while this pre-existent knowledge comes up in the surface mind as a knowledge acquired, it arises in the subliminal as a thing seen, caught from within, remembered as it were, or, when it is fully intuitive, self-evident to the inner awareness; or it is taken in from the object contacted but with an immediate response as to something intimately recognisable. In the surface consciousness knowledge represents itself as a truth seen from outside, thrown on us from the object, or as a response to its touch on the sense, a perceptive reproduction of its objective actuality. Our surface mind is obliged to give to itself this account of its knowledge, because the wall between itself and the outside world is pierced by the gates of sense and it can catch through these gates the surface of outward objects though not what is within them, but there is no such ready-made opening between itself and its own inner being: since it is unable to see what is within its deeper self or observe the process of the knowledge coming from within, it has no choice but to accept what it does see, the external object, as the cause of its knowledge. Thus all our mental knowing of things represents itself to us as objective, a truth imposed on us from outside; our knowledge is a reflection or responsive Construction reproducing in us a figure or picture or a mental scheme of something that is not in our own being. In fact, it is a hidden deeper response to the contact, a response coming from within that throws up from there an inner knowledge of the
Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge
2.13 - Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Therefore in his superficial consciousness man is to himself dynamically, practically, the man of the moment, not the man of the past who once was but is no longer in existence, nor the man of the future who is not yet in being; it is by memory that he links himself with the one, by anticipation with the other: a continuous ego-sense runs through the three times, but this is a centralising mental Construction, not an essential or an extended
Exclusive Concentration and the Ignorance
2.14 - The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These powers, beings or forces are active to impose their adverse Constructions upon terrestrial creatures; eager to maintain their reign in the manifestation, they oppose the increase of light and truth and good and, still more, are antagonistic to the progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness and divine existence. It is this feature of existence that we see figured in the tradition of the
The Origin of Falsehood and Evil
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The duality begins with conscious life and emerges fully with the development of mind in life; the vital mind, the mind of desire and sensation, is the creator of the sense of evil and of the fact of evil. Moreover, in animal life, the fact of evil is there, the evil of suffering and the sense of suffering, the evil of violence and cruelty and strife and deception, but the sense of moral evil is absent; in animal life there is no duality of sin or virtue, all action is neutral and permissible for the preservation of life and its maintenance and for the satisfaction of the life-instincts. The sensational values of good and evil are inherent in the form of pain and pleasure, vital satisfaction and vital frustration, but the mental idea, the moral response of the mind to these values are a creation of the human being. It does not follow, as might be hastily inferred, that they are unrealities, mental Constructions only, and that the only true way to receive the activities of Nature is either a neutral indifference or an equal acceptance or, intellectually, an admission of all that she may do as a divine or a natural law in which everything is impartially admissible. That is indeed one side of the truth: there is an infrarational truth of Life and Matter which is impartial and neutral and admits all things as facts of Nature and serviceable for the creation, preservation or destruction of life, three necessary movements of the universal Energy which are all connectedly indispensable and, each in its own place, of equal value. There is too a truth of the detached reason which can look on all that is thus admitted by Nature as serviceable to her processes in life and matter and observe everything that is with an unmoved neutral impartiality and acceptance; this is a philosophic and scientific reason that witnesses and seeks to understand but considers it futile to judge
The Origin of Falsehood and Evil
--
This separated life-form has also to affirm itself, supported only by a limited principle of association, against an outside world which is, if not hostile to its existence, yet full of dangers and on which it has to impose itself, conquer life-room, arrive at expression and propagation, if it wishes to survive. The result of an emergence of consciousness in these conditions is the growth of a self-affirming vital and physical individual, a Construction of Nature of life and matter with a concealed psychic or spiritual true individual behind it for which Nature is creating this outward means of expression. As mentality increases, this vital and material individual takes the more developed form of a constantly self-affirming mental, vital and physical ego. Our surface consciousness and type of existence, our natural being, has developed its present character under the compulsion of these two initial and basic facts of the evolutionary emergence.
In its first appearance consciousness has the semblance of a miracle, a power alien to Matter that manifests unaccountably in a world of inconscient Nature and grows slowly and with difficulty. Knowledge is acquired, created out of nothing as it were, learned, increased, accumulated by an ephemeral ignorant creature in whom at birth it is entirely absent or present only, not as knowledge, but in the form of an inherited capacity proper to the stage of development of this slowly learning ignorance.
--
individuality with a personal drive of mind-tendency, a mental temperament, a mind formation of its own. This surface mental individuality is ego-centric; it looks at the world and things and happenings from its own standpoint and sees them not as they are but as they affect itself: in observing things it gives them the turn suitable to its own tendency and temperament, selects or rejects, arranges truth according to its own mental preference and convenience; observation, judgment, reason are all determined or affected by this mind-personality and assimilated to the needs of the individuality and the ego. Even when the mind aims most at a pure impersonality of truth and reason, a sheer impersonality is impossible to it; even the most trained, severe and vigilant intellect fails to observe the twists and turns it gives to truth in the reception of fact and idea and the Construction of its mental knowledge. Here we have an almost inexhaustible source of distortion of truth, a cause of falsification, an unconscious or half-conscious will to error, an acceptance of ideas or facts not by a clear perception of the true and the false, but by preference, personal suitability, temperamental choice, prejudgment. Here is a fruitful seed-plot for the growth of falsehood or a gate or many gates through which it can enter by stealth or by an usurping but acceptable violence. Truth too can enter in and take up its dwelling, not by its own right, but at the mind's pleasure.
In the terms of the Sankhya psychology we can distinguish three types of mental individuality, - that which is governed by the principle of obscurity and inertia, first-born of the Inconscience, tamasic; that which is governed by a force of passion and activity, kinetic, rajasic; that which is cast in the mould of the sattwic principle of light, harmony, balance. The tamasic intelligence has its seat in the physical mind: it is inert to ideas,
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us evil and so to re-form our being, to reconstitute and shape ourselves into the image of an ideal, is a more profound ethical motive, because it comes nearer to the true issue; it rests on the sound idea that our life is a becoming and that there is something which we have to become and be. But the ideals constructed by the human mind are selective and relative; to shape our nature rigidly according to them is to limit ourselves and make a Construction where there should be growth into larger being. The true call upon us is the call of the Infinite and the Supreme; the self-affirmation and self-abnegation imposed on us by Nature are both movements towards that, and it is the right way of self-affirmation and self-negation taken together in place of the wrong, because ignorant, way of the ego and in place of the conflict between the yes and the no of Nature that we have to discover. If we do not discover that, either the push of life will be too strong for our narrow ideal of perfection, its instrumentation will break and it will fail to consummate and perpetuate itself, or at best a half result will be all that we shall obtain, or else the push away from life will present itself as the only remedy, the one way out of the otherwise invincible grasp of the Ignorance. This indeed is the way out usually indicated by religion; a divinely enjoined morality, a pursuit of piety, righteousness and virtue as laid down in a religious code of conduct, a law of God determined by some human inspiration, is put forward as a part of the means, the direction, by which we can tread the way that leads to the exit, the issue. But this exit leaves the problem where it was; it is only a way of escape for the personal being out of the unsolved perplexity of the cosmic existence. In ancient Indian spiritual thought there was a clearer perception of the difficulty; the practice of truth, virtue, right will and right doing was regarded as a necessity of the approach to spiritual realisation, but in the realisation itself the being arises to the greater consciousness of the Infinite and Eternal and shakes away from itself the burden of sin and virtue, for that belongs to the relativity and the Ignorance. Behind this larger truer perception lay the intuition that a relative good is a training imposed by World-Nature upon us so that we may pass through
650
2.14 - The Two Hundred and Eighty-Eight Sparks, #General Principles of Kabbalah, #Rabbi Moses Luzzatto, #Kabbalah
builds a new Construction.
Note that despite His concealment of His Counten
2.15 - Reality and the Integral Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But there are other conceptions of reality, other conceptions of the nature of knowledge which demand consideration. There is the view that all that exists is a subjective creation of Mind, a structure of Consciousness, and that the idea of an objective reality self-existent, independent of Consciousness, is an illusion, since we have and can have no evidence of any such independent self-existence of things. This way of seeing may lead to the affirmation of the creative Consciousness as the sole Reality or to the denial of all existence and the affirmation of Non-Existence or a nescient Zero as the sole Reality. For, in one view, the objects constructed by consciousness have no intrinsic reality, they are merely structures; even the consciousness that constructs them is itself only a flux of perceptions that assume an appearance of connection and continuity and create a sense of continuous time, but in reality these things have no stable basis as they are only an appearance of reality. This would mean that the reality is an eternal absence at once of all self-conscious existence and of all that constitutes movement of existence: Knowledge would mean a return to that from the appearance of the constructed universe. There would be a double and complete self-extinction, the disappearance of Purusha, the cessation or extinction of Prakriti; for the conscious Soul and Nature are the two terms of our being and comprehend all that we mean by existence, and the negation of both is the absolute Nirvana. What is real, then, must be either an Inconscience, in which this flux and these structures appear, or a Superconscience beyond all idea of self or existence. But this view of the universe is only true of the appearance of things when we regard our surface mind as the whole of consciousness; as a description of the working of that Mind it is valid: there, undoubtedly, all looks like a flux and a Construction by an impermanent Consciousness. But this cannot prevail as a whole account of existence if there is a greater and deeper self-knowledge and world-knowledge, a knowledge by identity, a consciousness to which that knowledge is normal and a Being of which that consciousness is the eternal self-awareness; for then the subjective and the objective can be real and intimate to that consciousness and being, both can be something of itself, sides of its identity, au thentic to its existence.
On the other hand, if the constructing Mind or Consciousness is real and the sole reality, then the universe of material beings and objects may have an existence, but it is purely subjective-structural, made by Consciousness out of itself, maintained by it, dissolving into it in their disappearance. For if there is nothing else, no essential Existence or Being supporting the creative Power, and there is not, either, a sustaining Void or Nihil, then this Consciousness which creates everything must itself have or be an existence or a substance; if it can make structures, they must be Constructions out of its own substance or forms of its own existence. A consciousness which is not that of an Existence or is not itself an existence, must be an unreality, a perceptive Force of a Void or in a Void raising there unreal structures made of nothing, - a proposition which is not easily acceptable unless all others prove to be invalid. It then becomes apparent that what we see as consciousness must be a Being or an Existence out of whose substance of consciousness all is created.
But if we thus get back to the biune or the dual reality of Being and Consciousness, we can either suppose with Vedanta one original Being or with Sankhya a plurality of beings to whom Consciousness or some Energy to which we attribute consciousness presents its structures. If a plurality of separate original beings alone is real, then, since each would be or create its own world in its own consciousness, the difficulty is to account for their relations in a single identical universe; there must be a one Consciousness or one Energy, - corresponding to the Sankhya idea of a single Prakriti which is the field of experience of many like Purushas, - in which they meet in an identical mind-constructed universe. This theory of things has the advantage of accounting for the multitude of souls and multitude of things and the oneness in diversity of their experience, while at the same time it gives a reality to the separate spiritual growth and destiny of the individual being. But if we can suppose a One Consciousness, or a One Energy, creating a multitude of figures of itself and accommodating in its world a plurality of beings, there is no difficulty in supposing a one original Being who supports or expresses himself in a plurality of beings, - souls or spiritual powers of his one-existence; it would follow also that all objects, all the figures of consciousness would be figures of the Being. It must then be asked whether this plurality and these figures are realities of the one Real Existence, or representative personalities and images only, or symbols or values created by Mind to represent It. This would depend largely on whether it is only Mind as we know it that is in action or a deeper and greater Consciousness, of which Mind is a surface instrument, executrix of its initiations, medium of its manifestations. If it is the former, the universe constructed and seen by Mind can only have a subjective or symbolic or representative reality: if the latter, then the universe and its natural beings and objects can be true realities of the One Existence, forms or powers of its being manifested by its force of being. Mind would be only an interpreter between the universal Reality and the manifestations of its creative Consciousness-Force, Shakti, Prakriti, Maya.
--
But this way of seeing things belongs to the action of the mind interpreting the relation between the Being and the external Becoming; it is valid as a dynamic mental representation corresponding to a certain truth of the manifestation, but subject to the proviso that these symbolic values of things do not make the things themselves mere significant counters, abstract symbols like mathematical formulae or other signs used by the mind for knowledge: for forms and happenings in the universe are realities significant of Reality; they are self-expressions of That, movements and powers of the Being. Each form is there because it is an expression of some power of That which inhabits it; each happening is a movement in the working out of some Truth of the Being in its dynamic process of manifestation. It is this significance that gives validity to the mind's interpretative knowledge, its subjective Construction of the universe; our mind is primarily a percipient and interpreter, secondarily and derivatively a creator. This indeed is the value of all mental subjectivity that it reflects in it some truth of the Being which exists independently of the reflection, - whether that independence presents itself as a physical objectivity or a supraphysical reality perceived by the mind but not perceptible by the physical senses.
Mind, then, is not the original constructor of the universe: it is an intermediate power valid for certain actualities of being; an agent, an intermediary, it actualises possibilities and has its share in the creation, but the real creatrix is a Consciousness, an Energy inherent in the transcendent and cosmic Spirit.
2.1.7.08 - Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I see no sufficient reason to alter the passage; certainly, I could not alter the line beginning Orphaned ; it is indispensable to the total idea and its omission would leave an unfilled gap. If I may not expect a complete alertness from the reader,but how without it can he grasp the subtleties of a mystical and symbolic poem?he surely ought to be alert enough when he reads the second line to see that it is somebody who is soliciting with a timid grace and it cant be somebody who is being gracefully solicited; also the line Orphaned etc. ought to suggest to him at once that it is some orphan who is soliciting and not the other way round: the delusion of the past participle passive ought to be dissipated long before he reaches the subject of the verb in the fourth line. The obscurity throughout, if there is any, is in the mind of the hasty reader and not in the grammatical Construction of the passage.
1946
--
I omitted any punctuation because it is a compressed Construction meant to signify refused to be struck from the starry list and quenched in dull despair etc.the quenching being the act of assent that would make effective the sentence of being struck from the starry list.
7 November 1936
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: What do you mean? Thoughts and suggestions come to me from every side and I don't refuse them. I accept them and see what they are. But what you call 'thinking', that I never do. Thinking in that sense ceased long ago since I had that experience with Lele. Thoughts, as I said, come to me from all sides and from above and the transmitting mind remains quiet, or it enlarges to receive them. True thoughts come in this way. You can't think out such thoughts, what Mother calls "mental Constructions".
Disciple: Was Arya written in that way?
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Work as part of Sadhana is all right, but work as part of spiritual creation we cannot take up unless the inner difficulties are overcome. It is not that we don't want to do it, but a spiritual creation cannot be done according to mental Constructions it must be left entirely to the Mother's intuition. Even then there are difficulties!
Disciple: What is the difference between peace and silence?
2.19 - Feb-May 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: He had always the habit of making mental Constructions and living in them. So, his valuation of the experience is not right.
Disciple: Why did he commit this mistake in the valuation?
2.19 - Knowledge of the Scientist and the Yogi, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Our aim is to change things. The scientist says that whatever is, is natural and cannot be changed at heart. But, really speaking, the laws of which he usually speaks are of his own mental making; and because he accepts Nature as it is as the very basis, things do not and cannot change for him in any complete sense. But, according to us, all this can be changed, because we know that there is something above, a divine truth seeking manifestation. There are no fixed laws here; even Science in its undogmatic moments recognises that the laws are mere mental Constructions. There are only cases, and if the mind could apply itself to all the circumstances it would find that no two cases are similar. Laws are for the minds convenience, but the process of the supramental manifestation is different, we may even say it is the reverse of the mind. In the supramental realisation, each thing will carry in itself a truth which will manifest at each instant without being bound by what has been or what will follow. That elaborate linking of the past with the present, which gives things in Nature such an air of unchangeable determinism is altogether the minds way of conceiving, and is no proof that all that exists is inevitable and cannot be otherwise.
The knowledge possessed by the Yogi is also an answer to the terrible theory that all that takes place is Gods direct working. For once you rise to the Supermind you immediately perceive that the world is false and distorted. The supramental truth has not at all found manifestation. How then can the world be a genuine expression of the Divine? Only when the Supermind is established and rules here, then alone the Supreme Will may be said to have au thentically manifested. At the same time, we must steer clear of the dangerous exaggeration of the sense of the falsehood of the world, which comes to those who have risen to the higher consciousness. What happened with Shankara and others like him was that they had a glimpse of the true consciousness, which threw the falsehood of this world into such sharp contrast that they declared the universe to be not only false but also a really non-existent illusion which should be entirely abandoned. We, on the other hand, see its falsehood, but realise also that it has to be replaced and not abandoned as an illusion. Only, the truth has got mistranslated, something has stepped in to pervert the divine reality, but the world is in fact meant to express it. And to express it is indeed our Yoga.
2.2.02 - Consciousness and the Inconscient, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is not an unborn eternal Matter from which it is born or of which it is the eternal force or in and on which it works, as was once supposed and as some still suppose. For that is now only a Construction of the speculative mind, an idea, a hypothesis, an arbitrary postulate for which there is no discoverable correspondent reality. Matter, as we now know it, is something that we
298
2.2.03 - The Divine Force in Work, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As for working, it depends on what you mean by the word. Desire often leads either to excess of effort, meaning often much labour and a limited fruit, with strain, exhaustion and in case of difficulty or failure despondence, disbelief or revolt; or else it leads to pulling down the force. That can be done, but except for the Yogically strong and experienced, it is not always safe, though it may be often very effective; not safe, first, because it may lead to violent reactions or bring down contrary or wrong or mixed forces which the sadhak is not experienced enough to distinguish from the true ones. Or else it may substitute the sadhaks own limited power of experience or mental and vital Constructions for the free gift and the true leading of the Divine. Cases differ, each has his own way of sadhana. But for you what I would recommend is constant openness, a quiet steady aspiration, no over-eagerness, a cheerful trust and patience.
***
2.20 - The Infancy and Maturity of ZO, Father and Mother, Israel The Ancient and Understanding, #General Principles of Kabbalah, #Rabbi Moses Luzzatto, #Kabbalah
first Construction containing the design for ZO was
fashioned in Mother at the time of gestation. As the
--- Overview of noun construction
The noun construction has 7 senses (first 5 from tagged texts)
1. (25) construction, building ::: (the act of constructing something; "during the construction we had to take a detour"; "his hobby was the building of boats")
2. (5) construction, grammatical construction, expression ::: (a group of words that form a constituent of a sentence and are considered as a single unit; "I concluded from his awkward constructions that he was a foreigner")
3. (2) construction, mental synthesis ::: (the creation of a construct; the process of combining ideas into a congruous object of thought)
4. (1) structure, construction ::: (a thing constructed; a complex entity constructed of many parts; "the structure consisted of a series of arches"; "she wore her hair in an amazing construction of whirls and ribbons")
5. (1) construction ::: (drawing a figure satisfying certain conditions as part of solving a problem or proving a theorem; "the assignment was to make a construction that could be used in proving the Pythagorean theorem")
6. construction, twist ::: (an interpretation of a text or action; "they put an unsympathetic construction on his conduct")
7. construction, building ::: (the commercial activity involved in repairing old structures or constructing new ones; "their main business is home construction"; "workers in the building trades")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun construction
7 senses of construction
Sense 1
construction, building
=> creating from raw materials
=> creation, creative activity
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
construction, grammatical construction, expression
=> constituent, grammatical constituent
=> syntagma, syntagm
=> string of words, word string, linguistic string
=> string
=> sequence
=> series
=> ordering, order, ordination
=> arrangement
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> language, linguistic communication
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
construction, mental synthesis
=> thinking, thought, thought process, cerebration, intellection, mentation
=> higher cognitive process
=> process, cognitive process, mental process, operation, cognitive operation
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
structure, construction
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 5
construction
=> mathematical process, mathematical operation, operation
=> calculation, computation, computing
=> procedure, process
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 6
construction, twist
=> interpretation
=> explanation, account
=> statement
=> message, content, subject matter, substance
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 7
construction, building
=> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
=> commerce, commercialism, mercantilism
=> transaction, dealing, dealings
=> group action
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun construction
6 of 7 senses of construction
Sense 1
construction, building
=> crenelation, crenellation
=> erecting, erection
=> house-raising
=> fabrication, assembly
=> dry walling
=> grading, leveling
=> road construction
=> shipbuilding, ship building
=> rustication
Sense 2
construction, grammatical construction, expression
=> adjunct
=> clause
=> complement
=> involution
=> phrase
=> predicator
Sense 3
construction, mental synthesis
=> crystallization
=> gestation
Sense 4
structure, construction
=> airdock, hangar, repair shed
=> altar
=> arcade, colonnade
=> arch
=> area
=> balcony
=> balcony
=> bascule
=> boarding
=> body
=> bridge, span
=> building, edifice
=> building complex, complex
=> catchment
=> coil, spiral, volute, whorl, helix
=> colonnade
=> column, pillar
=> corner, quoin
=> cross
=> deathtrap
=> defensive structure, defense, defence
=> door
=> entablature
=> erection
=> establishment
=> false bottom
=> floor, level, storey, story
=> fountain
=> guide
=> house of cards, cardhouse, card-house, cardcastle
=> housing, lodging, living accommodations
=> hull
=> jungle gym
=> lamination
=> landing, landing place
=> lookout, observation tower, lookout station, observatory
=> masonry
=> memorial, monument
=> mound, hill
=> obstruction, obstructor, obstructer, impediment, impedimenta
=> partition, divider
=> platform, weapons platform
=> porch
=> post and lintel
=> prefab
=> projection
=> public works
=> sail
=> set-back, setoff, offset
=> shelter
=> shoebox
=> signboard, sign
=> stadium, bowl, arena, sports stadium
=> superstructure
=> supporting structure
=> tower
=> transept
=> trestlework
=> vaulting
=> ways, shipway, slipway
=> wellhead
=> wind tunnel
=> honeycomb
=> balance, equilibrium, equipoise, counterbalance
Sense 5
construction
=> quadrature
Sense 7
construction, building
=> jerry-building
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun construction
7 senses of construction
Sense 1
construction, building
=> creating from raw materials
Sense 2
construction, grammatical construction, expression
=> constituent, grammatical constituent
Sense 3
construction, mental synthesis
=> thinking, thought, thought process, cerebration, intellection, mentation
Sense 4
structure, construction
=> artifact, artefact
Sense 5
construction
=> mathematical process, mathematical operation, operation
Sense 6
construction, twist
=> interpretation
Sense 7
construction, building
=> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun construction
7 senses of construction
Sense 1
construction, building
-> creating from raw materials
=> baking
=> molding, casting
=> recording, transcription
=> construction, building
=> fabrication, manufacture, manufacturing
=> confection, concoction
=> lamination
Sense 2
construction, grammatical construction, expression
-> constituent, grammatical constituent
=> subject
=> object
=> ablative absolute
=> immediate constituent
=> construction, grammatical construction, expression
=> misconstruction
=> term
Sense 3
construction, mental synthesis
-> thinking, thought, thought process, cerebration, intellection, mentation
=> free association
=> construction, mental synthesis
=> reasoning, logical thinking, abstract thought
=> line of thought
=> train of thought, thread
=> mysticism
=> ideation
=> consideration
=> excogitation
=> explanation
=> planning, preparation, provision
=> problem solving
=> convergent thinking
=> divergent thinking, out-of-the-box thinking
Sense 4
structure, construction
-> artifact, artefact
=> article
=> facility
=> Americana
=> anachronism
=> antiquity
=> block
=> button
=> commodity, trade good, good
=> cone
=> covering
=> creation
=> decker
=> decoration, ornament, ornamentation
=> electroplate
=> excavation
=> extra, duplicate
=> fabric, cloth, material, textile
=> facility, installation
=> fixture
=> float
=> insert, inset
=> instrumentality, instrumentation
=> layer, bed
=> lemon, stinker
=> line
=> marker
=> mystification
=> opening
=> padding, cushioning
=> plaything, toy
=> ready-made
=> restoration
=> sheet, flat solid
=> sphere
=> square
=> squeaker
=> strip, slip
=> structure, construction
=> surface
=> thing
=> track
=> way
=> weight
=> building material
=> paving, pavement, paving material
Sense 5
construction
-> mathematical process, mathematical operation, operation
=> permutation
=> combination
=> differentiation
=> maximization
=> integration
=> exponentiation, involution
=> arithmetic operation
=> matrix operation
=> construction
=> relaxation, relaxation method
Sense 6
construction, twist
-> interpretation
=> exposition, expounding
=> construal
=> clarification, elucidation, illumination
=> eisegesis
=> exegesis
=> ijtihad
=> literal interpretation
=> version
=> reading
=> construction, twist
=> reconstruction
=> popularization, popularisation
=> misinterpretation, misunderstanding, mistaking
Sense 7
construction, building
-> commercial enterprise, business enterprise, business
=> tourism, touristry
=> fishing
=> butchery, butchering
=> storage
=> industry, manufacture
=> field, field of operation, line of business
=> employee-owned enterprise, employee-owned business
=> finance
=> discount business
=> real-estate business
=> advertising, publicizing
=> publication, publishing
=> printing
=> packaging
=> agribusiness, agriculture, factory farm
=> construction, building
=> transportation, shipping, transport
=> venture
--- Grep of noun construction
construction
construction industry
construction paper
construction worker
deconstruction
grammatical construction
misconstruction
reconstruction
road construction
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Wikipedia - Bharatmala -- Indian highway and expressway construction project
Wikipedia - Bibliography of the Reconstruction Era
Wikipedia - Bibliography of the Reconstruction era -- Wikipedia bibliography
Wikipedia - Body-on-frame -- Automobile construction method using a separate body on a structural frame
Wikipedia - Braithwaite, Burn > Jessop Construction Company
Wikipedia - Brick -- Block or a single unit of a ceramic material used in masonry construction
Wikipedia - Brunnian link -- Interlinked multi-loop construction where cutting one loop frees all the others
Wikipedia - Building insulation -- Methods of minimizing heat transfer in constructions
Wikipedia - Building material -- Material which is used for construction purposes
Wikipedia - Caesar's Rhine bridges -- Roman construction, Gallic Wars
Wikipedia - Cairn Homes -- Irish construction company
Wikipedia - Calculus of constructions -- Type theory created by Thierry Coquand
Wikipedia - Caldwell & Drake -- Indiana construction company
Wikipedia - California High-Speed Rail -- System under construction and planning in the United States
Wikipedia - Category:Compiler construction
Wikipedia - Category:Construction and management simulation games
Wikipedia - Category:Construction
Wikipedia - Category:Deconstruction
Wikipedia - Category:Portals under construction
Wikipedia - Category:Questionnaire construction
Wikipedia - Category:Social constructionism
Wikipedia - Caterpillar 797F -- Off-highway ultra class haul truck for mining and heavy-duty construction
Wikipedia - Caterpillar 797 -- Off-highway ultra class haul truck for mining and heavy-duty construction
Wikipedia - Cbus -- Superannuation fund for the building and construction industries in Australia
Wikipedia - Central Park Tower -- Under-construction skyscraper in Manhattan, New York
Wikipedia - Central Susquehanna Valley Thruway -- Highway under construction in Pennsylvania
Wikipedia - Charles B. Thomsen -- American architect and construction manager
Wikipedia - Chassis -- Load-bearing framework of an artificial object, which structurally supports the object in its construction and function
Wikipedia - China Communications Construction Company -- Chinese construction company
Wikipedia - China Machinery Engineering Corporation -- Construction and engineering company
Wikipedia - China State Construction Engineering -- Largest construction company in the world by revenue
Wikipedia - ChM-EM-+M-EM-^M Shinkansen -- Maglev high-speed train line under construction in Japan
Wikipedia - Christian reconstructionism
Wikipedia - City Line (Spokane, Washington) -- Under-construction bus rapid transit line in Spokane, Washington, United States
Wikipedia - Ciudad Deportiva Millito Navarro -- Multi-sport complex currently under construction in Ponce, Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Cladding (construction)
Wikipedia - Clark Construction -- American construction company
Wikipedia - Cofiroute USA -- Concession and construction group
Wikipedia - Commercial Bank of Ethiopia Headquarters -- Skyscraper under construction in Addis Ababa
Wikipedia - Comparative -- Syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison
Wikipedia - Compass and straightedge constructions
Wikipedia - Compiler construction
Wikipedia - Comsys -- Japanese telecommunications construction and engineering company
Wikipedia - Concrete masonry unit -- Rectangular block used in construction
Wikipedia - Concrete -- Composite construction material
Wikipedia - Construction 3D printing
Wikipedia - Construction aggregate -- Coarse to fine grain rock materials used in concrete
Wikipedia - Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes
Wikipedia - Construction and management simulation game
Wikipedia - Construction and management simulation
Wikipedia - Construction and renovation fires -- Type of fire
Wikipedia - Construction bidding
Wikipedia - Construction (Cage)
Wikipedia - Construction collaboration technology
Wikipedia - Construction delay
Wikipedia - Construction engineering
Wikipedia - Construction equipment theft
Wikipedia - Construction foreman
Wikipedia - Construction Grammar
Wikipedia - Construction grammar
Wikipedia - Construction History Society
Wikipedia - Construction industry of India
Wikipedia - Construction industry of Iran
Wikipedia - Construction industry of Japan
Wikipedia - Construction industry of Romania
Wikipedia - Construction industry of the United Kingdom
Wikipedia - Construction industry
Wikipedia - Constructionism (learning theory) -- learning theory involving the construction of mental models
Wikipedia - Constructionist learning
Wikipedia - Construction law
Wikipedia - Construction loan
Wikipedia - Construction Management Association of America
Wikipedia - Construction management
Wikipedia - Construction of electronic cigarettes
Wikipedia - Construction of Rockefeller Center -- Construction project in New York City (1931-1974)
Wikipedia - Construction of the real numbers -- Axiomatic definitions of the real numbers
Wikipedia - Construction of the World Trade Center -- Construction project in New York City (1968-1987)
Wikipedia - Construction site safety -- Risk management at the workplace
Wikipedia - Construction site -- Place at which a building or infrastructure is constructed
Wikipedia - Construction Specifications Institute
Wikipedia - Construction waste
Wikipedia - Construction -- Process of the building or assembling of a building or infrastructure
Wikipedia - Construction workers
Wikipedia - Construction worker
Wikipedia - Constructor (software) -- CAD software used in construction
Wikipedia - Consuta -- Form of construction of watertight hulls
Wikipedia - Contained earth -- Earthbag construction material and method
Wikipedia - Content Disarm > Reconstruction
Wikipedia - Conway circle theorem -- Geometrical construction based on extending the sides of a triangle
Wikipedia - Crenshaw/LAX Line -- Under-construction light rail line in southwest Los Angeles
Wikipedia - Dakota Access Pipeline protests -- Series of protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline
Wikipedia - Damp proofing -- Type of moisture control in building construction
Wikipedia - Dan Ehrenkrantz -- American Reconstructionist rabbi
Wikipedia - Deconstruction (building)
Wikipedia - Deconstruction (disambiguation)
Wikipedia - Deconstructionism
Wikipedia - Deconstruction -- An approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning
Wikipedia - Dedekind cut -- Method of construction of the real numbers
Wikipedia - Democratic Reconstruction -- Political party in Peru
Wikipedia - Design -- Drafting of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or of a system; process of creation; act of creativity and innovation
Wikipedia - Dike (construction)
Wikipedia - Discrete tomography -- Reconstruction of binary images from a small number of their projections
Wikipedia - Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction era -- Post-civil war voter suppression efforts in the United States
Wikipedia - Distance matrices in phylogeny -- Matrices used in construction of phylogenetic trees
Wikipedia - DNA code construction
Wikipedia - Dog's bollocks (typography) -- typographical construction
Wikipedia - Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction -- South Korean company
Wikipedia - Dorshei Derekh -- Reconstructionist Jewish congregation in Philadelphia, USA
Wikipedia - Double negative -- Grammatical construction occurring when two forms of negation are used in the same sentence
Wikipedia - DPR Construction -- American construction firm
Wikipedia - Draft:Construction Information Systems, Inc. -- American Construction Project Leads Company
Wikipedia - Draft:Montasser Construction Company -- Construction and civil engineering company
Wikipedia - Draft:Nogizaka Under Construction -- Japanese variety show
Wikipedia - Dry stone -- Construction method
Wikipedia - Drywall -- Panel made of gypsum, used in interior construction
Wikipedia - Dubai Creek Tower -- Observation tower under construction in Dubai
Wikipedia - Dungeons 3 -- 2017 Construction and management simulation video game
Wikipedia - Earthbag construction -- Building method
Wikipedia - Eastern Busway, Auckland -- Busway project that is under construction
Wikipedia - Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor -- Dedicated freight railway under construction in India
Wikipedia - Ecole nationale supM-CM-)rieure d'ingM-CM-)nieurs de constructions aM-CM-)ronautiques -- French engineering scholl in Toulouse
Wikipedia - Economic Reconstruction Union -- Former German political party
Wikipedia - Edwin Belcher -- U.S politician during the Reconstruction Era
Wikipedia - Egyptian pyramid construction techniques -- Overview about the Egyptian pyramid construction techniques
Wikipedia - Emba Hunutlu power station -- Coal fired power station under construction in Turkey
Wikipedia - Enforcement Acts -- Laws aiming to combat resistance to reconstruction after the US Civil War
Wikipedia - Excavator -- Type of construction equipment
Wikipedia - Exterior algebra -- Algebraic construction used in multilinear algebra and geometry
Wikipedia - Fabrica ecclesiae -- Latin term describing the construction and maintenance of a church
Wikipedia - Facadism -- Preservation or reconstruction of a facade, but not the rest of the building
Wikipedia - Factorio -- Construction and management simulation video game
Wikipedia - Fairbank station -- Under-construction LRT station in Toronto, Canada
Wikipedia - Fairview Avenue North Bridge -- Bridge undergoing reconstruction in Seattle, Washington
Wikipedia - Fengdu railway station -- Railway station under construction in Chongqing
Wikipedia - Fenglin Bridge -- 364-metre-high bridge under construction in the Guizhou province of China
Wikipedia - Fengtai railway station -- Beijing Subway and under-construction railway station
Wikipedia - Fisher Industries -- American construction company
Wikipedia - Float-out -- Event during ship construction marking the first time the ship is floated
Wikipedia - Fluid Construction Grammar
Wikipedia - Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas -- Construction company from Barcelona, Spain
Wikipedia - Forensic facial reconstruction -- Process of recreating the face of an individual from their skeletal remains through an amalgamation of artistry, anthropology, osteology, and anatomy
Wikipedia - Fortification -- Military defensive construction
Wikipedia - Fort Myer Construction -- Construction company in Washington D.C., US
Wikipedia - Fosroc -- British construction chemicals company
Wikipedia - Frost damage (construction) -- Damages caused by water freezing can occur as cracks, stone splinters and swelling of the material
Wikipedia - Future Reconstructions - Ritual of the Solstice -- remix album by Hawkwind
Wikipedia - Gammon Construction -- Hong Kong construction company
Wikipedia - Geometric Constructions
Wikipedia - George Bobolas -- Greek construction and media businessman
Wikipedia - Geotextile -- Textile material used in ground stabilization and construction
Wikipedia - Global Village Construction Set
Wikipedia - Glossary of construction cost estimating -- Wikipedia glossary
Wikipedia - GPlates -- Open-source application software for interactive plate-tectonic reconstructions
Wikipedia - Grader -- Construction machine
Wikipedia - Grading (earthworks) -- Civil engineering term; the work of ensuring a level base, or one with a specified slope, for a construction work
Wikipedia - Grand Egyptian Museum -- Museum under construction in al-Giza, Egypt
Wikipedia - Great Stupa of Universal Compassion -- Buddhist monument under construction near Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
Wikipedia - Green Line Extension -- Under-construction light rail line extension in Massachusetts
Wikipedia - Greenport Basin and Construction Company -- Shipbuilder in the United States
Wikipedia - Groundbreaking -- Ceremony celebrating the first day of construction for a building or other project
Wikipedia - Guqin construction
Wikipedia - HAIFA construction -- Design method for cryptographic hash functions
Wikipedia - Haul truck -- Off-highway, rigid dump trucks specifically engineered for use in high-production mining and heavy-duty construction environments
Wikipedia - Heavy equipment -- Vehicles designed for executing construction tasks
Wikipedia - Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism
Wikipedia - Hellenism (religion) -- Hellenic polytheistic reconstructionism
Wikipedia - Hempcrete -- Biocomposite material used for construction and insulation
Wikipedia - Henry Grace a Dieu -- 16th century carrack of English construction, flagship of Henry VIII
Wikipedia - Henry L. Shrewsbury -- Member of the South Carolina House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era
Wikipedia - Hill-Burton Act -- 1946 US federal law for the construction of hospitals
Wikipedia - Hip Hing Construction -- Hong Kong construction company
Wikipedia - History of compiler construction
Wikipedia - History of construction
Wikipedia - Home construction
Wikipedia - House of cards -- Construction set
Wikipedia - Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 -- British Act of Parliament
Wikipedia - Hunt Construction Group -- American construction management company
Wikipedia - Hyundai Engineering & Construction -- South Korean construction company
Wikipedia - Image reconstruction
Wikipedia - Index of construction articles -- Wikipedia index
Wikipedia - Industrial construction -- Construction relating to industrial applications
Wikipedia - Intercity Railway Connector -- High-speed rail under construction between Langfang East and the Beijing Daxing International Airport
Wikipedia - Internal reconstruction
Wikipedia - International Bank for Reconstruction and Development -- The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development is one of the lending arm's of the World Bank Organization.
Wikipedia - International Institute of Rural Reconstruction -- Philippine non-profit organization
Wikipedia - Iveco Trakker -- Construction truck
Wikipedia - Iway -- Highway construction project in Rhode Island
Wikipedia - J&P AVAX -- Cypriot construction company
Wikipedia - Jane Wernick -- British construction engineer
Wikipedia - Jeddah Tower -- Skyscraper under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Wikipedia - Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. -- Organization for returning stolen Jewish cultural property after World War II
Wikipedia - Jewish Reconstructionist Federation -- Synagogue arm of Reconstructionist Judaism
Wikipedia - Justice and Construction Party -- Political party in Libya
Wikipedia - Karaikal Airport -- airport under construction in Karaikal, Puducherry, India
Wikipedia - KBR (company) -- American engineering, procurement, and construction company.
Wikipedia - Keel laying -- Formal recognition of the start of a ship's construction
Wikipedia - Kehillat Israel -- Reconstructionist Jewish synagogue
Wikipedia - Kell & Rigby -- Defunct Australian construction company
Wikipedia - Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters -- Iranian engineering firm
Wikipedia - Kobelco Construction Machinery America -- Japanese-owned Americal heavy equipment manufacturer
Wikipedia - Komatsu 960E-1 -- Off-highway ultra class haul truck for mining and heavy-duty construction
Wikipedia - KongM-EM-^M Gumi -- Japanese construction company
Wikipedia - Koszul complex -- Construction of homological algebra used in commutative agebra
Wikipedia - Krupp armour -- A type of steel armour used in the construction of capital ships
Wikipedia - Laser construction
Wikipedia - Laser level -- Control tool for surveying and construction
Wikipedia - League for Social Reconstruction
Wikipedia - Lebanese Council for Development and Reconstruction -- Lebanese governmental organisation involved in repairing infrastructure damaged by war
Wikipedia - Lego Juniors -- Product range of the Lego construction toy
Wikipedia - Lego -- Plastic construction toy
Wikipedia - Liberal Democrats' Rally for National Reconstruction - Vivoten -- Political party in Benin
Wikipedia - Lincoln's New Salem -- historic reconstruction of 1830s village associated with Abraham Lincoln
Wikipedia - Linda G. Alvarado -- American construction executive
Wikipedia - Line 2 (Sound Transit) -- Light rail line under construction in the Seattle metropolitan area
Wikipedia - Line 5 Eglinton -- Under-construction light rail line in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wikipedia - Linguistic reconstruction
Wikipedia - List of airports under construction -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of algebraic constructions -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of construction methods
Wikipedia - List of construction trades
Wikipedia - List of deconstructionists
Wikipedia - List of large-scale temperature reconstructions of the last 2,000 years -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of proposed and under-construction Kolkata metro stations -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of telescope parts and construction -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
Wikipedia - LNER P2 Class 2007 Prince of Wales -- British steam locomotive under construction
Wikipedia - Localization (commutative algebra) -- Construction of a ring of fractions, in commutative algebra
Wikipedia - Lossless compression -- Data compression approach allowing perfect reconstruction of the original data
Wikipedia - Macadam -- Type of road construction pioneered by Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam
Wikipedia - Markholm Construction Co Ltd v Wellington City Council -- New Zealand contract law case
Wikipedia - Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing -- Subfields of building design and construction
Wikipedia - Merdeka 118 -- Skyscraper under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Wikipedia - Merkle-DamgM-CM-%rd construction -- Method of building collision-resistant cryptographic hash functions
Wikipedia - MIC (organization) -- Russian construction company group
Wikipedia - Microdistrict -- Residential complex-a primary structural element of the residential area construction in the Soviet Union
Wikipedia - Millwork (building material) -- Decorative woodmill-produced products for building construction
Wikipedia - Minister for Building and Construction (New Zealand) -- New Zealand minister of the Crown
Wikipedia - Ministry of Industrial Reconstruction (West Bengal) -- Government department of West Bengal
Wikipedia - Mississippi Delta Levee Camps -- Camps constructed to house labor for the construction of levees on the Mississippi River
Wikipedia - Modular Approach to Software Construction Operation and Test
Wikipedia - Modular construction -- Structure of the building
Wikipedia - Mohr-Mascheroni theorem -- Constructions performed by a compass and straightedge can be performed by a compass alone
Wikipedia - MOL Campus -- Building under construction in Budapest, Hungary
Wikipedia - Monnet Plan -- Reconstruction plan for France
Wikipedia - Monocrete construction
Wikipedia - Moorabool Wind Farm -- Wind farm under construction in Victoria, Australia
Wikipedia - Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Construction Corp. -- 1983 U.S. Supreme Court arbitration-law case
Wikipedia - Moylist Construction Limited v Doheny -- 2016 Irish Supreme Court case
Wikipedia - MTA Capital Construction and Development Company -- Projects subsidiary of New York City's MTA
Wikipedia - Multiplex (company) -- International construction contractor
Wikipedia - National Alliance of Democrats for Reconstruction -- Political party in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Wikipedia - National Association of Women in Construction
Wikipedia - National Democratic Reconstruction -- Political party in Colombia
Wikipedia - National Federation of Construction and Wood Workers -- Trade union in France
Wikipedia - National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association
Wikipedia - National Reconstruction Front (Ecuador) -- Political party in Ecuador
Wikipedia - Naval architecture -- Engineering discipline dealing with the design and construction of marine vessels
Wikipedia - Neural decoding -- Hypothetical reconstruction of information from the brain
Wikipedia - Neusis construction
Wikipedia - New Austrian tunnelling method -- Method of modern tunnel design and construction
Wikipedia - New children's hospital -- Paediatric hospital under construction in Dublin, Ireland
Wikipedia - New Haven Harbor Crossing Improvement Program -- Highway construction project
Wikipedia - Niche construction -- Process by which an organism shapes its environment
Wikipedia - Nicklaus Design -- Golf course design and construction company
Wikipedia - Nicoll Highway collapse -- 2004 construction accident in Singapore
Wikipedia - Obayashi Corporation -- Japanese construction company
Wikipedia - Object-Oriented Software Construction
Wikipedia - OC Streetcar -- Under construction light rail line in Orange County, California
Wikipedia - Offshore construction -- Installation of structures and facilities in a marine environment
Wikipedia - Opus latericium -- An ancient Roman form of construction in which coarse-laid brickwork is used to face a core of opus caementicium
Wikipedia - Opus mixtum -- Combination of Roman construction techniques
Wikipedia - Opus spicatum -- Herringbone pattern of masonry construction used in Roman and medieval times
Wikipedia - Opus vittatum -- Roman construction technique using horizontal courses of tuff blocks alternated with bricks
Wikipedia - Order of Construction -- Iranian award of honor
Wikipedia - Origins and architecture of the Taj Mahal -- History and construction of the Taj Mahal
Wikipedia - Outline of construction
Wikipedia - Pacific Bridge Company -- Former American engineering and construction company
Wikipedia - Pacific Construction Group -- Chinese construction company
Wikipedia - Paleomap -- Map of continents and mountain ranges in the past based on plate reconstructions
Wikipedia - Parallel construction -- Law enforcement process that hides details of investigation
Wikipedia - Parity Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International -- political party
Wikipedia - Party for Peace, Democracy, Reconciliation, and Reconstruction -- Political party in Burundi
Wikipedia - Party of Construction and Labour -- Political party in Benin
Wikipedia - Paul Y. Engineering -- Hong Kong construction company
Wikipedia - Paver (vehicle) -- Construction equipment used to lay asphalt
Wikipedia - People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy -- Political party in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Wikipedia - Petersen-Morley theorem -- Geometric construction regarding 3 skew lines in space
Wikipedia - Petr-Douglas-Neumann theorem -- Construction on any polygon that yields a regular polygon with the same number of sides
Wikipedia - Pharmacy stop -- Under-construction surface light rail transit stop in Toronto, Canada
Wikipedia - Pioneer (military) -- Soldier tasked with engineering and construction
Wikipedia - Planetary surface construction -- Construction of structures on planetary surface
Wikipedia - Planning permission -- Government permission required for construction or expansion
Wikipedia - Plate reconstruction -- The process of reconstructing the positions of tectonic plates in the geological past
Wikipedia - Pointed arch (architecture) -- History and construction of pointed arch
Wikipedia - Pole building framing -- Construction method
Wikipedia - Polytheistic reconstructionism -- Attempts to re-establish historical polytheistic religions
Wikipedia - Poncelet-Steiner theorem -- Universality of construction using just a straightedge and a single circle with center
Wikipedia - Popular Construction -- Italian political party
Wikipedia - Positive deconstruction
Wikipedia - Postmodern social construction of nature
Wikipedia - Powerset construction
Wikipedia - Power trowel -- piece of light construction equipment
Wikipedia - Prestressed concrete -- Form of concrete used in construction
Wikipedia - Prison Architect -- Construction and management simulation game
Wikipedia - Project 22220 icebreaker -- Series of Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers under construction
Wikipedia - Project Iron Boomerang -- A 2006 proposal for a rail corridor spanning northern Australia and construction of steel-making facilities at both ends to eliminate running of empty trains
Wikipedia - Proposed Illyrian vocabulary -- Hypothetical reconstruction of Illyrian
Wikipedia - Protein-protein interaction -- Physical interactions and constructions between multiple proteins
Wikipedia - Proto-Min -- Comparative reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Min group of varieties of Chinese
Wikipedia - Proxy (climate) -- Preserved physical characteristics allowing reconstruction of past climatic conditions
Wikipedia - Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration -- Agency of the New Deal established by the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Wikipedia - Punch list -- A document prepared during a construction project listing work not conforming to contract specifications
Wikipedia - Questionnaire construction -- Design of a questionnaire to gather statistically useful information about a given topic
Wikipedia - Rafael Cordero Santiago Port of the Americas -- Megaport under construction in Ponce, Puerto Rico
Wikipedia - Railbus -- Lightweight passenger rail vehicle that shares many aspects of its construction with a bus
Wikipedia - Ramsey sentence -- Formal logical reconstructions of theoretical propositions attempting to draw a line between science and metaphysics
Wikipedia - Ramtek Kevala Narasimha temple inscription -- Epigraphic record documenting the construction of a Shiva temple in Maharashtra, India
Wikipedia - Rational reconstruction
Wikipedia - Reconstruction (2001 film) -- 2001 film by Irene Lusztig
Wikipedia - Reconstruction Acts -- Military control of former Confederate states
Wikipedia - Reconstruction Amendments -- Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution
Wikipedia - Reconstruction and Development Programme
Wikipedia - Reconstruction conjecture
Wikipedia - Reconstruction era of the United States
Wikipedia - Reconstruction Era
Wikipedia - Reconstruction era -- |Era of military occupation (1865-1877) in the Southern United States after the American Civil War
Wikipedia - Reconstructionist Judaism -- Denomination of Judaism
Wikipedia - Reconstructionist Rabbinical College -- Jewish seminary in Wyncote, Pennsylvania
Wikipedia - Reconstruction (law) -- Transfer of a company's business to a new company
Wikipedia - Reconstruction of Germany -- Overview of the reconstruction of Germany
Wikipedia - Redintegration -- Reconstruction of the whole of something, from a part
Wikipedia - Regional Connector -- Light rail tunnel under construction in Downtown Los Angeles
Wikipedia - Resilience (engineering and construction) -- Infrastructure design able to absorb damage without suffering complete failure
Wikipedia - Resorts World Las Vegas -- Casino resort under construction in Las Vegas, Nevada
Wikipedia - Rice-hull bagwall construction
Wikipedia - Richard B. Russell Lake -- Man-made lake created by the construction of Richard B. Russell Dam in South Carolina
Wikipedia - RimWorld -- 2018 construction and management simulation video game
Wikipedia - Riverview Plaza -- Under-construction Skyscraper in Wuhan, China
Wikipedia - RM-CM-)seau express mM-CM-)tropolitain -- Rapid transit system under construction in Greater Montreal, Canada
Wikipedia - Roadworks -- Construction of surfacing/building road with asphalt or concrete
Wikipedia - Robotics -- Design, construction, operation, and application of robots
Wikipedia - Rocky Steps -- Construction
Wikipedia - Rok plc -- British construction company
Wikipedia - Roman concrete -- Building material used in construction during the late Roman Republic and Empire
Wikipedia - Roman polytheistic reconstructionism
Wikipedia - Roman Polytheistic Reconstructionism -- Contemporary reconstructionist movement reviving traditional Roman religion
Wikipedia - Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant -- Power plant under construction in Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Round church -- Type of church construction
Wikipedia - Royal Canal -- 19th century construction in Ireland
Wikipedia - Ruler-and-compass constructions
Wikipedia - Rytz's construction -- method of finding axes and veritces of an ellipse
Wikipedia - Sandhog -- Term for underground construction workers in New York City
Wikipedia - School of Architecture and Construction Trades -- Magnet high school in Passaic County, New Jersey, United States
Wikipedia - Seabee -- Member of the US Naval Construction Forces
Wikipedia - Seacoast defense in the United States -- Coastal forts construction and maintenance in the U.S.
Wikipedia - Seattle crane collapse -- Construction accident in Seattle, Washington
Wikipedia - Second Temple Judaism -- Judaism between the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, c. 515 BCE, and its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE
Wikipedia - Self-replication -- any behavior of a dynamical system that yields construction of an identical or similar copy of itself
Wikipedia - Serpa solar power plant -- Construction
Wikipedia - Seven Wonders of the Ancient World -- Remarkable constructions of classical antiquity
Wikipedia - Shakespeare's Globe -- Modern reconstruction of the historic Globe Theatre
Wikipedia - Shell works -- Complex constructions of mollusc shells
Wikipedia - Shipbuilding -- Construction of ships and floating vessels
Wikipedia - Ship replica -- Reconstruction of a no longer existing ship
Wikipedia - Shrine of M-JM-;Abdu'l-Baha -- Tomb under construction near Acre, Israel
Wikipedia - SIAC Construction Ltd v The County Council of the County of Mayo -- Irish Supreme Court case
Wikipedia - Siding (construction) -- Exterior cladding material applied to the walls of a building
Wikipedia - Silver Line (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) -- Under construction commuter rail line in Texas, United States
Wikipedia - Simpson Manufacturing Company -- Construction materials company
Wikipedia - Simultaneous Algebraic Reconstruction Technique
Wikipedia - Sino-Steel Tower -- Under-construction Skyscraper in Tianjin, China
Wikipedia - Sir Robert McAlpine, 1st Baronet -- British construction firm founder
Wikipedia - Sisk Group -- Irish construction and property enterprise
Wikipedia - Skanska -- Multinational construction and development company based in Sweden
Wikipedia - Social constructionism -- Theory that shared understandings of the world create shared assumptions about reality
Wikipedia - Social constructionist
Wikipedia - Social construction of gender
Wikipedia - Social construction of technology
Wikipedia - Social construction
Wikipedia - Social Reconstructionism
Wikipedia - Society of Construction Arbitrators
Wikipedia - SociM-CM-)tM-CM-) Alsacienne de Constructions MM-CM-)caniques -- Defunct French manufacturing company
Wikipedia - SociM-CM-)tM-CM-) Latham -- French aeronautical construction company
Wikipedia - Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) -- 1936 painting by Salvador Dali
Wikipedia - Software construction
Wikipedia - Southern African Institute of Steel Construction -- an organization which helps building and construction in South Africa
Wikipedia - Spa Road Works -- Irish transportion construction company
Wikipedia - Split infinitive -- English grammatical construction
Wikipedia - Stairs -- Construction designed to bridge a large vertical distance by dividing it into steps
Wikipedia - Starmancer -- Upcoming construction and management simulation game
Wikipedia - Straightedge and compass construction
Wikipedia - St. Regis Chicago -- Supertall skyscraper under construction in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Wikipedia - Strict constructionism
Wikipedia - Structural integrity and failure -- Engineering event in which the structural integrity of a construction is compromised due to failure of components of the structure
Wikipedia - Subsea 7 -- Luxembourgish-domiciled subsea engineering, construction, and services company
Wikipedia - Subset construction algorithm
Wikipedia - Superadobe -- Form of earthbag construction
Wikipedia - Superintendent (construction)
Wikipedia - Supreme Council for National Reconstruction -- Military junta in South Korea (1961-1963)
Wikipedia - Surface reconstruction
Wikipedia - Sustainability in construction
Wikipedia - Suzhou Zhongnan Center -- Under-construction Skyscraper in Suzhou, China
Wikipedia - Technip -- Company in project management, engineering and construction for the energy industry
Wikipedia - Technology and Construction Court
Wikipedia - Tehran-Qom-Isfahan High Speed Rail -- First high-speed rail project under construction in Iran
Wikipedia - Template talk:Construction overview
Wikipedia - The Construction and Principal Uses of Mathematical Instruments -- Book by Nicolas Bion
Wikipedia - The Nationalist (Mobile, Alabama) -- Reconstruction era newspaper from Alabama
Wikipedia - Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor -- 1894 essay by German engineer Rudolf Diesel
Wikipedia - The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam -- 1930 book by Mohammed Iqbal
Wikipedia - The Social Construction of Reality -- 1966 book by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann
Wikipedia - The Spiral (New York City) -- Under-construction skyscraper in Manhattan, New York
Wikipedia - Thompson's construction algorithm
Wikipedia - Thompson's construction
Wikipedia - Three-taxon analysis -- A cladistic based method of phylogenetic reconstruction
Wikipedia - Tianjin R&F Guangdong Tower -- Under-construction Skyscraper in Tianjin, China
Wikipedia - Tokiwabashi Tower -- Skyscraper under construction in Tokyo, Japan
Wikipedia - Tomasso Group -- Connecticut construction and real estate conglomerate
Wikipedia - Tomographic reconstruction -- Estimate object properties from a finite number of projections
Wikipedia - Torch Tower (Japan) -- Supertall skyscraper under construction in Tokyo, Japan
Wikipedia - Total station -- Electro-optical instrument used in surveying and building construction
Wikipedia - Toy block -- Part of a construction set
Wikipedia - Trace (deconstruction)
Wikipedia - Traffic collision reconstruction
Wikipedia - Traffic guard -- Person who directs traffic through a construction site or other temporary traffic control zone
Wikipedia - Treasury Holdings -- Defunct Irish construction and development company
Wikipedia - Tunnel construction
Wikipedia - Turin-Lyon high-speed railway -- High speed rail under construction between Italy and France
Wikipedia - Turner Construction -- American construction company
Wikipedia - Tutor Perini -- U.S. construction company
Wikipedia - Twinning (roads) -- Road that involves the construction of a similar road
Wikipedia - Ukkonen's algorithm -- Algorithm for construction of suffix trees
Wikipedia - Ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction -- Surgical procedure
Wikipedia - Ultraproduct -- Mathematical construction
Wikipedia - Underground construction
Wikipedia - Underwater construction -- Industrial construction in an underwater environment
Wikipedia - VAG Class G1 -- German U-Bahn train type under construction for use in Nuremberg
Wikipedia - Valiant Lady (ship) -- Cruise ship under construction for Virgin Voyages
Wikipedia - Vernacular architecture -- Category of architecture based on local needs, construction materials and reflecting local traditions
Wikipedia - Vinci SA -- French concessions and construction company
Wikipedia - Vinson Filyaw -- American former construction worker
Wikipedia - Vito Frijia -- Italian-Canadian businessman and construction engineer
Wikipedia - Von Neumann cellular automaton -- Cellular automaton used to model universal construction
Wikipedia - Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir -- Hindu temple under construction in Vrindavan, India
Wikipedia - Vulcan Materials Company -- American construction materials company
Wikipedia - Wargame Construction Set III: Age of Rifles 1846-1905 -- 1996 computer wargame
Wikipedia - Washington Roebling -- American civil engineer best known for supervising the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge
Wikipedia - Waskita Karya -- Indonesian state-owned construction company
Wikipedia - Waterproof fabric -- Textile that resists moisture penetration through its construction, inherent materials or finish
Wikipedia - Wattle (construction)
Wikipedia - Welded wire mesh -- Construction material
Wikipedia - White elephant -- Idiom - name for large constructions that are not used
Wikipedia - Willow Island disaster -- 1978 collapse of a cooling tower under construction in WV, US
Wikipedia - Wilson Cooke -- Member of the South Carolina House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era
Wikipedia - Wing T. Chao -- American architect, master planner, construction developer and hospitality professional
Wikipedia - Wirtschaftswunder -- Rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II
Wikipedia - Wirye station -- Under-construction railway station
Wikipedia - Wolverton railway works -- Railway carriage construction and maintenance facility in Wolverton, Milton Keynes in England
Wikipedia - World-class cruise ship -- Class of cruise ships under construction for MSC Cruises
Wikipedia - World One -- Residential skyscraper under construction in Mumbai, India
Wikipedia - Wrought Iron Bridge Company -- American bridge fabrication and construction company
Wikipedia - Wuhu Xuanzhou Airport -- airport under construction in China
Wikipedia - Wythoff construction
Wikipedia - Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps -- Paramilitary and economic organization in Xinjiang, China
Wikipedia - Yale school (deconstruction)
Wikipedia - Zhengzhou South railway station -- Railway station under construction in Zhengzhou, Henan, China
Wikipedia - Zobrist hashing -- Hash function construction used in computer programs that play abstract board games
Rodney King ::: Born: April 2, 1965; Died: June 17, 2012; Occupation: Construction worker;
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1045662.Rehearsal_for_Reconstruction
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https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/File:Boston_CAT_Project-construction_view_from_air.jpeg
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/HMS_Acasta_(1912)#Construction
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/HMS_Achates_(1912)#Design_and_construction
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https://military.wikia.org/wiki/HMS_Cockatrice_(1912)#Construction
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/HMS_Fortune_(1913)#Construction
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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:American_Reconstructionist_rabbis
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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Deconstruction-and-religion
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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:Christian_Reconstructionism
auromere - freedom-from-mental-constructions
Integral World - Deconstructionism 101: A Dream of Derrida, David Lane
Integral World - AQAL 2.0, or the Deconstruction of the Last Myth of the Given, Oleg Linetsky
The Deconstruction of the World Trade Center
selforum - sri aurobindo and world reconstruction
selforum - deconstruction de sedimentation
dedroidify.blogspot - under-reconstruction
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-animated-construction-of-vesica.html
Dharmapedia - Polytheistic_reconstructionism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - logical-construction
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - social-construction-naturalistic
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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpellConstruction
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/ConstructionTimeAgain
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Construction
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Deconstruction
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Bisection_construction.gif
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Hypercube_construction_fr.png
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Stanford_torus_under_construction.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Wayne_National_Forest_Solar_Panel_Construction_(3725036895).jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:GlobalUsage/Bisection_construction.gif
Denver the Last Dinosaur (1988 - 1989) - A group of kids are playing in a construction site when they discover a giant egg that has been accidentaly uncovered. To their surprise, it hatches into a dinosaur, that just happens to understand english and be able to grunt and mime his wants and desires to his new human friends. Naming him Den...
Step by Step (1991 - 1998) - Frank Lambert is a construction worker and a single father of 3 kids: JT, Al (Alicia) and Branden. Carol Foster, a beautician, also has 3 children: Dana, Karen and Mark. After Frank and Carol met while on vacation and spontaneously got married, they and their children (who appeared to have known and...
Harriet's Magic Hats (1980 - 1986) - This series followed the adventures of a young girl named Susan, whose eccentric Aunt Harriet collected hats, from those of bakers, to construction workers, to beekeepers. Whenever Susan put on one of her aunt's hats, she would be transported to whatever workplace it suited.
Mobile Police Patlabor: On Television (1989 - 1990) - In the future, advanced robotics has created heavy robots ("labors") for use in a variety of functions: construction, fire-fighting, military, and more. However, though the robots are only machines, their operators are also only humanand humans sometimes turn to crime. Since a heavy labor unit can...
Get Up! (2018 - Current) - Get Up! is an American sports talk morning television program hosted by Mike Greenberg that airs weekdays on ESPN. The show is broadcast from a newly built studio in Pier 17 at New York's South Street Seaport. The premiere was originally set for New Year's Day 2018, but construction delays at the ne...
Total Recall(1990) - Construction worker Douglas Quaid discovers a memory chip in his brain during a virtual-reality trip. He also finds that his past has been invented to conceal a plot of planetary domination. Soon, he's off to Mars to find out who he is and who planted the chip.
Nail Gun Massacre(1985) - A beautiful young girl is brutally raped by construction workers at a building site in a small Texas town. suddenly, mutilated bodies begin turning up. Nailed up. Nailed to trees. Nailed to the pavement. nailed to each other! The Nail Gun Maniac is deadly and no one knows who he'll hammer down next....
Song of the South(1946) - Set in the deep South during the era of Reconstruction, seven-year-old Johnny is looking forward to a vacation at his family's plantation. Johnny is distraught to learn that his parents will be living apart and he must spend his time with his mother and grandmother and has never been apart from his...
Blue Streak(1999) - Can a crook go straight without really trying? Jewel thief Miles Logan (Martin Lawrence) was being chased by the police after a robbery when he was forced to hide a cache of diamonds, worth $20 million, at a construction site. Despite his caution, Miles ended up behind bars anyway; after serving his...
Violent Shit II(1992) - After Karl, The Killer From Th First VS, Passes Its Up To His Son To Fill In For Him. Driven To Insanity By His Deranged Mother, Karl Jr. Goes On A Blood Drenched Killing Spree That Takes Him To A Construction Site, A Tanning Salon, A Movie Theater, And Various Other Places.
The Haunting(1999) - In the 1860's, industrialist Hugh Crain financed the construction of Hill House, a beautiful but forbidding mansion where Crain hoped to house a wife and children. However, Crain died an unexplained death at Hill House, and ever since tales have circulated that the mansion is haunted by evil spirits...
Betsy's Wedding(1990) - Offbeat fashion student Betsy Hopper (Molly Ringwald) and her straight-laced investment-banker fianc, Dylan Walsh (Jake Lovell), just want an intimate little wedding reception, but Betsy's father, Eddie (Alan Alda), a Long Island construction contractor, feels so threatened by Jake's rich WASP par...
Harry & Son(1984) - They were two men with very little in common...except for the fact they had the same blood in their veins. Widower Harry is a blue-collared construction worker who always believed that to appreciate the importance of working for a living. His son, Howard believes in his own lifestyle which include...
Blinky Bill The Movie(1992) - Blinky Bill and his friends lived a relatively normal life in the Australian Bush however there peaceful home is destroyed by humans. Billy Bill and his friends in an attempt to battle the construction workers and save there home from devastation. This film was very unique for the time as it was sho...
Eddie And The Cruisers II:Eddie Lives(1989) - Eddie Wilson,believed dead,is leading a quiet life in Montreal,as a construction worker.Unable to fight his passion for music,he starts a new band.In the process,he is forced to confront the demons of his past.Starring Michael Pare,and Marina Orsini.
A Woman Under The Influence(1974) - A construction worker(Peter Falk) believes his wife(Gena Rowlands)is going insane and has her committed.
Patlabor: The Movie(1989) - The year is 1999 and Tokyos Mobile Police have a new weapon in the war on crimeadvanced robots called Labors are used to combat criminals who would use the new technology for illegal means. The suicide of a mysterious man on the massive Babylon Project construction site sets off a cascade of event...
Momotaro, Sacred Sailors(1945) - After successfully bombing Pearl Harbor, Momotaro over sees construction of a Japanese base with the help of his animal fleet along with some new recruits & volunteers. Their new mission is to attack the American troops occupying the island of Sulawesi.
The Bridge On The River Kwai(1957) - After settling his differences with a Japanese PoW camp commander, a British colonel co-operates to oversee his men's construction of a railway bridge for their captors - while oblivious to a plan by the Allies to destroy it.
Homebodies(1974) - When a quiet group of pensioners learn that their homes are to be torn down to make way for a block of flats, they decide to take action. What starts as an attempt to discourage the developers soon escalates into wholesale murder of both the developers and the construction workers.
The Time Guardian(1987) - In the distant future, the human race nears extinction and a new race of beast-like creatures rule the earth. The few surviving people live in the City, a huge protected construction with the ability to travel in both space and time. The City travels back to our time to save humanity...
LEGO Star Wars: Holiday Special(2020) - A Disney+ holiday short, based on LEGO Construction toys and George Lucas' "Star Wars" characters. In the special, set after Episode IX, Rey begins to doubt her abilities as a teacher to Finn. She travels to a temple and finds a time key, which allows her to travel to different moments in time throu...
Air Emergency ::: Mayday (original tit ::: TV-14 | 1h | Documentary, Crime, Drama | TV Series (2003 ) -- Dramatized reconstruction of real-life air disasters, along with interviews with aviation experts and eyewitnesses. Creators:
Atlantics (2019) ::: 6.7/10 -- Atlantique (original title) -- Atlantics Poster -- In a popular suburb of Dakar, workers on the construction site of a futuristic tower, without pay for months, decide to leave the country by the ocean for a better future. Among them is Souleiman, the lover of Ada, promised to another. Director: Mati Diop
Extreme Engineering ::: 50min | Documentary | TV Series (2003- ) Episode Guide 77 episodes Extreme Engineering Poster Each episode of Extreme Engineering features a major construction and engineering project. Some projects are completed ones, like the new Hong Kong airport. Other projects are those under ... S Stars: Danny Forster, Joseph Giotta, Larc Spies Available on Amazon
Gone with the Wind (1939) ::: 8.1/10 -- Passed | 3h 58min | Drama, History, Romance | 17 January 1940 (USA) -- A manipulative woman and a roguish man conduct a turbulent romance during the American Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Directors: Victor Fleming, George Cukor (uncredited) | 1 more credit Writers: Margaret Mitchell (story of the Old South "Gone with the Wind"), Sidney
Karppi ::: TV-MA | 45min | Crime, Drama, Mystery | TV Series (20182020) -- When Sofia Karppi discovers the body of a young woman on a construction site, she triggers a chain of events that threatens to destroy her life again. Creators:
Locke (2013) ::: 7.1/10 -- R | 1h 25min | Drama | 18 April 2014 (UK) -- Ivan Locke, a dedicated family man and successful construction manager, receives a phone call on the eve of the biggest challenge of his career that sets in motion a series of events that threaten his carefully cultivated existence. Director: Steven Knight Writer:
Patlabor: The Movie (1989) ::: 7.1/10 -- Kid keisatsu patoreb: Gekij-ban (original title) -- Patlabor: The Movie Poster -- The screwball cops of Special Vehicles Section 2 Division 2 must investigate and stop a spree of rampaging construction robots. Director: Mamoru Oshii Writers:
Playtime (1967) ::: 7.9/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 35min | Comedy | 27 June 1973 (USA) -- Monsieur Hulot curiously wanders around a high-tech Paris, paralleling a trip with a group of American tourists. Meanwhile, a nightclub/restaurant prepares its opening night, but it's still under construction. Director: Jacques Tati Writers:
Riff-Raff (1991) ::: 7.0/10 -- Unrated | 1h 35min | Comedy, Drama | 12 February 1993 (USA) -- The story of Stevie, a construction worker, and his girlfriend, an unemployed pop singer, serves to show the living conditions of the British poor class. Director: Ken Loach Writer: Bill Jesse (screenplay) Stars:
The Aftermath (2019) ::: 6.3/10 -- R | 1h 48min | Drama, Romance, War | 15 March 2019 (USA) -- Post World War II, a British colonel and his wife are assigned to live in Hamburg during the post-war reconstruction, but tensions arise with the German who previously owned the house. Director: James Kent Writers:
The Fighting Seabees (1944) ::: 6.6/10 -- Approved | 1h 40min | Drama, Romance, War | 10 July 1944 (UK) -- During WW2, the U.S. Navy implements a new idea of forming construction battalions that also are fighting units, in case of Japanese attack. Director: Edward Ludwig Writers: Borden Chase (screenplay), neas MacKenzie (screenplay) (as Aeneas MacKenzie) | 1 more credit Stars:
The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) ::: 6.9/10 -- R | 1h 50min | Adventure, Drama, Thriller | 11 October 1996 (USA) -- A bridge engineer and an experienced old hunter begin a hunt for two lions after they start attacking local construction workers. Director: Stephen Hopkins Writer: William Goldman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) ::: 6.8/10 -- PG | 1h 49min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi | 29 April 2005 (USA) -- Mere seconds before the Earth is to be demolished by an alien construction crew, journeyman Arthur Dent is swept off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher penning a new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Director: Garth Jennings Writers:
The Lego Movie (2014) ::: 7.7/10 -- PG | 1h 40min | Animation, Action, Adventure | 7 February 2014 (USA) -- An ordinary LEGO construction worker, thought to be the prophesied as "special", is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil tyrant from gluing the LEGO universe into eternal stasis. Directors: Christopher Miller, Phil Lord Writers:
The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) ::: 7.5/10 -- Procs de Jeanne d'Arc (original title) -- The Trial of Joan of Arc Poster A Joan of Arc's trial reconstruction concerning her imprisonment, interrogation and final execution at the hands of the English. Filmed in a spare, low-key fashion. Director: Robert Bresson Writer: Robert Bresson
Western (2017) ::: 7.0/10 -- Unrated | 2h 1min | Drama | 24 August 2017 (Germany) -- German construction workers building a dam near a Bulgarian village interact with the locals, and soon the troubles arise both with the locals and among themselves. Director: Valeska Grisebach Writer:
https://akb48.fandom.com/wiki/Nogizaka_Under_Construction
https://allods.fandom.com/wiki/Novograd_Construction_Council
https://allods.fandom.com/wiki/Quest:The_construction_of_a_bypass_road
https://characters.fandom.com/wiki/Construction
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https://cogling.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_grammar
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https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Lightning_(TV_Series)_Episode:_The_Book_of_Reconstruction:_Chapter_Four
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Lightning_(TV_Series)_Episode:_The_Book_of_Reconstruction:_Chapter_One
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Lightning_(TV_Series)_Episode:_The_Book_of_Reconstruction:_Chapter_Three
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Lightning_(TV_Series)_Episode:_The_Book_of_Reconstruction:_Chapter_Two
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Molecular_Reconstruction
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https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Discordian_Construction_Company
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Bigby's_Construction_Crew
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https://drednotio.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_Gauntlets
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https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion_Construction_Set
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_Area
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Enhance:_Necrotic_Reconstruction
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Infuser_Reconstruction_of_the_Deepforge_Founders
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https://kancolle.fandom.com/wiki/Construction
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https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_firms_engaged_in_the_construction_of_the_Canadian_Fairmile_B_motor_launch
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Hyundai_Engineering_&_Construction
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https://lovenikki.fandom.com/wiki/Reconstruction
https://madagascar.fandom.com/wiki/Madagascar_Wiki/2019_Madagascar_Wiki_Reconstruction_Program
https://medicalimaging.fandom.com/wiki/Background_to_optical_modelling_and_reconstruction
https://medicalimaging.fandom.com/wiki/Image_reconstruction_in_diffuse_optical_imaging
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/40_Eridani_A_Starfleet_Construction_Yards
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https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cranial_reconstruction
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Facsimile_construction_program_047
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Forensic_molecular_reconstruction
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Reconstruction_bay
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ship_Construction_Manual
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Synaptic_reconstruction
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Federation_construction_ship
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https://ninjago.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_workers
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https://sqmegapolis.fandom.com/wiki/Construction
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_the_TIE_Fighter_Construction_Facility
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https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Crystal_and_Edge:_Lightsaber_Construction_and_Philosophy
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/EVS_Construction_Droid
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https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_chargehand
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https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_construction_of_the_Daleks_(webcast)
https://titanic.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_of_the_Titanic
https://tractors.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_Plant
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https://victorybelles.fandom.com/wiki/Construction_Gals
https://walkingdead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_Construction_Sets
https://wasteland.fandom.com/wiki/Wasteland:_The_Definitive_Deconstruction
https://xenoblade.fandom.com/wiki/Colony_6_Reconstruction
Atom: The Beginning -- -- OLM, Production I.G, Signal.MD -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha Seinen -- Atom: The Beginning Atom: The Beginning -- Japan in the near future suffers an unexplained major disaster. Five years later, reconstruction is well underway. Two young researchers at a university are pinning all their hopes on robot development. Now their new interpretation of the eternal hero Astro Boy up until his birth is just about to start! -- -- (Source: Showgate) -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 27,301 6.84
Detective Conan Movie 15: Quarter of Silence -- -- TMS Entertainment -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Adventure Mystery Comedy Police Shounen -- Detective Conan Movie 15: Quarter of Silence Detective Conan Movie 15: Quarter of Silence -- The momentous day of the opening of the new Tokyo subway, the Touto Line, has come, but a bombing incident puts all celebrations to a halt. The governor of Tokyo is caught in the blast while onboard the train, but he and everyone else present is fortunately saved by the quick thinking and actions of Conan Edogawa. -- -- Intrigued by the incident, Conan researches the governor's political history and discovers that the man was responsible for the destruction of a village in Niigata to build the Kitanosawa Dam. Believing the attack to be related to the construction of the dam, Conan, accompanied by Ran Mouri, Kogorou Mouri, Professor Agasa, Sonoko Suzuki, and the Detective Boys, decides to visit the village and investigate. -- -- There, they meet a group of locals who lived in the old village before it was torn down. However, just as one mystery leads to another, one of the locals is murdered. Suspecting that something much more sinister is afoot, Conan vows to uncover the truth behind these two incidents before it is too late. -- -- Movie - Apr 16, 2011 -- 36,932 8.02
Hataraku Saibou (TV) -- -- David Production -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Shounen -- Hataraku Saibou (TV) Hataraku Saibou (TV) -- Inside the human body, roughly 37.2 trillion cells work energetically 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Fresh out of training, the cheerful and somewhat airheaded Sekkekkyuu AE3803 is ready to take on the ever-so-important task of transporting oxygen. As usual, Hakkekkyuu U-1146 is hard at work patrolling and eliminating foreign bacteria seeking to make the body their new lair. Elsewhere, little platelets are lining up for a new construction project. -- -- Dealing with wounds and allergies, getting lost on the way to the lungs, and bickering with similar cell types, the daily lives of cells are always hectic as they work together to keep the body healthy! -- -- 471,853 7.62
Hataraku Saibou (TV) -- -- David Production -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Shounen -- Hataraku Saibou (TV) Hataraku Saibou (TV) -- Inside the human body, roughly 37.2 trillion cells work energetically 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Fresh out of training, the cheerful and somewhat airheaded Sekkekkyuu AE3803 is ready to take on the ever-so-important task of transporting oxygen. As usual, Hakkekkyuu U-1146 is hard at work patrolling and eliminating foreign bacteria seeking to make the body their new lair. Elsewhere, little platelets are lining up for a new construction project. -- -- Dealing with wounds and allergies, getting lost on the way to the lungs, and bickering with similar cell types, the daily lives of cells are always hectic as they work together to keep the body healthy! -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 471,853 7.62
Hinamatsuri (TV) -- -- feel. -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Slice of Life Comedy Supernatural Seinen -- Hinamatsuri (TV) Hinamatsuri (TV) -- While reveling in the successful clinching of a prized vase for his collection, Yoshifumi Nitta, a yakuza member, is rudely interrupted when a large, peculiar capsule suddenly materializes and falls on his head. He opens the capsule to reveal a young, blue-haired girl, who doesn't divulge anything about herself but her name—Hina—and the fact that she possesses immense powers. As if things couldn't get any worse, she loses control and unleashes an explosion if her powers remain unused. Faced with no other choice, Nitta finds himself becoming her caregiver. -- -- To let her use her powers freely, Nitta asks Hina to help out with a construction deal, which goes smoothly. But while this is happening, a rival yakuza group covertly attacks his boss. To Nitta's shock, his colleagues later pin the blame on him! Tasked with attacking the rival group in retaliation, Nitta steels himself and arrives at their hideout. But suddenly, Hina unexpectedly steps in and helps him wipe out the entire group. As it turns out, Hina might just become a valuable asset to Nitta and his yakuza business, provided she does not use her powers on him first! And so the strange life of this unusual duo begins. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 362,188 8.20
Kanamewo -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Romance Supernatural Drama Shoujo Ai -- Kanamewo Kanamewo -- A young, unnamed woman, while biking home from the bank she works at, happens upon a weakened tree goddess whose native shrine is being demolished for construction work. She rescues her and brings the goddess home with her. The two form a relationship, but what will happen to the goddess as the construction progresses? -- ONA - Nov 4, 2015 -- 13,169 6.66
Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl - Shoujo wa Shoujo ni Koi wo Shita -- -- Studio Hibari -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Slice of Life Comedy Drama Romance School Shoujo Ai -- Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl - Shoujo wa Shoujo ni Koi wo Shita Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl - Shoujo wa Shoujo ni Koi wo Shita -- This is an OVA released on October 27th, 2006. It is also classified as the 13th episode (thus a sequel) to Kashimashi ~Girl Meets Girl~. -- -- Hazumu confessed his love to Yasuna, but she turned him down him. To ease his heartbreak, he went to Mt. Kashimayama where he had met her first. However he lost his way in the mountain, and it was night time. He saw a big shooting star, and when he began to wish, he found out that something was wrong. It was not a shooting star, but it was a falling space ship. He was involved in the crash, but he managed to survive by the help of an alien. However, he became a girl due to the accident during the reconstruction of his body. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Media Blasters -- OVA - Oct 27, 2006 -- 13,802 6.81
Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor: On Television -- -- Sunrise -- 47 eps -- Original -- Comedy Mecha Police Sci-Fi -- Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor: On Television Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor: On Television -- In the future, advanced robotics has created heavy robots ("labors") for use in a variety of functions: construction, fire-fighting, military, and more. However, though the robots are only machines, their operators are also only human—and humans sometimes turn to crime. Since a heavy labor unit can be a dangerous weapon, the police of the future are set to fight fire with fire, using advanced patrol labor units, "patlabors." This is the story of the Second Special Vehicles Division, a motley crew of patlabor policemen and women doing their best to fight crime and live a normal life. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media, Maiden Japan -- TV - Oct 11, 1989 -- 29,118 7.68
Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor the Movie -- -- Production I.G, Studio Deen -- 1 ep -- Original -- Drama Mecha Military Police -- Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor the Movie Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor the Movie -- The Babylon Project is a massive renovation of Tokyo's neighborhoods, including the creation of artificial islands in the Bay. Utilizing "Labors," or robots created for the express purpose of doing work, architects and construction crews are able to more efficiently progress development of the overhaul. When a key figure in the Project's conception is found dead after committing suicide under mysterious circumstances, Captain Kiichi Gotou's Patlabor police unit is tasked with getting to the bottom of the bizarre situation. -- -- As several Labors begin to go haywire and a hacked AI program endangers the people of Tokyo, young pilot Noa Izumi and her Patlabor Alphonse work under Gotou's orders to save the city and the entire nation from a massive biblical conspiracy. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Visual USA, Maiden Japan, Manga Entertainment -- Movie - Jul 15, 1989 -- 33,720 7.55
Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - Tou no Kuni - Free Lance -- -- A.C.G.T. -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Adventure Psychological Fantasy -- Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - Tou no Kuni - Free Lance Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - Tou no Kuni - Free Lance -- Waking up from a nap, Kino is relieved to see that a certain tower from afar is still proudly standing. Located in the heart of the Tower Country, the immensely tall tower stretches high into the sky, reaching seemingly infinite heights. The tower looks like something out of a dream, but the breathtaking construction is unmistakably real. Intrigued, the traveling partners Kino and Hermes—the talking motorcycle—journey to the tower to get a closer look at the building. -- -- Despite already being unbelievably tall, the tower is still being built by the townspeople to this day. Puzzled by the origins of the tower, Kino and Hermes ask around the town for information, but they fail to obtain any definitive answer. They continue to observe both the tower and the townspeople during their stay, hoping to understand the reasoning behind building a tower that requires so much effort. After all, there is always something to learn... even from the strangest of countries. -- -- Special - Oct 19, 2005 -- 33,066 7.60
Koukaku Kidoutai Arise: Ghost in the Shell - Border:4 Ghost Stands Alone -- -- Production I.G -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Police Psychological Mecha -- Koukaku Kidoutai Arise: Ghost in the Shell - Border:4 Ghost Stands Alone Koukaku Kidoutai Arise: Ghost in the Shell - Border:4 Ghost Stands Alone -- The story of this fourth installment takes place amidst signs of postwar reconstruction in the winter of 2028. Tensions are rising in New Port City as demonstrations are held concerning the interests of foreign cartels. This leads to a shooting incident involving riot police. It all started with a cyberbrain infection released by the terrorist "Fire Starter." An independent offensive unit led by Motoko Kusanagi entrusts the suppression of the situation to their ghosts and aims for their own justice. Below the surface of the incident, lies the "tin girl" Emma and the "scarecrow man" Burinda Junior. As Kusanagi deals with the incident, she draws near to what those two ghosts were seeking. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Sep 6, 2014 -- 34,776 7.45
Kuromukuro -- -- P.A. Works -- 26 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- Kuromukuro Kuromukuro -- During the dawn of the 21st century, the United Nations Kurobe Research Institute was established in Japan to investigate an ancient artifact, which was discovered during the construction of the Kurobe Dam. Scientists from around the world have gathered in the facility to study the object, while their children enjoy their everyday lives attending Mt. Tate International Senior High School. -- -- Yukina Shirahane, a reserved high school girl, is the daughter of the facility's head scientist. While visiting her mother at the facility, Yukina manages to solve part of the artifact's puzzle. To her surprise, what appears before her is Kennosuke Tokisada Ouma, a young samurai from the Sengoku era. -- -- As a threat approaches from outer space, Yukina, along with Kennosuke, finds herself defending Earth against the invading forces. Along the way, she discovers the mystery behind Kennosuke and the reason he is determined to protect her. -- -- 115,000 7.19
Kuromukuro -- -- P.A. Works -- 26 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- Kuromukuro Kuromukuro -- During the dawn of the 21st century, the United Nations Kurobe Research Institute was established in Japan to investigate an ancient artifact, which was discovered during the construction of the Kurobe Dam. Scientists from around the world have gathered in the facility to study the object, while their children enjoy their everyday lives attending Mt. Tate International Senior High School. -- -- Yukina Shirahane, a reserved high school girl, is the daughter of the facility's head scientist. While visiting her mother at the facility, Yukina manages to solve part of the artifact's puzzle. To her surprise, what appears before her is Kennosuke Tokisada Ouma, a young samurai from the Sengoku era. -- -- As a threat approaches from outer space, Yukina, along with Kennosuke, finds herself defending Earth against the invading forces. Along the way, she discovers the mystery behind Kennosuke and the reason he is determined to protect her. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Ponycan USA -- 115,000 7.19
Manie-Manie: Meikyuu Monogatari -- -- Madhouse -- 3 eps -- Original -- Adventure Fantasy Horror Sci-Fi Supernatural -- Manie-Manie: Meikyuu Monogatari Manie-Manie: Meikyuu Monogatari -- Manie-Manie: Meikyuu Monogatari is an anthology film composed of three short films by acclaimed directors Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and Katsuhiro Otomo. -- -- Labyrinth Labyrinthos -- While Sachi is searching for her cat, Cicerone, they both fall through a mirror and become trapped in a mysterious, mind-bending labyrinth. They follow a clown's shadow into the distance, not knowing where it will lead them. -- -- Running Man -- Bob Stone is a reporter working on an article about racer Zack Hugh, the ten-year reigning champion of an extremely popular and deadly automobile race. By the time the two meet, Zack's body and mind are shells of what they used to be. When the next race starts, Bob observes what happens when both man and machine are pushed to their breaking point, and what it takes to be an enduring champion. -- -- The Order to Stop Construction -- Salaryman Tsutomo Sugioka is dispatched into the heart of a dangerous jungle in order to halt a construction project after the foreman's mysterious disappearance. There, he discovers the deadly and uncontrollable world created by the automated construction robots. When the chief robot is resistant to his orders, Tsutomo must figure out another way to stop the project before his company's financial losses become too great. -- -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films -- Movie - Sep 25, 1987 -- 24,165 7.05
Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 -- -- Science SARU -- 10 eps -- Novel -- Sci-Fi Drama -- Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 -- The Mutou family leads a peaceful life: Kouichirou works at a construction site and his wife Mari is returning from an overseas trip. Their daughter Ayumu has just finished her track practice while their son Gou is playing video games at home. However, life as they know it is flipped upside down when a calamitous earthquake strikes the entire Japanese archipelago—obliterating the face of the country in an instant. -- -- With society crumbling around them and their nation gradually sinking into the ocean, the Mutou family must band together to survive the catastrophe. Treading the near-apocalyptic setting, they struggle not only to stay alive, but also to learn the difficulty of coping with loss. -- -- ONA - Jul 9, 2020 -- 100,291 6.43
Orbital Era -- -- Sunrise -- 1 ep -- Original -- Sci-Fi Adventure Space -- Orbital Era Orbital Era -- Orbital Era is set in the near-future on a space colony under construction. The film features a coming-of-age action-adventure story following the lives of young boys surviving in this peculiar environment and society as they are tossed around by fate. "The reality found in mankind's future" will be depicted through their perspective. -- -- The story will take place over four seasons in the space colony. The characters relationships will unfold over these seasons. Otomo noted that the film is set in the future, but instead of being rooted in science fiction, the story will skew more toward fantasy. -- -- (Source: MAL News) -- Movie - ??? ??, ???? -- 2,451 N/A -- -- Uchuu no Kishi Tekkaman -- -- Tatsunoko Production -- 26 eps -- Original -- Action Adventure Mecha Sci-Fi Shounen Space -- Uchuu no Kishi Tekkaman Uchuu no Kishi Tekkaman -- Tekkaman is just an average bright boy in his everyday life. However, modern science can turn him into a mighty space warrior. This becomes a reality when aggressive aliens come from space to invade our planet. Armed with a space lance, Tekkaman gallantly goes into action against the grotesque space creatures. During his battles he encounters a mysterious young man from another planet who helps him out whenever he is in danger. -- -- (Source: Absoluteanime) -- TV - Jul 2, 1975 -- 2,442 6.19
Saraba Uchuu Senkan Yamato: Ai no Senshi-tachi -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Space Drama -- Saraba Uchuu Senkan Yamato: Ai no Senshi-tachi Saraba Uchuu Senkan Yamato: Ai no Senshi-tachi -- In the year 2201, one year after the Yamato saved Earth from radioactive contamination, a new threat emerges. The Yamato makes its final journey to save the Earth from this new threat. -- -- Earth has almost recovered from the battle against Gamilus, and reconstruction has expanded to the other planets. When former Yamato crew-mates discover a strange, garbled message that seems to be coming from a white comet headed towards Earth, they hijack their old space fortress and begin a new battle. -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- Movie - Aug 5, 1978 -- 3,387 7.09
Tokyo Babylon -- -- Madhouse -- 2 eps -- Manga -- Action Magic Mystery Supernatural -- Tokyo Babylon Tokyo Babylon -- Subaru Sumeragi is the 13th head of the Sumeragi Clan and a most powerful onmyouji. Subaru is hired to exorcise a construction site, but his employer mysteriously died. The only suspect is a man who repeatedly walks away from situations in which he should have died. Then Subaru meets a young woman intent upon cursing the man, saying that he killed her brother. Subaru must figure out how his employer died and fight the evil spirits that are protecting the man with the help of his friend and twin sister, Seishirou Sakurazuka and Hokuto Sumeragi. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- OVA - Oct 21, 1992 -- 16,356 6.72
Uzumaki -- -- Drive -- 4 eps -- Manga -- Dementia Horror Psychological Supernatural Drama Romance Seinen -- Uzumaki Uzumaki -- In the town of Kurouzu-cho, Kirie Goshima lives a fairly normal life with her family. As she walks to the train station one day to meet her boyfriend, Shuuichi Saito, she sees his father staring at a snail shell in an alley. Thinking nothing of it, she mentions the incident to Shuuichi, who says that his father has been acting weird lately. Shuuichi reveals his rising desire to leave the town with Kirie, saying that the town is infected with spirals. -- -- But his father's obsession with the shape soon proves deadly, beginning a chain of horrific and unexplainable events that causes the residents of Kurouzu-cho to spiral into madness. -- -- TV - ??? ??, 2021 -- 33,169 N/A -- -- Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - Tou no Kuni - Free Lance -- -- A.C.G.T. -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Adventure Psychological Fantasy -- Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - Tou no Kuni - Free Lance Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World - Tou no Kuni - Free Lance -- Waking up from a nap, Kino is relieved to see that a certain tower from afar is still proudly standing. Located in the heart of the Tower Country, the immensely tall tower stretches high into the sky, reaching seemingly infinite heights. The tower looks like something out of a dream, but the breathtaking construction is unmistakably real. Intrigued, the traveling partners Kino and Hermes—the talking motorcycle—journey to the tower to get a closer look at the building. -- -- Despite already being unbelievably tall, the tower is still being built by the townspeople to this day. Puzzled by the origins of the tower, Kino and Hermes ask around the town for information, but they fail to obtain any definitive answer. They continue to observe both the tower and the townspeople during their stay, hoping to understand the reasoning behind building a tower that requires so much effort. After all, there is always something to learn... even from the strangest of countries. -- -- Special - Oct 19, 2005 -- 33,066 7.60
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Construction
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121st Regiment (Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps)
1944 Australian Post-War Reconstruction and Democratic Rights referendum
1st Division of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
3D Construction Kit
3D Construction Kit II
3D data acquisition and object reconstruction
3D reconstruction
3D reconstruction from multiple images
3D sound reconstruction
7th Division of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
8th Division of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
Absolute construction
Action Construction Equipment
ADHM construction
Adventure Construction Set
African Forum for Reconstruction
A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration, and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and in All Times
Agriculture, Fisheries, Mining, Energy and Construction (constituency)
Akkord Industry Construction Investment Corporation
Alexander Construction Company
Algebraic reconstruction technique
Alliance for National Reconstruction
Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction
All India Construction Workers Federation
All Japan Construction, Transport and General Workers' Union
Altogether Builders' Labourers and Constructional Workers' Society
Ambient construction
American Institute of Steel Construction
Amoy dialect/Complement constructions/simplified
Amoy dialect/Complement constructions/traditional
Amphibious Construction Battalion 1
Amphibious Construction Battalion 2
Anabuki Construction
Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021
Ancestral reconstruction
Ancestral sequence reconstruction
Ancient constructions of Sri Lanka
Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Group
Anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction
Apo koinou construction
Arkansas militias during Reconstruction
Ateliers de Construction Aronautique de Zeebruges
Ateliers de Construction Mecanique l'Aster
Ateliers de Constructions Electriques de Charleroi
Ateliers de Constructions Mcaniques de Vevey
Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth
Australian Building and Construction Commission
Automatic basis function construction
Automatic taxonomy construction
Azerbaijan University of Architecture and Construction
Back construction
B construction
Barr Construction
BBR Construction
BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles
Beijing Construction Engineering Group
Beijing Urban Construction Group
Bibliography of the Reconstruction era
Bicycle Accident Reconstruction and Litigation
Black Reconstruction in America
Blake construction
Blamelessness and Reconstruction
Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction
Botswana Construction Workers' Union
Braithwaite, Burn & Jessop Construction Company
Brass Construction
Brass Construction (album)
Breast reconstruction
Building & Construction Trades Council v. Associated Builders & Contractors of Massachusetts/Rhode Island, Inc.
Building and Construction Authority
Building and Construction Improvement Program
Building and Construction Trades Department, AFLCIO
Building and Construction Union
Building Design+Construction
Bureau of Construction and Repair
Byrne Construction Services
Calculus of constructions
Canons of page construction
Case Construction Equipment
Caterpillar Construction Tycoon
CayleyDickson construction
Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism
Central Registry of Securitisation Asset Reconstruction and Security Interest
Cheek reconstruction
CHICO (construction company)
China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation
China Communications Construction Company
China Construction Bank
China Construction Bank (Asia)
China Construction Bank (Macau)
China National Democratic Construction Association
Chongqing International Construction Corporation
Christian National Union for the Reconstruction of Haiti
Christian reconstructionism
Cladding (construction)
Clark Construction
Classifier constructions in sign languages
Combined Construction and Operating License
Commission de la construction du Qubec
Committee for Support to the Reconstruction of the Party (MarxistLeninist)
Committee for the Reconstruction of Revolutionary Communism
Communist Party of Portugal (in Construction)
Communist Reconstruction Party
Communist Union for the Reconstruction of the Party (MarxistLeninist)
Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development, and Stabilisation
Connally v. General Construction Co.
Construction
Construction 3D printing
Construction aggregate
Constructional apraxia
Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes
Construction and Local Government Journal
Construction and management simulation
Construction and Planning Agency
Construction barrel
Construction battalion
Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 302
Construction bidding
Construction buyer
Construction (Cage)
Construction communication
Construction contract
Construction costs (biology)
Construction Data Company
Construction delay
Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007
Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015
Construction (disambiguation)
Construction engineering
Construction estimating software
Construction Fence (Keith Haring)
Construction field computing
Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union
Construction for the Modern Idiot
Construction grammar
Construction History Society
Construction Holiday (Quebec)
Construction Industry Council Hong Kong
Construction industry of India
Construction industry of Iran
Construction industry of Japan
Construction industry of Romania
Construction industry of the United Kingdom
Construction in Process
Construction in progress
Constructionism
Constructionism (learning theory)
Construction law
Construction loan
Construction Maintenance and Allied Workers
Construction management
Construction Management Association of America
Construction Morphology
Construction of an irreducible Markov chain in the Ising model
Construction of electronic cigarettes
Construction of Mount Rushmore
Construction of One World Trade Center
Construction of Rockefeller Center
Construction of the real numbers
Construction of the World Trade Center
Construction of t-norms
Construction paper
Construction partnering
Construction plant fitting in Ireland
Construction point
Construction Products Association
Constructions Aronautiques du Barn
Construction set
Construction Simulator
Constructions industrielles de la Mditerrane
Constructions in hyperbolic geometry
Construction site safety
Construction Site (TV series)
Construction Skills Certification Scheme
Constructions Mcaniques de Normandie
Construction soldier
Construction Specifications Institute
Construction surveying
Construction Time Again
Construction Time & Demolition
Construction Trade Union
Construction waste
Construction worker
Content Disarm & Reconstruction
Controversy of arrests in Tamil Nadu about construction of flyovers
Cordwood construction
Coset construction
Crime reconstruction
Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Crossland Construction Company
Cuco (construction)
ukurova (construction firm)
Danish Timber Industry and Construction Workers' Union
Dative construction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction (building)
Deconstruction (Deconstruction album)
Deconstruction (Devin Townsend Project album)
Deconstruction (disambiguation)
Deconstruction Records
Deconstruction Tour
Del E. Webb Construction Company
Democratic Reconstruction
Department of Housing and Construction
Department of Housing and Construction (197375)
Department of Housing and Construction (197882)
Department of Housing and Construction (198387)
Department of Post-War Reconstruction
Development Fund of the Swedish Construction Industry
Dexter Construction
Dillingham Construction
Director of Naval Construction
Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction era
Doctrine of repair and reconstruction
Domestic roof construction
Doosan Engineering & Construction
Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction
DPR Construction
Earthbag construction
Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority
Eastern Construction Company
cole nationale suprieure d'ingnieurs de constructions aronautiques
Economic reconstruction
Economic Reconstruction Union
Egyptian pyramid construction techniques
Electrical Impedance and Diffuse Optical Tomography Reconstruction Software
Emergency Relief and Construction Act
Engineering & Construction Services Division (City of Toronto)
Engineering, procurement, and construction
English Text Construction
Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development
EUC Construction El Hazek
European Agency for Reconstruction
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Evolution of motorway construction in African countries
Evolution of motorway construction in European nations
Executives of Construction Party
Fables of the Reconstruction
Fair Work Building and Construction
Falls City Construction Co.
Farmer Review of the UK Construction Labour Model
Fast Tracks: The Computer Slot Car Construction Kit
Federation of Norwegian Construction Industries
Fiber bundle construction theorem
Fletcher Construction
Fluid construction grammar
FO Construction
Forensic facial reconstruction
Frameless construction
Framing (construction)
Future Reconstructions Ritual of the Solstice
GabrielRosenberg reconstruction theorem
Gaiola (construction)
Gammon Construction
Geer-Melkus Construction
GelfandNaimarkSegal construction
Genitive construction
Georgia during Reconstruction
Glushkov's construction algorithm
GoldbergCoxeter construction
Goods wagons of welded construction
Grammatical construction
Granite Construction
Great Construction Projects of Communism
Greenport Basin and Construction Company
HAIFA construction
Hajs construction
Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Philippines
Hasbro Reconstruction
Health measures during the construction of the Panama Canal
Henry C. Turner Prize for Innovation in Construction Technology
Hensel Phelps Construction
Hip Hing Construction
History of compiler construction
History of construction
Hitachi Construction Machinery (Europe)
Hoar Construction
Hoffman Construction Company
Holmdene Brickworks v Roberts Construction
Home construction
Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996
Hunt Construction Group
Hyundai Engineering & Construction
Illegal construction
Indian Institute of Infrastructure and Construction
Ingra (construction company)
Injection mold construction
Inquiry into Construction Industry Insolvency in NSW
Institute of Design and Construction
Internal reconstruction
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
International Green Construction Code
International Institute of Rural Reconstruction
International Structural Engineering and Construction Society
Inverse copular constructions
Iranian Offshore Engineering and Construction Company
Iterative reconstruction
J.A. Jones Construction
James McHugh Construction Co
Janaadhar Constructions
Japanese Iraq Reconstruction and Support Group
J. E. Dunn Construction Group
Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.
Jihad of Construction
Journal of Composites for Construction
Journal of Construction Engineering & Management
Journal of Construction Research
Junta of National Reconstruction
Justice and Construction Party
KantorKoecherTits construction
KarlgrenLi reconstruction of Middle Chinese
Kay Construction
Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters
Kumho Engineering and Construction
Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture
LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction
LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction
Lao Front for National Construction
Lean construction
Lebanese Council for Development and Reconstruction
Lend Lease Project Management & Construction
Lhasa Urban Construction Investment F.C.
Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International
Libellus constructionis Farfensis
Liberal Democrats' Rally for National Reconstruction Vivoten
Lift slab construction
Lincoln Construction Co.
Linguistic reconstruction
Lip reconstruction
List of African-American officeholders during Reconstruction
List of African-American officeholders during the Reconstruction era
List of algebraic constructions
List of construction methods
List of construction trades
List of large-scale temperature reconstructions of the last 2,000 years
List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009
Lockheed Shipbuilding and Construction Company
Luftwaffe construction units
Lugged steel frame construction
Mace (construction company)
Male chest reconstruction
Manhattan Construction Company
Markholm Construction Co Ltd v Wellington City Council
Marxist-Leninist Party (Communist Reconstruction)
MerkleDamgrd construction
Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014
Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015
Ministry for Reconstruction (Greece)
Ministry of Assembly and Special Construction Works
Ministry of Construction
Ministry of Construction and Settlement (Turkey)
Ministry of Construction and Urbanism (Serbia)
Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities (Russia)
Ministry of Construction (Israel)
Ministry of Construction Materials Industry
Ministry of Construction (Myanmar)
Ministry of Construction of Heavy Industry
Ministry of Construction of Machine-Building Enterprises
Ministry of Construction of Oil and Gas Industries
Ministry of Construction (Poland)
Ministry of Construction (Soviet Union)
Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure (Serbia)
Ministry of Housing and Construction (Sri Lanka)
Ministry of Infrastructure and Construction
Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction (Cambodia)
Ministry of Privatization and Economic Reconstruction (Serbia)
Ministry of Provisioning and Reconstruction
Ministry of Transportation and Construction (Poland)
Ministry of Transport Construction
Ministry of Transport, Construction and Marine Economy (Poland)
Ministry of Transport, Construction, and Regional Development
Modular Approach to Software Construction Operation and Test
Modular construction
Monocrete construction
Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Construction Corp.
Movement for Reconstruction of Poland
Moylist Construction Limited v Doheny
MTA Capital Construction and Development Company
Museum of the History and Reconstruction of Ulan-Bator
Nabholz Construction
Nasal reconstruction using a paramedian forehead flap
National Academy of Construction
National Agency for Administrative City Construction
National Alliance for Reconstruction
National Alliance for Reconstruction administration
National Alliance of Democrats for Reconstruction
National Association of Women in Construction
National Center for Construction Education and Research
National Committee of the Chinese Seamen and Construction Workers' Union
National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction
National Construction Equipment Museum
National Construction Rentals
National Federation of Construction Workers
National Housing and Construction Company
National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government
National University of Architecture and Construction of Armenia
Naval Construction Battalion Center (Gulfport, Mississippi)
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 1
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 25
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 26
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 4
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 40
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 5
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Fifteen
Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Seven
NEC Engineering and Construction Contract
Neural circuit reconstruction
Neusis construction
Neutral unit of construction
New-construction building commissioning
New digraph reconstruction conjecture
New Rural Reconstruction Movement
New Ten Major Construction Projects
New York City Department of Design and Construction
No. 2 Construction Battalion
No. 5 Airfield Construction Squadron RAAF
No. 7 Airfield Construction Squadron RAAF
Northern Pipeline Construction Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co.
North Key Construction Men's Open
North Ocean Shipping Co. Ltd. v. Hyundai Construction Co., Ltd.
Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property
Object-Oriented Software Construction
Officer in Charge of Construction RVN
Offshore construction
Off-site construction
Orascom Construction
Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party (MarxistLeninist)
Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party of Greece
Outline of construction
Pacific Construction Group
Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction
Paley construction
Parallel construction
Parity Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International
Party for Peace, Democracy, Reconciliation, and Reconstruction
Party of Construction and Labour
Party of the Cardenist Front of National Reconstruction
Party of the Reconstruction of the National Order
PCL Construction
People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy
People's Reconstruction Party
Perpendicular bisector construction
Philippine National Construction Corporation
Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement
Pinball Construction Set
Plastics in the construction industry
Plate reconstruction
Plus construction
Point-to-point construction
Polytheistic reconstructionism
Popular Construction
Portal:Companies/Index by industry/Sub/Construction
Positive deconstruction
Power Construction Corporation of China
Powerset construction
Pre-construction services
Proj construction
Public Construction Commission
Public Works and Constructional Operatives' Union
Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration
Q-construction
Questionnaire construction
Radiation dose reconstruction
Rational reconstruction
Rauma Marine Constructions
Reciprocal construction
ReConStruction
Reconstruction
Reconstruction Acts
Reconstruction Amendments
Reconstruction (architecture)
Reconstruction conjecture
Reconstruction efforts after the Russo-Georgian War
Reconstruction era
Reconstruction Era National Historical Park
Reconstruction filter
Reconstruction Finance Corporation
Reconstruction from zero crossings
Reconstruction in Afghanistan
Reconstruction in South Carolina
Reconstructionism
Reconstructionist Congregation Beth Israel
Reconstructionist Judaism
Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Reconstruction of Germany
Reconstruction of New Orleans
Reconstruction Party of Canada
Reconstruction Site
Reconstructions of Old Chinese
Reconstruction Time: The Best of iiO Remixed
Reema construction
Re Gray's Inn Construction Co Ltd
Report on the Construction of Situations
Resilience (engineering and construction)
Resource construction set
Revised Joint Ministerial Decrees on Construction of Houses of Worship
Rocky Mountain Construction
Roman Construction Sites
Roman Polytheistic Reconstructionism
Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry
Rural Reconstruction Movement
Ruxley Electronics and Construction Ltd v Forsyth
R v Ron Engineering and Construction (Eastern) Ltd
Safety and Health in Construction Convention, 1988
Scalp reconstruction
Scientific Research Institute of Parachute Construction
Seattle Construction and Drydock Company
Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002
Serial verb construction
Set construction
Shaanxi Construction Engineering Group Corporation
Shanghai Construction Group
Shock construction project
Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit
Shooting reconstruction
Siding (construction)
Simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique
Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction
Skyline (construction set)
Skyscraper design and construction
Smeg Virus Construction Kit
Social constructionism
Social construction of gender
Social construction of technology
Socit Alsacienne de Constructions Mcaniques
Socit de Construction des Batignolles
Socit de Constructions et d'Aviation Lgre
Socit Franaise de Construction Aronautique
Socit Provenale de Constructions Aronautiques
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)
Software construction
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction
Spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction
Ssangyong Engineering and Construction
SS construction brigade
Stabilization, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations
Sta. Elena Construction Wrecking Balls
Steel plate construction
Stellar (construction company)
Stick-built construction
Strhle construction
Straightedge and compass construction
Straw-bale construction
Strict constructionism
Submittals (construction)
Suffolk Construction Company
Sumitomo Mitsui Construction
Superintendent (construction)
Supreme Council for National Reconstruction
Takamatsu Construction Group
Tata Hitachi Construction Machinery
Technical Construction Archive (Albania)
Technology and Construction Court
Tekfen Construction and Installation
Test construction strategies
Texas Residential Construction Commission
The Appetite for Construction Tour
The Bard's Tale Construction Set
The Construction and Principal Uses of Mathematical Instruments
The Deconstruction
The Deconstruction of Falling Stars
The Dissection and Reconstruction of Music from the Past as Performed by the Inmates of Lalo Schifrin's Demented Ensemble as a Tribute to the Memory of the Marquis De Sade
Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor
The Reconstruction of Nations
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
The Social Construction of Reality
Thompson's construction
Tishman Realty & Construction
TOA Construction Corporation
Tomographic reconstruction
Trace (deconstruction)
Traditional Korean roof construction
Traffic collision reconstruction
Traffic congestion reconstruction with Kerner's three-phase theory
Transport Construction Authority
Tube-and-fabric construction
Tunnel construction
Turkish construction and contracting industry
Turn construction unit
Turner Construction
berseering BV v Nordic Construction Company Baumanagement GmbH
Ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction
Under Construction
Underconstruction 1: Silence E.P.
Under Construction (Missy Elliott album)
Under Construction, Part II
Under Construction (Schugar/Schenker album)
Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians
Union of Construction and Wood
Union of Workers in Industry, Garages, Construction Firms, Mines and Printers
Unit construction
United Building & Construction Trades Council v. Mayor and Council of Camden
United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency
United Nations Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
University of Florida College of Design, Construction and Planning
Urban construction
USCG inland construction tender
User:LGBT Car54/Construction interested
User:Sebwite:Arguments to avoid in discussions/construction sandbox
USSR in Construction
Vector field reconstruction
Viennot's geometric construction
Village Reconstruction Organization
Violin construction and mechanics
Virtual design and construction
Volvo Construction Equipment
Walter Construction Group
Wargame Construction Set III: Age of Rifles 1846-1905
Wattle (construction)
Weldon Brothers Construction Company
Western Bridge and Construction Company
Wheel construction
White House Reconstruction
Women during the Reconstruction era
Woodar Investment Development Ltd v Wimpey Construction UK Ltd
Wulff construction
Wythoff construction
Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
Yellow goods (construction and agriculture)
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