6.001 "education" /siks dub*l oh wun/, /dub*l oh wun/ or rarely /siks dub*l oh fun/ {MIT}'s introductory computer class for majors, known for its intensity. Developed by {Gerald Sussman} and {Hal Abelson}, the course is taught in {Scheme} and introduces {recursion}, {higher-order functions}, {object-oriented programming} and much more. Students who grasp the {meta}circular {interpreter} gain entry into the {Knights of the Lambda-Calculus}. 6.001 has been exported to several other colleges, sometimes successfully. The textbook, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", written with Julie Sussman is a classic that can be found on the shelves of many computer scientists, whether they took the course or not. Legendary characters from the class, problem sets, and book include the wise Alyssa P. Hacker, Ben Bitdiddle, Lem E. Tweakit and Eva Lu Ator, the careless Louis Reasoner and {Captain Abstraction}. (1994-11-22)
A bound variable, or apparent variable, in a given formula, is distinguished from a free variable by the fact that the meaning of the formula does not depend on giving the variable a particular value. (The same variable may be allowed, if desired, to have both bound occurrences and free occurrences in the same formula, and in this case the meaning of the formula depends on giving a value to the variable only at the places where it is free.) For examples, see Abstraction, and Logic, formal, § 3.
absence ::: n. --> A state of being absent or withdrawn from a place or from companionship; -- opposed to presence.
Want; destitution; withdrawal.
Inattention to things present; abstraction (of mind); as, absence of mind.
abstract ::: a. --> Withdraw; separate.
Considered apart from any application to a particular object; separated from matter; existing in the mind only; as, abstract truth, abstract numbers. Hence: ideal; abstruse; difficult.
Expressing a particular property of an object viewed apart from the other properties which constitute it; -- opposed to concrete; as, honesty is an abstract word.
Resulting from the mental faculty of abstraction; general
abstract data type "programming" (ADT) A kind of {data abstraction} where a type's internal form is hidden behind a set of {access functions}. Values of the type are created and inspected only by calls to the access functions. This allows the implementation of the type to be changed without requiring any changes outside the {module} in which it is defined. {Objects} and ADTs are both forms of data abstraction, but objects are not ADTs. Objects use procedural abstraction (methods), not type abstraction. A classic example of an ADT is a {stack} data type for which functions might be provided to create an empty stack, to {push} values onto a stack and to {pop} values from a stack. {Reynolds paper (http://cis.upenn.edu/~gunter/publications/documents/taoop94.html)}. {Cook paper "OOP vs ADTs" (http://wcook.org/papers/OOPvsADT/CookOOPvsADT90.pdf)}. (2003-07-03)
abstract data type ::: (programming) (ADT) A kind of data abstraction where a type's internal form is hidden behind a set of access functions. Values of the type are created implementation of the type to be changed without requiring any changes outside the module in which it is defined.Objects and ADTs are both forms of data abstraction, but objects are not ADTs. Objects use procedural abstraction (methods), not type abstraction.A classic example of an ADT is a stack data type for which functions might be provided to create an empty stack, to push values onto a stack and to pop values from a stack. . .(2003-07-03)
abstract interpretation "theory" A partial execution of a program which gains information about its {semantics} (e.g. control structure, flow of information) without performing all the calculations. Abstract interpretation is typically used by compilers to analyse programs in order to decide whether certain optimisations or transformations are applicable. The objects manipulated by the program (typically values and functions) are represented by points in some {domain}. Each abstract domain point represents some set of real ("{concrete}") values. For example, we may take the abstract points "+", "0" and "-" to represent positive, zero and negative numbers and then define an abstract version of the multiplication operator, *
Abstractio imaginationis: According to the Scholastics a degree of abstraction below that of reason and above that of the senses, which do abstract from matter, but not from the presence of matter, whereas the imagination abstracts even from the presence of matter, but not from its appendices, or sensible qualities. -- J.J.R.
Abstractio intellectus seu rationis: According to the Scholastics the highest degree of abstraction is that of reason which abstracts not only matter and its presence, but also from its appendices, that is, its sensible conditions and properties, considering essence or quiddity alone. -- J.J.R.
ABSTRACTION, DESCRIPTIONS (see articles of those titles):
Abstractionism: (Lat. ab, from + trahere, to draw) The illegitimate use of abstraction, and especially the tendency to mistake abstractions for concrete realities. Cf. W. James, The Meaning of Truth, ch XIII. Equivalent to A. N. Whitehead's "Fallacy of misplaced concreteness." -- L.W.
Abstraction: (Lat. ab, from + trahere, to draw) The process of ideally separating a partial aspect or quality from a total object. Also the result or product of mental abstraction. Abstraction, which concentrates its attention on a single aspect, differs from analysis which considers all aspects on a par. -- L.W.
Abstractions ::: (language) (LOLITA) An extension of the Culler-Fried System for symbolic mathematics.[An On- line Symbol Manipulation System, F.W. Blackwell, Proc ACM 22nd Natl Conf, 1967].[Sammet 1969, p. 464].(2003-07-29)
abstract "philosophy" A description of a concept that leaves out some information or details in order to simplify it in some useful way. Abstraction is a powerful technique that is applied in many areas of computing and elsewhere. For example: {abstract class}, {data abstraction}, {abstract interpretation}, {abstract syntax}, {Hardware Abstraction Layer}. (2009-12-09)
Ada "language" (After {Ada Lovelace}) A {Pascal}-descended language, designed by Jean Ichbiah's team at {CII Honeywell} in 1979, made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. The original language was standardised as "Ada 83", the latest is "{Ada 95}". Ada is a large, complex, {block-structured} language aimed primarily at {embedded} applications. It has facilities for {real-time} response, {concurrency}, hardware access and reliable run-time error handling. In support of large-scale {software engineering}, it emphasises {strong typing}, {data abstraction} and {encapsulation}. The type system uses {name equivalence} and includes both {subtypes} and {derived types}. Both fixed and {floating-point} numerical types are supported. {Control flow} is fully bracketed: if-then-elsif-end if, case-is-when-end case, loop-exit-end loop, goto. Subprogram parameters are in, out, or inout. Variables imported from other packages may be hidden or directly visible. Operators may be {overloaded} and so may {enumeration} literals. There are user-defined {exceptions} and {exception handlers}. An Ada program consists of a set of packages encapsulating data objects and their related operations. A package has a separately compilable body and interface. Ada permits {generic packages} and subroutines, possibly parametrised. Ada support {single inheritance}, using "tagged types" which are types that can be extended via {inheritance}. Ada programming places a heavy emphasis on {multitasking}. Tasks are synchronised by the {rendezvous}, in which a task waits for one of its subroutines to be executed by another. The conditional entry makes it possible for a task to test whether an entry is ready. The selective wait waits for either of two entries or waits for a limited time. Ada is often criticised, especially for its size and complexity, and this is attributed to its having been designed by committee. In fact, both Ada 83 and Ada 95 were designed by small design teams to be internally consistent and tightly integrated. By contrast, two possible competitors, {Fortran 90} and {C++} have both become products designed by large and disparate volunteer committees. See also {Ada/Ed}, {Toy/Ada}. {Home of the Brave Ada Programmers (http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/)}. {Ada FAQs (http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/FAQ/)} (hypertext), {text only (ftp://lglftp.epfl.ch/pub/Ada/FAQ)}. {(http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/ada/)}, {(ftp://ajpo.sei.cmu.edu/)}, {(ftp://stars.rosslyn.unisys.com/pub/ACE_8.0)}. E-mail: "adainfo@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu". {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.ada}. {An Ada grammar (ftp://primost.cs.wisc.edu/)} including a lex scanner and yacc parser is available. E-mail: "masticol@dumas.rutgers.edu". {Another yacc grammar and parser for Ada by Herman Fischer (ftp://wsmr-simtel20.army.mil/PD2:"ADA.EXTERNAL-TOOLS"GRAM2.SRC)}. An {LR parser} and {pretty-printer} for {Ada} from NASA is available from the {Ada Software Repository}. {Adamakegen} generates {makefiles} for {Ada} programs. ["Reference Manual for the Ada Programming Language", ANSI/MIL STD 1815A, US DoD (Jan 1983)]. Earlier draft versions appeared in July 1980 and July 1982. ISO 1987. [{Jargon File}] (2000-08-12)
Aeshma-Daeva (Avestan) Aēshma-Daēva Eesham-Diev, Hesham-Diev (Pahlavi) [from aēshma wrath, ill wish, anger from the verbal root ish desire, passion + daēvas evil spirits (originally gods); cf Sanskrit deva, Persian dievs] The fiend of the wounding spear in the Avesta. The Aryan gods or daevas having become anthropomorphic, they were denounced by the Aryan initiates who had settled in Airya-Vaeja (Eran or Iran). Zarathustra in the Gathas refers to Kavis and Karpans, the leaders of the ancient Aryan faith, as daevas because they had polluted the abstraction of Mazdean philosophy with ritualistic ceremonies.
Again, Epicurus based everything on sensation in order to bring people back to actual experience, as opposed to vain outlooking speculation, as a solid foundation for an ethic. He was not an atheist in the modern sense, for he explicitly says that there are gods, but not the gods of the anthropomorphic religionists. In the same way, he did not teach a selfish individualism, but that the way to final freedom is within oneself; and when he depreciates the State and sundry social or political theories, he was merely opposing the futile abstractions then prevalent under these names.
Algebra of Communicating Processes ::: (theory) (ACP)Compare CCS.[Algebra of Communicating Processes with Abstraction, J.A. Bergstra & J.W. Klop, Theor Comp Sci 37(1):77-121 1985].[Summary?] (1994-11-08)
Algebra of Communicating Processes "theory" (ACP) Compare {CCS}. ["Algebra of Communicating Processes with Abstraction", J.A. Bergstra & J.W. Klop, Theor Comp Sci 37(1):77-121 1985]. [Summary?] (1994-11-08)
All Indian doctrines orient themselves by the Vedas, accepting or rejecting their authority. In ranging from materialism to acosmism and nihilism, from physiologism to spiritualism, realism to idealism, monism to pluralism, atheism and pantheism, Hindus believe they have exhausted all possible philosophic attitudes (cf. darsana), which they feel supplement rather than exclude each other. A unnersal feature is the fusion of religion, metaphysics, ethics and psychology, due to the universal acceptance of a psycho-physicalism, further exemplified in the typical doctrines of karma and samsara (q.v.). Rigorous logic is nevertheless applied in theology where metaphvsics passes into eschatology (cf., e.g., is) and the generally accepted belief in the cyclic nature of the cosmos oscillating between srsti ("throwing out") and pralaya (dissolution) of the absolute reality (cf. abhasa), and in psychology, where epistemology seeks practical outlets in Yoga (q.v.). With a genius for abstraction, thinkers were and are almost invariably hedonistically motivated by the desire to overcome the evils of existence in the hope of attaining liberation (cf. moksa) and everlasting bliss (cf. ananda, nirvana). -- K.F.L.
alpha conversion ::: (theory) In lambda-calculus and reduction, the renaming of a formal parameter in a lambda abstraction. This does not change the meaning of the abstraction. For example: \ x . x+1 --> \ y . y+1 to rename the parameter before applying the abstraction to avoid name capture. (1995-05-10)
alpha conversion "theory" In {lambda-calculus} and {reduction}, the renaming of a {formal parameter} in a {lambda abstraction}. This does not change the meaning of the abstraction. For example: \ x . x+1 "--" \ y . y+1 If the {actual argument} to a lambda abstraction contains instances of the abstraction's formal parameter then it is necessary to rename the parameter before applying the abstraction to avoid {name capture}. (1995-05-10)
Alphard "language" (Named after the brightest star in Hydra) A {Pascal}-like language developed by Wulf, Shaw and London of {CMU} in 1974. Alphard supports {data abstraction} using the 'form', which combines a specification and an implementation. ["Abstraction and Verification in Alphard: Defining and Specifying Iteration and Generators", Mary Shaw, CACM 20(8):553-563, Aug 1977]. (1995-05-10)
Alphard ::: (language) (Named after the brightest star in Hydra) A Pascal-like language developed by Wulf, Shaw and London of CMU in 1974. Alphard supports data abstraction using the 'form', which combines a specification and an implementation.[Abstraction and Verification in Alphard: Defining and Specifying Iteration and Generators, Mary Shaw, CACM 20(8):553-563, Aug 1977]. (1995-05-10)
Also the doctrine of Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) that the soul is the vital principle and responsible for organic functions in the body, and synonymous with Vitalism. This doctrine avoids the logical absurdity of making life at once the cause and the effect of the properties of matter; but it errs in making life something entirely distinct from matter, for such a separation reduces both to mere abstractions.
Also theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience. ::: A branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology, and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.[97][98][99][100]
Amesha-Spentas (Avestan) Ameshā-Spentās [from a not + mesha, mara mortal, mutable + spenta benefactor, holy, soul-healing] Immortal benefactors; six in number: Vohu-Manah, Asha-Vahishta, Khshathra-Vayria, Spenta-Armaiti (love), Haurvatat (perfection), and Ameretat (immortality). The first three are attributes of Ahura-Mazda, abstractions without form. These male positive creative forces leave their impressions in the mental world and give birth to the second trinity, who lead man to freedom. “The Amshaspends, [are] our Dhyan-Chohans or the ‘Serpents of Wisdom.’ They are identical with, and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura-Mazda). They are also the Angels of the Stars of the Christians — the Star-yazatas of the Zoroastrians — or again the seven planets (including the sun) of every religion. The epithet — ‘the shining having efficacious eyes’ — proves it. This on the physical and sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the divine powers of Ahura-Mazda; but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the ‘Builders,’ the ‘watchers,’ the Pitar (fathers), and the first Preceptors of mankind” (SD 2:358).
Among his most important works the following must be mentioned: Paz en la Guerra, 1897; De la Ensenanza Superior en Espana, 1899; En Torno al Casticismo, 1902; Amor y Pedagogia, 1902; Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, 1905; Mi Religion y Otros Ensayos, 1910; Soliloquios y Conversaciones, 1912; Contra Esto y Aquello, 1912; Ensayos, 7 vols., 1916-1920; Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida en los Hombres y en los Pueblos, 1914; Niebla, 1914; La Agonia del Cristianismo, 1930; etc. Unamuno conceives of everv individual man as an end in himself and not a means. Civilization has an individual responsibility towards each man. Man lives in society, but society as such is an abstraction. The concrete fact is the individual man "of flesh and blood". This doctrine of man constitutes the first principle of his entire philosophy. He develops it throughout his writings by way of a soliloquy in which he attacks the concepts of "man", "Society", "Humanity", etc. as mere abstractions of the philosophers, and argues for the "Concrete", "experiential" facts of the individual living man. On his doctrine of man as an individual fact ontologically valid, Unamuno roots the second principle of his philosophy, namely, his theory of Immortality. Faith in immortality grows out, not from the realm of reason, but from the realm of facts which lie beyond the boundaries of reason. In fact, reason as such, that is, as a logical function is absolutely disowned bv Unamuno, as useless and unjustified. The third principle of his philosophy is his theory of the Logos which has to do with man's intuition of the world and his immediate response in language and action. -- J.A.F.
anhydride ::: n. --> An oxide of a nonmetallic body or an organic radical, capable of forming an acid by uniting with the elements of water; -- so called because it may be formed from an acid by the abstraction of water.
Antaryoga (Sanskrit) Antaryoga [from antar interior, within + yoga union from the verbal root yuj to join, unite] Interior union; a state of deep thought or abstraction signifying that high stage of inner spiritual and intellectual recollection in which all the superior part of a person’s constitution is gathered together and focused as it were into a single point of consciousness. It is involved in the attaining of the higher states of consciousness such as turiya-samadhi.
anthropomorphism ::: A form of personification involving the attribution of human characteristics and qualities to non-human beings, objects, or natural phenomena. Animals, forces of nature, and unseen or unknown authors of chance are frequent subjects of anthropomorphosis. Two examples are the attribution of a human body or of human qualities generally to God (or the gods), and creating imaginary persons who are the embodiment of an abstraction such as Death, Lust, War, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Anthropomorphism is similar to prosopopoeia (adopting the persona of another person).[4]
Application Program Interface "programming" (API, or "application programming interface") The interface (calling conventions) by which an {application program} accesses {operating system} and other services. An API is defined at {source code} level and provides a level of {abstraction} between the application and the {kernel} (or other privileged utilities) to ensure the {portability} of the code. An API can also provide an interface between a {high level language} and lower level utilities and services which were written without consideration for the {calling conventions} supported by compiled languages. In this case, the API's main task may be the translation of parameter lists from one format to another and the interpretation of {call-by-value} and {call-by-reference} arguments in one or both directions. (1995-02-15)
Application Program Interface ::: (programming) (API, or application programming interface) The interface (calling conventions) by which an application program accesses operating system of abstraction between the application and the kernel (or other privileged utilities) to ensure the portability of the code.An API can also provide an interface between a high level language and lower level utilities and services which were written without consideration for the and the interpretation of call-by-value and call-by-reference arguments in one or both directions. (1995-02-15)
A
aspect-oriented programming "programming" (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond simple functional modules and thereby improve the {quality} of software. Mechanisms for defining and composing {abstractions} are essential elements of programming languages. The design style supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised components that can be called upon to perform a function. But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components, such as failure handling, {persistence}, communication, replication, coordination, {memory management}, or {real-time} constraints, and tend to cut across groups of functional components. While they can be thought about and analysed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current {component-oriented languages} tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The {source code} becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes. This "tangling" phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. A number of researchers have begun working on approaches to this problem that allow programmers to express each of a system's aspects of concern in a separate and natural form, and then automatically combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form. These approaches have been called aspect-oriented programming. {Xerox AOP homepage (http://parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/)}. {AspectJ (http://AspectJ.org/)}. {ECOOPP'99 AOP workshop (http://wwwtrese.cs.utwente.nl/aop-ecoop99/)}. (1999-11-21)
aspect-oriented programming ::: (programming) (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond simple functional modules and thereby improve the quality of software.Mechanisms for defining and composing abstractions are essential elements of programming languages. The design style supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised components that can be called upon to perform a function.But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components, such as failure handling, persistence, communication, replication, coordination, memory management, or real-time constraints, and tend to cut across groups of functional components.While they can be thought about and analysed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current component-oriented languages tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The source code becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes.This tangling phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. A number of researchers have begun working on combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form. These approaches have been called aspect-oriented programming. . . . (1999-11-21)
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
abstraction 1. Generalisation; ignoring or hiding details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances. Examples are {abstract data types} (the representation details are hidden), {abstract syntax} (the details of the {concrete syntax} are ignored), {abstract interpretation} (details are ignored to analyse specific properties). 2. "programming" Parameterisation, making something a function of something else. Examples are {lambda abstractions} (making a term into a function of some variable), {higher-order functions} (parameters are functions), {bracket abstraction} (making a term into a function of a variable). Opposite of {concretisation}. (1998-06-04)
abstraction ::: 1. Generalisation; ignoring or hiding details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances. Examples are abstract data types (the syntax are ignored), abstract interpretation (details are ignored to analyse specific properties).2. (programming) Parameterisation, making something a function of something else. Examples are lambda abstractions (making a term into a function of some variable), higher-order functions (parameters are functions), bracket abstraction (making a term into a function of a variable).Opposite of concretisation. (1998-06-04)
abstractional ::: a. --> Pertaining to abstraction.
abstraction ::: a. --> The act of abstracting, separating, or withdrawing, or the state of being withdrawn; withdrawal.
The act process of leaving out of consideration one or more properties of a complex object so as to attend to others; analysis. Thus, when the mind considers the form of a tree by itself, or the color of the leaves as separate from their size or figure, the act is called abstraction. So, also, when it considers whiteness, softness, virtue, existence, as separate from any particular objects.
abstractionist ::: n. --> An idealist.
abstractions ::: things which have no independent existence, which exist only in idea; visionary and unrealistic.
abstraction ::: The process of removing physical, spatial, or temporal details[3] or attributes in the study of objects or systems in order to more closely attend to other details of interest[4]
Barbara Liskov "person" Professor Barbara Liskov was the first US woman to be awarded a PhD in computing, and her innovations can be found in every modern programming language. She currently (2009) heads the Programming Methodology Group at the {Massachusetts Institute of Technology}. Professor Liskov's design innovations have, over the decades, made software more reliable and easier to maintain. She has invented two computer progamming languages: {CLU}, an {object-oriented language}, and {Argus}, a {distributed programming language}. Liskov's research forms the basis of modern programming languages such as {Java}, {C
beta abstraction ::: [lambda-calculus] The conversion of an expression to an application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --> (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is beta reduction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.
beta abstraction [{lambda-calculus}] The conversion of an expression to an {application} of a {lambda abstraction} to an argument expression. Some subterm of the original expression becomes the argument of the abstraction and the rest becomes its body. E.g. 4+1 --" (\ x . x+1) 4 The opposite of beta abstraction is {beta reduction}. These are the two kinds of {beta conversion}.
beta conversion "theory" A term from {lambda-calculus} for {beta reduction} or {beta abstraction}. (1999-01-15)
beta conversion ::: (theory) A term from lambda-calculus for beta reduction or beta abstraction. (1999-01-15)
BETA Kristensen, Madsen "olmadsen@daimi.aau.dk", Moller-Pedersen & Nygaard, 1983. Object-oriented language with block structure, coroutines, concurrency, {strong typing}, part objects, separate objects and classless objects. Central feature is a single abstraction mechanism called "patterns", a generalisation of classes, providing instantiation and hierarchical inheritance for all objects including procedures and processes. Mjolner Informatics ApS, Aarhus, implementations for Mac, Sun, HP, Apollo. E-mail: "info@mjolner.dk". Mailing list: "usergroup@mjolner.dk". ["Object-Oriented Programming in the BETA Programming Language", Ole Lehrmann et al, A-W June 1993, ISBN 0-201-62430-3]. [{Jargon File}] (1995-10-31)
beta reduction [{lambda-calculus}] The {application} of a {lambda abstraction} to an argument expression. A copy of the body of the lambda abstraction is made and occurrences of the {bound variable} being replaced by the argument. E.g. (\ x . x+1) 4 --" 4+1 Beta reduction is the only kind of {reduction} in the {pure lambda-calculus}. The opposite of beta reduction is {beta abstraction}. These are the two kinds of {beta conversion}. See also {name capture}.
beta reduction ::: [lambda-calculus] The application of a lambda abstraction to an argument expression. A copy of the body of the lambda abstraction is made and occurrences of the bound variable being replaced by the argument. E.g. (\ x . x+1) 4 --> 4+1 The opposite of beta reduction is beta abstraction. These are the two kinds of beta conversion.See also name capture.
beyond ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads *
Beyond ::: “The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads
black box "jargon" An {abstraction} of a device or system in which only its externally visible behaviour is considered and not its implementation or "inner workings". See also {functional testing}. (1997-07-03)
black box ::: (jargon) An abstraction of a device or system in which only its externally visible behaviour is considered and not its implementation or inner workings.See also functional testing. (1997-07-03)
bottom-up implementation "programming" The opposite of {top-down design}. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to *build* things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together. [{Jargon File}] (1996-05-10)
bound variable ::: 1. A bound variable or formal argument in a function definition is replaced by the actual argument when the function is applied. In the lambda abstraction \ x . M M is considered on its own. M is the scope of the binding of x.2. In logic a bound variable is a quantified variable. See quantifier.
bound variable 1. A bound variable or {formal argument} in a function definition is replaced by the {actual argument} when the function is applied. In the {lambda abstraction} \ x . M x is the bound variable. However, x is a {free variable} of the term M when M is considered on its own. M is the {scope} of the binding of x. 2. In logic a bound variable is a quantified variable. See {quantifier}.
bracket abstraction ::: (compiler) An algorithm which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable bracket abstraction and currying we can define a language without bound variables in which the only operation is monadic function application.See combinator. (1995-03-07)
bracket abstraction "compiler" An {algorithm} which turns a term into a function of some variable. The result of using bracket abstraction on T with respect to variable v, written as [v]T, is a term containing no occurrences of v and denoting a function f such that f v = T. This defines the function f = (\ v . T). Using bracket abstraction and {currying} we can define a language without {bound variables} in which the only operation is {monadic} function application. See {combinator}. (1995-03-07)
Brentano, Franz: (1838-1917) Who had originally been a Roman Catholic priest may be described as an unorthodox neo-scholastic. According to him the only three forms of psychic activity, representation, judgment and "phenomena of love and hate", are just three modes of "intentionality", i.e., of referring to an object intended. Judgments may be self-evident and thereby characterized as true and in an analogous way love and hate may be characterized as "right". It is on these characterizations that a dogmatic theory of truth and value may be based. In any mental experience the content is merely a "physical phenomenon" (real or imaginary) intended to be referred to, what is psychic is merely the "act" of representing, judging (viz. affirming or denying) and valuing (i.e. loving or hating). Since such "acts" are evidently immaterial, the soul by which they are performed may be proved to be a purely spiritual and imperishable substance and from these and other considerations the existence, spirituality, as also the infinite wisdom, goodness and justice of God may also be demonstrated. It is most of all by his classification of psychic phenomena, his psychology of "acts" and "intentions" and by his doctrine concerning self-evident truths and values that Brentano, who considered himself an Aristotelian, exercised a profound influence on subsequent German philosophers: not only on those who accepted his entire system (such as A. Marty and C. Stumpf) but also those who were somewhat more independent and original and whom he influenced either directly (as A. Meinong and E. Husserl) or indirectly (as M. Scheler and Nik. Hartmann). Main works: Psychologie des Aristoteles, 1867; Vom Dasein Gottes, 1868; Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874; Vom Ursprung sittliches Erkenntnis, 1884; Ueber die Zukunft der Philosophie, 1893; Die vier Phasen der Philos., 1895. -- H.Go. Broad, C.D.: (1887) As a realistic critical thinker Broad takes over from the sciences the methods that are fruitful there, classifies the various propositions used in all the sciences, and defines basic scientific concepts. In going beyond science, he seeks to reach a total view of the world by bringing in the facts and principles of aesthetic, religious, ethical and political experience. In trying to work out a much more general method which attacks the problem of the connection between mathematical concepts and sense-data better than the method of analysis in situ, he gives a simple exposition of the method of extensive abstraction, which applies the mutual relations of objects, first recognized in pure mathematics, to physics. Moreover, a great deal can be learned from Broad on the relation of the principle of relativity to measurement.
brute force ::: (programming) A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence heavy-handed, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also brute force and ignorance).The canonical example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the travelling salesman problem (TSP), a classical NP-hard problem:Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order to minimise the distance travelled?The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is consider, and for N = 1000 - well, see bignum). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general solution than brute force. See also NP-complete.A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front.Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement.When applied to cryptography, it is usually known as brute force attack.Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix, is reported to have uttered the epigram When in doubt, use brute force. He probably intended this as a ha ha only serious, cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate aesthetic judgment.[Jargon File] (1995-02-14)
brute force "programming" A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavy-handed, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction (see also {brute force and ignorance}). The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the "{travelling salesman problem}" (TSP), a classical {NP-hard} problem: Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should the cities be visited in order to minimise the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very stupid in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider, and for N = 1000 - well, see {bignum}). Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no better general solution than brute force. See also {NP-complete}. A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front. Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more "intelligent" algorithm. Additionally, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement. When applied to {cryptography}, it is usually known as {brute force attack}. {Ken Thompson}, co-inventor of {Unix}, is reported to have uttered the epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably intended this as a {ha ha only serious}, but the original {Unix} {kernel}'s preference for simple, robust and portable {algorithms} over {brittle} "smart" ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that {operating system}. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate aesthetic judgment. [{Jargon File}] (1995-02-14)
Captain Abstraction ::: The champion of the principles of abstraction and modularity, who protects unwary students on MIT's course 6.001 from the nefarious designs of Sergeant Spaghetticode and his vile concrete programming practices.See also spaghetti code. (1994-11-22)
Captain Abstraction The champion of the principles of {abstraction} and modularity, who protects unwary students on {MIT}'s course {6.001} from the nefarious designs of Sergeant Spaghetticode and his vile {concrete} programming practices. See also {spaghetti code}. (1994-11-22)
Cardinal number: Two classes are equivalent if there exists a one-to-one correspondence between them (see One-one). Cardinal numbers are obtained by abstraction (q. v.) with respect to equivalence, so that two classes have the same cardinal number if and only if they are equivalent. This may be formulated more exactly, following Frege, by defining the cardinal number of a class to be the class of classes equivalent to it.
Charles Babbage ::: (person) The british inventor known to some as the Father of Computing for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical Engine. His previous Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables.Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London.Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking.[Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994].Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of abstraction, fell into a trap familiar to toolsmiths since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord Moulton:One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.'After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart.When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to was that everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to any useful purpose.[Lord Moulton, The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and growth, in G. C. Knott, ed., Napier tercentenary memorial volume (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage Passage from the Life of a Philosopher, Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994), p. 34].Compare: uninteresting, Ninety-Ninety Rule. (1996-02-22)
Charles Babbage "person" The British inventor known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his {Analytical Engine}. His previous {Difference Engine} was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables. Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he published a table of {logarithms} from 1 to 108000. In 1828 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London. Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking. [Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994]. Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of {abstraction}, fell into a trap familiar to {toolsmiths} since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord Moulton: "One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my {Analytical Machine}, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.'" "After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart." "When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to any useful purpose." [Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial volume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage "Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994), p. 34]. Compare: {uninteresting}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}. (1996-02-22)
Closely related to the process of functional abstraction is the process of forming a class by abstraction from a suitable formula A relative to a particular variable, say x. The formula A must be such that (under the given system of interpretation for the notations appearing in A) λx[A] denotes a propositional function. Then x∋(A) (Peano), or xˆ (A) (Russell), denotes the class, determined by this propositional function. Frege's ε (A) also belongs here, when the function corresponding to A (relatively to the variable ε) is a propositional function.
CLP* ::: A derivative of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP).[CLP* and Constraint Abstraction, T. Hickey, 16th POPL, pp. 125-133, 1989]. (1994-11-01)
CLP* "language, logic programming" A derivative of {Constraint Logic Programming} (CLP). ["CLP* and Constraint Abstraction", T. Hickey, 16th POPL, pp. 125-133, 1989]. [Difference?] (1994-11-01)
CLU ::: CLUster.An object-oriented programming language developed at MIT by Liskov et al in 1974-1975.CLU is an object-oriented language of the Pascal family designed to support data abstraction, similar to Alphard. It introduced the iterator: a coroutine yielding the elements of a data object, to be used as the sequence of values in a 'for' loop.A CLU program consists of separately compilable procedures, clusters and iterators, no nesting. A cluster is a module naming an abstract type and its iterators may be generic. Supplying actual constant values for the parameters instantiates the module.There are no implicit type conversions. In a cluster, the explicit type conversions 'up' and 'down' change between the abstract type and the representation. There is a universal type 'any', and a procedure force[] to check that an object is a certain type. Objects may be mutable or immutable.Exceptions are raised using 'signal' and handled with 'except'. Assignment is by sharing, similar to the sharing of data objects in Lisp. Arguments are passed by and can be changed only if they are mutable. CLU has own variables and multiple assignment.See also Kamin's interpreters, clu2c.[CLU Reference Manual, Barbara Liskov et al, LNCS 114, Springer 1981].E-mail: Paul R. Johnson . . (1994-12-16)
CLU "language" (CLUster) An {object-oriented} programming language developed at {MIT} by {Liskov} et al in 1974-1975. CLU is an {object-oriented} language of the {Pascal} family designed to support {data abstraction}, similar to {Alphard}. It introduced the {iterator}: a {coroutine} yielding the elements of a data object, to be used as the sequence of values in a {for loop}. A CLU program consists of separately compilable {procedures}, {clusters} and iterators, no nesting. A cluster is a module naming an {abstract type} and its operations, its internal representation and implementation. Clusters and iterators may be generic. Supplying actual constant values for the {parameters} instantiates the {module}. There are no {implicit type conversions}. In a cluster, the explicit type conversions 'up' and 'down' change between the abstract type and the representation. There is a universal type 'any', and a procedure force[] to check that an object is a certain type. Objects may be mutable or {immutable}. {Exceptions} are raised using 'signal' and handled with 'except'. {Assignment} is by sharing, similar to the sharing of data objects in {Lisp}. Arguments are passed by {call-by-sharing}, similar to {call-by-value}, except that the arguments are objects and can be changed only if they are mutable. CLU has {own variables} and multiple assignment. CLU was one of {Kamin's interpreters}. {clu2c} compiled CLU to {C}. {Concurrent CLU} was an extension designed to support parallel proceses. ["CLU Reference Manual", Barbara Liskov et al, LNCS 114, Springer 1981]. E-mail: Paul R. Johnson "prj@pm-prj.lcs.mit.edu". {Versions for Sun and VAX/VMS (ftp://pion.lcs.mit.edu/pub/clu/)}. {Portable version (ftp://mintaka.lcs.mit.edu/pub/dcurtis/)}. (1994-12-16)
Concrete Universal: In Hegel's system a category is concrete when it possesses the basic character of the real, i.e. tension, change dialectical opposition. Such a universal comprises a synthesis of two opposite abstractions; and with one exception, it in turn becomes an abstract member of a piir of logical opposites united or "sublated" in a higher category. The lowest of such dynamic or concrete universals is Becoming, which is a dialectical synthesis of Being and Not-Being. The only absolutely concrete universal, however, is Reality itself, the World Whole, conceived as an all-inclusive, organic svstem of self-thinking Thought.
Concurrent CLU ::: Hamilton, 1984.[Preserving Abstraction in Concurrent Programming, R. Cooper et al, IEEE Trans Soft Eng SE-14(2):258-263 (Feb 1988)].
Concurrent CLU "language" A {programming language} extending {CLU} for {concurrent} processes, developed by by Hamilton in 1984. ["Preserving Abstraction in Concurrent Programming", R.C.B. Cooper, K.G. Hamilton, IEEE Trans Soft Eng SE-14(2):258-263, Feb 1988].1 (2013-09-28)
Concurrent ML "language" (CML) A {concurrent} extension of {SML/NJ} written by J. Reppy at {Cornell University} in 1990. CML supports dynamic {thread} creation and synchronous {message passing} on typed channels. Threads are implemented using first-class {continuations}. First-class synchronous operations allow users to tailor their synchronisation abstractions for their application. CML also supports both {stream I/O} and low-level I/O in an integrated fashion. {(ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/)}. E-mail: "sml-bugs@research.att.com" (bugs). ["CML: A Higher-Order Concurrent Language", John H. Reppy, SIGPLAN Notices 26(6):293-305, June 1991]. (2000-08-09)
Concurrent ML ::: (language) (CML) A concurrent extension of SML/NJ written by J. Reppy at Cornell University in 1990. CML supports dynamic thread creation and synchronous synchronisation abstractions for their application. CML also supports both stream I/O and low-level I/O in an integrated fashion.Latest version: 0.9.8, as of 1994-12-21, requires SML/NJ 0.75 or later. .E-mail: (bugs).[CML: A Higher-Order Concurrent Language, John H. Reppy, SIGPLAN Notices 26(6):293-305, June 1991].(2000-08-09)
congelation ::: n. --> The act or process of passing, or causing to pass, from a fluid to a solid state, as by the abstraction of heat; the act or process of freezing.
The state of being congealed.
That which is congealed.
constant applicative form "functional programming" (CAF) A {supercombinator} which is not a {lambda abstraction}. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, (+ 1 2), [1, 2, 3] as well as partially applied functions such as (+ 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under {eta abstraction} to \ x . + 4 x which is not a CAF. Since a CAF is a supercombinator, it contains no free variables. Moreover, since it is not a lambda abstraction it contains no variables at all. It may however contain identifiers which refer to other CAFs, e.g. c 3 where c = (* 2). A CAF can always be lifted to the top level of the program. It can either be compiled to a piece of graph which will be shared by all uses or to some shared code which will overwrite itself with some graph the first time it is evaluated. A CAF such as ints = from 1 where from n = n : from (n+1) can grow without bound but may only be accessible from within the code of one or more functions. In order for the {garbage collector} to be able to reclaim such structures, we associate with each function a list of the CAFs to which it refers. When garbage collecting a reference to the function we collect the CAFs on its list. [{The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages, Simon Peyton Jones (http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/papers/slpj-book-1987/PAGES/224.HTM)}]. (2006-10-12)
constant applicative form ::: (functional programming) (CAF) A supercombinator which is not a lambda abstraction. This includes truly constant expressions such as 12, (+ 1 2), [1, 2, 3] as well as partially applied functions such as (+ 4). Note that this last example is equivalent under eta abstraction to \ x . + 4 x which is not a CAF.Since a CAF is a supercombinator, it contains no free variables. Moreover, since it is not a lambda abstraction it contains no variables at all. It may however contain identifiers which refer to other CAFs, e.g. c 3 where c = (* 2). overwrite itself with some graph the first time it is evaluated. A CAF such as ints = from 1 where from n = n : from (n+1) which it refers. When garbage collecting a reference to the function we collect the CAFs on its list.[ ].(2006-10-12)
constructive proof "mathematics" A proof that something exists that provides an example or a method for actually constructing it. For example, for any pair of finite real numbers n " 0 and p " 0, there exists a real number 0 " k " 1 such that f(k) = (1-k)*n + k*p = 0. A constructive proof would proceed by rearranging the above to derive an equation for k: k = 1/(1-n/p) From this and the constraints on n and p, we can show that 0 " k " 1. A few mathematicians actually reject *all* non-constructive arguments as invalid; this means, for instance, that the law of the {excluded middle} (either P or not-P must hold, whatever P is) has to go; this makes {proof by contradiction} invalid. See {intuitionistic logic}. Constructive proofs are popular in theoretical computer science, both because computer scientists are less given to abstraction than mathematicians and because {intuitionistic logic} turns out to be an appropriate theoretical treatment of the foundations of computer science. (2014-08-24)
Corpuscular Theory of Light Newton enunciated the theory that light consists in the emission and propagation of minute particles or corpuscles; but this theory failed to explain may important phenomena, especially those of diffraction, and was in time abandoned in favor of the undulatory or wave theory of Young and Fresnel, which proved satisfactory in explaining diffraction and polarization and in showing the connection between light and radiant heat, and its analogy with sound. This theory led to the supposition of an ether, in order that the undulations might be conceived in the same way as those waves which are observed in ordinary matter. Later, refined investigations into energy transmission showed that this transmission must be regarded as particles, so that physicists speak of quanta of energy and photons of light. The apparent irreconcilability of the two necessary theories emphasizes that the former distinction between atoms and vibrations is no longer serviceable. But that which physicists call light is the effects produced in matter by light itself, which is one of the modes or effects of cosmic vital electricity — of fohat acting on the terrestrial planes. The forces of science are entified abstractions.
creations, the only one of the supernal abstractions
curried function ::: (mathematics, programming) A function of N arguments that is considered as a function of one argument which returns another function of N-1 arguments. E.g. in Haskell we can define: average :: Int -> (Int -> Int) application can be represented using a lambda abstraction: \ x -> average(4,x) Currying is necessary if full laziness is to be applied to functional sub-expressions.It was named after the logician Haskell Curry but the 19th-century logician, Gottlob Frege was the first to propose it and it was first referred to in [Uber die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik, M. Schoenfinkel, Mathematische Annalen. Vol 92 (1924)].David Turner said he got the term from Christopher Strachey who invented the term currying and used it in his lecture notes on programming languages written circa 1967. Strachey also remarked that it ought really to be called Schoenfinkeling.Stefan Kahrs reported hearing somebody in Germany trying to introduce schonen for currying and finkeln for uncurrying. The verb schonen means to beautify; finkeln isn't a German word, but it suggests to fiddle.[Some philosophical aspects of combinatory logic, H. B. Curry, The Kleene Symposium, Eds. J. Barwise, J. Keisler, K. Kunen, North Holland, 1980, pp. 85-101](2002-07-24)
curried function "mathematics, programming" A {function} of N {arguments} that is considered as a function of one argument which returns another function of N-1 arguments. E.g. in {Haskell} we can define: average :: Int -" (Int -" Int) (The parentheses are optional). A {partial application} of average, to one Int, e.g. (average 4), returns a function of type (Int -" Int) which averages its argument with 4. In uncurried languages a function must always be applied to all its arguments but a {partial application} can be represented using a {lambda abstraction}: \ x -" average(4,x) Currying is necessary if {full laziness} is to be applied to functional sub-expressions. It was named after the logician {Haskell Curry} but the 19th-century logician, {Gottlob Frege} was the first to propose it and it was first referred to in ["Uber die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik", M. Schoenfinkel, Mathematische Annalen. Vol 92 (1924)]. {David Turner} said he got the term from {Christopher Strachey} who invented the term "currying" and used it in his lecture notes on programming languages written circa 1967. Strachey also remarked that it ought really to be called "Schoenfinkeling". Stefan Kahrs "smk@dcs.ed.ac.uk" reported hearing somebody in Germany trying to introduce "scho"nen" for currying and "finkeln" for "uncurrying". The verb "scho"nen" means "to beautify"; "finkeln" isn't a German word, but it suggests "to fiddle". ["Some philosophical aspects of combinatory logic", H. B. Curry, The Kleene Symposium, Eds. J. Barwise, J. Keisler, K. Kunen, North Holland, 1980, pp. 85-101] (2002-07-24)
Darwin ::: 1. (operating system) An operating system based on the FreeBSD version of Unix, running on top of a microkernel (Mach 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers 2000, was being ported to Intel processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community.2. (programming, tool) A general purpose structuring tool of use in building complex distributed systems from diverse components and diverse central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are formed by manipulating references to services.The operational semantics of Darwin is described in terms of the Pi-calculus, Milner's calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour. .E-mail: Jeff Magee , Naranker Dulay .3. Core War.(2003-08-08)
Darwin 1. "operating system" An {operating system} based on the {FreeBSD} version of {Unix}, running on top of a {microkernel} ({Mach} 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers advanced networking, services such as the {Apache} {web server}, and support for both {Macintosh} and Unix {file systems}. Darwin was originally released in March 1999. It currently runs on {PowerPC} based Macintosh computers, and, in October 2000, was being ported to {Intel} processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community. 2. "programming, tool" A general purpose structuring tool of use in building complex {distributed systems} from diverse components and diverse component interaction mechanisms. Darwin is being developed by the Distributed Software Engineering Section of the Department of Computing at {Imperial College}. It is in essence a {declarative} binding language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with orthogonally to system structuring. The language allows the specification of both static structures and dynamic structures which evolve during execution. The central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are formed by manipulating references to services. The {operational semantics} of Darwin is described in terms of the {Pi-calculus}, {Milner}'s calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's {operational semantics}. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour. {Distributed Software Engineering Section (http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/)}. {Darwin publications (http://scorch.doc.ic.ac.uk/dse-papers/darwin/)}. E-mail: Jeff Magee "jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk", Naranker Dulay "nd@doc.ic.ac.uk". 3. {Core War}. (2003-08-08)
data abstraction "data" Any representation of data in which the implementation details are hidden (abstracted). {Abstract data types} and {objects} are the two primary forms of data abstraction. [Other forms?]. (2003-07-03)
data abstraction ::: (data) Any representation of data in which the implementation details are hidden (abstracted). Abstract data types and objects are the two primary forms of data abstraction.[Other forms?].(2003-07-03)
Deep learning - a set of algorithms in machine learning that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data by using architectures composed of multiple non-linear transformations.
defalcation ::: n. --> A lopping off; a diminution; abatement; deficit. Specifically: Reduction of a claim by deducting a counterclaim; set- off.
That which is lopped off, diminished, or abated.
An abstraction of money, etc., by an officer or agent having it in trust; an embezzlement.
defiliation ::: n. --> Abstraction of a child from its parents.
definitional constraint programming ::: (language) (DCP) A declarative, programming paradigm which integrates concurrent constraint programming, constraint logic programming and functional abstractions are reused to define new constraints, as the means of programming logical variables for parallel coordination.Goffin is a DCP language. (1995-03-28)
definitional constraint programming "language" (DCP) A declarative, programming paradigm which integrates {concurrent constraint programming}, {constraint logic programming} and {functional programming}. In this setting a concurrent constraint language becomes a coordination system that organises the concurrent interaction of parallel functional computations. The language is also a generalisation of parallel {functional programming} languages, such as {Id}, where {constraints} and constraint abstractions are reused to define new constraints, as the means of programming logical variables for parallel coordination. {Goffin} is a DCP language. (1995-03-28)
Descriptions: Where a formula A containing a free variable -- say, for example, x -- means a true proposition (is true) for one and only one value of x, the notation (iota;x)A is used to mean thit value of x. The approximately equivalent English phraseology is "the x such that A" -- or simply 'the F," where F denotes the concept (monadic propositional function) obtained from A by abstraction (q. v.) with respect to x. This notation, or its sense in the sense of Frege, is called a description.
design recovery "process" A subtask of {reverse engineering} in which domain knowledge, external information, and deduction of fuzzy reasoning are added to the observations of the subject system to identify meaningful higher level abstractions beyond those obtained directly by examining the system itself. In other words, design recovery aims to work out what a system or component was designed to do rather than just examining its subcomponents and their interrelationships. (1996-12-08)
design recovery ::: (process) A subtask of reverse engineering in which domain knowledge, external information, and deduction of fuzzy reasoning are added to the observations of the subject system to identify meaningful higher level abstractions beyond those obtained directly by examining the system itself.In other words, design recovery aims to work out what a system or component was designed to do rather than just examining its subcomponents and their interrelationships. (1996-12-08)
detachment ::: n. --> The act of detaching or separating, or the state of being detached.
That which is detached; especially, a body of troops or part of a fleet sent from the main body on special service.
Abstraction from worldly objects; renunciation.
Dharana (Sanskrit) Dhāraṇā [from the verbal root dhṛ to hold, carry, maintain, resolve] Intense concentration of the mind when directed to “some one interior object, accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external Universe, or the world of the Senses” (VS 73). It is the sixth stage of spiritual yoga, the effort to unite the human with the divine within, in which training “every sense as an individual faculty has to be ‘killed’ (or paralyzed) on this plane, passing into and merging with the Seventh sense, the most spiritual” (VS 78-9).
Dhyana Yoga (Sanskrit) Dhyāna Yoga Profound spiritual mediation on the divinity within, imbodying six or seven stages of advancement, accompanied by the simultaneous abstraction of thought from external existence; the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita treats of dhyana yoga. Likewise, one of the paramitas of Buddhism.
Dissociated Press [Play on "Associated Press"; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up, Doc?"] An algorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it through a {marketroid}. The algorithm starts by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step it searches for any random occurrence in the original text of the last N words (or letters) already printed and then prints the next word or letter. {Emacs} has a handy command for this. Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier version of the {Jargon File}: wart: A small, crocky {feature} that sticks out of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question. Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same source: window sysIWYG: A bit was named aften /bee't*/ prefer to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem! A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to a random body of text and {vgrep} the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word. (In the preceding example, "window sysIWYG" and "informash" show some promise.) Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yield better results. Similar techniques called "travesty generators" have been employed with considerable satirical effect to the utterances of {Usenet} flamers; see {pseudo}. [{Jargon File}]
Dissociated Press ::: [Play on Associated Press; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Up, Doc?] An algorithm for transforming any text into short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier version of the Jargon File: wart: A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question.Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same source: window sysIWYG: A bit was named aften /bee't*/ prefer to use the other guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual abstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem!A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to a random body of text and vgrep the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word. techniques called travesty generators have been employed with considerable satirical effect to the utterances of Usenet flamers; see pseudo.[Jargon File]
Domain Analysis "systems analysis" 1. Determining the operations, data objects, properties and {abstractions} appropriate for designing solutions to problems in a given {domain}. 2. The {domain engineering} activity in which domain knowledge is studied and formalised as a domain definition and a domain specification. A {software reuse} approach that involves combining software components, subsystems, etc., into a single application system. 3. The process of identifying, collecting organising, analysing and representing a {domain model} and software architecture from the study of existing systems, underlying theory, emerging technology and development histories within the domain of interest. 4. The analysis of systems within a domain to discover commonalities and differences among them. (1997-12-26)
Domain Analysis ::: (systems analysis) 1. Determining the operations, data objects, properties and abstractions appropriate for designing solutions to problems in a given domain.2. The domain engineering activity in which domain knowledge is studied and formalised as a domain definition and a domain specification. A software reuse approach that involves combining software components, subsystems, etc., into a single application system.3. The process of identifying, collecting organising, analysing and representing a domain model and software architecture from the study of existing systems, underlying theory, emerging technology and development histories within the domain of interest.4. The analysis of systems within a domain to discover commonalities and differences among them. (1997-12-26)
Epicurean Philosophy School founded by Epicurus (b. 341 BC), an atomist philosopher popularly associated with later travesties of his teachings. His actual teachings and way of living prove that his chief aim and good was happiness rather than pleasure; for he taught and practiced abstemiousness of living. In this he reacted to the travestied forms of Platonism which existed in his time, moving away from a barren idealism towards a concrete practicality, trying to substitute realities for empty abstractions, both in philosophy and ethics. For this reason he lays the chief stress on ethics, to the comparative neglect of logic and philosophy.
eta abstraction ::: eta conversion
eta abstraction {eta conversion}
eta conversion "theory" In {lambda-calculus}, the eta conversion rule states \ x . f x "--" f provided x does not occur as a {free variable} in f and f is a function. Left to right is eta reduction, right to left is eta abstraction (or eta expansion). This conversion is only valid if {bottom} and \ x . bottom are equivalent in all contexts. They are certainly equivalent when applied to some argument - they both fail to terminate. If we are allowed to force the evaluation of an expression in any other way, e.g. using {seq} in {Miranda} or returning a function as the overall result of a program, then bottom and \ x . bottom will not be equivalent. See also {observational equivalence}, {reduction}.
eta conversion ::: (theory) In lambda-calculus, the eta conversion rule states \ x . f x --> f Left to right is eta reduction, right to left is eta abstraction (or eta expansion).This conversion is only valid if bottom and \ x . bottom are equivalent in all contexts. They are certainly equivalent when applied to some argument - they as the overall result of a program, then bottom and \ x . bottom will not be equivalent.See also observational equivalence, reduction.
Extended Concurrent Prolog "language" (ECP) {Concurrent Prolog} with {OR parallelism}, {set abstraction} and {meta-inference} features. ["AND-OR Queuing in Extended Concurrent Prolog", J. Tanaka et al, Proc Logic Prog Conf '85, LNCS 193, Springer 1985]. (1994-12-01)
Extended Concurrent Prolog ::: (language) (ECP) Concurrent Prolog with OR parallelism, set abstraction and meta-inference features.[AND-OR Queuing in Extended Concurrent Prolog, J. Tanaka et al, Proc Logic Prog Conf '85, LNCS 193, Springer 1985]. (1994-12-01)
Factual: See Meaning, Kinds of, 2. Faculty: (Scholastic) Medieval psychology distinguishes several faculties of the soul which are said to be really distinct from each other and from the substance of the soul. According to Aquinas the distinction is based on objects and operations. The faculties are conceived as accidents of the soul's substance, but as pertaining essentially to its nature, therefore "proper accidents". The soul operates by means of the faculties. Much misunderstood and deteriorated, this theory remained alive until recent times and is still maintained, in its original and pure form, by Neo-Scholasticism. A certain rapprochement to the older notion may he observed in the modern theory of "general factors". Most of the criticisms directed against the faculty-psychology are based on modern experimental and nominalistic approaches. The faculties listed by Aquinas are: The sensory faculties, which to operate need a bodily organ; The external senses, The internal senses, sensus communis, memory, imagination, vis aestimativa (in animals) or cogitativa (in man), The sensory appetites, subdivided in the concupiscible appetite aiming at the attainable good or fleeing the avoidable evil, the irascible appetite related to good and evil whose attainment or avoidance encounters obstacles. The vegetative faculties, comprising the achievements of nutrition, growth and procreation. While the sensory appetites are common sto man and animals, the vegetative are observed also in plants. The locomotive faculty, characteristic of animals and, therefore, also of man. The rational faculties, found with man alone; Intellect, whose proper object is the universal nature of things and whose achievements are abstraction, reasoning, judging, syllogistic thought, Rational Will, directed towards the good as such and relying in its operation on particulars on the co-operation of the appetites, just as intellect needs for the formation of its abstract notions the phantasm, derived from sense impressions and presented to the intellect by imagination. The vis cogitativa forms a link between rational universal will and particular strivings; it is therefore also called ratio particularis. Ch. A. Hart, The Thomisttc Theory of Mental Faculties, Washington, D. C, 1930. -- R.A.
FALSE A small, compiled extensible language with {lambda abstractions} by W. van Oortmerssen. {For Amiga (ftp://ftp.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/amiga/fish/ff885)}.
FALSE ::: A small, compiled extensible language with lambda abstractions by W. van Oortmerssen. .
fix 1. "mathematics" The {fixed point} {combinator}. Called Y in {combinatory logic}. Fix is a {higher-order function} which returns a fixed point of its argument (which is a function). fix :: (a -" a) -" a fix f = f (fix f) Which satisfies the equation fix f = x such that f x = x. Somewhat surprisingly, fix can be defined as the non-recursive {lambda abstraction}: fix = \ h . (\ x . h (x x)) (\ x . h (x x)) Since this involves self-application, it has an {infinite type}. A function defined by f x1 .. xN = E can be expressed as f = fix (\ f . \ x1 ... \ xN . E) = (\ f . \ x1 ... \xN . E) (fix (\ f . \ x1 ... \ xN . E)) = let f = (fix (\ f . \ x1 ... \ xN . E)) in \ x1 ... \xN . E If f does not occur {free} in E (i.e. it is not {recursive}) then this reduces to simply f = \ x1 ... \ xN . E In the case where N = 0 and f is free in E, this defines an infinite data object, e.g. ones = fix (\ ones . 1 : ones) = (\ ones . 1 : ones) (fix (\ ones . 1 : ones)) = 1 : (fix (\ ones . 1 : ones)) = 1 : 1 : ... Fix f is also sometimes written as mu f where mu is the Greek letter or alternatively, if f = \ x . E, written as mu x . E. Compare {quine}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-13) 2. {bug fix}. (1998-06-25)
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)
Formalization: (Ger. Formalisierung) In Husserl: 1. (objective) Ideational "abstraction" from the determination of an object as belonging in some material region. The residuum is a pure eidetic form. 2. (noematic) Substitution, in a noematic-objective sense, e.g., the sense signified by a sentence, of the moment "what you please" for every materially determinate core of sense, while retaining all the moments of categorial form. Noematic formalization reduces a determinate objective sense to a materially indeterminate categorial sense-form. See Algebraization, Generalization, and Ideation. -- DC.
FORMAT-Fortran {Fortran Matrix Abstraction Technique Fortran}
::: "For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
“For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Fortran Matrix Abstraction Technique Fortran "language" (FORMAT-Fortran) A language for manipulation, printing and plotting of large matrices. ["FORMAT-FORTRAN Matrix Abstraction Technique (Vol. V)" AFFDL-TR-66-207, Douglas Aircraft Co. Oct 1968]. (1996-09-29)
Fortran Matrix Abstraction Technique Fortran ::: (language) (FORMAT-Fortran) A language for manipulation, printing and plotting of large matrices.[FORMAT-FORTRAN Matrix Abstraction Technique (Vol. V) AFFDL-TR-66-207, Douglas Aircraft Co. Oct 1968]. (1996-09-29)
forward engineering "process" The traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and logical, implementation-independent designs to the physical implementation of a system. Contrast {reverse engineering}. (1996-10-02)
forward engineering ::: (process) The traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and logical, implementation-independent designs to the physical implementation of a system.Contrast reverse engineering. (1996-10-02)
freeze ::: n. --> A frieze.
The act of congealing, or the state of being congealed. ::: v. i. --> To become congealed by cold; to be changed from a liquid to a solid state by the abstraction of heat; to be hardened into ice or a like solid body.
fully lazy lambda lifting ::: John Hughes's optimisation of lambda lifting to give full laziness. Maximal free expressions are shared to minimise the amount of recalculation. Each inner (expressions not containing any bound variable) applied to those expressions. E.g. f = \ x . (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) ((+) (sqrt x)) is a maximal free expression in (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) so this inner abstraction is replaced with (\ g . \ y . g y) ((+) (sqrt x)) introducing the new higher-order function, g, if we just extracted out (sqrt x).This is similar to the code motion optimisation in procedural languages where constant expressions are moved outside a loop or procedure. (1994-12-01)
fully lazy lambda lifting John Hughes's optimisation of {lambda lifting} to give {full laziness}. {Maximal free expressions} are shared to minimise the amount of recalculation. Each inner sub-expression is replaced by a function of its maximal free expressions (expressions not containing any {bound variable}) applied to those expressions. E.g. f = \ x . (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) ((+) (sqrt x)) is a maximal free expression in (\ y . (+) (sqrt x) y) so this inner {abstraction} is replaced with (\ g . \ y . g y) ((+) (sqrt x)) Now, if a {partial application} of f is shared, the result of evaluating (sqrt x) will also be shared rather than re-evaluated on each application of f. As Chin notes, the same benefit could be achieved without introducing the new {higher-order function}, g, if we just extracted out (sqrt x). This is similar to the {code motion} optimisation in {procedural languages} where constant expressions are moved outside a loop or procedure. (1994-12-01)
Fun ::: A typed lambda-calculus, similar to SOL[2]. On Understanding Types, Data Abstractions and Polymorphism, L. Cardelli et al, ACM Comp Surveys 17(4) (Dec 1985).
Fun A {typed lambda-calculus}, similar to {SOL}[2]. "On Understanding Types, Data Abstractions and Polymorphism", L. Cardelli et al, ACM Comp Surveys 17(4) (Dec 1985).
Given a formula A containing a free variable, say x, the process of forming a corresponding monadic function (q.v.) -- defined by the rule that the value of the function for an argument b is that which A denotes if the variable x is taken as denoting b -- is also called abstraction, or functional abstraction. In this sense, abstraction is an operation upon a formula A yielding a function, and is relative to a particular system of interpretation for the notations appearing in the formula, and to a particular variable, as x. The requirement that A shall contain x as a free variable is not essential: when A does not contain x as a free variable, the function obtained by abstraction relative to x may be taken to be the function whose value, the same for all arguments, is denoted by A.
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
graph (discrete mathematics) ::: In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a graph is a structure amounting to a set of objects in which some pairs of the objects are in some sense "related". The objects correspond to mathematical abstractions called vertices (also called nodes or points) and each of the related pairs of vertices is called an edge (also called an arc or line).[187]
Graphical Kernel System ::: (graphics, standard) (GKS) The widely recognised standard ANSI X3.124 for graphical input/output. GKS is worked on by the ISO/IEC group JTC1/SC24. It computer graphics output devices. It provides an abstraction to save programmers from dealing with the detailed capabilities and interfaces of specific hardware.GKS defines a basic two-dimensional graphics system with: uniform input and output primitives; a uniform interface to and from a GKS metafile for storing output devices including such as printers, plotters, vector graphics devices, storage tubes, refresh displays, raster displays, and microfilm recorders. (1999-04-01)
Graphical Kernel System "graphics, standard" (GKS) The widely recognised standard {ANSI} X3.124 for graphical input/output. GKS is worked on by the {ISO}/{IEC} group {JTC1/SC24}. It provides applications programmers with standard methods of creating, manipulating, and displaying or printing computer graphics on different types of computer graphics {output devices}. It provides an abstraction to save programmers from dealing with the detailed capabilities and interfaces of specific hardware. GKS defines a basic two-dimensional graphics system with: uniform input and output {primitives}; a uniform interface to and from a {GKS metafile} for storing and transferring graphics information. It supports a wide range of graphics output devices including such as {printers}, {plotters}, {vector graphics} devices, {storage tubes}, {refresh displays}, {raster displays}, and {microfilm recorders}. (1999-04-01)
Griffin, Grypes (Latin) [plural of gryps; cf Greek gryph] A creature supposed to have the fore parts and wings of an eagle and the hind parts of a lion, with either the head of a lion or an eagle; in some forms there is also a serpent’s tail. It belongs to the general class of dragons, chimeras, etc., which may be symbolic representations of abstractions, reminiscences of extinct animals, or the actual forms presented to the eye of a seer by certain cosmic powers — a familiar ancient Greek idea. Assyrian, Persian, and Greek griffins were generally represented as savage guardians of treasure, which shows them to be some of the natural energies which the individual has to defy in order to obtain such treasure. They are one way of representing the powers that guard and govern the lower kingdoms of nature, and which resist and menace whoever challenges their power and treasure; whence they appear as horrific monsters.
HAL ::: 1. (computer) HAL 9000, the murdering computer on the spaceship in the science fiction classic 2001, A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark.HAL is IBM with each letter changed to the one before and there is an unconfirmed rumour that 9000 is the sum of the various IBM computer numbers that denies that HAL's name is supposed to be one step ahead of IBM. It is, rather, short for heuristic algorithm.2. (operating system) Hardware Abstraction Layer. (1995-11-09)
HAL 1. "computer" HAL 9000, the murdering computer on the spaceship in the science fiction classic "2001, A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clark. "HAL" is "{IBM}" with each letter changed to the one before and there is an unconfirmed rumour that 9000 is the sum of the various IBM computer numbers that were in service at the time. However, in the sequel "2010", Clarke emphatically denies that HAL's name is supposed to be "one step ahead of IBM". It is, rather, short for "heuristic algorithm". 2. "operating system" {Hardware Abstraction Layer}. (1995-11-09)
Hardware Abstraction Layer "operating system" (HAL) The layer of {Microsoft} {Windows NT} where they have isolated their {assembly language} code. (1995-04-17)
Hardware Abstraction Layer ::: (operating system) (HAL) The layer of Microsoft Windows NT where they have isolated their assembly language code. (1995-04-17)
Hatha Yoga (Sanskrit) Haṭha-yoga A lower form of yoga practice which uses physical means for purposes of self-development, teaching that it is possible to attain to a certain grade of psychomental abstraction and to develop some of the lower vital-astral powers, by means of a set of physical exercises and postures, by the regulation of the breath, or by certain other psychophysical methods. These methods are to be neither recommended nor followed, for they are exceedingly dangerous except when practiced in minor degree under the supervision of a teacher, and above everything else in full coordination with the higher forms of yoga.
Head Normal Form "theory, reduction" (HNF) A term describing a {lambda expression} whose top level is either a variable, a data value, a built-in function applied to too few arguments, or a {lambda abstraction} whose body is not reducible. I.e. the top level is neither a {redex} nor a lambda abstraction with a reducible body. An expression in HNF may contain redexes in argument postions whereas a {normal form} may not. Compare {Weak Head Normal Form}. (2003-01-08)
Head Normal Form ::: (theory, reduction) (HNF) A term describing a lambda expression whose top level is either a variable, a data value, a built-in function applied to too few arguments, or a lambda abstraction whose body is not reducible. I.e. the top level is neither a redex nor a lambda abstraction with a reducible body.An expression in HNF may contain redexes in argument postions whereas a normal form may not.Compare Weak Head Normal Form.(2003-01-08)
high-level language ::: (HLL) A programming language which provides some level of abstraction above assembly language. These normally use statements consisting of English-like high-level language than in assembly language though the efficiency of execution depends on how good the compiler or interpreter is at optimising the program.Rarely, the variants VHLL and MLL are found.See also languages of choice, generation. (1994-12-07)
high-level language (HLL) A programming language which provides some level of abstraction above {assembly language}. These normally use statements consisting of English-like keywords such as "FOR", "PRINT" or "GOTO", where each statement corresponds to several {machine language} instructions. It is much easier to program in a high-level language than in {assembly language} though the efficiency of execution depends on how good the {compiler} or {interpreter} is at optimising the program. Rarely, the variants "{VHLL}" and "{MLL}" are found. See also {languages of choice}, {generation}. (1994-12-07)
hole 1. "electronics" In the {hole model} of current flow, the absence of an {electron}, e.g. in a {semiconductor} material. In the {electron model}, a hole can be thought of as an incomplete outer electron shell in a doping substance. Considering holes as positive charge carriers is a useful abstraction. 2. "security" A security {vulnerability}, particularly one which allows an attacker to gain unauthorised access to a system (by analogy with a hole in a wall). (2014-10-25)
hole ::: (electronics) The absence of an electron in a semiconductor material. In the electron model, a hole can be thought of as an incomplete outer electron shell in a doping substance. Holes can also be thought of as positive charge carriers; while this is in a sense a fiction, it is a useful abstraction. (1995-10-06)
Hope+ "language, functional programming" An extension of {Hope} implemented in the Alvey {Flagship} project at {Imperial College}. Hope+ has vectors, real numbers, best fit {pattern matching}, lazy data constructors, absolute {set abstractions} and {constraints}. It has a {continuation}-based I/O system with {referential transparency} and is capable of handling all common I/O tasks such as terminal and file I/O, {signal} handling and interprocess communications. It has {modules} and {separate compilation}. See also {Hope+C}, {Massey Hope}, {Concurrent Massey Hope}. ["Hope+", N. Perry, Imperial College, IC/FPR/LANG/2.5.1/7, 1988.] (1999-08-24)
Idealists regard such an equalization of physical laws and psychological, historical laws as untenable. The "tvpical case" with which physics or chemistry analyzes is a result of logical abstraction; the object of history, however, is not a unit with universal traits but something individual, in a singular space and at a particular time, never repeatable under the same circumstances. Therefore no physical laws can be formed about it. What makes it a fact worthy of historical interest, is iust the fullness of live activity in it; it is a "value", not a "thing". Granted that historical events are exposed to influences from biological, geological, racial and traditional sources, they aie always carried by a human being whose singularity of character has assimilated the forces of his environment and surmounted them There is a reciprocal action between man and society, but it is always personal initiative and free productivity of the individual which account for history. Denying, therefore, the logical primacy of physical laws in history, does not mean lawlessness, and that is the standpoint of the logic of history in more recent times. Windelband and H. Rickert established another kind of historical order of laws. On their view, to understand history one must see the facts in their relation to a universally applicable and transcendental system of values. Values "are" not, they "hold"; they are not facts but realities of our reason, they are not developed but discovered. According to Max Weber historical facts form an ideally typical, transcendental whole which, although seen, can never be fully explained. G, Simmel went further into metaphysics: "life" is declared an historical category, it is the indefinable, last reality ascending to central values which shaped cultural epochs, such as the medieval idea of God, or the Renaissance-idea of Nature, only to be tragically disappointed, whereupon other values rise up, as humanity, liberty, technique, evolution and others.
Ideation The faculty, power, or process of forming ideas. Cosmic ideation denotes an abstraction, being one aspect of cosmic egoity, and also the more concrete reality represented by mahat. Cosmic ideation, focused in a basis or upadhi, results as the abstract consciousness of space working through the monad or vehicle; and the manifestations vary according to the degree of the different upadhis. Cosmic ideation is sometimes called mahabuddhi or mahat, the universal world-soul, the cosmic or spiritual noumenon of matter. As mahat is the primordial essence or principle of cosmic consciousness and intelligence, it is the fountain of the seven prakritis — the seven planes or elements of the universe — and the guiding intelligence of manifested nature on all planes. Going deeper, we have precosmic ideation, which is an aspect of that metaphysical triad which is the root from which proceeds all manifestation.
In articles herein by the present writer, the notation λx[A] will be employed for the function obtained from A by abstraction relative to (or, as we may also say, with respect to) x. Russell, and Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica, employ for this purpose the formula A with a circumflex ˆ placed over each (free) occurrence of x -- but only for propositional functions. Frege (1893) uses a Greek vowel, say ε, as the variable relative to which abstraction is made, and employs the notation ε(A) to denote what is essentially the function in extension (the "Werthverlauf" in his terminology) obtained from A by abstraction relative to ε.
Incomplete symbol: A symbol (or expression) which has no meaning in isolation but which may occur as a constituent part in, and contribute to the meaning of, an expression which does have a meaning. Thus -- as ordinarily employed -- a terminal parenthesis ) is an incomplete symbol, likewise the letter λ which appears in the notation for functional abstraction (q. v.), etc.
inconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” *Letters on Savitri
". . . in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient — the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe — or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat.” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it — ‘an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force".” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient is the last resort of the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
"The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga :::
"The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal.” The Life Divine
"Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome books like The Life Divine. Letters on Savitri :::
"Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of English words. One would say ‘even the inconscient stone" but one would not say, as one might of a child, ‘the ignorant stone". One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don"t see how I can acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most. illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded, how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid, in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my mind, he will have to be left wondering.” Letters on Savitri
**inconscient, Inconscient"s.**
Induction, complete or mathematical: See Recursion. In esse, in intellects in re: Medieval Latin expressions of which the first signifies, in being, in existence, the second, in the intellect, especially as a general idea formed by the process of abstraction, the third, in a really existing thing outside the mind. One may add that in the matter of is the commonly known signification of the third. -- J.J.R.
In logic: Given a relation R which is transitive, symmetric, and reflexive, we may introduce or postulate "new elements corresponding to the members of the field of R, in such a way that the same new element corresponds to two members x and y of the field of R if and only if xRy (see the article relation). These new elements are then said to be obtained by abstraction with respect to R. Peano calls this a method or kind of definition, and speaks, e.g., of cardinal numbers (q.v.) as obtained from classes by abstraction with respect to the relation of equivalence -- two classes having the same cardinal number if and only if they are equivalent.
Intermediate Programming Language "language" A very early attempt by Arthur W. Burks to express machine language at a higher level of abstraction. Like {Plankalkul}, it used a right-handed style of {assignment}, in which the location appears on the right. (1995-05-09)
Intermediate Programming Language ::: (language) A very early attempt by Arthur W. Burks to express machine language at a higher level of abstraction. Like Plankalk�l, it used a right-handed style of assignment, in which the location appears on the right. (1995-05-09)
In various mathematical contexts, the term constant will be found applied to letters which should properly be called variables (according to our account here), but which are thought of as constant relatively to other variables appearing. The actual distinction in such cases, as revealed by logistic formalization, either is between free and bound variables, or concerns the order and manner in which the variables are bound by quantifiers, abstraction operators, etc.
lambda abstraction ::: A term in lambda-calculus denoting a function. A lambda abstraction begins with a lower-case lambda (represented as \ in this document), followed by a body). The body is taken to extend as far to the right as possible so, for example an expression, \ x . \ y . x+y is read as \ x . (\ y . x+y). A nested abstraction such as this is often abbreviated to: \ x y . x + y v replaced by the actual argument. Application is represented by juxtaposition so (\ x . x) 42 represents the identity function applied to the constant 42.A lambda abstraction in Lisp is written as the symbol lambda, a list of zero or more variable names and a list of zero or more terms, e.g. (lambda (x y) (plus x y)) patterns (e.g. variable names), -> and an expression, e.g. \ x -> x. (1995-01-24)
lambda abstraction A term in {lambda-calculus} denoting a function. A lambda abstraction begins with a lower-case lambda (represented as "\" in this document), followed by a variable name (the "bound variable"), a full stop and a {lambda expression} (the body). The body is taken to extend as far to the right as possible so, for example an expression, \ x . \ y . x+y is read as \ x . (\ y . x+y). A nested abstraction such as this is often abbreviated to: \ x y . x + y The lambda expression (\ v . E) denotes a function which takes an argument and returns the term E with all {free} occurrences of v replaced by the {actual argument}. Application is represented by {juxtaposition} so (\ x . x) 42 represents the identity function applied to the constant 42. A {lambda abstraction} in {Lisp} is written as the symbol lambda, a list of zero or more variable names and a list of zero or more terms, e.g. (lambda (x y) (plus x y)) Lambda expressions in {Haskell} are written as a backslash, "\", one or more patterns (e.g. variable names), "-"" and an expression, e.g. \ x -" x. (1995-01-24)
lambda-calculus "mathematics" (Normally written with a Greek letter lambda). A branch of mathematical logic developed by {Alonzo Church} in the late 1930s and early 1940s, dealing with the application of {functions} to their arguments. The {pure lambda-calculus} contains no constants - neither numbers nor mathematical functions such as plus - and is untyped. It consists only of {lambda abstractions} (functions), variables and applications of one function to another. All entities must therefore be represented as functions. For example, the natural number N can be represented as the function which applies its first argument to its second N times ({Church integer} N). Church invented lambda-calculus in order to set up a foundational project restricting mathematics to quantities with "{effective procedures}". Unfortunately, the resulting system admits {Russell's paradox} in a particularly nasty way; Church couldn't see any way to get rid of it, and gave the project up. Most {functional programming} languages are equivalent to lambda-calculus extended with constants and types. {Lisp} uses a variant of lambda notation for defining functions but only its {purely functional} subset is really equivalent to lambda-calculus. See {reduction}. (1995-04-13)
lambda expression "mathematics" A term in the {lambda-calculus} denoting an unnamed function (a "{lambda abstraction}"), a variable or a constant. The {pure lambda-calculus} has only functions and no constants. (1995-04-13)
lambda expression ::: (mathematics) A term in the lambda-calculus denoting an unnamed function (a lambda abstraction), a variable or a constant. The pure lambda-calculus has only functions and no constants. (1995-04-13)
Language for the On-Line Investigation and Transformation of Abstractions "language" (LOLITA) An extension of the {Culler-Fried System} for {symbolic mathematics}. ["An On- line Symbol Manipulation System", F.W. Blackwell, Proc ACM 22nd Natl Conf, 1967]. [Sammet 1969, p. 464]. (2003-07-29)
Language for the On-Line Investigation and Transformation of Abstractions ::: (language) (LOLITA) An extension of the Culler-Fried System for symbolic mathematics.[An On- line Symbol Manipulation System, F.W. Blackwell, Proc ACM 22nd Natl Conf, 1967].[Sammet 1969, p. 464].(2003-07-29)
LARCH/CLU ::: (language, specification) The Larch specification language for CLU. Used in Abstraction and Specification in Program Development, B. Liskov & J. Guttag, MIT Press 1986. (1996-01-02)
LARCH/CLU "language, specification" The {Larch} specification language for {CLU}. Used in "Abstraction and Specification in Program Development", B. Liskov & J. Guttag, MIT Press 1986. (1996-01-02)
lenient evaluation "reduction" An {evaluation strategy}, described in [Traub, FPCA 89], under which all {redex}es are evaluated in parallel except inside the arms of conditionals and inside {lambda abstractions}. Lenient evaluation is an example of an {eager} evaluation strategy. (2004-01-22)
lenient evaluation ::: (reduction) An evaluation strategy, described in [Traub, FPCA 89], under which all redexes are evaluated in parallel except inside the arms of conditionals and inside lambda abstractions. Lenient evaluation is an example of an eager evaluation strategy.(2004-01-22)
Liskov substitution principle "programming, theory" (LSP) The principle that {object-oriented} {functions} that use {pointers} or references to a {base class} must be able to use {objects} of a {derived class} without knowing it. {Barbara Liskov} first wrote it as follows: If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behaviour of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a {subtype} of T. A function that violates the LSP uses a reference to a base class and must know about all the derivatives of that base class. Such a function violates the {open/closed principle} because it must be modified whenever a new derivative of the base class is created. [Liskov, B. Data Abstraction and Hierarchy, SIGPLAN Notices. 23(5), May 1988]. (2001-09-14)
Liskov substitution principle ::: (programming, theory) (LSP) The principle that object-oriented functions that use pointers or references to a base class must be able to use objects of a derived class without knowing it.Barbara Liskov first wrote it as follows: If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behaviour of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T.A function that violates the LSP uses a reference to a base class and must know about all the derivatives of that base class. Such a function violates the open/closed principle because it must be modified whenever a new derivative of the base class is created.[Liskov, B. Data Abstraction and Hierarchy, SIGPLAN Notices. 23(5), May 1988].(2001-09-14)
list comprehension ::: (functional programming) An expression in a functional language denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in Haskell:[ (x,y) | x - [1 .. 6], y - [1 .. x], x+y 10]This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y = x and their sum is less than 10.A list comprehension is simply syntactic sugar for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: filter p (concat (map (\ x -> map (\ y -> (x,y))[1..x]) [1..6])) programming construct itself goes back much further (most likely Jack Schwartz and the SETL language).The term list comprehension appears in the references below.The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL.David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them ZF expressions, set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]).[The OL Manual Philip Wadler, Quentin Miller and Martin Raskovsky, probably 1983-1985].[How to Replace Failure by a List of Successes FPCA September 1985, Nancy, France, pp. 113-146]. (1995-02-22)
list comprehension "functional programming" An expression in a {functional language} denoting the results of some operation on (selected) elements of one or more lists. An example in {Haskell}: [ (x,y) | x "- [1 .. 6], y "- [1 .. x], x+y " 10] This returns all pairs of numbers (x,y) where x and y are elements of the list 1, 2, ..., 10, y "= x and their sum is less than 10. A list comprehension is simply "{syntactic sugar}" for a combination of applications of the functions, concat, map and filter. For instance the above example could be written: filter p (concat (map (\ x -" map (\ y -" (x,y)) [1..x]) [1..6])) where p (x,y) = x+y " 10 According to a note by Rishiyur Nikhil "nikhil@crl.dec.com", (August 1992), the term itself seems to have been coined by Phil Wadler circa 1983-5, although the programming construct itself goes back much further (most likely Jack Schwartz and the SETL language). The term "list comprehension" appears in the references below. The earliest reference to the notation is in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their language, NPL. David Turner subsequently adopted this notation in his languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, where he has called them "{ZF expressions}", set abstractions and list abstractions (in his 1985 FPCA paper [Miranda: A Non-Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types]). ["The OL Manual" Philip Wadler, Quentin Miller and Martin Raskovsky, probably 1983-1985]. ["How to Replace Failure by a List of Successes" FPCA September 1985, Nancy, France, pp. 113-146]. (1995-02-22)
literalism ::: n. --> That which accords with the letter; a mode of interpreting literally; adherence to the letter.
The tendency or disposition to represent objects faithfully, without abstraction, conventionalities, or idealization.
LOLITA {Language for the On-Line Investigation and Transformation of Abstractions}
Macroprosopus (Latin) [from Greek makros great + prosopon face] Also Long Face, Great or Vast Countenance. Coined by medieval Qabbalists to translate the Chaldee phrase ’Arich ’Anpin (great face), one of the names of the first emanation of the Sephirothal Tree, Kether the Crown. Generally regarded as the universe in its totality, “in the Chaldean Kabal, a pure abstraction; the Word or logos, or dabar (in Hebrew), which Word, though it becomes in fact a plural number, or ‘Words’ — d(a)B(a)Rim, when it reflects itself, or falls into the aspect of a Host (of angels, or Sephiroth, ‘numbers’) is still collectively One, and on the ideal plane a nought — 0, a ‘No-thing.’ It is without form or being, ‘with no likeness with anything else’ ” (SD 1:350). The originator of the succeeding nine emanated Sephiroth which, flowing forth from the Crown, are collectively called Microprosopus.
Manduka Yoga (Sanskrit) Maṇḍūka-yoga [from maṇḍūka frog] A “particular kind of abstract meditation in which an ascetic sits motionless like a frog” (Monier-Williams). However, all true yoga practice involves complete mental abstraction from exterior concerns and the outer environment, so that all yogis, while practicing yoga sit motionless “like a frog.” It is not a particularly high kind of yoga, in any case, for true spiritual yoga is the yoga of the inner man, implying intense intellectual and spiritual concentration on affairs and subjects of spiritual character, and need not necessarily involve any sitting in yoga whatsoever. The true disciple may be doing his master’s business and going about in pursuit of his duties from day to day, and yet be practicing this spiritual yoga without a moment’s intermission. All forms of yoga practice which involve postures, sittings or similar things in which the physical body is active or inactive, technically belong to one of the various kinds of hatha yoga and are to be discouraged.
marbles ::: (jargon) (From the mainstream lost his marbles) The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad rebuild from scratch. This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile hello, world.[Jargon File] (1998-05-21)
marbles "jargon" (From the mainstream "lost his marbles") The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system {crash}, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from {backups}, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This {compiler} doesn't even have enough marbles to compile {hello, world}." [{Jargon File}] (1998-05-21)
Matter ::: What men call matter or substance is the existent but illusory aggregate of veils surrounding thefundamental essence of the universe which is consciousness-life-substance. From another point of view,matter or substance is in one sense the most evolved form of expression of manifested spirit in anyparticular hierarchy. This is but another way of saying that matter is but inherent energies or powers orfaculties of kosmical beings, unfolded, rolled out, and self-expressed. It is the nether and lowest pole ofwhat the original and originating spirit is; for spirit is the primal or original pole of the evolutionaryactivity which brought forth through its own inherent energies the appearance or manifestation in thekosmic spaces of the vast aggregate of hierarchies. Between the originant or spirit and the resultant ormatter, there is all the vast range of hierarchical stages or steps, thus forming the ladder of life or theladder of being of any one such hierarchy.When theosophists speak of spirit and substance, of which latter, matter and energy or force are thephysicalized expressions, we must remember that all these terms are abstractions -- generalizedexpressions for hosts of entities manifesting aggregatively. The whole process of evolution is the raisingof units of essential matter, life-atoms, into becoming at one with their spiritual and inmost essence. Asthe kosmic aeons slowly drop one after the other into the ocean of the past, matter pari passu is resolvedback into the brilliant realms of spirit from which it originally came forth. All the sheaths ofconsciousness, all the blinding veils around it, arise from the matter side or dark side or night side ofnature, which is matter -- the nether pole of spirit.
maximal free expression (MFE) A {free expression} is sub-expression of a {lambda abstraction} not containing the {bound variable}. A maximal free expression is a free expression not contained within any other free expression. See {full laziness}.
maximal free expression ::: (MFE) A free expression is sub-expression of a lambda abstraction not containing the bound variable. A maximal free expression is a free expression not contained within any other free expression. See full laziness.
Metaphors such as woman and mother are always symbolical when referring to motherhood, and have no associations with physical sex, for “esotericism ignores both sexes. Its highest Deity is sexless as it is formless, neither Father nor Mother; and its first manifested beings, celestial and terrestrial alike, become only gradually androgynous and finally separate into distinct sexes” (SD 1:136n). This was clearly understood originally, so that there was no degrading or misinterpreting of these figures of speech. With descending cycles, however, humanity’s religious conceptions equally materialized: the key ideas having been forgotten or lost, abstractions became concreted into materializations, a masculine Creator or feminine Creatrix were then placed at the summit of the various pantheons, and early religious philosophy — which was as scientific as it was religious and philosophical — cast upon the background of the spatial universe images of human surroundings and way of life; so that the deities in the mythologies finally became human images, more powerful but equally swayed by passion, driven by impulse, and restricted by these even as human beings are. Such projection of human attributes into the cosmic spaces led to a still more materialized visioning of the divinities, so that the feminine or productive characteristics of nature in the popular religious mythologies finally gave way before the masculine, and the earlier, essentially beautiful idea of the mother of nature was swallowed up in the purely masculine traits of national divinities, many of them distinctly male and evil, such as the Jewish Jehovah, who waxed wroth and smelt the sweet savor of burnt sacrifices, or again the Greek Zeus swayed by ignoble passions.
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.
Miranda "language" (From the Latin for "admirable", also the heroine of Shakespeare's "Tempest") A {lazy} {purely functional} programming language and {interpreter} designed by {David Turner} of the University of Kent in the early 1980s and implemented as a product of his company, {Research Software Limited}. Miranda combines the main features of {KRC} and {SASL} with {strong typing} similar to that of {ML}. It features terse {syntax} using the {offside rule} for indentation. The {type} of an expression is inferred from the {source} by the {compiler} but explicit type declarations are also allowed. It has nested {pattern-matching}, {list comprehensions} and {modules}. It uses {operator sections} rather than {lambda abstractions}. User types are algebraic, and in early versions could be constrained by {laws}. It is implemented using {SKI combinator} {reduction}. Originally implemented for {Unix}, there are versions for most UNIX-like platforms including {Intel PC} under {Linux}. The {KAOS} operating system is written entirely in Miranda. There are translators from Miranda to {Haskell} {mira2hs (/pub/misc/mira2hs)} and to {LML} {mira2lml (/pub/misc/mira2lml)}. Non-commercial near-equivalents of Miranda include {Miracula} and {Orwell}. {(http://miranda.org.uk/)}. [{"Miranda: A Non Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic Types" (http://miranda.org.uk/nancy.html)}, D.A. Turner, in Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, LNCS 201, Springer 1985]. [{"An Overview of Miranda" (http://miranda.org.uk/overview.pdf)}, D. A. Turner, SIGPLAN Notices, 21(12):158--166, December 1986]. ["Functional Programming with Miranda", Ian Holyer, Pitman Press 0-273-03453-7]. (2007-03-22)
MODEF ::: Pascal-like language with polymorphism and data abstraction. Definition of the Programming Language MODEF, J. Steensgard-Madsen et al, SIGPLAN Notices 19(2):92-110 (Feb 1984).
MODEF Pascal-like language with polymorphism and data abstraction. "Definition of the Programming Language MODEF", J. Steensgard-Madsen et al, SIGPLAN Notices 19(2):92-110 (Feb 1984).
MODEL "language" A {Pascal}-like language with extensions for large-scale system programming and interface with {Fortran} applications. MODEL includes {generic procedures}, and a "static" {macro}-like approach to {data abstraction}. It produces {P-code} and was used to implement the {DEMOS} {operating system} on the {Cray-1}. ["A Manual for the MODEL Programming Language", J.B. Morris, Los Alamos 1976]. (1996-05-29)
module 1. "programming" An independent piece of {software} which forms part of one or more larger {programs}. Different languages have different concepts of a module but there are several common ideas. Modules are usually compiled seperately (in compiled languages) and provide an {abstraction} or information hiding mechanism so that a module's implementation can be changed without requiring any change to other modules. In this respect they are similar to {objects} in an {object-oriented language}, though a module may contain many {procedures} and/or {functions} which would correspond to many objects. A module often has its own {name space} for {identifiers} so the same identifier may be used to mean different things in different modules. [Difference from {package}?]. 2. "hardware" An independent assembly of electronic components with some distinct function, e.g. a RAM module consisting of several RAM chips mounted on a small circuit board. (1997-10-27)
module ::: 1. (programming) An independent piece of software which forms part of one or more larger programs. Different languages have different concepts of a module but there are several common ideas.Modules are usually compiled seperately (in compiled languages) and provide an abstraction or information hiding mechanism so that a module's implementation they are similar to objects in an object-oriented language, though a module may contain many procedures and/or functions which would correspond to many objects.A module often has its own name space for identifiers so the same identifier may be used to mean different things in different modules.[Difference from package?].2. (hardware) An independent assembly of electronic components with some distinct function, e.g. a RAM module consisting of several RAM chips mounted on a small circuit board. (1997-10-27)
Monotheists recognize but one God, conceived as a supreme personality and usually endowed with attributes pertaining to human personality, this mental image of God therefore being but a reflection of the human mind, with its inherent limitations and biases; yet even monotheists tacitly recognize other gods under the name of natural forces. Polytheism recognizes hierarchies of divine beings, and pantheism discerns divine power as everywhere and eternally present. The human being also in essence is a divinity. The attribution of personality to God is justly regarded as an inadmissible limitation; but there is a lack of clearness as to the meaning of such words as personality, self, and individuality, which unfortunately leads some monotheistic minds to the fear that the denial of personality will reduce the conception of divinity to merely an empty abstraction. Yet our inability to conceive the inconceivable has nothing to do with our intuition and duty, nor with the vision of the inner god as the supreme guide in a human life. See also PERSONAL GOD
Moreover, it is a serious wide-spread error of interpretation to consider Bergson as an anti-intellectualist. His alleged anti-intellectualism should be considered as a protest against taking the static materialism and spatialization of Newton's conception of nature is being anything but a high abstraction, as a rejection of the extreme claims of mechanistic and materialistic science, as an effort of reason to transcend itself in harmony with the greatest idealistic thinkers, as an effort of thinkers to stress the dynamic nature of reality, and as a persistent criticism of reason, a continuation of the Kantian tradition. His much misread conception of intuition may be viewed as akin to Spinoza's intuitio, to wit: a completion rather than a rejection of reason. -- H.H.
muse ::: n. 1. A state of abstraction or contemplation; reverie. 2. The goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like. musings, musers. *v. 3. To be absorbed in one"s thoughts; engage in meditation. 4. To consider or say thoughtfully. mused, musing. adj. *mused. 5. Perplexed, bewildered, bemused. musing. 6. Being absorbed in thoughts; reflecting deeply; contemplating; engaged in meditation. muse-lipped.
name capture ::: (reduction) In beta reduction, when a term containing a free occurrence of a variable v is substituted into another term where v is bound the free v becomes spuriously bound or captured. E.g. (\ x . \ y . x y) y --> \ y . y y (WRONG) most common solution is to rename the bound variable using alpha conversion: (\ x . \ y' . x y') y --> \ y' . y y' Another solution is to use de Bruijn notation.Note that the argument expression, y, contained a free variable. The whole expression above must therefore be notionally contained within the body of some abstraction (as in reduction to weak head normal form) then name capture cannot occur. (1995-03-14)
name capture "reduction" In {beta reduction}, when a term containing a {free} occurrence of a variable v is substituted into another term where v is bound the free v becomes spuriously bound or "captured". E.g. (\ x . \ y . x y) y --" \ y . y y (WRONG) This problem arises because two distinct variables have the same name. The most common solution is to rename the bound variable using {alpha conversion}: (\ x . \ y' . x y') y --" \ y' . y y' Another solution is to use {de Bruijn notation}. Note that the argument expression, y, contained a {free variable}. The whole expression above must therefore be notionally contained within the body of some {lambda abstraction} which binds y. If we never reduce inside the body of a lambda abstraction (as in reduction to {weak head normal form}) then name capture cannot occur. (1995-03-14)
Nirvana has also been called the vanishing point of differentiated matter. The purely nirvanic state is an assimilation with parabrahman, a passage of spirit back to the ideal abstraction of Be-ness which has no modifying relation with the manifested planes on which our universe exists during this manvantara. Being “blown out” refers only to the lower human principles, not to entitative annihilation.
Nominalists, Nominalism [from Latin nomen name] In the 11th century, Scholastic controversy arose between the Nominalists and Realists, as to whether substantive reality should be ascribed to particulars or to universals. The Nominalists held that nothing exists but individuals, and that universals are mere names invented to express the qualities of particular things. Thus the conception “man” is a mere abstract idea, a figment of the mind, devised to express certain qualities which we have abstracted from our experience of individual men, but having no existence except as a name. The Realists, on the contrary, maintained that universals alone have substantive reality, and that they exist independently of, and prior to, the individuals, which are derivative from them or expressive of them. The controversy dates back to Aristotle’s question as to whether genera, species, and abstract nouns are real or only convenient abstractions and ways of speaking.
Number People usually think of number as merely a varying multiplicity of units, a plurality of individuals, which is correct enough. Yet “Number lies at the root of the manifested Universe: numbers and harmonious proportions guide the first differentiations of homogeneous substance into heterogeneous elements; and number and numbers set limits to the formative hand of Nature” (BCW 12:517) — a strictly Pythagorean vision and conception. Our reasoning minds lend a spurious reality to abstractions; and from this viewpoint the genuine realities appear in the guise of such abstraction. Number is such an apparent abstraction; we know it only by its effects in that world which seems to us so real, and of which we regard number as an attribute. Yet nothing can be more fundamental than number. As Balzac said, number is an entity, a divinity; the creative Logos itself is called the Number, meaning number one, arising out of no-number or the zero. After this we have the duad, triad, etc. For the Pythagoreans number was a creative, emanationally formative power, and the Hebrew Sepher Yetsirah (Numbers of Creation) gives out the whole process of evolution in numbers, while in China the I Ching speaks of celestial numbers. All esoteric systems set great store by numbers — some systems more so than others. For “we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because thoroughly mystic, numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and evolution of living Beings” (SD 2:35). See also SEPHIROTH
One may assert that the human brain, capable of forming ideas, does so not prior to or independently of the rest of the natural world, but in relation to it, moved and stimulated by its manifold content. Ideas reflect things, but the reflection, like everything else, is dialectical, not inert, but active. Ideas grow out of and lead back to things, sometimes very circuitously; things may be reflected fancifully, by abstraction or in new combinations as well as directly. While there is a perfectly objective reality to reflect, the reflection is never perfect: truth is absolute, but knowledge relative.
open/closed principle "programming, theory" A principle used in {OOPL} which states that a {class} must be open and closed where open means it has the ability to be extended and closed means it cannot be modified other than by extension. The idea is that once a class has been approved for use having gone through code reviews, unit tests, and other qualifying procedures, you don't want to change the class very much, just extend it. In practice the open/closed principle simply means making good use of {abstraction} and {polymorphism}. (1997-09-23)
open/closed principle ::: (programming, theory) A principle used in OOPL which states that a class must be open and closed where open means it has the ability to be extended and closed means it cannot be modified other than by extension.The idea is that once a class has been approved for use having gone through code reviews, unit tests, and other qualifying procedures, you don't want to change the class very much, just extend it. In practice the open/closed principle simply means making good use of abstraction and polymorphism. (1997-09-23)
Open Distributed Processing ::: (standard) (ODP) An attempt to standardise an OSI application layer communications architecture. ODP is a natural progression from OSI, broadening different participants to observe a system from a suitable perspective and a suitable level of abstraction. (1995-03-10)
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)
Other primitive formulas (possibly involving new primitive notations) which may be added correspond to the axiom of choice (q. v.) or are designed to introduce classes (q. v.) or descriptions (q. v.). Functional abstraction (q. v.) may also be Introduced by means of additional primitive formulas or primitive rules of inference, or it may be defined with the aid of descriptions. Whitehead and Russell employ the axiom of infinity and the axiom of choice but avoid the necessity of special primitive formulas in connection with classes and descriptions by introducing classes and descriptions as incomplete symbols.
Peano, Giuseppe, 1858-1932, Italian mathematician. Professor of mathematics at the University of Turin, 1890-1932. His work in mathematical logic marks a transition stage between the old algebra of logic and the newer methods. It is inferior to Frege's by present standards of rigor, but nevertheless contains important advances, among which may be mentioned the distinction between class inclusion (⊂) and class membership (∈) -- which had previously been confused -- and the introduction of a notation for formation of a class by abstraction (q. v.). His logical notations are more convenient than Frege's, and many of them are still in common use.
Personal God The personal anthropomorphic extra-cosmic God of theology is a purely human creation — for personality is a limitation utterly inconsistent with the nature of the boundless and eternal. This theological God is merely a reflection of man. The infinite source of all cannot be defined, since every possible attribute which we might assign to it is a human mental creation. We are forced to speak of God as impersonal, but must beware lest in doing so we reduce the conception to an empty abstraction. God may denote a divine being, a being who was once in our present human stage but has evolved beyond it, having transcended the limit of personality but without losing individuality. Or God may be applied to a being who has emanated from the divine source but is on the downward arc of evolution, not having yet become man; or again it may be a projection of the human mind, like the personal God of theology, but in this case it is a human mental creation — therefore containing human limitations because the human mind is finite — and therefore inadmissible.
personification: A literary device where abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character traits, abilities, or reactions. Personification is common in poetry, but also appears in other writing.
Planetesimal Hypothesis A modification of the nebular hypothesis — put forward by Lockyer and See, and developed by Chamberlin and Moulton in the early 20th century — according to which the nebulae from which planets originated were not gaseous but made up of a multitude of planetesimals or solid bodies varying in size from a mere particle up to a planetoid. According to theosophy, at a certain later stage in the formation of worlds there does take place such a concretion of large bodies out of small bodies and out of cosmic dust; but a particular and minor phase in the physical stage of development is far from a complete account of the origin of the solar system. It ignores all ultraphysical conditions, and therefore has to begin by assuming nine-tenths of the whole process, such as the eternity of physical matter, and the independent existence of such abstractions as gravitation, inertia, etc.
Polytheism The doctrine of and belief in a plurality of gods, cosmic spirits, or celestial entities under whatever name they may be described. The word came into use as a correlative of monotheism — the doctrine as of the Jews, Christians, and Moslems, of one and only one God. The unphilosophical nature of monotheism, which in the Occident is quite different from the significance of divine unity, is shown by the subterfuges resorted to in order to supply its deficiencies. As divinity cannot be successfully imagined as individually concerned with every operation in the universe, the general term nature is used to denote a kind of secondary god; while the progress of science has analyzed this into various laws and forces, which paradoxically enough perform somewhat the same functions as the gods of polytheism, except in their wrongly supposed lack of intelligence. Less sophisticated and more profound intellects have never ceased to believe in a whole range of cosmic hierarchies, running from divinity down to the so-called nature spirits, and traditional peoples have always looked upon these as powers which are often dreaded and can be propitiated. Even Christianity has its saints, and its theology speaks of Angels and Archangels, of Dominions and Thrones, etc. As soon as we depart from the simple primeval idea of a universe filled with intelligent beings — and indeed formed of these beings themselves — of numerous hierarchies, grades, and kinds, we land in a maze of abstractions and contradictions.
Pragmatics: The study of the relations between signs and their interpreters in abstraction from relations to their designata or to other signs. A department of Semiotic (q.v.). -- M.B.
Pratyahara: Abstraction or withdrawal of the senses from their objects, the fifth limb of Patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga.
pratyahara. ::: abstraction or withdrawal of the mind and senses from their objects in order to still the mind; the absorption of the mind in the supreme consciousness by realising the Self in all objects; the fifth of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga
precisive ::: a. --> Cutting off; (Logic) exactly limiting by cutting off all that is not absolutely relative to the purpose; as, precisive censure; precisive abstraction.
principal type ::: The most general type of an expression. For example, the following are all valid types for the lambda abstraction (\ x . x): Int -> IntBool -> Bool from those of its subexpressions by Robinson's unification algorithm. (1994-12-16)
principal type The most general {type} of an expression. For example, the following are all valid types for the {lambda abstraction} (\ x . x): Int -" Int Bool -" Bool (a-"b) -" (a-"b) but any valid type will be an instance of the principal type: a -" a. An instance is derived by substituting the same type expression for all occurences of some {type variable}. The principal type of an expression can be computed from those of its subexpressions by Robinson's {unification} {algorithm}. (1994-12-16)
Prograph "language" A visual {dataflow} programming language and environment from the {Technical University of Halifax}. Prograph is an entirely graphical {visual programming} language, other than for the text of {method} names, and supports the program development process in a highly-interactive fashion. Operation icons are connected by data links through which information flows. It supports {object orientation} via {class}-based {data abstraction} with {single inheritance}. Prograph is available for the {Macintosh}, and soon for Windows and Unix, from {TGS Systems}. (1995-03-31)
Prograph ::: (language)A visual dataflow programming language and environment from the Technical University of Halifax.Prograph is an entirely graphical visual programming language, other than for the text of method names, and supports the program development process in a which information flows. It supports object orientation via class-based data abstraction with single inheritance.Prograph is available for the Macintosh, and soon for Windows and Unix, from TGS Systems. (1995-03-31)
pure lambda-calculus ::: Lambda-calculus with no constants, only functions expressed as lambda abstractions. (1994-10-27)
pure lambda-calculus {Lambda-calculus} with no constants, only functions expressed as {lambda abstractions}. (1994-10-27)
raw mode "operating system" A mode that allows a program to transfer {bits} directly to or from an {I/O} device without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the {operating system}. Systems that make this distinction for a disk file are generally regarded as broken. Compare {rare mode}, {cooked mode}. [{Jargon File}] (2002-04-14)
raw mode ::: (operating system) A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system.Systems that make this distinction for a disk file are generally regarded as broken.Compare rare mode, cooked mode.[Jargon File](2002-04-14)
Reason is a clarified, ordered and organised Ignorance. It is a half-enlightened Ignorance seeking for truth, but a truth which it insists on founding upon the data and postulates of the Ignorance. Reason is not in possession of the Truth, it is a seeker. It is [unable to] discover the Truth or embody it; it leaves Truth covered but rendered into mental representations, a verbal and ideative scheme, an abstract algebra of concepts, a theory of the Ignorance. Sense-evidence is its starting point and it never really gets away from that insecure beginning. Its concepts start from sense-data and though like a kite it can fly high into an air of abstractions, it is held to the earth of sense by a string of great strength; if that string is broken it drifts lazily [in] the clouds and always it falls back by natural gravitation to its original earth basis—only so can it receive strength to go farther. Its field is the air and sky of the finite, it cannot ascend into the stratosphere of the spiritual vision, still less can it move at ease in the Infinite.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 256
REASON Subjective consciousness. Reason is the faculty of imagination, abstraction, conception, reflection, deduction, judgement, etc. K
1.17.3
Reason is the instrument for working up the content of sense. Reason obtains all its reality material and knowledge material from sense. K 5.25.10
redocumentation ::: The creation or revision of a semantically equivalent representation within the same relative abstraction level. The resulting forms of representation are usually considered alternate views intended for a human audience.
redocumentation The creation or revision of a semantically equivalent representation within the same relative abstraction level. The resulting forms of representation are usually considered alternate views intended for a human audience.
reduction (Or "contraction") The process of transforming an expression according to certain reduction rules. The most important forms are {beta reduction} (application of a {lambda abstraction} to one or more argument expressions) and {delta reduction} (application of a mathematical function to the required number of arguments). An {evaluation strategy} (or {reduction strategy}), determines which part of an expression (which redex) to reduce first. There are many such strategies. See {graph reduction}, {string reduction}, {normal order reduction}, {applicative order reduction}, {parallel reduction}, {alpha conversion}, {beta conversion}, {delta conversion}, {eta conversion}. (1995-02-21)
restructuring ::: The transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics).
restructuring The transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics).
reverse engineering "systems, product, design" The process of analysing an existing system to identify its components and their interrelationships and create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of {abstraction}. Reverse engineering is usually undertaken in order to redesign the system for better maintainability or to produce a copy of a system without access to the design from which it was originally produced. For example, one might take the {executable code} of a computer program, run it to study how it behaved with different inputs and then attempt to write a program which behaved identically (or better). An {integrated circuit} might also be reverse engineered by an unscrupulous company wishing to make unlicensed copies of a popular chip. (1995-10-06)
Ruby "language" 1. A {relational language} designed by Jones and M. Sheeran in 1986 for describing and designing circuits (a {hardware description language}). Ruby programs denote {binary relations} and programs are built-up inductively from primitive relations using a pre-defined set of {relational operators}. Ruby programs also have a geometric interpretation as networks of primitive relations connected by wires, which is important when layout is considered in circuit design. Ruby has been continually developed since 1986, and has been used to design many different kinds of circuits, including {systolic arrays}, {butterfly networks} and arithmetic circuits. {(ftp://ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/misc/ruby/)}. E-mail: "graham@cs.chalmers.se". ["Ruby - A Language of Relations and Higher-Order Functions", M. Sheeran, Proc 3rd Banff Workshop on Hardware Verification, Springer 1990]. (1994-10-27) 2. One of five pedagogical languages based on {Markov algorithms}, used in Higman's report (below). The other languages are {Brilliant}, {Diamond}, {Nonpareil}, and {Pearl}. ["Nonpareil, a Machine Level Machine Independent Language for the Study of Semantics", B. Higman, ULICS Intl Report No ICSI 170, U London (1968)]. (1994-10-27) 3. A fully {object oriented} {interpreted} {scripting language} by Yukihiro Matsumoto "matz@netlab.co.jp". Similar in scope to {Perl} and {Python}, Ruby has high-level {data types}, automatic {memory management}, {dynamic typing}, a {module} system, {exceptions}, and a rich standard library. Other features are {CLU}-style {iterators} for {loop abstraction}, {singleton classes}/{methods} and {lexical closures}. In Ruby, everything is an {object}, including the basic data types. For example, the number 1 is an instance of {class} Fixnum. Current version (stable): 1.6.7, as of 2002-03-01. {Ruby Home (http://ruby-lang.org/)}. {Ruby Central (http://rubycentral.com/)}. ["Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide", David Thomas, Andrew Hunt, Yukihiro Matsumoto pub. Addison Wesley 2000]. (2002-06-19)
Ruby ::: (language)1. A relational language designed by Jones and M. Sheeran in 1986 for describing and designing circuits (a hardware description language). Ruby programs denote geometric interpretation as networks of primitive relations connected by wires, which is important when layout is considered in circuit design.Ruby has been continually developed since 1986, and has been used to design many different kinds of circuits, including systolic arrays, butterfly networks and arithmetic circuits. .E-mail: .[Ruby - A Language of Relations and Higher-Order Functions, M. Sheeran, Proc 3rd Banff Workshop on Hardware Verification, Springer 1990]. (1994-10-27)2. One of five pedagogical languages based on Markov algorithms, used in Higman's report (below). The other languages are Brilliant, Diamond, Nonpareil, and Pearl.[Nonpareil, a Machine Level Machine Independent Language for the Study of Semantics, B. Higman, ULICS Intl Report No ICSI 170, U London (1968)]. (1994-10-27)3. A fully object oriented interpreted scripting language by Yukihiro Matsumoto .Similar in scope to Perl and Python, Ruby has high-level data types, automatic memory management, dynamic typing, a module system, exceptions, and a rich standard library. Other features are CLU-style iterators for loop abstraction, singleton classes/methods and lexical closures.In Ruby, everything is an object, including the basic data types. For example, the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.Current version (stable): 1.6.7, as of 2002-03-01. . .[Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, David Thomas, Andrew Hunt, Yukihiro Matsumoto pub. Addison Wesley 2000].(2002-06-19)
Samadhi(Sanskrit) ::: A compound word formed of sam, meaning "with" or "together"; a, meaning "towards"; andthe verbal root dha, signifying "to place," or "to bring"; hence samadhi, meaning "to direct towards,"generally signifies to combine the faculties of the mind with a direction towards an object. Hence, intensecontemplation or profound meditation, with the consciousness directed to the spiritual. It is the highestform of self-possession, in the sense of collecting all the faculties of the constitution towards reachingunion or quasi-union, long or short in time as the case may be, with the divine-spiritual. One whopossesses and is accustomed to use this power has complete, absolute control over all his faculties, andis, therefore, said to be "completely self- possessed." It is the highest state of yoga or "union."Samadhi, therefore, is a word of exceedingly mystical and profound significance implying the completeabstraction of the percipient consciousness from all worldly or exterior or even mental concerns orattributes, and its absorption into or, perhaps better, its becoming the pure unadulterate, undilutesuperconsciousness of the god within. In other words, samadhi is self-conscious union with the spiritualmonad of the human constitution. Samadhi is the eighth or final stage of genuine occult yoga, and can beattained at any time by the initiate without conscious recourse to the other phases or practices of yogaenumerated in Oriental works, and which other and inferior practices are often misleading, in some casesdistinctly injurious, and at the best mere props or aids in the attaining of complete mental abstractionfrom worldly concerns.The eight stages of yoga usually enumerated are the following: (1) yama, signifying "restraint" or"forbearance"; (2) niyama, religious observances of various kinds, such as watchings or fastings,prayings, penances, etc.; (3) asana (q.v.), postures of various kinds; (4) pranayama, various methods ofregulating the breath; (5) pratyahara, a word signifying "withdrawal," but technically and esoterically the"withdrawal" of the consciousness from sensual or sensuous concerns, or from external objects; (6)dharana (q.v.), firmness or steadiness or resolution in holding the mind set or concentrated on a topic orobject of thought, mental concentration; (7) dhyana (q.v.), abstract contemplation or meditation whenfreed from exterior distractions; and finally, (8) samadhi, complete collection of the consciousness and ofits faculties into oneness or union with the monadic essence.It may be observed, and should be carefully taken note of by the student, that when the initiate hasattained samadhi he becomes practically omniscient for the solar universe in which he dwells, becausehis consciousness is functioning at the time in the spiritual-causal worlds. All knowledge is then to himlike an open page because he is self-consciously conscious, to use a rather awkward phrase, of nature'sinner and spiritual realms, the reason being that his consciousness has become kosmic in its reaches.
Samadhi (Sanskrit) Samādhi [from sam with, together + ā towards + the verbal root dhā to place, bring] To direct towards; to combine the mental faculties towards an object. Self-consciousness union with the spiritual monad by intense and profound spiritual contemplation or meditation. It implies “the complete abstraction of the percipient consciousness from all worldly, or exterior, or even mental concerns or attributes, and its . . . becoming the pure unadulterate, undilute super-consciousness of the god within. . . . Samadhi is the eighth or final stage of genuine occult Yoga, and can be attained at any time by the initiate without conscious recourse to the other phases or practices of Yoga enumerated in Oriental works, and which other and inferior practices are often misleading, in some cases distinctly injurious, and at the best mere props or aids in the attaining of complete mental abstraction from worldly concerns” (OG 150-1). The seeker on attaining samadhi becomes practically omniscient for his solar universe because his consciousness is functioning in the cosmic spiritual and causal worlds.
Sather "language" /Say-ther/ (Named after the Sather Tower at {UCB}, as opposed to the Eiffel Tower). An interactive {object-oriented} language designed by Steve M. Omohundro at {ICSI} in 1991. Sather has simple {syntax}, similar to {Eiffel}, but it is non-proprietary and faster. Sather 0.2 was nearly a subset of Eiffel 2.0, but Sather 1.0 adds many distinctive features: parameterised {class}es, {multiple inheritance}, statically-checked {strong typing}, {garbage collection}. The compiler generates {C} as an {intermediate language}. There are versions for most {workstations}. Sather attempts to retain much of {Eiffel}'s theoretical cleanliness and simplicity while achieving the efficiency of {C++}. The compiler generates efficient and portable C code which is easily integrated with existing code. A variety of development tools including a debugger and {browser} based on {gdb} and a {GNU Emacs} development environment have also been written. There is also a {class library} with several hundred classes that implement a variety of basic data structures and numerical, geometric, connectionist, statistical, and graphical abstractions. The authors would like to encourage contributions to the library and hope to build a large collection of efficient, well-written, well-tested classes in a variety of areas of computer science. Sather runs on {Sun-4}, {HP9000}/300, {Decstation} 5000, {MIPS}, {Sony News} 3000, {Sequent}/{Dynix}, {SCO} {SysV}R3.2, {NeXT}, {Linux}. See also {dpSather}, {pSather}, {Sather-K}. {(ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/sather)}. E-mail: "sather-admin@icsi.berkeley.edu". Mailing list: sather-request@icsi.berkeley.edu. (1995-04-26)
SCRIPT 1. An early system on the {IBM 702}. [Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959)]. 2. A {real-time} language. ["A Communication Abstraction Mechanism and its Verification", N. Francez et al, Sci Comp Prog 6(1):35-88 (1986)]. (1994-12-01)
self-involution ::: n. --> Involution in one&
Sentential function has been used by some as a syntactical term, to mean a sentence (q.v.) containing free variables. This notion should not be confused with that of a propositional function (q.v.), the relationship is that a propositional function may be obtained from a sentential function by abstraction (q. v.) -- A.C.
Serpent One of the most fundamental and prolific symbols of the mystery-language. Its most basic meaning is of the eternal, alternating, cyclic motion during cosmic manifestation. For motion, which to the physicist and the philosopher alike seems an abstraction, is for the ancient wisdom a primordial principle or axiom, of the same order as space and time, existing per se. Never does motion cease utterly even during kosmic pralaya. And motion is essentially circular: where physics would derive circular motion from a composition of rectilinear motions, the opposite procedure would be that of the ancient wisdom. This circular motion, compounding itself into spirals, helixes, and vortices, is the builder of worlds, bringing together the scattered elements of chaos; motion per se is essential cosmic intelligence. This circular motion, returning upon itself like a serpent swallowing its tail, represents the cycles of time. This conscious energy in spirals whirls through all the planes of cosmos as fohat and his innumerable sons — the cosmic energies and forces, fundamentally intelligent, operating in every scale or grade of matter. The caduceus of Hermes, twin serpents wound about a staff, represents cosmically the mighty drama of evolution, in its twin aspects, the staff or tree standing for the structural aspect, the serpent for the fohatic forces that animate the structure.
Server Message Block "protocol" (SMB) A {client/server} {protocol} that provides file and printer sharing between computers. In addition SMB can share {serial ports} and communications abstractions such as {named pipes} and {mail slots}. SMB is similar to {remote procedure call} (RPC) specialised for file system access. SMB was developed by {Intel}, {Microsoft}, and {IBM} in the early 1980s. It has also had input from {Xerox} and {3Com}. It is the native method of file and print sharing for Microsoft {operating systems}; where it is called {Microsoft Networking}. {Windows for Workgroups}, {Windows 95}, and {Windows NT} all include SMB clients and servers. SMB is also used by {OS/2}, {Lan Manager} and {Banyan} {Vines}. There are SMB servers and clients for {Unix}, for example {Samba} and {smbclient}. SMB is a {presentation layer} protocol structured as a large set of commands (Server Message Blocks). There are commands to support file sharing, printer sharing, {user authentication}, resource browsing, and other miscellaneous functions. As clients and servers may implement different versions ("dialects") of the protocol they negotiate before starting a session. The {redirector} packages SMB requests into a {network control block} (NBC) structure that can be sent across the network to a remote device. SMB originally ran on top of the lower level protocols {NetBEUI} and {NetBIOS}, but now typically runs over {TCP/IP}. Microsoft have developed an extended version of SMB for the {Internet}, the {Common Internet File System} (CIFS), which in most cases replaces SMB. {CIFS} runs only runs over TCP/IP. {Just what is SMB? (http://samba.anu.edu.au/cifs/docs/what-is-smb.html)}. {IBM protocols (http://protocols.com/pbook/ibm.htm)}. {Microsoft SMB/CIFS documents (ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/drg/CIFS/)}. (1999-08-08)
Server Message Block ::: (protocol) (SMB) A client/server protocol that provides file and printer sharing between computers. In addition SMB can share serial ports and communications abstractions such as named pipes and mail slots. SMB is similar to remote procedure call (RPC) specialised for file system access.SMB was developed by Intel, Microsoft, and IBM in the early 1980s. It has also had input from Xerox and 3Com. It is the native method of file and print sharing servers. SMB is also used by OS/2, Lan Manager and Banyan Vines. There are SMB servers and clients for Unix, for example Samba and smbclient.SMB is a presentation layer protocol structured as a large set of commands (Server Message Blocks). There are commands to support file sharing, printer functions. As clients and servers may implement different versions (dialects) of the protocol they negotiate before starting a session.The redirector packages SMB requests into a network control block (NBC) structure that can be sent across the network to a remote device.SMB originally ran on top of the lower level protocols NetBEUI and NetBIOS, but now typically runs over TCP/IP.Microsoft have developed an extended version of SMB for the Internet, the Common Internet File System (CIFS), which in most cases replaces SMB. CIFS runs only runs over TCP/IP. . . . (1999-08-08)
Sesha (Sanskrit) Śeṣa [from the verbal root śiṣ to leave a remainder or residue] Remainder; the karmic remainders of the preceding cosmic manvantara which become the basis for the manifestation of the present manvantara. Also the name of the seven-headed serpent of space on which Vishnu rests during pralaya, representing the seven principles of the cosmos in which the spiritual or unmanifested universe remains until the period for its new manifestation arrives, thereafter to become manifest by degrees. Sesha or Ananta, the couch of Vishnu, is an abstraction symbolizing ever-continuing cosmic life in space, which contains the remainders or germs of the future manvantara, and throws off periodically the efflorescence of these germs as the manifested universe. But during a solar pralaya, the cosmic spirit from which all flows forth, reposes sleeping upon Sesha, the serpent of eternity, in the midst of the kosmic Deep. Hence Sesha is considered Vishnu’s first vahana (vehicle) in the primordial water of space, before manvantaric activity begins.
set abstraction {list comprehension}
Shechinah is equivalent to Devamatri or Aditi — mother of the gods; to Vach; the music of the spheres of Pythagoras; and the Holy Ghost in the Christian Trinity. Shechinah is always regarded as feminine in the Qabbalah, “And so it is considered in the exoteric Puranas, for Shekinah is no more than Sakti — the female double or lining of any god, in such case. And so it was with the early Christians whose Holy Spirit, was feminine, as Sophia was with the Gnostics. But in the transcendental Chaldean Kabala or ‘Book of Numbers,’ ‘Shekinah’ is sexless, and the purest abstraction, a State, like Nirvana, not subject or object or anything except an absolute Presence.
Similarly, a relation in extension may be formed by abstraction from a suitable formula A relative to two particular variables taken in a given order. -- A.C.
SIMULA I "language" SIMUlation LAnguage. An extension to {ALGOL 60} for the {Univac 1107} designed in 1962 by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl and implemented in 1964. SIMULA I was designed for {discrete simulation}. It introduced the {record} {class}, leading the way to {data abstraction} and {object-oriented programming} languages like {Smalltalk}. It also featured {coroutines}. SIMULA's philosophy was the result of addressing the problems of describing complex systems for the purpose of simulating them. This philosophy proved to be applicable for describing complex systems generally (not just for simulation) and so SIMULA is a general-purpose object-oriented application programming language which also has very good discrete event simulation capability. Virtually all OOP products are derived in some manner from SIMULA. For a description of the evolution of SIMULA and therefore the fundamental concepts of OOP, see Dahl and Nygaard in ["History of Programming Languages". Ed. R. W. Wexelblat. Addison-Wesley, 1981]. (1995-03-29)
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. …
Siri ::: An object-oriented constraint language using a single abstraction mechanism developed by Bruce Horn of CMU in 1991. Siri is a conceptual blend of BETA and Bertrand. It is similar to Kaleidoscope.[Constraint Patterns as a Basis for Object-Oriented Constraint Programming, B. Horn, OOPSLA '92 (Sept 1992)]. (1994-11-04)
Siri An {object-oriented} {constraint language} using a single abstraction mechanism developed by Bruce Horn of {CMU} in 1991. Siri is a conceptual blend of {BETA} and {Bertrand}. It is similar to {Kaleidoscope}. ["Constraint Patterns as a Basis for Object-Oriented Constraint Programming", B. Horn, OOPSLA '92 (Sept 1992)]. (1994-11-04)
Some people try to introduce a volitional principle into nature at this point, but this is falsely to assume that the volitional principle is absent elsewhere — an assumption purely speculative, and which seems entirely unwarranted. It is not that the universe is divided into a mechanical section and a volitional section, arbitrarily separated by a hypothetical boundary that varies according to our progress in investigation. The mechanical interpretation therefore is a device adopted for practical purposes on the physical plane, which enables us to predict results within limits that do not bring the validity of its assumptions into question. Science finds that one form of motion is consequent upon another, but it knows nothing about the cause of motion; and words like force and mass are merely convenient abstractions. Hence there can be no reason for introducing a psychological element into nature at one point rather than at another, for such disjunct compartments do not exist in nature.
Space-Time: The four-dimensional continuum including the three dimensions of space (length, width and height) and one of time; the unity of space and time. The concept was first suggested by H. Minkowski and immediately afterward incorporated by A. Einstein into his (special) theory of relativity. The former contended that nothing can exist or be conceived of as physical apart from space-time; for every object must have not only length, width and height, but also duration in time. As a result, a complete description and location of an object must be given in terms of four coordinates. Space-Time is mathematically grounded in world-points, or durationless geometrical points, as the foundation of all four-dimensional measurement; and in world-lines, or geometrical lines cutting across the four dimensions. An enduring geometrical point thus beconus a geometrical line (or possibly a curve) in space-time. Space-Time is physically conceived of as a general structure determined by the relationship among world-events, or four-dimensional events. The universe of four dimensions (the omniverse, as it may be called) includes space with all of its events and objects as well as time with its changes and motions. As such this four-dimensional universe must be changeless and motionless, insofar as things move and change only when taken in abstraction from time, or rather when space and time are regarded as separate.
Spirit (in reference to Matter) ::: The theosophist points out that what men call spirit is the summit or acme or root or seed or beginning ornoumenon -- call it by any name -- of any particular hierarchy existing in the innumerable hosts of thekosmic hierarchies, with all of which any such hierarchy is inextricably interblended and interworking.When theosophists speak of spirit and substance, of which matter and energy or force are thephysicalized expressions, we must remember that all these terms are abstractions, generalizedexpressions for certain entities manifesting aggregatively.Spirit, for instance, is not essentially different from matter, and is only relatively so different, orevolutionally so different: the difference not lying in the roots of these two where they become one in theunderlying consciousness-reality, but in their characters they are two evolutional forms of manifestationof that underlying reality. In other words, to use the terminology of modern scientific philosophy, spiritand matter are, each of them, respectively an "event" as the underlying reality passes through eternalduration.
stargasing ::: n. --> The act or practice of observing the stars with attention; contemplation of the stars as connected with astrology or astronomy.
Hence, absent-mindedness; abstraction.
stream 1. "communications" An {abstraction} referring to any flow of data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or receiver, consumer). A stream usually flows through a channel of some kind, as opposed to {packets} which may be addressed and routed independently, possibly to multiple recipients. Streams usually require some mechanism for establishing a channel or a "{connection}" between the sender and receiver. 2. "programming" In the {C} language's buffered input/ouput library functions, a stream is associated with a file or device which has been opened using {fopen}. Characters may be read from (written to) a stream without knowing their actual source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently by the library routines. 3. "operating system" Confusingly, {Sun} have called their modular {device driver} mechanism "{STREAMS}". 4. "operating system" In {IBM}'s {AIX} {operating system}, a stream is a {full-duplex} processing and data transfer path between a driver in {kernel space} and a process in {user space}. [IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03]. 5. "communications" {streaming}. 6. "programming" {lazy list}. (1996-11-06)
stream ::: 1. (communications) An abstraction referring to any flow of data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or receiver, consumer). A stream usually require some mechanism for establishing a channel or a connection between the sender and receiver.2. (programming) In the C language's buffered input/ouput library functions, a stream is associated with a file or device which has been opened their actual source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently by the library routines.3. (operating system) Confusingly, Sun have called their modular device driver mechanism STREAMS.4. (operating system) In IBM's AIX operating system, a stream is a full-duplex processing and data transfer path between a driver in kernel space and a process in user space.[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03].5. (communications) streaming.6. (programming) lazy list. (1996-11-06)
Subset-Equational Language (SEL) A {declarative} language for set processing by Bharat Jayaraman with subset and equational program clauses; {pattern matching} over sets (it supports efficient iteration over sets); annotations to say which functions distribute over union in which arguments (for point-wise/incremental computation over sets); defining {transitive closures} through circular constraints (implemented by mixed top-down/{memoisation} and bottom-up strategy); {meta-programming} and simple {higher-order} programming; modest user-interface including tracing. The SEL {compiler}, written in {Quintus Prolog}, generates {WAM}-like code, extended to deal with set-matching, {memoisation}, and the novel control structure of the language. The {run-time system} is written in {C}. {(ftp://ftp.cs.buffalo.edu/users/bharat/SEL2)}. E-mail: Bharat Jayaraman "bharat@cs.buffalo.edu". ["Towards a Broader Basis for Logic Programming", B. Jayaraman, TR CS Dept, SUNY Buffalo, 1990]. ["Set Abstraction in Functional and Logic Programming", F.S.K. Silbermann "fs@cs.tulane.edu" et al, ACM Proc 1989]. (1994-12-15)
Subset-Equational Language ::: (SEL) A declarative language for set processing by Bharat Jayaraman with subset and equational program clauses; pattern matching over sets (it supports mixed top-down/memoisation and bottom-up strategy); meta-programming and simple higher-order programming; modest user-interface including tracing.The SEL compiler, written in Quintus Prolog, generates WAM-like code, extended to deal with set-matching, memoisation, and the novel control structure of the language. The run-time system is written in C. .E-mail: Bharat Jayaraman .[Towards a Broader Basis for Logic Programming, B. Jayaraman, TR CS Dept, SUNY Buffalo, 1990].[Set Abstraction in Functional and Logic Programming, F.S.K. Silbermann (1994-12-15)
Such methods of introducing new concepts, functions, etc. as definition by abstraction (q. v.), definition by recursion (q. v.), definition by composition (see Recursiveness) may be dealt with by reducing them to nominal definitions; i.e., by finding a nominal definition such that the definiens (and therefore also the definiendum) turns out, under an intended interpretation of the logistic system, to mean the concept, function, etc. which is to be introduced.
Symbolism: Representation of an entity or idea in terms of another, usually the translation of an abstraction into concrete form.
Syntax-Case "language" A {macro} system for {Scheme} by R. Kent Dybvig "dyb@cs.indiana.edu". It is superior to the low-level system described in the Revised^4 Report ({R4RS}). Pattern variables are ordinary identifiers with essentially the same status as lexical variable names and {macro} {keywords}. The {syntax} is modified to recognise and handle references to pattern variables. Version 2.1 works with {Chez Scheme} and the {Macintosh} port runs under {MacGambit} 2.0 {(ftp://iuvax.cs.indiana.edu/pub/scheme/syntax-case.tar.Z)}. {Macintosh (ftp://maya.dei.unipd.it/pub/mac/gambit/)}. ["Syntactic Abstraction in Scheme", Robert Hieb, R. Kent Dybvig and Carl Bruggeman IUCS TR
Syntax-Case ::: (language) A macro system for Scheme by R. Kent Dybvig . It is superior to the low-level system described Version 2.1 works with Chez Scheme and the Macintosh port runs under MacGambit 2.0 . .[Syntactic Abstraction in Scheme, Robert Hieb, R. Kent Dybvig and Carl Bruggeman IUCS TR
Syntax/Semantic Language "language" (S/SL) A high level {specification language} for {recursive descent parsers} developed by J.R. Cordy "cordy@cs.queensu.ca" and R.C. Holt "holt@uwaterloo.ca" at the University of Toronto in 1980. S/SL is a small language that supports cheap recursion and defines input, output, and error token names (& values), semantic mechanisms (class interfaces whose methods are really escapes to routines in a host programming language but allow good abstraction in the pseudo-code) and a pseudo-code program that defines the syntax of the input language by the token stream the program accepts. Alternation, control flow and one-symbol look-ahead constructs are part of the language. The S/SL processor compiles this pseudo-code into a table (byte-codes) that is interpreted by the S/SL table-walker (interpreter). The pseudo-code language processes the input language in recursive descent LL1 style but extensions allow it to process any LRk language relatively easily. S/SL is designed to provide excellent syntax error recovery and repair. It is more powerful and transparent than yacc but slower. S/SL has been used to implement production commercial compilers for languages such as {PL/I}, {Euclid}, {Turing}, {Ada}, and {COBOL}, as well as {interpreters}, {command processors}, and domain specific languages of many kinds. {(ftp://ftp.cs.queensu.ca/pub/cordy/ssl)}. ["Specification of S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language", J.R. Cordy and R.C. Holt, Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, 1980]. ["An Introduction to S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language", R.C. Holt, J.R. Cordy, and D.B. Wortman; ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Vol 4, No. 2, April 1982, pp 149-178]. ["Hierarchic Syntax Error Repair", D.T. Barnard and R.C. Holt, International Journal of Computing and Information Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 4, August 1982, Pages 231-258.] (2003-10-30)
Tapas (Sanskrit) Tapas Warmth, fire, heat; abstraction, meditation. To perform tapas is to sit for contemplation or undergo some special observance. Occultly the inner fire or spiritual flame aroused by intense abstraction of thought or meditation. The Laws of Manu says tapas with the Brahmins is sacred learning; with the Kshatriyas, protection of subjects; with the Vaisyas, giving alms to Brahmins; with the Sudras, service.
The difficulty encountered by vitalists, as regards the nature of the vital principle and its power of acting upon matter, is fundamental in the entire materialistic philosophy. The matter and force of materialistic science are highly metaphysical abstractions. No such thing as an inert material particle exists or can exist, for all such inert matter is but life or force in one of its multiform phases of quiescence or equilibrium. Nor can there be an absolutely immaterial force, without relation of function or action in the material worlds. The universe consists of living beings, whose activities may be expressed collectively by the word life. The term matter has been applied to the static aspect of life, and the term force to the dynamic aspect. No distinction valid for this purpose can be drawn between organic and inorganic beings. If there is need of a vital principle for animals and plants, working upon yet other than essential stuff or substance, there is equal need in the case of minerals; but there is no need to postulate such divorce between force and matter in either case.
The first Gnostic trinity, equivalent to Father-Mother-Son is composed of Ferho, Chaos, and Fetahil — this first triad is concealed or nonmanifest — a pure abstraction to us (IU 2:227).
The immediate inferences not involving obversion can be represented as valid inferences in the functional calculus of first order, but obversion can be to represented only in an extended calculus embracing functional abstraction (q. v.). For the p used above in describing obversion is, in terms of abstraction, λx[∼P(x)]. F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, 4th edn., Bonn, 1874.
“The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” Letters on Savitri
The intellectual thought
refines and sublimates to a r
refied abstractness; the supramental thought as it rises in its height increases to a greater spiritual concreteness. The thought of the intellect presents itself to us as an abstraction from something seized by the mind sense and is as if supported in a void and subtle air of mind by an intangible force of the intelligence. It has to resort to a use of the mind’s power of image if it wishes to make itself more concretely felt and seen by the soul sense and soul vision. The supramental thought on the contrary presents always the idea as a luminous substance of being, luminous stuff of consciousness taking significative thought form and it th
refore creates no such sense of a gulf between the idea and the real as we are liable to feel in the mind, but is itself a reality, it is realidea and the body of a reality.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 835
"The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations.” Letters on Savitri
“The mystic feels real and present, even ever present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations.” Letters on Savitri
The number four is considered feminine on the planes of matter; it is considered to be masculine and energic only on the highest plane of abstraction. When united with three (spirit), “their union is the emblem of life eternal in spirit on its ascending arc, and in matter as the ever resurrecting element — by procreation and reproduction” (SD 2:592).
Theory: (Gr. theoria, viewing) The hypothetical universal aspect of anything. For Plato, a contemplated truth. For Aristotle, pure knowledge as opposed to the practical. An abstraction from practice. The principle from which practice proceeds. Opposite of practice. -- J.K.F. Hypothesis. More loosely: supposition, whatever is problematic, verifiable but not verified. (As opposed to practice) systematically organized knowledge of relatively high generality. (See "the theory of light"). (As opposed to laws and observations): explanation. The deduction of the axioms and theorems of one system from assertions (not necessarily verified) from another system and of a relatively less problematic and more intelligible nature. (Note: Since criteria of what is 'intelligible' and 'problematic' are subjective and liable to fluctuation, any definition of the term is bound to be provisional. It might be advisable to distinguish between laws (general statements in a system), principles (axioms), and theories (methods for deriving the axioms by means of appropriate definitions employing terms from other systems). -- M.B.
Theosophy, because of the confusion arising in scholastic and modern disputes, points directly to all the phenomena of nature as expressed in beings, objects, entities, and things as arising in spiritual realms, or noumena. The hidden or invisible noumena of beings and things are both real and mere abstract names. Thus force — electricity, for instance — is both an existing emanation from cosmic entities, and yet also a “name” or abstraction because it is an aggregate of effects derivative from a hid cause which is the cosmic being or beings. All natural phenomena arise in and are therefore derivative from and emanations from causal and originating cosmic intelligences, which perdure in essence throughout eternity, but express themselves by means of phenomena or effects in cosmic manvantaras. Thus the phenomena which human intelligence cognizes are transitory but yet are real in their essence, because that essence lies in the perduring intelligence or intelligences from which they flow.
Theosophy divides boundless duration into unconditionally eternal and universal time, and a conditioned or periodic or “broken” one (SD 1:62). One is the abstraction or noumenon of infinite endless time (Kala); the other its phenomenon, appearing periodically. The symbol of causal or relatively boundless time, so far as the universe is concerned, is often given as a circle, which mathematically is a beginningless and endless line. A spiral line represents time returning upon itself in cycles, and yet transcending itself at each cyclic sweep, devouring its children, as Kronos among the Greeks is said to do; and the serpent with its tail in its mouth often stands for the same ideas. Time, meaning divided or phenomenal time, or manvantaric cycles, is often mentioned as an offspring of space, the latter considered as a container of manifestation. Mystically, theosophy looks upon present and past as well as future as being illusional effects of that beginningless and endless Now, eternal duration.
There is also an analogous process of functional abstraction relative to two or more variables (taken in a given order), which yields a polyadic function when applied to a formula A.
The soul is the principle of all vital actions and, though these vital operations on the biological, sensory and intellectual levels are attributed to various "faculties", these faculties are not really distinct from the essence of the soul. In this life the human intellect cannot operate without the aid of images supplied by sense perception. An intellectual concept of a single individual thing may be formed directly and then a universal concept of the common nature of many sensible things within a class may be developed by the intellect through the process of abstraction. The will is the faculty of rational appetite, it is free in the ultimate choice of its object, which is called a "good." Suarez emphasizes the psychological and moral supremacy of the will. The Suarezian theory of knowledge is what would be called naive realism today.
"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
“The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.” The Supramental Manifestation
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 201
To be an Aristotelian under such extremely complicated circumstances was the problem that St. Thomas set himself. What he did reduced itself fundamentally to three points: (a) He showed the Platonic orientation of St. Augustine's thought, the limitations that St. Augustine himself placed on his Platonism, and he inferred from this that St. Augustine could not be made the patron of the highly elaborated and sophisticated Platonism that an Ibn Gebirol expounded in his Fons Vitae or an Avicenna in his commentaries on the metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle. (b) Having singled out Plato as the thinker to search out behind St. Augustine, and having really eliminated St. Augustine from the Platonic controversies of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas is then concerned to diagnose the Platonic inspiration of the various commentators of Aristotle, and to separate what is to him the authentic Aristotle from those Platonic aberrations. In this sense, the philosophical activity of St. Thomas in the thirteenth century can be understood as a systematic critique and elimination of Platonism in metaphysics, psychology and epistemology. The Platonic World of Ideas is translated into a theory of substantial principles in a world of stable and intelligible individuals; the Platonic man, who was scarcely more than an incarcerated spirit, became a rational animal, containing within his being an interior economy which presented in a rational system his mysterious nature as a reality existing on the confines of two worlds, spirit and matter; the Platonic theory of knowledge (at least in the version of the Meno rather than that of the later dialogues where the doctrine of division is more prominent), which was regularly beset with the difficulty of accounting for the origin and the truth of knowledge, was translated into a theory of abstraction in which sensible experience enters as a necessary moment into the explanation of the origin, the growth and the use of knowledge, and in which the intelligible structure of sensible being becomes the measure of the truth of knowledge and of knowing.
"To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event.” Letters on Savitri*
“To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event.” Letters on Savitri
trance ::: 1. A semiconscious state, as between sleeping and waking; a daze. 2. A hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state. 3. A state of deep musing or mental abstraction from external things; absorption, exaltation, rapture, ecstasy. trance-bound, trance-claimed, trance-closed, splendour-trance.
Turiya is a state or condition of consciousness which to the eye of an observer seems to be that of the deepest abstraction from things of the material world — that state which to most people would seem to be a complete or perfect trance, physically speaking. The higher consciousness of the human being, often unconsciously to the brain-mind consciousness, enters into turiya and brings about for the physical person a condition of perfectly dreamless sleep; however, it is a state of the highest or most exalted spiritual and intellectual activity.
Universals A philosophical and logical term, used in opposition to particulars. For example, matter may be called a universal, and material bodies may be called particulars; or life may be a universal, and living beings particulars. The universal is sometimes defined as that which is left when all particularities or differences have ceased to be. The question arises as to which shall be considered real. If the particulars are realities, then the universals become mere abstract ideas: thus mankind would be merely an indefinite number of human beings. But if the universal is real, then we regard particular humans as being each a manifestation on respective lower planes of man, the Heavenly Man or Qabbalistic ’Adam Qadmon. Again, if living beings are real, then life becomes an abstraction. But if life is a real entity in itself, then living beings are its particular manifestations. The philosophy which starts with universals and proceeds to particulars is called deductive: it is that of theosophy and of Pythagoras and Plato. The inductive philosophy of Aristotle and Francis Bacon proceeds from particulars to universals. Space, motion, duration, intelligence, etc., in themselves abstract realities, are regarded by theosophy as universals, whereas from the opposite viewpoint they appear as only abstractions from experience. The deductive method has its uses in applied science, but in fact it tacitly assumes certain universals and reasons back to them from particulars.
vikalpa. ::: conditioned mind; doubt; wrong concept; imagination; fantasy; mental construct; abstraction
Vital Principle, Fluid, or Force Synonyms for life or jiva, for in theosophy life is not only a force or principle which is an entity, but actually a fluid — not a mere abstraction signifying haphazard results from natural forces. It is the universal activity of spirit in matter: Purusha-prakriti, consciousness-substance, the First and Second Logos. Cosmically, life is in essence one of the spiritual-substantial aspects of Brahman or paramatman, guided by cosmic intelligence; and this cosmic vital fluid or principle, sometimes called fohat, is the universal source of both energy and matter, the carrier of consciousness.
Weak Head Normal Form ::: (reduction, lambda calculus) (WHNF) A lambda expression is in weak head normal form (WHNF) if it is a head normal form (HNF) or any lambda abstraction. I.e. the top level is not a redex.The term was coined by Simon Peyton Jones to make explicit the difference between head normal form (HNF) and what graph reduction systems produce in practice. A lambda abstraction with a reducible body, e.g. \ x . ((\ y . y+x) 2) is in WHNF but not HNF. To reduce this expression to HNF would require reduction of the lambda body: (\ y . y+x) 2 --> 2+x conversion of an inner lambda abstraction and so is preferred in practical graph reduction systems.The same principle is often used in strict languages such as Scheme to provide call-by-name evaluation by wrapping an expression in a lambda abstraction with no arguments: D = delay E = \ () . E The value of the expression is obtained by applying it to the empty argument list: force D = apply D ()= apply (\ () . E) () (1994-10-31)
Weak Head Normal Form "reduction, theory" (WHNF) A {lambda expression} is in weak head normal form (WHNF) if it is a {head normal form} (HNF) or any {lambda abstraction}. I.e. the top level is not a {redex}. The term was coined by {Simon Peyton Jones} to make explicit the difference between {head normal form} (HNF) and what {graph reduction} systems produce in practice. A lambda abstraction with a reducible body, e.g. \ x . ((\ y . y+x) 2) is in WHNF but not HNF. To reduce this expression to HNF would require reduction of the lambda body: (\ y . y+x) 2 --" 2+x Reduction to WHNF avoids the {name capture} problem with its need for {alpha conversion} of an inner lambda abstraction and so is preferred in practical {graph reduction} systems. The same principle is often used in {strict} languages such as {Scheme} to provide {call-by-name} evaluation by wrapping an expression in a lambda abstraction with no arguments: D = delay E = \ () . E The value of the expression is obtained by applying it to the empty argument list: force D = apply D () = apply (\ () . E) () = E (1994-10-31)
Whence, in the typical Scholastic or medieval notion, intellect is an immaterial faculty of the soul, that is, its operations are performed without a bodily organ, though they depend on the body and its senses for the material from which they receive their first impulse. Nothing is in the intellect that has not been previously in the senses. The impressions received by the external senses are synthesized by the internal sensus communis which forms an image or phantasm; the phantasm is presented to the intellect by imagination, memory and the vis cogitativa co-operating. The internal senses are conceived as being bound to organic functions of the brain. The intellect operates in a twofold manner, but is only one. As active intellect (intellectus agens) it "illuminates" the phantasm, disengaging there from the universal nature; as passive intellect (int. possibilis) it is informed by the result of this abstractive operation and develops the concept. Concepts are united into judgments by combination and division (assertion and negation). Judgments are related to each other in syllogistic reasoning or by the abbreviated form of enthymeme. Aquinas denies to the intellect the capacity of becoming aware of particulars in any direct way. The intellect knows of them (e.g. when asserting: Socrates is a man) only indirectly by reflecting on its own operations and finally on the phantasm which served as starting point. Propositions, however, have no directly corresponding phantasm. Later Scholastics credit the intellect with a direct knowledge of particulars (Suarez). See Abstraction, Faculty. -- R.A.
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
Whitehead, Alfred North: British philosopher. Born in 1861. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1911-14. Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London, 1914-24. Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. From 1924 until retirement in 1938, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Among his most important philosophical works are the Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (1910-13) (with Bertrand Russell; An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919); The Concept of Nature (1920); Science and the Modern World (1926); Religion tn the Making (1926); Symbolism (1928); Process and Reality (1929); and Adventures of Ideas (1933). The principle of relativity in physics is the key to the understanding of metaphysics. Whitehead opposes the current philosophy of static substance having qualities which he holds to be based on the simply located material bodies of Newtonian physics and the "pure sensations" of Hume. This 17th century philosophy depends upon a "bifurcation of nature" into two unequal systems of reality on the Cartesian model of mind and matter. The high abstractions of science must not be mistaken for concrete realities. Instead, Whitehead argues that there is only one reality, what appears, whatever is given in perception, is real. There is nothing existing beyond what is present in the experience of subjects, understanding by subject any actual entity. There are neither static concepts nor substances in the world; only a network of events. All such events are actual extensions or spatio-temporal unities. The philosophy of organism, as Whitehead terms his work, is based upon the patterned process of events. All things or events are sensitive to the existence of all others; the relations between them consisting in a kind of feeling. Every actual entity is then a "prehensive occasion", that is, it consists of all those active relations with other things into which it enters. An actual entity is further determined by "negative prehension", the exclusion of all that which it is not. Thus every feeling is a positive prehension, every abstraction a negative one. Every actual entity is lost as an individual when it perishes, but is preserved through its relations with other entities in the framework of the world. Also, whatever has happened must remain an absolute fact. In this sense, past events have achieved "objective immortality". Except for this, the actual entities are involved in flux, into which there is the ingression of eternal objects from the realm of possibilities. The eternal objects are universals whose selection is necessary to the actual entities. Thus the actual world is a certain selection of eternal objects. God is the principles of concretion which determines the selection. "Creativity" is the primal cause whereby possibilities are selected in the advance of actuality toward novelty. This movement is termed the consequent nature of God. The pure possibility of the eternal objects themsehes is termed his primordial nature. -- J.K.F.
Windows NT "operating system" (Windows New Technology, NT) {Microsoft}'s 32-bit {operating system} developed from what was originally intended to be {OS/2} 3.0 before {Microsoft} and {IBM} ceased joint development of OS/2. NT was designed for high end {workstations} (Windows NT 3.1), servers (Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server), and corporate networks (NT 4.0 Enterprise Server). The first release was {Windows NT 3.1}. Unlike {Windows 3.1}, which was a graphical environment that ran on top of {MS-DOS}, Windows NT is a complete operating system. To the user it looks like Windows 3.1, but it has true {multi-threading}, built in networking, security, and {memory protection}. It is based on a {microkernel}, with 32-bit addressing for up to 4Gb of {RAM}, virtualised hardware access to fully protect applications, installable file systems, such as {FAT}, {HPFS} and {NTFS}, built-in networking, {multi-processor} support, and {C2 security}. NT is also designed to be hardware independent. Once the machine specific part - the {Hardware Abstraction Layer} (HAL) - has been ported to a particular machine, the rest of the operating system should theorertically compile without alteration. A version of NT for {DEC}'s {Alpha} machines was planned (September 1993). NT needs a fast {386} or equivalent, at least 12MB of {RAM} (preferably 16MB) and at least 75MB of free disk space. NT 4.0 was followed by {Windows 2000}. {Usenet} newsgroups: {news:comp.os.ms-windows.nt.setup}, {news:comp.os.ms-windows.nt.misc}. (2002-06-10)
Windows NT ::: (operating system) (Windows New Technology, NT) Microsoft's 32-bit operating system developed from what was originally intended to be OS/2 3.0 Server), and corporate networks (NT 4.0 Enterprise Server). The first release was Windows NT 3.1.Unlike Windows 3.1, which was a graphical environment that ran on top of MS-DOS, Windows NT is a complete operating system. To the user it looks like Windows 3.1, but it has true multi-threading, built in networking, security, and memory protection.It is based on a microkernel, with 32-bit addressing for up to 4Gb of RAM, virtualised hardware access to fully protect applications, installable file systems, such as FAT, HPFS and NTFS, built-in networking, multi-processor support, and C2 security.NT is also designed to be hardware independent. Once the machine specific part - the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) - has been ported to a particular machine, alteration. A version of NT for DEC's Alpha machines was planned (September 1993).NT needs a fast 386 or equivalent, at least 12MB of RAM (preferably 16MB) and at least 75MB of free disk space.NT 4.0 was followed by Windows 2000.Usenet newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.setup, comp.os.ms-windows.nt.misc.(2002-06-10)
Windows Open Service Architecture "architecture, library, Microsoft" (WOSA) One of the mainstays of {Microsoft Windows}: the ethos of {abstraction} of core {services}. For each extension, Windows {Open} Services {Architecture} defines an {API} and an {SPI}, as well as a universal interface (usually placed in a single {DLL}) that both comply to. These then {transparent}ly let the {operating system} speak to {device drivers}, {database managers}, and other {low level} entities. These extensions include, among others, {ODBC} (called the "crowning jewel of WOSA"), {TAPI}, {WOSA/XFS}, {SAPI} and {MAPI}, and their supporting services, as well as the abstraction of access to {printers}, {modems}, and {networking services}, which run identically over {TCP/IP}, {IPX/SPX}, and {NetBEUI}. (2000-08-16)
Windows Open Service Architecture ::: (architecture, library, microsoft) (WOSA) One of the mainstays of Microsoft Windows: the ethos of abstraction of core services.For each extension, Windows Open Services Architecture defines an API and an SPI, as well as a universal interface (usually placed in a single DLL) that both comply to.These then transparently let the operating system speak to device drivers, database managers, and other low level entities.These extensions include, among others, ODBC (called the crowning jewel of WOSA), TAPI, WOSA/XFS, SAPI and MAPI, and their supporting services, as well as the abstraction of access to printers, modems, and networking services, which run identically over TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, and NetBEUI.(2000-08-16)
x, class abstraction with respect to x -- so that x M may be read "the class of x's such that M." An alternative notation, instead of x , is x3.
xy, relation abstraction with respect to x and y -- so that xyM may be read "the relation which holds between x and y if and only if M."
Yesod ::: Ninth of the sefirot, Yesod means “foundation.” It is the conduit from abstraction to manifestation, and is analogized to the sexual organs, which take together that which is inside and project it into the outside (malchut). Yesod is also identified with the righteous human being, whose actions support the world.
Yet “in all such numerical divisions the One universal Principle, — although referred to as (the) one, because the Only One — never enters into the calculations. It stands, in its character of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the universal abstraction, entirely by Itself and independent of every other Power whether noumenal or phenomenal” (SD 2:598). Here the cosmic One is intimately intertwined with the universal zero, the last being equivalent to the universal All. Analogies in different systems of thought are numerous; for instance, the cosmic zero corresponds to parabrahman-mulaprakriti, whereas the cosmic One or monad corresponds to Brahman. See also UNITY
yoga ::: n. --> A species of asceticism among the Hindoos, which consists in a complete abstraction from all worldly objects, by which the votary expects to obtain union with the universal spirit, and to acquire superhuman faculties.
λx, functional abstraction with respect to x -- so that λxM may be read "the (monadic) function whose value for the argument x is M."
KEYS (10k)
5 Sri Aurobindo
1 Robert Anton Wilson
1 John Locke
1 James George Frazer
1 Essential Integral
1 Alfred North Whitehead
1 Aleister Crowley
1 Abraham Maslow
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
16 Anonymous
14 Alfred North Whitehead
8 Alan W Watts
6 William James
6 Robert C Martin
6 Fulton J Sheen
6 Albert Camus
5 T S Eliot
5 S ren Kierkegaard
5 Paul Gauguin
5 Neil Gaiman
5 Kurt Vonnegut
5 Edmund Burke
5 David Lynch
5 David Levithan
5 David Bohm
5 Camille Paglia
5 Aldous Huxley
5 Alan Watts
4 William Hazlitt
1:The mind can hardly conceive unity except as an abstraction, a sum or a void. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Worlds - Surya, #KEYS
2:Become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes. ~ Abraham Maslow, #KEYS
3:Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought #KEYS
4:Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #KEYS
5:The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. ~ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), #KEYS
6:The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. ~ James George Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, Part 1, #KEYS
7:Now, on the other hand, there is an entirely different type of angel; and here we must be especially careful to remember that we include gods and devils, for there are such beings who are not by any means dependent on one particular element for their existence. They are microcosms in exactly the same sense as men and women are. They are individuals who have picked up the elements of their composition as possibility and convenience dictates, exactly as we do ourselves... I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order. He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood. He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #KEYS
8:higher mind or late vision logic ::: Even more rare, found stably in less than 1% of the population and even more emergent is the turquoise altitude.
Cognition at Turquoise is called late vision-logic or cross-paradigmatic and features the ability to connect meta-systems or paradigms, with other meta-systems. This is the realm of coordinating principles. Which are unified systems of systems of abstraction to other principles. ... Aurobindo indian sage and philosopher offers a more first-person account of turquoise which he called higher-mind, a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamism capable of formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming of all of which a spontaneous inherient knowledge.
Self-sense at turquoise is called Construct-aware and is the first stage of Cook-Greuter's extension of Loveigers work on ego-development. The Construct-aware stage sees individuals for the first time as exploring more and more complex thought-structures with awareness of the automatic nature of human map making and absurdities which unbridaled complexity and logical argumentation can lead. Individuals at this stage begin to see their ego as a central point of reference and therefore a limit to growth. They also struggle to balance unique self-expressions and their concurrent sense of importance, the imperical and intuitive knowledge that there is no fundamental subject-object separation and the budding awareness of self-identity as temporary which leads to a decreased ego-desire to create a stable self-identity. Turquoise individuals are keenly aware of the interplay between awareness, thought, action and effects. They seek personal and spiritual transformation and hold a complex matrix of self-identifications, the adequecy of which they increasingly call into question. Much of this already points to Turquoise values which embrace holistic and intuitive thinking and alignment to universal order in a conscious fashion.
Faith at Turquoise is called Universalising and can generate faith compositions in which conceptions of Ultimate Reality start to include all beings. Individuals at Turquoise faith dedicate themselves to transformation of present reality in the direction of transcendent actuality. Both of these are preludes to the coming of Third Tier. ~ Essential Integral, L4.1-54, Higher Mind,#KEYS
9:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83],#KEYS
10:We have now completed our view of the path of Knowledge and seen to what it leads. First, the end of Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of division. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality; in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him. It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all relations. Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge [511] [T1],#KEYS
11:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
12:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. ~ booker-t-washington, @wisdomtrove 2:To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 3:Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 4:Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 5:The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 6:People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 7:Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 8:Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 9:Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 10:There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 11:Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 12:We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 13:From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 14:Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality. ~ oscar-wilde, @wisdomtrove 15:God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably... . We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 16:Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 17:Become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 18:Think of yourself by all means. Only don't bring the idea of a body into the picture. There is only a stream of sensations, perceptions, memories and ideations. The body is an abstraction, created by our tendency to seek unity in diversity - which again is not wrong. Limiting oneself to one body only is a mistake. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 19:When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 20:Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 21:This is our dilemma& 22:If, therefore, man has come into the world to search for God and, if he has found Him, to adhere to Him and to find repose in adhering to Him-man cannot search for Him and attain Him in this sensible and corporeal world, since God is spirit rather than body, and cannot be attained in intellectual abstraction, since one is able to conceive nothing similar to God, as he asserts-how can one, therefore, search for Him in order to find Him? ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove 23:In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate & 24:In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved... He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 25:Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 26:I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 27:Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 28:One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 29:Divinity above all knowledge, whose goodness passes understanding . . . direct our way to the summit of thy mystical oracles, most incomprehensible, most lucid and most exalted, where the simple and pure and unchangeable mysteries of theology are revealed in the darkness, clearer than light, of that silence in which secret things are hidden; a darkness that shines brighter than light, that invisibly and intangibly illuminates with splendours of inconceivable beauty the soul that sees not. Let this be my prayer; but do thou, diligently giving thyself to mystical contemplation, leave the senses, and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intelligible, and things that are and things that are not, that thou mayest rise as may be lawful for thee, by ways above knowledge to union with Him who is above all knowledge and all being; that in freedom and abandonment of all, thou mayest be borne, through pure, entire and absolute abstraction of thyself from all things, into the supernatural radiance of the divine darkness. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 30:“Divinity above all knowledge, whose goodness passes understanding . . . direct our way to the summit of thy mystical oracles, most incomprehensible, most lucid and most exalted, where the simple and pure and unchangeable mysteries of theology are revealed in the darkness, clearer than light, of that silence in which secret things are hidden; a darkness that shines brighter than light, that invisibly and intangibly illuminates with splendours of inconceivable beauty the soul that sees not. Let this be my prayer; but do thou, diligently giving thyself to mystical contemplation, leave the senses, and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intelligible, and things that are and things that are not, that thou mayest rise as may be lawful for thee, by ways above knowledge to union with Him who is above all knowledge and all being; that in freedom and abandonment of all, thou mayest be borne, through pure, entire and absolute abstraction of thyself from all things, into the supernatural radiance of the divine darkness. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 31:We desire to abide in this most luminous darkness, and without sight or knowledge, to see that which is above sight or knowledge, by means of that very fact that we see not and know not. For this is truly to see and know, to praise Him who is above nature in a manner above nature, by the abstraction of all that is natural; as those who would make a statue out of the natural stone abstract all the surrounding material which hinders the sight of the shape lying concealed within, and by that abstraction alone reveal its hidden beauty. It is needful, as I think, to make this abstraction in a manner precisely opposite to that in which we deal with the Divine attributes; for we add them together, beginning with the primary ones, and passing from them to the secondary, and so to the last; but here we ascend from the last to the first, abstracting all, so as to unveil and know that which is beyond knowledge, and which in all things is hidden from our sight by that which can be known, and so to behold that supernatural darkness which is hidden by all such light as is in created things. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 32:Because in proportion as we ascend higher our speech is contracted to the limits of our view of the purely intelligible; and so now, when we enter that darkness which is above understanding, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, and the negation of thought. Thus in the other treatises our subject took us from the highest to the lowest, and in the measure of this descent our treatment of it extended itself; whereas now we rise from beneath to that which is the highest, and accordingly our speech is restrained in proportion to the height of our ascent; but when our ascent is accomplished, speech will cease altogether, and be absorbed into the ineffable. But why, you will ask, do we add in the first and begin to abstract in the last? The reason is that we affirmed that which is above all affirmation by comparison with that which is most nearly related to it, and were therefore compelled to make a hypothetical affirmation; but when we abstract that which is above all abstraction, we must distinguish it also from those things which are most remote from it. Is not God more nearly life and goodness than air or a stone; must we not deny more fully that He is drunken or enraged, than that He can be spoken of or understood? ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Pure drawing is an abstraction. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
2:I like residing in abstraction. ~ Sufjan Stevens, #NFDB
3:Abstraction is an esoteric language. ~ Eric Fischl, #NFDB
4:인간은 정보를 추상화(abstraction)를 통해 축적하고 관리합니다. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
5:Abstraction is the enemy of meaning. ~ Marshall Ganz, #NFDB
6:LOVE is one kind of abstraction ... ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
7:Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
8:Abstraction and realism work best together. ~ Ken Danby, #NFDB
9:All art is an abstraction to some degree. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
10:Art, indeed, began with abstraction. ~ Sigfried Giedion, #NFDB
11:That was the beginning of her abstraction. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
12:Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction. ~ Dylan Thomas, #NFDB
13:Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous; ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
14:Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
15:Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
16:The state, the state apparatus, is not an abstraction. ~ Samora Machel, #NFDB
17:Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
18:"Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
19:[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
20:Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class. ~ Jeff Koons, #NFDB
21:An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. ~ Booker T Washington, #NFDB
22:We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit. ~ Mark Tobey, #NFDB
23:Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
24:When you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
25:What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
26:"I'm not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction." ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
27:I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction. ~ Julie Mehretu, #NFDB
28:I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche. ~ Joe Bradley, #NFDB
29:"I'm not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction." ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
30:Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
31:The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
32:Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction. ~ R D Laing, #NFDB
33:Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction ~ Remy de Gourmont, #NFDB
34:Resisting premature abstraction is as important as abstraction itself. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
35:The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
36:Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you've got to get busy with it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
37:abstraction is evil. Code is anti-evil, and clean code is perhaps divine. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
38:By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
39:Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ K W Jeter Herr Doktor Pavel ~ K W Jeter, #NFDB
40:Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
41:A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
42:To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
43:From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
44:Imagine, if you will, this abstraction brought to life: a bourgeois Goddess. ~ Villiers de L Isle Adam, #NFDB
45:Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. ~ Arshile Gorky, #NFDB
46:I'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
47:Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one. ~ Henry Moore, #NFDB
48:Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
49:Time is not an object but an abstraction, hence it does not lend itself to imagery, ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert, #NFDB
50:Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
51:Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
52:Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
53:Time is an abstraction which, on earth, exists only for the human brain it has evolved. ~ Charles Lindbergh, #NFDB
54:Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion. ~ Anne Carson, #NFDB
55:Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
56:Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German. ~ Karl Barth, #NFDB
57:With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
58:As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
59:Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
60:Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
61:knowledge is cut off from the activity in which it has its meaning, and becomes a false abstraction. ~ Louis Menand, #NFDB
62:Tests are your record of the interface of every abstraction and as such they are the wall at your back. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
63:Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
64:The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
65:A perfume is more than an extract it is a presence in abstraction. A perfume, for me, is a mystique. ~ Giorgio Armani, #NFDB
66:Faith" is not a generalized abstraction but a way of life that is expressed in persistent prayer. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
67:Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
68:I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it ~ Alexander Stepanov, #NFDB
69:Such is the power of death -- to strip away breath and transform a person into an airy abstraction. ~ Anita Rau Badami, #NFDB
70:Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints. ~ Helen Lynd, #NFDB
71:I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific. ~ Lena Dunham, #NFDB
72:Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
73:She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
74:It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today! ~ John Carmack, #NFDB
75:What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation. ~ T S Eliot,#NFDB
76:I've always wondered, like, what is so masculine about abstraction? How did men get the ownership over this? ~ Cecily Brown, #NFDB
77:It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
78:When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
79:In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
80:I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art. ~ Sean Scully, #NFDB
81:In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground. ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
82:The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
83:The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
84:The mind can hardly conceive unity except as an abstraction, a sum or a void. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, The Worlds - Surya, #NFDB
85:For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
86:The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry. ~ Kerry James Marshall, #NFDB
87:The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily. ~ Joel Sternfeld, #NFDB
88:Everybody’s life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
89:No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
90:Barbarians incapable of analysis and abstraction must use their fantasy to explain what their reasons cannot comprehend. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
91:There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished. ~ Michel Gondry, #NFDB
92:Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
93:The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. ~ Evangelista Torricelli, #NFDB
94:What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum. ~ Jeffrey Deitch, #NFDB
95:When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven. ~ Lorraine Hansberry, #NFDB
96:The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
97:Without God, all seeing and perceiving of things and laws become abstraction, a separation from both origin and goal. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
98:In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life. ~ Jane Addams, #NFDB
99:So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
100:The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction,” Dobzhansky wrote. “It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
101:By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
102:Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction. ~ Jack Donovan, #NFDB
103:The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
104:Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
105:The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
106:Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans. ~ Aleksandar Hemon, #NFDB
107:Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted. ~ Sigfried Giedion, #NFDB
108:An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor. ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
109:In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
110:Making the code read like a top-down set of TO paragraphs is an effective technique for keeping the abstraction level consistent. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
111:The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction. ~ Sidney Coleman, #NFDB
112:Bonhoeffer was not interested in intellectual abstraction. Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
113:Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience. ~ William Eggleston, #NFDB
114:so each day brought a further descent into the depths of concrete existence and a further ascent toward the heights of abstraction. ~ Jean d Ormesson, #NFDB
115:Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
116:You see, the notion of "sin" is for me an abstraction. There's no such thing as "sin". There's only such a thing as "tactlessness". ~ Mihail Sebastian, #NFDB
117:Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic. ~ Kerry James Marshall, #NFDB
118:To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
119:The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
120:Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg, #NFDB
121:She smiled at us both, brightly. She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
122:Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact.… ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
123:Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion. ~ Raoul Vaneigem, #NFDB
124:The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction. ~ Gabriel Marcel, #NFDB
125:What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix. ~ Erik Naggum, #NFDB
126:At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal. ~ Walker Percy, #NFDB
127:Functional programming is the use of functions that transform values into units of abstraction, subsequently used to build software systems. ~ Michael Fogus, #NFDB
128:When your problem is one of needing numerous specializations of a stable, common abstraction, inheritance can be an extremely low-cost solution. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
129:People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
130:Deep Learning is about learning multiple levels of representation and abstraction that help to make sense of data such as images, sound, and text. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
131:Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
132:Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
133:Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else. ~ Eric Maisel, #NFDB
134:Someone who is incapable of drawing, and cannot master line or colour perspective can always express themselves in some form of abstraction. ~ Hans Werner Henze, #NFDB
135:If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table. ~ Mark Bradford, #NFDB
136:To think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself be led into a cul-de-sac and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence. ~ Jacob Epstein, #NFDB
137:True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution. ~ William James, #NFDB
138:The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
139:Don't get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
140:Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government. ~ Jonah Goldberg, #NFDB
141:Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
142:Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
143:If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently. ~ Linus Torvalds, #NFDB
144:In the superficial activity of her life, she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long blanks and darkness of abstraction were Polish. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
145:Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
146:The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
147:Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling. ~ Marquis de Sade, #NFDB
148:She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
149:Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. ~ Havelock Ellis, #NFDB
150:Somewhere, floating in a muddled abstraction beyond your existence as a generally good person, are the Externalities. Fuck ’em and God Bless ’em. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson, #NFDB
151:No doubt, in complete abstraction one has a feeling of a great shock, if not an explosion, and in approaching the real, one feels health and truth restored. ~ Jean Helion, #NFDB
152:Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us. ~ Toni Morrison, #NFDB
153:Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
154:I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb. ~ Emily Carr, #NFDB
155:We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
156:Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
157:My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape. ~ Marsden Hartley, #NFDB
158:So what we can say is that freedom is the experience of abnormality as possibility, uttered in abstraction and compelled by strange-love that no law can underwrite. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
159:To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
160:In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
161:I don't have any personal upset at the death penalty as an abstraction, What I do realize is how many mistakes can be made with the way things are being done now. ~ Michael Baden, #NFDB
162:If you cannot correctly identify the abstraction there may not be one, and if no common abstraction exists then inheritance is not the solution to your design problem. ~ Sandi Metz, #NFDB
163:Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
164:The levelling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The levelling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
165:There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned. ~ Raymond Louis Wilder, #NFDB
166:I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche. ~ Joe Bradley, #NFDB
167:I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
168:For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
169:Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren't so easy. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
170:It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team. ~ Isaac D Israeli, #NFDB
171:The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image. ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
172:Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
173:«Toute abstraction est si dure à accepter que notre premier réflexe est de la refuser, d’autant plus si elle s’inscrit à contre-courant de ce que nous avons toujours pensé.» ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
174:As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism. ~ Alfred H Barr Jr, #NFDB
175:A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
176:Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
177:I'm trying not to delve into my world of abstraction and self-indulgence. But I haven't. When I sit down and I try not to [be abstract], it comes out really forced and awkward. ~ Spencer Krug, #NFDB
178:I paint - I tend more to abstraction - but not as much as I would like to because of time. I would love to do sculpture - I've toyed with the idea of fitting in a sculpture course. ~ Lily Cole, #NFDB
179:Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance. ~ Patricia Duncker, #NFDB
180:The theory of thought is like
painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to
abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image. ~ Gilles Deleuze,#NFDB
181:A harmonious combination... enough abstraction that the image is sustained by the eye; enough reality that it is sustained by reason and experience. Share this quote with a friend ~ Jean Helion, #NFDB
182:At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
183:I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line. ~ Daniel Clowes, #NFDB
184:Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
185:An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
186:In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits. ~ Reinhold Messner, #NFDB
187:I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it. ~ Mary Ellen Mark, #NFDB
188:it was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier; ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
189:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "future perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
190:The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
191:Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment. ~ Diego Rivera, #NFDB
192:Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction. ~ Lewis H Lapham, #NFDB
193:That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
194:There is no way to extend an instantiable class and add a value component while preserving the equals contract, unless you’re willing to forgo the benefits of object-oriented abstraction. ~ Joshua Bloch, #NFDB
195:Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves. ~ Dag Hammarskjold, #NFDB
196:ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
197:I am fully and entirely concentrated on the board. I never even consider my opponent's personality. So far as I am concerned, my opponent might as well be an abstraction or an automaton. ~ Wilhelm Steinitz, #NFDB
198:And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out. Lucid, ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
199:Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. ~ William Manchester, #NFDB
200:No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society ~ Irving Howe, #NFDB
201:something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. The ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
202:I've never read a book on shape. I've read books on gesture; I've read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I've never read a book on what a shape is. ~ Amy Sillman, #NFDB
203:Rights and empowerment are interconnected: unless a substantial number of women in a community come to believe that they have rights and demand to exercise them, right remains an abstraction. ~ Mahnaz Afkhami, #NFDB
204:The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large. ~ Donald Knuth, #NFDB
205:America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
206:Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole. ~ Edith Stein, #NFDB
207:It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole. ~ Barbara Hepworth, #NFDB
208:Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience. ~ Michael Oakeshott, #NFDB
209:The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
210:Dewey consistently argues that any theory of human beings that fails to acknowledge that human beings “are not isolated non-social atoms” is defective, a misleading abstraction of philosophers. ~ Richard J Bernstein, #NFDB
211:The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
212:There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
213:Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
214:At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction. ~ Glenn Ligon, #NFDB
215:[...] no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people -- human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had. ~ Ben H Winters, #NFDB
216:I don’t like the word ‘education’ because it is such an extraordinary abstraction. I’m very much in favor of learning. I’m much more skeptical of credentialing or the abstraction called ‘education.’ So ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
217:Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience. ~ Michael Joseph Oakeshott, #NFDB
218:We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
219:From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
220:I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. "You're omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I'd thought it would have changed you more. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
221:The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects. ~ John C Wright, #NFDB
222:Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. ~ Henri Barbusse, #NFDB
223:Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
224:He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases. ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
225:New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
226:Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
227:Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking. A concrete event, then an abstraction. An image, then a thought. Finally, writing builds another establishment with the fragments. ~ Diane Glancy, #NFDB
228:The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity. ~ Clement Greenberg, #NFDB
229:Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
230:The beauty of physics lies in the extent which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity. ~ Melvin Schwartz, #NFDB
231:We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
232:Group theory has been called by the noted mathematics scholar James R. Newman "the supreme art of mathematical abstraction." It derives its incredible power from the intellectual flexibility afforded by its definition. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
233:We must not see any person as an abstraction.
Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets,
with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish,
and with some measure of triumph. ~ Rebecca Skloot,#NFDB
234:All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
235:There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
236:We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
237:Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
238:Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. RUMI, attributed, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
239:To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter. ~ Ernst Mach, #NFDB
240:Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other. ~ Arthur Miller, #NFDB
241:A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
242:it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
243:Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
244:A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
245:All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as “the sum of the world’s suffering,” an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
246:At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
247:If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
248:I think abstraction is a very rich area. And it is upsetting that people seem to have some fear of it. I'm constantly making these statements about how you should just look at it and react to it on your own; just relax and let go. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
249:The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and carry the soul forever unmatched. ~ Mark Helprin, #NFDB
250:We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction. ~ Max Bill, #NFDB
251:I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
252:She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
253:If you are going to learn mathematics, you have to learn it not simply as an abstraction but as it is applied. I always say to teachers, for goodness sake, take the kids out first to look at the stars in order to understand infinity. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
254:The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts. ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
255:We must not see any person as an
abstraction.
Instead, we must see in every
person a universe with its own secrets,
with its own treasures, with its own
sources of anguish,
and with some measure of
triumph. ~ Elie Wiesel,#NFDB
256:A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
257:I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests. ~ Joyce Tenneson, #NFDB
258:Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
259:Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. ~ Giorgio de Chirico, #NFDB
260:If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead. ~ Yukio Mishima, #NFDB
261:It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
262:Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself. ~ Brian D McLaren, #NFDB
263:To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
264:You can still tell the truth by "pointing to" an abstraction or assessment of your mind, if your intent is simply to point out your thought, rather than to make the other person believe your thought to be the "right interpretation" of reality. ~ Brad Blanton, #NFDB
265:The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction. ~ Hilary Putnam, #NFDB
266:The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
267:he’d paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it’s true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts. ~ Thomas McGuane, #NFDB
268:one thing that separates good programmers from bad programmers is that good programmers are more facile at jumping between layers of abstraction—they can keep the layers distinct while making changes and choose the right layer to make changes in. ~ Peter Seibel, #NFDB
269:The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. It ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
270:The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing. ~ Richard Leakey, #NFDB
271:The science called ‘economics’ is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed. ~ Pierre Bourdieu, #NFDB
272:When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
273:Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. ~ Alexander Calder, #NFDB
274:In order than everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage--and that phantom is the public. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
275:Have you ever seen a demonstrable example of equality in your entire life? Can it be glimpsed in any dog show or classroom? In any ping pong game or chess match? Of course not. It is a philosophical abstraction, something nowhere to be found in nature. ~ Boyd Rice, #NFDB
276:What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
277:Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you dont fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract. ~ Rafael Vinoly, #NFDB
278:Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
279:Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction—the collectivity, the “nation”—and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
280:Behind the abstraction known as 'the markets' lurks a set of institutions designed to maximize the wealth and power of the most privileged group of people in the world, the creditor-rentier class of the First World and their junior partners in the Third. ~ Doug Henwood, #NFDB
281:Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
282:God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
283:Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
284:Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
285:If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
286:An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice. ~ Romain Gary, #NFDB
287:My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment. ~ Robert W Floyd, #NFDB
288:You cannot read mathematics superficially; the inescapable abstraction always has an element of self-torture in it, and the one to whom this self-torture is joy is the mathematician. ~ Rózsa Péter, "Playing with Infinity: Mathematical Explorations and Excursions" p. xiii (1976)., #NFDB
289:Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that. ~ Brice Marden, #NFDB
290:We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
291:Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
292:For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening. ~ Q Tip, #NFDB
293:If a painting contains no abstraction nor impressionistic elements, it is a kite that will never fly. But if the painting completely breaks the connection between human feeling and the object portrayed, the kite string has been broken. I try to keep the line unbroken. ~ Wu Guanzhong, #NFDB
294:This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
295:We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art. ~ Hans Arp, #NFDB
296:Both the destruction and the preservation of capitalism are meaningless slogans, but these slogans are supported by real organizations. Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group, and any abstraction of which this is not true remains harmless. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
297:The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work. ~ Keith Devlin, #NFDB
298:But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and direction and to combine according to the parallelogram law; and many of them are not at all reminiscent of journeys. ~ Banesh Hoffmann, #NFDB
299:There can be conceptual skeletons on several different levels of abstraction. For instance, the "isomorphism" between Bongard problems 70 and 71, already pointed out, involves higher-level conceptual skeleton than that needed to solve either problem in isolation. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
300:Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. ~ Arshile Gorky, #NFDB
301:Do you feel like you’re a threat to yourself? But which is the threat and which is the self? I wasn’t not a threat, but couldn’t say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down. ~ John Green, #NFDB
302:In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands. ~ Eleanor Catton, #NFDB
303:Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder. ~ Eric R Kandel, #NFDB
304:the value of a game is in abstraction. Many Nirai go in for simulationist approaches, a tendency you share, but sometimes you learn more by throwing details out than coding them all in. You want to get rid of everything nonessential, cook it down to its simplest possible form. ~ Yoon Ha Lee, #NFDB
305:...concepts have three fundamental properties—contextuality, intentionality, and abstraction—which independent things do not. To produce a mental world from the physical world, the physical world must first explain how contextuality, intentionality, and abstraction can arise. ~ Ashish Dalela, #NFDB
306:My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
307:By insisting that economic laws always take shape through social norms, values, and political choices, Piketty would rescue his discipline from the aridity of abstraction and return it to the richer model of political economy that its best nineteenth-century practitioners pursued. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
308:I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake. ~ Arthur C Danto, #NFDB
309:The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free. ~ Anthony Daniels, #NFDB
310:This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins." ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
311:At a certain level of abstraction, anyone could have written the poem, but that didn't feel true either. It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there's something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way you experience the world is beautiful in some way. ~ Sally Rooney, #NFDB
312:Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness loom huge in my development as a writer. I think I'm always trying to write Heart of Darkness - trying to explode an abstraction in concrete terms, although I am aware that Conrad's story has a bit of baggage that I'd rather avoid in my work. ~ Sabina Murray, #NFDB
313:Only since the turn of the century has abstraction again become recognized as an artistic means of representation. It was then that one returned to the recognition of the immense role abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials. ~ Sigfried Giedion, #NFDB
314:I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure. ~ Hilton Als, #NFDB
315:She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identity to her for the asking, as my father did. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
316:The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. ~ William James, #NFDB
317:It is astonishing that so simple a truth should ever have had an adversary; and it is one among a multitude of proofs, how apt a spirit of ill-informed jealousy, or of too great abstraction and refinement is to lead men astray from the plainest paths of reason and conviction. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
318:I should have been a pair of ragged claws.’ The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see- ~ Frederik Pohl, #NFDB
319:Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
320:The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world? ~ Evangelista Torricelli, #NFDB
321:Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying — and you have to keep trying — eventually you will come across the next item on your list. ~ Jonathan Nolan, #NFDB
322:Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. Doctors treat diseases but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once. ~ June Goodfield, #NFDB
323:Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too much pressure on consciousness and a floating abstraction untied to reality. These ~ Leonard Peikoff, #NFDB
324:Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
325:Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
326:Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,
More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.
The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky! ~ James Galvin,#NFDB
327:She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
328:The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment. ~ Sufjan Stevens, #NFDB
329: “The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins, As things emerged and moved and were dissolved, Either in distance, change or nothingness, The visible transformations of summer night, An argentine abstraction approaching form And suddenly denying itself away. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
330:The misery of other people is only an abstraction something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
331:No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important. ~ Mark Kostabi, #NFDB
332:Life is the path. Can the path be seen? Observe the path and you are far from it. Without observation how can one know they are on the path? The path cannot be seen, nor can it not be unseen. Perception is delusion; abstraction is nonsensical. Your path is freedom. Name it and it vanishes. ~ Eric S Nylund, #NFDB
333:Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community. *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
334:The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. ~ Nadine Gordimer, #NFDB
335:I never want to code in a non-garbage-collected language again. Been there,
done that, got the T-shirt, and don’t want to go back, because I’d rather spend my time
at a higher level of abstraction, thinking about ways to solve complex business scenarios,
not complicated plumbing problem ~ Neal Ford,#NFDB
336:It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law. ~ William James, #NFDB
337:The Christian commitment is not an abstraction. It is a concrete, visible, courageous, and formidable way of being in the world, forged by daily choices consistent with inner truth. A commitment that is not visible in humble service, suffering discipleship, and creative love is an illusion. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
338:The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
339:Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
340:The Negro said, “I don’t feel so good right now. Say, if I’d known that cutting your throat gave you septicaemia, I sure would have made a job of it.” “Or else not done it at all,” said Turner. The Negro paused for a moment in abstraction. “Well,” he said at last, “that would have been another way. ~ Nevil Shute, #NFDB
341:Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
342:Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. And, since the creator of the universe is to them unknowable so far, they serve as best they can the highest abstraction of which they have some understanding, which is their community. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
343:Our love story comes to me in waves, in movie stills and long summer afternoons spent under a sky of incessant blue. I still think of your eyes in flashes of color, your hands in a frenetic, feverish blur—your smile a mosaic of light and shadow. I still find myself lost in those moments of abstraction. ~ Lang Leav, #NFDB
344:abstraction, n.
Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
345:Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction ~ Jack Donovan, #NFDB
346:Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction. ~ Jack Donovan, #NFDB
347:Extension and abstraction without apparent direction or purpose is fundamental to the discipline. Applicability is not the reason we work, and plenty that is not applicable contributes to the beauty and magnificence of our subject. ~ Peter Rowlett, "The unplanned impact of mathematics", Nature 475, 2011, pp. 166-169., #NFDB
348:What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges or diminishes us, how, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
349:Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. . . . Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once. —June Goodfield ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
350:I want to expand the question of when something is done. I want to vex the ending. I want to mess around with that. I like the idea that if you make a work that has no clear ending, then you must play with the ending. Because if you don't, you're not highlighting the weird, lovely openness of abstraction. ~ Amy Sillman, #NFDB
351:This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
352:She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself b disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
353:The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called "society" may be laid more realistically at the door of Everyman. Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower into civic virtue, inner reforms leading to outer ones. A man who has reformed himself will reform thousands. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
354:The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection. ~ Robert J Sawyer, #NFDB
355:all thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
356:Poor young man! he was one of the four subaltern officers of La Rochelle. How horrible is the idea of their (fancied) political necessity, to give the frightful reality of the guillotine for an opinion, a reverie, an abstraction! — And I! I have complained of its severity!-I who have really committed crime — ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
357:Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction. ~ Ezra Pound, #NFDB
358:I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived. ~ Junot Diaz, #NFDB
359:The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number. ~ Keith Devlin, #NFDB
360:Another good reason to create a class is to model an abstract object—an object that isn't a concrete, real-world object but that provides an abstraction of other concrete objects. A good example is the classic Shape object. Circle and Square really exist, but Shape is an abstraction of other specific shapes. ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
361:A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration. ~ Wayne Thiebaud, #NFDB
362:… there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. ~ Bret Easton Ellis, #NFDB
363:...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. ~ Bret Easton Ellis, #NFDB
364:When we aren’t personally acquainted with the beings who make up our community, the truth of interdependence becomes an abstraction. And when the connections between us become abstract, we start to doubt they exist. And when that doubt settles in like a rolling fog, we shrug away our responsibility to others. The ~ Ethan Nichtern, #NFDB
365:We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for. ...[The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for. Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
366:It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law. ~ William James, #NFDB
367:... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
368:I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy. ~ Wynton Marsalis, #NFDB
369:It is essential that a work of art should be self-consistent, that an artist should consciously or unconsciously draw a circle beyond which he does not trespass: on the one hand actual life is always the material, and on the other hand an abstraction from actual life is a necessary condition to the creation of the work of art. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
370:Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding. ~ Nick Land, "What is Philosophy? (Part 1)", in Xenosystems.com (2013), #NFDB
371:You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality. ~ Aleksandar Hemon, #NFDB
372:In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers. ~ Mark Helprin, #NFDB
373:History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
374:Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
375:Become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
376:Become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
377:The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is the honoring of small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
378:Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker. ~ Robert Hughes, #NFDB
379:Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to re-describe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.... depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction....
[NY, Dec. 1991; Columbia Graduate School Of Journalism Speech] ~ Salman Rushdie,#NFDB
380:I think there's a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don't think much of political activism. It's so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I've said that about environmentalists. I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
381:relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context. ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
382:You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
383:Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
384:We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why'd they have kids if they couldn't support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies. ~ Katha Pollitt, #NFDB
385:When we opt to stay above the clouds, relying only on information fed to us instead of going down to see for ourselves, not only is it harder to make the right moral decisions, it makes it even harder to take responsibility when we fail to do so. The good news is, there are things we can do to help us manage the abstraction and keep our Circles strong. ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
386:I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own. ~ Jeffrey Rosen, #NFDB
387:Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die.
Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. "The fortunate fall" as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited Then it can't rise to the edifying abstraction of 'experience. ~ Patricia Hampl,#NFDB
388:...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life... ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
389:Even now, missing Earth, he felt sympathy only for those aboard Gypsy, those orphaned, damaged, disaffected, dispossessed, Aspergerish souls whose anger at that great abstraction, The World, was more truly an anger at all those fortunate enough to be unlike them. We were all so young. How can you be so young, and so hungry for, and yet so empty of life? ~ Carter Scholz, #NFDB
390:He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
391:If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details. ~ John G Kemeny, #NFDB
392:So that’s where we stand. The Me Generation, addicted to performance, dismantled the controls that protect us from corporate abuses and stock market crashes. A Distracted Generation, living in a world of abstraction, thinks it has ADHD but more likely has a dopamine-fueled addiction to social media and cell phones. It would seem we have reached the abyss. ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
393:When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
394:When writing these tests it’s obvious and clear where “duplication” lies and how “common” pieces can be pulled into helper methods. Unfortunately, each time we extract a method we risk complicating our tiny universes. The right abstractions can reduce complexity; however, it’s often unclear which abstraction within a test will provide the most value to the team. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
395:Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music. ~ Yukio Mishima, #NFDB
396:Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
397:In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
398:In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences. ~ Tony Hoare, #NFDB
399:Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship. ~ William James, #NFDB
400:The nation’s leaders keep throwing out the word “Washington” as a vulgar abstraction. Nothing new here: the anti-Washington reflex in American politics has been honed for centuries, often by candidates who deride the capital as a swamp, only to settle into the place as if it were a soothing whirlpool bath once they get elected. The city exists to be condemned. ~ Mark Leibovich, #NFDB
401:In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.” True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
402:In the final scene of Power, the Supreme Court justices appear as a striking abstraction: Nine scowling masks line up in a row on top of a giant podium. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes speaks the majority opinion: 'Water power, the right to convert it into electric energy, and the electric energy thus produced constitute property belonging to the United States. ~ Susan Quinn, #NFDB
403:The Aleph moment would be followed, on a timescale of seconds, by the degeneration of physics into pure mathematics. Just as the Big Bang implied pre-space before it – an infinitely symmetric roiling abstraction where nothing really existed or happened – the Aleph moment would bring on the informational mirror image, another infinite wasteland without time or space. ~ Greg Egan, #NFDB
404:It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there’s nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. ~ Jonathan Littell, #NFDB
405:Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
406:It is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
407:She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
408:The poet wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether. ~ Cleanth Brooks, #NFDB
409:The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have. ~ Willem de Kooning, #NFDB
410:For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
411:In the ordinal view, number is thought as a link in a chain, it is an element of a total order. In the cardinal view, it is rather the mark of a 'pure quantity' obtained through the abstraction of domains of objects having 'the same quantity'. The ordinal number is thought according to the schema of a sequence, the cardinal number, according to that of a measurement. ~ Alain Badiou, #NFDB
412:The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete. ~ Philip Pearlstein, #NFDB
413:The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
414:Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. ~ T S Eliot,#NFDB
415:it is sufficient to say, that a chorus of work, the whole of my past life - but, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of it's incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings. ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
416:To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
417:Any event or group of events may be viewed from different degrees of abstraction. A man jumps from a bridge. The psychologists make abstraction from everything except the mental state which prompted the suicide; the biologists abstract from everything except the dying organism; while the physicists are interested in the man, not as mind, or as organism, but as a falling body. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
418:the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction,” and that “our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind—that ever-calculating, self-evaluating, seething cauldron of thoughts, predictions, anxieties, judgments, and incessant meta-experiences about experience itself. ~ Amy Cuddy, #NFDB
419:Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are sosure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist. ~ David Elkind, #NFDB
420:Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
421:If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons. ~ Tao Lin, #NFDB
422:How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider your image erotic? Do you pretend that you are a star's child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization? ~ Wayne Koestenbaum, #NFDB
423:The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction. ~ Nicholson Baker, #NFDB
424:A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
425:In the final analysis, that state of abstraction turns out to be a very specific set of conditions: white middle-class women suffering and responding to the sexist attitudes and conduct of white middle-class men and calling for equality with those particular men. This approach leaves the existing socioeconomic system with its fundamental reliance on racism and class bias unchallenged. It ~ Angela Y Davis, #NFDB
426:One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker. ~ C Wright Mills, #NFDB
427:There was much sense in your smile: it was very shrewd, and seemed to make light of your own abstraction. It seemed to say–'My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky and a green flowery Eden in my brain; but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet a rough tract to travel, and around me gather black tempests to encounter. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
428:Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
429:They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. ~ Lauren Groff, #NFDB
430:It would be a mistake to believe that one could come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true, or the rational in complete abstraction from the way in which these items figure in the motivationally active parts of the human psyche, and particularly in abstraction from the way in which they impinge, even if indirectly, on human action. ~ Raymond Geuss, #NFDB
431:But how will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger? ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
432:To some degree, all civilized people are out of touch with reality because we fail to distinguish between the way things are and the way they are described. For politicians this dichotomy has reached extreme proportions, but it affects everyone. We confuse money, which is an abstraction, with real wealth; we confuse the idea of who we are with the actual experience of our organic existence. During ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
433:Hmmmm?” He looked around at her. She thought the look on his face was one of gentle abstraction, perhaps mixed with minor annoyance. It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
434:13:4–7 In the previous comments (vv.1–3), the focus is on the emptiness produced when love is absent from ministry. In these verses, the fullness of love is described, in each case by what love does. Love is action, not abstraction. Positively, love is patient with people and gracious to them with generosity. Negatively, love never envies, or brags, or is arrogant, since that is the opposite of ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
435:On the contrary, when one works in terms of the implicate order, one begins with the undivided wholeness of the universe, and the task of science is to derive the parts through abstraction from the whole, explaining them as approximately separable, stable and recurrent, but externally related elements making up relatively autonomous sub-totalities, which are to be described in terms of an explicate order. ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
436:Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
437:THE FOLLOWING ARGUMENT is intended to be an exercise in sociological theory. Specifically, it seeks to apply a general theoretical perspective derived from the sociology of knowledge to the phenomenon of religion. While at certain points the argument moves on levels of considerable abstraction, it never leaves (at least not intentionally) the frame of reference of the empirical discipline of sociology. ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
438:The public is a host, more numerous than all the peoples together, but it is a body which can never be reviewed, it cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction. Nevertheless, when the age is reflective and passionless and destroys everything concrete, the public becomes everything and is supposed to include everything. And that again shows how the individual is thrown back upon himself. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
439:This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
440:God as God, … as a being not finite, not human, not materially conditioned, not phenomenal, is only an object of thought. … [H]e is known … only by abstraction and negation … There is no other spirit, no other intelligence which enlightens him, which is active in him. … The 'infinite spirit,' is therefore nothing else than the intelligence disengaged from the limits of individuality and corporeality[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
441:The notion developed that the breach of reason with nature was a necessary one; that man had to make it in order to develop his powers of reason and abstraction. Schiller makes this point in his Letters on the Aestethic education of Man, as does Hölderin in his Hyperion Fragment. The belief was that the human destiny was to return to nature at a higher level, having made a synthesis of reason and desire. ~ Charles Taylor, #NFDB
442:Why is music capable of inflicting such pain? Because it works on our feelings directly. No ideas interfere with its emotions. This is why "all art aspires to the condition of music." The symphony gives us the thrill of uncertainty--the pleasurable anxiety of searching for a pattern--but without the risks of real life. When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why. ~ Jonah Lehrer, #NFDB
443:With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. ~ Rand Paul, #NFDB
444:Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
445:Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
446:Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there. ~ Glenn Ligon, #NFDB
447:Suppose that you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.? I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats, saying 'kitty' each time, until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience. ~ Ralph P Boas Jr, #NFDB
448:The truth I've discovered is that you don't have to lift enormous weights to grow muscle. By using stricter form, slower negatives, and stretching between sets you can get an incredible pump in all your workouts. Numbers are an abstraction, especially to muscles. Your body doesn't know the absolute weight of what you lift, it only recognizes how heavy it feels. The secret is to make lighter weights feel heavier. ~ Frank Zane, #NFDB
449:For leveling really to come about a phantom must first be provided, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage -- this phantom is the public. Only a passionless but reflective age can spin this phantom out, with the help of the press when the press itself becomes an abstraction ... [and] the only thing that can keep life going in the prevailing torpor. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
450:It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
451:That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
452:Vitruvius didn’t conjure up Vitruvian Man only as an abstraction. He also wanted his readers to associate the figure directly with a specific person: the august ruler who had just begun to build a body of empire in his own perfect image, and whose ideal form was embodied in all temples. Vitruvian Man, in other words, was none other than the figure to whom Vitruvius dedicated his Ten Books: Caesar Augustus himself. ~ Toby Lester, #NFDB
453:People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #NFDB
454:All these disconnected communities and houses will be united through radio as they were never united by the telegraph and the telephone. The President of the United States delivers important messages in every home, not in cold, impersonal type, but in living speech; he is transformed from what is almost a political abstraction, a personification of the republic’s dignity and power, into a kindly father, talking to his children. ~ Tim Wu, #NFDB
455:A televangelist or president blessing troops in the name of God somehow is reminiscent of a neo-Darwinist laying the blame for genocides on irrational religion, smugly sure of being inured from the same while claiming a kind of amoral immortality for the gene, that veritable Platonic abstraction, that chemical instantiation of eternal life going on indefinitely as the real world of life, which it produces, dies around it. ~ Dorion Sagan, #NFDB
456:The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen. ~ Fritz Haber, #NFDB
457:In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'things' and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
458:I started doing 'figures', then, one day, all of a sudden, I started doing abstraction. And then I started doing both. But it was never really a conscious decision. It was simply a question of desire. In fact, I really prefer making figurative work, but the figure is difficult. So to work around the difficulty I take a break and paint abstractly. Which I really like, by the way, because it allows me to make beautiful paintings. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
459:We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
460:Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.". ~ Isidor Isaac Rabi, #NFDB
461:This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety. ~ William Barrett, #NFDB
462:The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking."
"You keep saying them," Dreyfus said.
"For a reason," Stasov answered. ~ Alastair Reynolds,#NFDB
463:The most important decision in Christian theology is to decide whether you will speak of God as a person or as a concept, as a name or as an idea. Talk about God as, to use Paul Tillich's term, "ultimate reality," and you will get a safe, dead abstraction that you can utilize in whatever salvation project you happen now to be working. Name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God will enlist you in God's move upon the world. ~ William H Willimon, #NFDB
464:Une des clés évidentes et secrètes de ce monde où nous vivons est qu'il passe son temps dans un éternel présent toujours en train de s'évanouir. Entre un avenir qui n'existe pas encore et un passé qui n'existe déjà plus se glisse une pure abstraction, une sorte de rêve impossible. C'est cette absence haletante que nous appelons le présent. Personne n'a jamais vécu ailleurs que sur cette frontière vacillante entre le passé et l'avenir. ~ Jean d Ormesson, #NFDB
465:His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
466:If, therefore, man has come into the world to search for God and, if he has found Him, to adhere to Him and to find repose in adhering to Him-man cannot search for Him and attain Him in this sensible and corporeal world, since God is spirit rather than body, and cannot be attained in intellectual abstraction, since one is able to conceive nothing similar to God, as he asserts-how can one, therefore, search for Him in order to find Him? ~ Nicholas of Cusa, #NFDB
467:Cloud storage in data centers will utilize the latest developments in physical storage virtualization, deduplication and other methods to make the most effective use of physical storage assets. Software defined storage could allow a further level of abstraction and cost effectiveness. The vast bulk of content stored "in the cloud" will reside on large SATA interface HDDs with some on magnetic (mostly LTO) tape (particularly for "archives.") ~ Tom Coughlin, #NFDB
468:All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
469:The personality can truly begin to emerge in religion because God, as an abstraction, does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers necessary for independent self-justification. What greater security than to lean confidently on God, on the Fount of creation, the most terrifying power of all? If God is hidden and intangible, all the better: that allows man to expand and develop by himself. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
470:A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
471:Seeing people only as members of groups is, he says, “inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure.” Real, personal identity, he argues, “springs from the capacity of human beings to resist these influences and counter them with free acts of their own invention.” 5 ~ Nicholas A Christakis, #NFDB
472:Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
473:once you become their Other, you’re no longer a person. You’re just an idea, an abstraction of everything that’s wrong with their world. Give them the slightest excuse, and they will tear you down. And the easiest way for them to target you as this Other is to find something that’s different about you. Color of your skin. The way you speak. The place you’re from. Magic. It comes and goes in cycles, Kate. Each new generation picks their own Other. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
474:Here is God's purpose - For God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; is loving, not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated; is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
475:Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, #NFDB
476:that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
477:Man’s collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life. ~ Christopher Lasch, #NFDB
478:A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
479:There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction. ~ Kehinde Wiley, #NFDB
480:When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
481:He didn't believe there was a Heaven or Hell, and to him, the concept of sin was an abstraction founded in cultural mythology. It wasn't science, therefore it wasn't real.
He knew though, that suicide was universally considered a sin, a grievous sin, and for some reason-perhaps a subconscious instinct of self-preservation, which was actually a biological, not a spiritual activity, he wondered...
What if I'm wrong? What if I kill myself and I go to Hell? ~ Edward Lee,#NFDB
482:In order to understand the dynamics of wage inequality, we must introduce other factors, such as the institutions and rules that govern the operation of the labor market in each society. To an even greater extent than other markets, the labor market is not a mathematical abstraction whose workings are entirely determined by natural and immutable mechanisms and implacable technological forces: it is a social construct based on specific rules and compromises. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
483:Everyone accepts the abstraction of Bach. My work aspires to the same kind of abstraction, which is so engaging that you're distracted from asking about what it means. So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category. Once it's in the viewer's eyes my job will be judged on whether or not it is engaging and pulls you in to a kind of intelligence or poetic something going on there that makes it sustainable to look at. ~ Caio Fonseca, #NFDB
484:The sentiment that is very inappropriately named equality is fresh, strong, alert, precisely because it is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive "intellectuals" still believe; but because it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favour, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favour, this latter being their chief concern. ~ Vilfredo Pareto, #NFDB
485:Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on. ~ Frank Stella, #NFDB
486:Perhaps it is the increasing abstraction of ourselves from the world, to which language contributes, that explains why “fifteen years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds; today many children can’t go beyond 100,000 and the average is 180,000. Twenty years ago the average subject could detect 350 shades of a particular color. Today the number is 130.”13 By naming the world, abstracting it and reducing it, we impoverish our perception of it. Language ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
487:The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
488:When we were kids, you picked up a little paper and put it on a stick; and when you waved it back and forth, you understood the power of air underneath the wings. In that way, a child begins to understand abstraction, poetry, metaphor, symbolism. You play with the materials you have and use your imagination to make them into something else. That what's so sad about having everything on a little screen - it's not physical and dimensional, and that seems backward. ~ Julie Taymor, #NFDB
489:If we were to study these fragments by Baudelaire according to the normal methods of psychology, we might conclude that when the poet left behind him the settings of the world, to experience the single "setting" of immensity, he could only have knowledge of an "abstraction come true." Intimate space elaborated in this way by a poet, would be merely the pendant of the outside space of geometricians, who seek infinite space with no other sign than infinity itself. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
490:The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man? ~ H P Blavatsky, #NFDB
491:With abstraction, birds become numbers. Men and maniocs, too. We can look at a scene and say, ‘There are two men, three birds and four maniocs’ but also, ‘There are nine things’ (summing two and three and four). The Pirahã do not think this way. They ask, ‘What are these things?’ ‘Where are they?’, ‘What do they do?’ A bird flies, a man breathes and a manioc plant grows. It is meaningless to try to bring them together. Man is a small world. The world is a big manioc. ~ Daniel Tammet, #NFDB
492:There are those who will say that the idea of humanity is an abstraction, subjective in character. It must be confessed that the concrete objectiveness of this living truth cannot be proved to its own units. They can never see its entireness from outside; for they are one with it. The individual cells of our body have their separate lives; but they never have the opportunity of observing the body as a whole with its past, present, and future. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, #NFDB
493:In mathematics ... we find two tendencies present. On the one hand, the tendency towards abstraction seeks to crystallise the logical relations inherent in the maze of materials ... being studied, and to correlate the material in a systematic and orderly manner. On the other hand, the tendency towards intuitive understanding fosters a more immediate grasp of the objects one studies, a live rapport with them, so to speak, which stresses the concrete meaning of their relations. ~ David Hilbert, #NFDB
494:It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e.g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion. ~ Hans Georg Gadamer, #NFDB
495:The notion of a thing is thus seen to be an abstraction, in which it is conceptually separated from its infinite background and substructure. Actually, however, a thing does not and could not exist apart from the context from which it has thus been conceptually abstracted. And therefore the world is not made by putting together the various “things” in it, but, rather, these things are only approximately what we find on analysis in certain contexts and under suitable conditions. To ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
496:Still another reason why the payment of taxes implies no consent, or pledge, to support the government, is that the taxpayer does not know, and has no means of knowing, who the particular individuals are who compose "the government." To him "the government" is a myth, an abstraction, an incorporeality, with which he can make no contract, and to which he can give no consent, and make no pledge. He knows it only through its pretended agents. "The government" itself he never sees. ~ Lysander Spooner, #NFDB
497:With the capability of abstraction the emancipation from the reality of the outer world becomes possible. On the other hand, the neocortex receives sensory data from the outer world. Thus, there is not only the symmetry break between the outer world and its symbolic abstraction. The abstraction—we may also say, the idea or the vision—superimposes itself over the existing reality and starts the creative process of the transformation of the outer world. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, #NFDB
498:Art was a union of the father and mother worlds, of mind and blood. It might start in utter sensuality and lead to total abstraction; then again it might originate in pure concept and end in bleeding flesh. Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good juggler's trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master's madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
499:Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban. ~ Richard Louv, #NFDB
500:For our radically misnamed “materialistic” civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so–called “things” are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock? ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
501:In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
502:In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
503:The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. . . . Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
504:The being who is the object of its own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon itself, becomes in a flash able to raise itself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love—all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed centre as it explodes onto itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
505:Very much like the fiduciary value of money, mind is an abstraction riding a physical vehicle. Like monetary fiduciarity, the idea of mind as a separate, nonmaterial essence of being developed over thousands of years, leading to the modern concept of an immaterial consciousness, a disembodied spirit. Tellingly, in both secular and religious thought, this abstraction has become more important than the physical vehicle, just as the “value” of a thing is more important than its physical attributes. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
506:The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he -- because he usually doesn't know any Greek -- can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination. ~ Robertson Davies, #NFDB
507:Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
508:When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
509:Therefore pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh. As it reduces the actors in the sexual drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest. The pornographer, in spite of himself, becomes a metaphysician when he states that the friction of penis in orifice is the supreme matter of the world, for which the world is well lost; as he says so, the world vanishes. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
510:I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
511:Internalized shame causes you to focus on a particular group of automatic thoughts to the exclusion of all contrary thoughts. This preoccupation creates a kind of tunnel vision in which you think only one kind of thought and notice only one aspect of your environment. Aaron Beck uses the phrase “selective abstraction” to describe this tunnel vision. Selective abstraction means that we look at one set of cues in our environment to the exclusion of all others. Tunnel vision is the product of toxic shame. ~ John Bradshaw, #NFDB
512:I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion). ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
513:What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
514:Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. ~ T S Eliot,#NFDB
515:You believe in a loving God. Then along comes criticism, or rejection (say, a relationship breaks up), or some failure that’s a blow to your reputation in some realm. Anyone in such a situation will feel quite crestfallen and downcast. But there is a difference between being discouraged and being devastated, between sliding into despondency and not being able to function. If God’s love is an abstraction, it is of no consolation. But if it is a felt and lived reality through prayer, then it buoys you up. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
516:nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
517:I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. I go one way and then it opens up into a million different ideas, and somehow, when you look at the art, Buddhist art, or particularly Tibetan art, you know, it's a similar thing. All of a sudden there are a million lotus leaves and you're following one to the next and to another, and I related to that, and it felt simple and easy to me. And it made me feel smart. ~ Jake Gyllenhaal, #NFDB
518:There is no way to guarantee in advance what pure mathematics will later find application. We can only let the process of curiosity and abstraction take place, let mathematicians obsessively take results to their logical extremes, leaving relevance far behind, and wait to see which topics turn out to be extremely useful. If not, when the challenges of the future arrive, we won’t have the right piece of seemingly pointless mathematics to hand. ~ Peter Rowlett, "The unplanned impact of mathematics", Nature 475, 2011, pp. 166-169., #NFDB
519:Human nature being what it is, peace must inevitably be a relative condition. The essence of life is struggle and competition, and to that extent perfect peace is an almost meaningless abstraction. Struggle and competition are stimulating, but when they degenerate into conflict it is usually both destructive and disruptive. The aim of political institutions like the United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for nations to stay on the right side of that line. ~ Javier Perez de Cuellar, #NFDB
520:The disease of the hypochondriac consists in this: that certain bodily sensations do not so much indicate a really existing disease in the body as rather merely excite apprehensions of its existence: and human nature is so constituted – a trait which the animal lacks – that it is able to strengthen or make permanent local impressions simply by paying attention to them, whereas an abstraction – whether produced on purpose or by other diverting occupations – lessen these impressions, or even effaces them altogether. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
521:Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
522:If, by accident or miracle, words were to disappear, we should be plunged into an intolerable anguish and stupor. Such sudden dumbness would expose us to the crudest torment. It is the use of concepts which makes us masters of our fears. We say: Death—and this abstraction releases us from experiencing its infinity, its horror. By baptizing events and things, we elude the Inexplicable: the mind’s activity is a salutary deception, a conjuring trick; it allows us to circulate in a tempered reality, comfortable and inexact. To ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
523:The conception of list processing as an abstraction created a new world in which designation and dynamic symbolic structure were the defining characteristics. The embedding of the early list processing systems in languages (the IPLs, LISP) is often decried as having been a barrier to the diffusion of list processing techniques throughout programming practice; but it was the vehicle that held the abstraction together. ~ Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, 1975 Turing Award Lecture[2], Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (March 1976): p. 118., #NFDB
524:Because of … this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; … God is … a subject; … the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians … deify the human individual, make him the absolute being. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
525:above all, intellectual. Anti-intellectualism is one of the grand unifying themes of the backlash, the mutant strain of class war that underpins so many of Kansas’s otherwise random-seeming grievances. Contemporary conservatism holds as a key article of faith that it is fruitless to scrutinize the business pages for clues about the way the world works. We do not labor under the yoke of some abstraction like market forces, or even flesh-and-blood figures like executives or owners. No, it is intellectuals who call the shots, ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
526:Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
527:Nothing worked. Even giving in to the thought had only provided a moment's release. I returned to a question Dr. Singh had first asked me years ago, the first time it got this bad: Do you feel like you're a threat to yourself? But which is the threat and which is the self? I wasn't not a threat, but couldn't say to whom or what, the pronouns and objects of the sentence muddied by the abstraction of it all, the words sucked into the non-lingual way down. You're a we. You're a you. You're a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I. ~ John Green, #NFDB
528:I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
529:In one sense, the “fourth wall” perfectly suits the Age of the Enlightenment and the privilege it accorded to critical distance, abstraction, and neutral observation (i.e., “theory”). However, even in the church there is often a tendency to erect a “fourth wall” between what leaders do at the front of the church and what happens in the congregation. The fourth wall here functions not as a theatrical convention but rather as an obstacle to genuine worship insofar as it cordons off the congregation from the doxological action. ~ Kevin J Vanhoozer, #NFDB
530:Taboos, magic, superstition, personified abstraction, myths, gods, empty verbalisms, in every culture and at every period of history express man's persisting non-logical impulses. Gods and goddesses like Athena or Janus or Ammon are replaced by new divinities such as Progress and Humanity and even Science; hymns to Jupiter give way to invocations to the People; the magic of the votes and electoral manipulations supersedes the magic of dolls and wands; faith in the Historical Process does duty for faith in the God of our Fathers. ~ James Burnham, #NFDB
531:For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory, somewhat like the illusory circle of fire made by a whirling torch. We can, for example, imagine the path of a bird through the sky as a distinct line which it has taken. But this line is as abstract as a line of latitude. In concrete reality, the bird left no line, and, similarly, the past from which our ego is abstracted has entirely disappeared. Thus any attempt to cling to the ego or to make it an effective source of action is doomed to frustration. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
532:Physics is thus a creative work of abstraction, far from the theory of everything that is sometimes claimed. For about a century, then, determinism was assumed to exist and to be the first requirement to be able to exert precise control over the world. This has come to dominate our cultural attitudes towards control. Today, determinism is known to be fundamentally false, and yet the illusion of determinism is still clung onto with fervour in our human world of bulk materials, artificial environments, computers and information systems. ~ Mark Burgess, #NFDB
533:Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
534:From where I sit, battles are hard. I’ve written my share. Sometimes I employ the private’s viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That’s vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general’s point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
535:Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating. ~ Taryn Simon, #NFDB
536:I got to a state where phrases like "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card-index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
537:Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
538:Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
539:I was aware that I was on the moon, but the immense distance separating me from the earth was a pure abstraction for me. I felt as though the people I spoke with on the phone were somewhere close by—not because I could hear their voices clearly in the receiver, but because I couldn’t imagine how the entirely immaterial official relationships and personal feelings that linked us together could be stretched so far. But the strangest thing was that the memories connecting me with childhood could extend over such an incomprehensible distance too. ~ Victor Pelevin, #NFDB
540:One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
541:I submit to you a much simpler alternative: there is no state A. If there were, we could, by definition, never see it anyway. State A is just a mental abstraction of smart human beings engaged in fun puzzle-solving. And neither do we have the magical power to change the universe ‘out there’ merely by the act of glancing at it. Yes, nature is contextual, but contextuality does not require superhero powers: it is simply another way to say that reality is the unfolding of mind; that is, the unfolding of the observer in the process of observation. ~ Bernardo Kastrup, #NFDB
542:That is, through his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral). ~ Gary Lachman, #NFDB
543:The shop was kept by a man called Shackleton who looked exactly as you would wish a bookseller to look. He would never have done for any other sort of shopman – certainly not for a haberdasher or milliner who must be smarter than his customers – but for a bookseller he was perfect. He appeared to be of no particular age. He was thin and dusty and spotted finely all over with ink. He had an air of learning tinged with abstraction. His nose was adorned with spectacles; there was a quill pen stuck behind his ear and a half-unravelled wig upon his head. ~ Susanna Clarke, #NFDB
544:Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction ‘the Public,’ consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation …”9 Under the influence of this notion, each of us begins to view himself as a representative of something more general. We bring this “representativeness” to our encounters with others. This flattens out relationships and makes them more abstract. Kierkegaard’s ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB
545:Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
546:Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
547:Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as love. Love is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self increasing. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
548:Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." "Love" is abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
549:"I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. So I don't want to explain it away… I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater." ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
550:"I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. So I don't want to explain it away… I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater." ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
551:You paint from your subject, not what you see…I rarely paint anything I don’t know very well. It was surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. ~ Georgia O Keeffe, #NFDB
552:Perfection" is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe. There is no perfection. It's really the world's greatest con game; it promises riches and delivers misery. The harder you strive for perfection, the worse your disappointment will become because it's only an abstraction, a concept that doesn't fit reality. Everything can be improved if you look at it closely and critically enough—every person, every idea, every work of art, every experience, everything. So if you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do. ~ David D Burns, #NFDB
553:The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
554:[T]he changing, functional, causal, and conditioned world, present to ordinary sensory and mental experience, was what was ultimately real. To be real [...] means to be capable of producing effects in the concrete world. Thus a seed, a jug, wind in the trees, a desire, a thought, the pain in one’s knees, another person: these are what are real. Emptiness of inherent existence, by contrast, is just a conceptual and linguistic abstraction. It may serve as a strategic idea, but it lacks the vital reality of a rosebud, the beating of one’s heart, or a crying child. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
555:The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television if the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning. ~ James Howard Kunstler, #NFDB
556:The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning. ~ James Howard Kunstler, #NFDB
557:Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
558:We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail. ~ Hal Abelson, #NFDB
559:A word is no more than a means to an end. Its an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself. The word honey isn't honey. You can study and talk about honey for as long as you like, but you won' t really know it until you taste it. After you have tasted it, the word becomes less important to you. You won't be attached to it anymore. Similarly, you can talk or think about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which the word points? ~ Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997) p.71, #NFDB
560:Let me explain why. "Perfection" is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe. There is no perfection. It's really the world's greatest con game; it promises riches and delivers misery. The harder you strive for perfection, the worse your disappointment will become because it's only an abstraction, a concept that doesn't fit reality. Everything can be improved if you look at it closely and critically enough—every person, every idea, every work of art, every experience, everything. So if you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do. ~ David D Burns, #NFDB
561:In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control. ~ Herbert Marcuse, #NFDB
562:And there was no longer a single race who bred blindly and without question. Time and its agonizing nostalgia would touch the heart each season, and be seen in the fall of a leaf, or, most terrible of all, a loved face would grow old. Cronos and the Fates had entered man's thinking, and try to escape as he might, he would endure an interior Ice Age. He would make, and then unmake fables. Then at last, and unwillingly, comprehend an intangible abstraction called space-time, and shiver inwardly at the endless abysses of space as he had once shivered, unclothed and unlighted before the Earthly frost. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
563:Let me give you another example from the Bible of how illustrations work. God says to Cain, “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:7). The Hebrew word used here connotes an animal that is coiled low, perhaps off in the shadows, ready to spring, rend, and kill. God does not simply say, “Sin will get you into trouble, Cain.” That would have been an abstraction. By likening sin to a dangerous, predatory animal, God is not only gripping the heart but also conveying a great deal of information about sin—much more than a mere proposition could do. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
564:There are many agreements across the so-called "world religions," at a certain level of abstraction. But when it comes to applying them in concrete situations they may lead to incompatible decisions. As an example, some people think that Christian ideas of sexual modesty suggest that homosexuals should be locked up, some people think that they mean that the churches should recongize gay marriages. But everyone believes in sexual modesty. I think there are universal moral truths, whether or not everyone accepts them. Here's one very low level but important one: it's very bad to torture people. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah, #NFDB
565:Exceptions occur at different levels of abstraction. Catching and reporting a low-level exception can be confusing to someone who is not expecting it. When a web server shows me an error page with stack trace headed by a NullPointerException, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information. I’d rather see a message that said, “The programmer did not consider the scenario you have just presented.” I wouldn’t mind if the page also provided a pointer to further information that I could send to a programmer so he could diagnose the problem, but presenting me with untranslated details isn’t helpful. ~ Kent Beck, #NFDB
566:Galois's ideas, with all their brilliance, did not appear out of thin air. They addressed a problem whose roots could be traced all the way back to ancient Babylon. Still, the revolution that Galois had started grouped together entire domains that were previously unrelated. Much like the Cambrian explosion-that stunning burst of diversification in life forms on Earth-the abstraction of group theory opened windows into an infinity of truths. Fields as far apart as the laws of nature and music suddenly became mysteriously connected. The Tower of Babel of symmetries miraculously fused into a single language. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
567:The root of [our] frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction… The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., “everyone will die”) that the future assumes a high degree of reality — so high that the present loses its value. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
568:Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist's breakfast. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
569:The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. ~ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), #NFDB
570:Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved. ~ John Updike, #NFDB
571:The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
572:...all this abstraction is also potentially distancing. We don't see the labor that went into building our railroads or the civilizations that were wiped out in order to clear the land. We don't see the millennia of dinosaurs or plankton that went into our oil, the Chinese repetitive stress injuries that went into our iPhones, or any of the other time-intensive processes we can spend in an instant today. We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders" of the previous generation. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
573:He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
574:One of its charming miracles is that through its form, poetry can resist the content of authoritarian discourse. By resorting to understatement, concrete and physical language, a poet contends against abstraction, generalization, hyperbole and the heroic language of hot-headed generals and bogus lovers alike.... Poetry remains one of the astonishing forms in our hands to resist obscurantism and silence. And since we cannot wash the polluted words of hatred the same way we wash greasy dishes with soap and hot water, we the poets of the world, continue to write our poems to restore the respect of meaning and to give meaning to our existence. ~, #NFDB
575:Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
576:We think we value mothers in America, but we don’t. We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why’d they have kids if they couldn’t support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies: Don’t they know how annoying they are, with their yoga, their catfights over diapers and breastfeeding, their designer strollers that take up half the sidewalk so that people with important places to go have to take several extra steps? ~ Katha Pollitt, #NFDB
577:Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral, or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
578:Quand on raisonne par groupes, par ensembles, par camps, on fait abstraction des particularités, de la valeur et de l'apport de chaque individu, et on tombe facilement dans le simplisme et la généralisation [...] On bâtit des théories qui servent nos croyances. Et non seulement la plupart de ces théories sont fausses, mais elles poussent les gens à devenir ce que la théorie dit qu'ils sont.
On fait un grand pas dans la vie quand on cesse de généraliser ce qui concerne les autres, et que l'on considère chacun individuellement, même s'il fait de toute façon partie d'un tout qui le dépasse, l'humanité et, même au-delà, l'univers. ~ Laurent Gounelle,#NFDB
579:These sculptors consituteted a new movement, he claimed. Not for them the bald abstraction of their predecessors. Their creations were rooted in a postwar world of broken buildings and broken people. Their language was one of terror and trepidation. They tore into the human form, flaying it, tearing it limb from limb, discarding what they didn’t want. And when they were done, they found themselves presenting to the world an army of creatures—part man, part beast, and sometimes part machine. As one of Harry’s teachers at Corsham had said to him: ‘When you’ve seen the inside of a Sherman tank after a direct hit, it all becomes the same thing. ~ Mark Mills, #NFDB
580:The creation of art, the delineation of animals or purposeful markings, was an expression of the ability to make abstractions—the ability to take the essence of a thing and make of it a symbol that stands for the thing itself. The symbol for a thing has another form as well: a sound, a word. A brain that could think in terms of art was a brain capable of developing to its fullest potential another abstraction of great significance: language. And the same brain that was capable of creating a synthesis of the abstraction of art and the abstraction of language would someday form a synergism of both symbols, in effect, a memory of the words: writing. ~ Jean M Auel, #NFDB
581:Through many types of abstraction and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and through many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities (which constitute an indispensable pillar supporting every adult’s belief system, despite the insistence of high-school teachers who year after year teach that “arguments by authority” are spurious and are convinced that they ought to be believed because they are, after all, authority figures), we build up an intricate, interlocked set of beliefs as to what exists “out there” — and then, once again, that set of beliefs folds back, inevitably and seamlessly, to apply to our own selves. ~ Douglas R Hofstadter, #NFDB
582:The point of loose coupling is that an effective module provides an additional level of abstraction—once you write it, you can take it for granted. It reduces overall program complexity and allows you to focus on one thing at a time. If using a module requires you to focus on more than one thing at once—knowledge of its internal workings, modification to global data, uncertain functionality—the abstractive power is lost and the module's ability to help manage complexity is reduced or eliminated. Classes and routines are first and foremost intellectual tools for reducing complexity. If they're not making your job simpler, they're not doing their jobs. ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
583:Or perhaps I would be an influence that prevails in water, something sea-borne and far away, some certain arrangement of sun, light and water unknown and unbeheld, something far-from-usual. There are in the great world whirls of fluid and vaporous existences obtaining in their own unpassing time, unwatched and uninterpreted, valid only in their un-understandable mystery, justified only in their eyeless and mindless immeasurability, unassailable in their actual abstraction; of the inner quality of such a thing I might well in my own time be the true quintessential pith. I might belong to a lonely shore or be the agony of the sea when it bursts upon it in despair. ~ Flann O Brien, #NFDB
584:I discovered the works of Euler and my perception of the nature of mathematics underwent a dramatic transformation. I was de-Bourbakized, stopped believing in sets, and was expelled from the Cantorian paradise. I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it. I learned that one has to adapt abstractions to reality and not the other way around. Mathematics stopped being a science of theories but reappeared to me as a science of numbers and shapes. ~ Alexander Stepanov, Bjarne Stroustrup: Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006. ACM HOPL-III. June 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-11-20. Retrieved on 2008-04-25., #NFDB
585:Veni Seer
Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards,
or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a human being: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well,
that the statue in church lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore, call one person, anywhere on earth,
not me-after all I have some decencyand allow me, when I look at that person,
to marvel at you.
~ Czeslaw Milosz,#NFDB
586:In short, the majority of men "without religion" still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies, There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. This is all the more true because a great part of his existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the "unconscious," A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life. Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences. ~ Mircea Eliade, #NFDB
587:It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn't even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word 'why' is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
588:Humans tend to segregate the world: enemies on one side, friends on the other. Friends are people we know. Enemies are the Other. You can do just about anything to the Other. It doesn't matter if this Other is actually guilty of any crimes, because it's a matter of emotion, not logic. You see, angry people aren't interested in justice. they just want an excuse to vent their rage. And once you become their Other, you're no longer a person. You're just an idea, an abstraction of everything that's wrong with their world. Give them the slightest excuse, and they will tear you down. And the easiest way for them to target you as this Other is to find something that's different about you. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
589:It is not feasible for most of us to abandon the Internet entirely. But at the very least we can impose on ourselves a discipline similar to the Benedictine monks, who, observing the Rule, strictly limit themselves to particular tasks during certain hours. We can also do more things with our hands. Put that way, it sounds almost childish, but there’s a serious point here. Technology enables us to treat interaction with the material world—people, places, things—as an abstraction. Getting our hands dirty, so to speak, with gardening, cooking, sewing, exercise, and the like, is a crucial way of restoring our sense of connection with the real world. So is doing things face to face with other people. ~ Rod Dreher, #NFDB
590:Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters... The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
591:Now the End of the World is an abstraction because it has never happened. It has no existence in the real world. It will cease to be an abstraction only when it happens--if it happens. (I do not claim to know "God's mind" on the subject- -nor to possess any scientific knowledge about a still non- existent future). I see only a mental image & its emotional ramifications; as such I identify it as a kind of ghostly virus, a spook-sickness in myself which ought to be expunged rather than hypochondriacally coddled & indulged. I have come to despise the "End of the World" as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, & cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing. ~ Hakim Bey, #NFDB
592:A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. Thus, when we describe a language, we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas. Every powerful language has three mechanisms for accomplishing this:
- primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
- means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
- means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units. ~ Harold Abelson,#NFDB
593:It seemed fitting to arrange the book around the sacraments because it was the sacraments that drew me back to church after I’d given up on it. When my faith had become little more than an abstraction, a set of propositions to be affirmed or denied, the tangible, tactile nature of the sacraments invited me to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the stuff of everyday life again. They got God out of my head and into my hands. They reminded me that Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people. They reminded me that, try as I may, I can’t be a Christian on my own. I need a community. I need the church. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
594:A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further—if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person—then it is no longer an abstraction. It is palpable. People begin to see it as if it exists. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision. At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?” Just as personal visions are pictures or images people carry in their heads and hearts, so too are shared visions pictures that people throughout an organization carry. ~ Peter M Senge, #NFDB
595:A child who was taught from the age of three or four "You are here for a reason" would face a very different future. Such a child would see the search for meaning in life as a natural thing, the spiritual equivalent of learning your ABCs. There would be no years of postponement, followed by desperate inner turmoil. "Why am I here?" doesn't have to be a fearsome existential question. It is the most joyful exploration a person can undertake, and we do our children an immense favor by presenting it as such. A child who paid attention to just this one principle would have a far richer life - a more successful life - than countless adults for whom "spirit" and "God" remain forever locked in a world of abstraction. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
596:Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people's lives, so that a man, while pursuing Heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands against the world...
Though Heaven is certainly more important than the earth if all they say about it is true, it is still morally incidental to it and dependent on it, and I can only imagine it and desire it in terms of what I know of the earth.
(pg. 23, "A Native Hill") ~ Wendell Berry,#NFDB
597:Admittedly, the sciences so created were masterly symbolic fabrications: unfortunately those who utilized these symbols implicitly believed that they represented a higher order of reality, when in fact they expressed only a higher order of abstraction. Human experience itself remained, necessarily, multi-dimensional: one axis extends horizontally through the world open to external observation, the so-called objective world, and the other axis, at right angles, passes vertically through the depths and heights of the subjective world; while reality itself can only be represented by a figure composed of an indefinite number of lines drawn through both planes and intersecting at the center, in the mind of a living person. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
598:The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. ...The conic sections, invented in an attempt to solve the problem of doubling the altar of an oracle, ended by becoming the orbits followed by the planets... The imaginary magnitudes invented by Cardan and Bombelli describe... the characteristic features of alternating currents. The absolute differential calculus, which originated as a fantasy of Reimann, became the mathematical model for the theory of Relativity. And the matrices which were a complete abstraction in the days of Cayley and Sylvester appear admirably adapted to the... quantum of the atom. ~ Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930)., #NFDB
599:I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march in parade off to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body. What we need is not the sound of horns rising to the sky, but the steady beat of the bass drum. When you march to a bass drum, your left foot touches the earth with each beat, and you can feel the drum in your body: boom and boom and boom and pity people pity people pity people. ~ Andre Dubus, #NFDB
600:… Autrefois, le prince des ténèbres combattait les religions surtout de l'extérieur, abstraction faite de la nature pécheresse des hommes; à notre époque, il ajoute à cette lutte un stratagème nouveau, du moins quant à l'accentuation, lequel consiste à s'emparer des religions de l’intérieur, et il y a largement réussi, dans le monde de l'Islam aussi bien que dans les mondes du Judaïsme et du Christianisme. Cela ne lui est même pas difficile, - la ruse serait presque un luxe inutile, - étant donné le prodigieux manque de discernement qui caractérise l'humanité de notre époque; une humanité qui tend de plus en plus à remplacer l'intelligence par la psychologie et l'objectif par le subjectif, voire la vérité par « notre temps ». ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
601:If the invariable human problem with the sacred is its intangibility, its elusiveness, here all complaints are surely laid to rest. For here is reality in capital letters. Here is mountain – solid, physical, eminently tactile. And here is metaphor – richly veined, textured, inflected by aeons of spiritual folklore. The result of this conjunction between the physical and the metaphysical, between the literal and the emblematic is Shiva frozen eternally in form. Or, to put it another way, here is simply the staggering sight of centuries of abstraction – of incredible mythological and mystical sophistication – embodied in unequivocal stone. Here is idea made image. The conceptual made concrete. Thought turned thingy. Miracle as mountain. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
602:An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.
Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources. ~ Jaron Lanier,#NFDB
603:Hence, (25) since every finite body is exhausted by the repeated abstraction of a finite body, it seems obviously to follow that everything cannot subsist in everything else. For let flesh be extracted from water and again more flesh be produced from the remainder by repeating the process of separation: then, even though the quantity separated out will continually decrease, still it will not fall below a certain magnitude. If, (30) therefore, the process comes to an end, everything will not be in everything else (for there will be no flesh in the remaining water); if on the other hand it does not, and further extraction is always possible, there will be an infinite multitude of finite equal particles in a finite quantity—which is impossible. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
604:Let me repeat: to talk of 'directiveness' , or purpose in this limited sense, in ontogeny, has become respectable once more; but to apply these terms to phylogeny is still considered heretical (or at least in bad taste). But phylogeny is an abstraction, which only acquires a concrete meaning when we realise that 'phylogeny, evolutionary descent, is a sequence of ontogenies', and that 'the course of evolution is through changes in ontogeny'. The quotations in the previous sentence are actually also by Simpson and contain the answer to his own conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose. The Purposer is each and every individual organism, from the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of its limited opportunities. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
605:The temporal and geographic connection between the alphabet and monotheism in Egypt-Palestine during the middle of the second millennium may be more than coincidence. What might tie them together? The notion of a disembodied, formless, all-seeing, and ever-present supreme being requires a far more abstract frame of mind than that needed for the older plethora of anthropomorphized beings who oversaw the heavenly bodies, the crops, fertility, and the seas. Alphabetic writing requires the same high degree of abstraction and may have provided a literate priestly caste with the intellectual tools necessary to imagine a belief system overseen by a single disembodied deity. Whatever the reason, Judaism and the West acquired their God and their Book. ~ William J Bernstein, #NFDB
606:As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a shadowy corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick's mouth, powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm round Miss Skiffins's waist. In course of time I saw his hand appear on the other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were an article of dress, and with the greatest deliberation laid it on the table before her. Miss Skiffins's composure while she did this was one of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
607:A market economy is an abstraction that is meant to capture a situation in which all individuals and firms can freely produce, buy, and sell any products or services that they wish. When these circumstances are not present there is a “market failure.” Such failures provide the basis for a theory of world inequality, since the more that market failures go unaddressed, the poorer a country is likely to be. The ignorance hypothesis maintains that poor countries are poor because they have a lot of market failures and because economists and policymakers do not know how to get rid of them and have heeded the wrong advice in the past. Rich countries are rich because they have figured out better policies and have successfully eliminated these failures. Could ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
608:But epistemology also played a dominant role in determining several other aspects of life. As with all of Quigley’s concepts, however, “epistemology” must be clearly defined before its role in shaping history can be understood. The operational definition Quigley gives “epistemology” is “cognitive system” that is, the ways in which “the language of a society classifies human experience in order to think or to communicate and the values which a particular society puts upon these categories, determining the most fundamental engines of human motivation.” 17 The generic morphology of a cognitive system consists of those five levels on the continuum of the fifth dimension of abstraction, that is, feelings, emotions, self-awareness, rationality, and spirituality. ~ Carroll Quigley, #NFDB
609:It is as if Protestantism by clinging to the Scripture wished to preserve the last faint echoes of God’s Word in a world that has fallen silent, a world where only things speak dumbly, a world delivered over to the silence and ruthlessness of the Absolute, - and in his fear of God the Protestant has realized that it is his own goal before which he cowers. For in excluding all other values, in casting himself in the last resort on an autonomous religious experience, he has assumed a final abstraction of a logical rigour that urges him unambiguously to strip all sensory trappings from his faith, to empty it of all content but the naked Absolute, retaining nothing but the pure form, the pure, empty and neutral form of a 'religion in itself', a 'mysticism in itself'. ~ Hermann Broch, #NFDB
610:Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don’t do that. But here’s a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions. ~ Robert Olen Butler, #NFDB
611:I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come. ~ Jonathan Littell, #NFDB
612:Watch for coupling that's too tight. "Coupling" refers to how tight the connection is between two classes. In general, the looser the connection, the better. Several general guidelines flow from this concept: Minimize accessibility of classes and members. Avoid friend classes, because they're tightly coupled. Make data private rather than protected in a base class to make derived classes less tightly coupled to the base class. Avoid exposing member data in a class's public interface. Be wary of semantic violations of encapsulation. Observe the "Law of Demeter" (discussed in Design and Implementation Issues of this chapter). Coupling goes hand in glove with abstraction and encapsulation. Tight coupling occurs when an abstraction is leaky, or when encapsulation is broken. ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
613:Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread. ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
614:Perhaps swimming was dancing under the water, he thought. To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, rivers, giant rivers where one was swept along easefully by the current, to swim naked alone at night when you were nineteen and so alone you felt like you were choking every waking moment, having left home for reasons more hormonal than rational; reasons having to do with the abstraction of the future and one's questionable place in the world of the future, an absurdity not the less harsh for being so widespread. ~ Jim Harrison, #NFDB
615:Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics—all those profundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness; destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
616:Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and demystification. The abstraction of the 'spectacle' was never irrevocable, even for the Situationists. Whereas unconditional realization is irrevocable, since we are no longer either alienated or dispossessed: we are in possession of all the information. We are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course of that performance. Whereas we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we are defenceless before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection. We are, in fact, beyond all disalienation. This is the new form of terror, by comparison with which the horrors of alienation were very small beer. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
617:Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea’s mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow — the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and despondency. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
618:As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
619:It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
620:The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian Right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
621:So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music.
Most people can't deal with that abstraction -- or don't want to. They say: "Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes I can sing along with. I like those notes very, very much. Give me a beat. Not a fancy one. Give me a GOOD BEAT -- something I can dance to. It has to go boom-bap, boom-boom-BAP. If it doesn't, I will hate it very, very much. Also, I want it right away -- and then, write me some more songs like that -- over and over and over again, because I'm really into music. ~ Frank Zappa,#NFDB
622:I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable - a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than punishment. No one has ever called me a leper or a psychopath. No doctor has ever pointed a gun at me. No cop has ever shot me at an intersection while I was reaching for my wallet, for that matter, or even pulled me over for drunk driving, something I've done more times than I could count. My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication. When it comes to addiction, the abstraction of privilege is ultimately a question of what type of story gets told about your body: Do you need to be shielded from harm, or prevented from causing it? My body has been understood as something to be protected, rather than something to be protected from. ~ Leslie Jamison, #NFDB
623:I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers—the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. The Hidden—and our acknowledgement of it—is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
624:Symbolic means sidestep reality; they are part of what is going wrong. Division of labor, for instance, eroded face-to-face interaction and eroded people's direct, intimate relationship with the natural world. The symbolic is complicit; it generates more and more mediations to accompany those created by social practices. Life becomes fragmented; connections to nature are obscured and dissolved. Instead of repairing the rupture, symbolic thought turns people in the wrong direction: toward abstraction. The "thirst for transcendence" is initiated, ignoring the shifting reality that created that desire in the first place. Language plays a key role here, re-ordering and subordinating natural systems that humankind was once attuned to. Symbolic culture demands that we reject our "animal nature" in favor of a symbolically defined "human nature". ~ John Zerzan, #NFDB
625:Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honour; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And these – these madmen – respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
626:... he will seek vainly to the right and to the left and in the newspapers for a guarantee that he has actually been amused.
For a sophisticated person, on the other hand, who is still unembarrassed enough to dare to be amused all by himself, who has enough self-confidence to know, without seeking advice from anyone else, whether he has been amused, farce will perhaps have a very special meaning, in that now with the spaciousness of abstraction and now with the presentation of a tangible actuality, it will affect his mood differently.
He will, of course refrain from bringing a fixed and definite mood with him so that everything affects him in relation to that mood. He will have perfected his mood, in that he will be able to keep himself in a condition where no particular mood is present, but where all moods are possible. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,#NFDB
627:The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which de- develops,–these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
628:USE YOUR SENSES FULLY. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now. You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
629:I know now that everything after the accident was merely a tactic to indulge in escapism and self-delusion. When you are hit by a streetcar that almost smashes you to a pulp, when you experience your own end...there is no recovery, only temporary respite, she thought.
Pain made me aware of my body. My body made me aware of deterioration and death. That awareness made me old. My death sentence may have been deferred, but I now had to live with a twofold realization. Not only was I going to die—there was nothing unusual about that except that I was made to realize it at a tender age—but I knew exactly what that meant. Because I had already been through it. Unlike other condemned people for whom death is an abstraction because they have no idea what really awaits them, my stay of death came with a constant reminder, the presence of pain. ~ Slavenka Drakuli,#NFDB
630:Humans tend to segregate the world: enemies on one side, friends on the other. Friends are people we know. Enemies are the Other. You can do just about anything to the Other. It doesn’t matter if this Other is actually guilty of any crimes, because it’s a matter of emotion, not logic. You see, angry people aren’t interested in justice. They just want an excuse to vent their rage.” Doolittle sighed. “And once you become their Other, you’re no longer a person. You’re just an idea, an abstraction of everything that’s wrong with their world. Give them the slightest excuse, and they will tear you down. And the easiest way for them to target you as this Other is to find something that’s different about you. Color of your skin. The way you speak. The place you’re from. Magic. It comes and goes in cycles, Kate. Each new generation picks their own Other. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
631:This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics," observed commentator John Tierney. "No matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it. The Greeks
decide to study, for no good reason, a curve called an ellipse, and 2,000 years later astronomers discover that it describesthe way the planets move around the sun. Again, for no good reason, in 1 854 a German mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, wonders what would happen if he discards one of the hallowed postulates of Euclid's plane geometry. He builds a seemingly ridiculous assumption that it's not possible to draw two lines parallel to each other. His non-Euclidean geometry replaces Euclid's plane with a bizarre abstraction called curved space, and then, 60 years later, Einstein announces that this is the shape of the universe. ~ Paul Hoffman,#NFDB
632:Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
633:The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. ~ James George Frazer, #NFDB
634:God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life he listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
635:Galois did not have a clear vision of the possible shapes lurking behind an equation, or of why the language he was developing would help reveal the symmetry of those shapes. Perhaps it was just as well, because the power of the language lay in its ability to create an abstraction – a mathematical description that was independent of any underlying geometry. What Galois could see was that every equation would have its own collection of permutations of the solutions which would preserve the laws relating these solutions, and that analysing the collection of permutations together revealed the secrets of each equation. He called this collection ‘the group’ of permutations associated with the equation. Galois discovered that it was the particular way in which these permutations interacted with each other that indicated whether an equation could be solved or not. ~ Marcus du Sautoy, #NFDB
636:Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they—these madmen—respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
637:The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction. ~ Nicholson Baker, #NFDB
638:Directly he was alone, he was assailed by her simulacra, in all states of acute sorrow, or smiling, of complete abstraction or painful animation, of dress and undress, as he had seen her these last few days: directly he was alone, the images came to mock everything he had seen. Her sadness became shrieking grief, and her animation riotous, immodest in dress and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology assaulting the days he spent copying his work on clean scores, and the nights he passed alone in his chair where, instantly the lights went out, everything was transformed, and the body he had seen a moment before with no more surprise than its simple lines and modest unself-conscious movement permitted, rose up on him full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs undistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse. ~ William Gaddis, #NFDB
639:No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
640:The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. ~ James George Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, Part 1, #NFDB
641:The abstraction expresses a judgement, - an affirmative and negative one at the same time, praise and blame[.] What a man praises and approves, that is God to him; what he blames, condemns is the non-divine. … In religion man frees himself from the limits of life; … the self-consciousness of man freed from all discordant elements; … all which he excludes from God is … judged to be non-divine, and what is non-divine to be worthless, nothing. … The divine being is the pure subjectivity of man freed from all else, from everything objective, … The process of discrimination, the separating of the intelligent from the non-intelligent, of personality from Nature, of the perfect from the imperfect, necessarily therefore takes place in the subject, not in the object, the idea of God lies not at the beginning but at the end of sensible existence, of the world. … [T]his Omega of sensible existence become an Alpha[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
642:Women's Rights
You cannot rob us of the rights we cherish,
Nor turn our thoughts away
From the bright picture of a "Woman's Mission"
Our hearts portray.
We claim to dwell, in quiet and seclusion,
Beneath the household roof,-From the great world's harsh strife, and jarring voices,
To stand aloof;-Not in a dreamy and inane abstraction
To sleep our life away,
But, gathering up the brightness of home sunshine,
To deck our way.
As humble plants by country hedgerows growing,
That treasure up the rain,
And yield in odours, ere the day's declining,
The gift again;
So let us, unobtrusive and unnoticed,
But happy none the less,
Be privileged to fill the air around us
With happiness;
To live, unknown beyond the cherished circle,
Which we can bless and aid;
To die, and not a heart that does not love us
Know where we're laid.
~ Annie Louisa Walker,#NFDB
643:See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. ~ William James, #NFDB
644:...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong. ~ Peter Watson, #NFDB
645:Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon. Many believers search their hearts in condemnation, looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen. It is impossible to love “the lost”. You can’t feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as “all lost people”.
Don’t wait for a feeling or love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him, so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God. ~ John Piper,#NFDB
646:Before the day I didn't fit, this conversation was largely an abstraction for me. My stance was the same as it is now (if people pay for a service, it's the seller's obligation to accommodate those people and provide the service they paid for), but I didn't understand what that panicky, uncertain walk down the aisle actually felt like. How inhumane it is. I'm telling you this not to garner sympathy or pity, or even to change your opinion about how airplanes should accommodate larger passengers. I'm just telling you, human to human, that life is complicated and fat people are trying to live. Same as you. Reasons I have had to fly within the past five years: For work (often). To see beloved friends get married. To speak to college students about rape culture and body image. To hold my father's hand while he died. I'm sorry, but I'm not constraining and rearranging my life just because no one cares enough to make flying accessible to all bodies. ~ Lindy West, #NFDB
647:Everyone was so worried about me when I broke my ankle and it confused me. I have a huge, loving family and a solid circle of friends, but these things were something of an abstraction, something to take for granted, and then all of a sudden, they weren't... There were lots of concerned texts and e-mails, and I had to face something I've long pretended wasn't true, for reasons I don't fully understand. If i died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don't have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time. When I broke my ankle, love was no longer an abstraction. It became this real, frustrating, messy, necessary thing, and I had a lot of it in my life. It was an overwhelming thing to realize. I am still trying to make sense of it all even though it has always been there. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
648:If there is no love, what is there?" she cried, almost jeering.
"There is," he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, "a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you-not in the emotional loving plane-but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman-so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever-because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. On can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire. ~ D H Lawrence,#NFDB
649:Attachment Is Escape Just try to be aware of your conditioning. You can only know it indirectly, in relation to something else. You cannot be aware of your conditioning as an abstraction, for then it is merely verbal, without much significance. We are only aware of conflict. Conflict exists when there is no integration between challenge and response. This conflict is the result of our conditioning. Conditioning is attachment: attachment to work, to tradition, to property, to people, to ideas, and so on. If there were no attachment, would there be conditioning? Of course not. So why are we attached? I am attached to my country because through identification with it I become somebody. I identify myself with my work, and the work becomes important. I am my family, my property; I am attached to them. The object of attachment offers me the means of escape from my own emptiness. Attachment is escape, and it is escape that strengthens conditioning ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
650:A synthesis—an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea—is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds—we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patterns we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns.
Once we have created a chunk as a neural pattern, we can more easily pass that chunked pattern to others, as Cajal and other great artists, poets, scientists, and writers have done for millennia, Once other people grasp that chunk, not only can they use it, but also they can more easily create similar chunks that apply to other areas in their lives—an important part of the creative process. ~ Barbara Oakley,#NFDB
651:Despite Acton's optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as "one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces." "Nationality," newly flourishing in Europe in Acton's day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. "The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality....Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational....The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom." And the State (as in Bismarck's Prussia)-the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism-was "a vast abstraction above all other things" (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives. ~ Daniel J Boorstin, #NFDB
652:[12] What I have said makes ·five things· clear: that •all moral concepts have their origin entirely a priori in reason, and this holds as much for the most ordinary common-sense moral concepts as for ·the ones used in· high-level theorizing; that •moral concepts can’t be formed by abstraction from any empirical knowledge or, therefore, from anything contingent; that •this purity ·or non-empiricalness· of origin is what gives them the dignity of serving as supreme practical principles; that •any addition of something empirical takes away just that much of their influence and of the unqualified worth of actions ·performed in accordance with them·; and that •not only is it necessary in developing a moral theory but also important in our practical lives that we derive the concepts and laws of morals from pure reason and present them pure and unmixed, determining the scope of this entire practical but pure rational knowledge (the entire faculty of pure practical reason). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
653:If I were physically dependent—paralyzed or disabled or limited in some physical way—I would need you to help me. If I were emotionally dependent, my sense of worth and security would come from your opinion of me. If you didn’t like me, it could be devastating. If I were intellectually dependent, I would count on you to do my thinking for me, to think through the issues and problems of my life. If I were independent, physically, I could pretty well make it on my own. Mentally, I could think my own thoughts, I could move from one level of abstraction to another. I could think creatively and analytically and organize and express my thoughts in understandable ways. Emotionally, I would be validated from within. I would be inner directed. My sense of worth would not be a function of being liked or treated well. It’s easy to see that independence is much more mature than dependence. Independence is a major achievement in and of itself. But independence is not supreme. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
654:…it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster pursuing its ends regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and to insist that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, lie real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. (…) the fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, (…) its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective”, systemic, anonymous—quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
655:Now, on the other hand, there is an entirely different type of angel; and here we must be especially careful to remember that we include gods and devils, for there are such beings who are not by any means dependent on one particular element for their existence. They are microcosms in exactly the same sense as men and women are. They are individuals who have picked up the elements of their composition as possibility and convenience dictates, exactly as we do ourselves... I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order. He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood. He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion. ~ Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, #NFDB
656:A foreboding grew on me; I sensed that if I did not reply, some tragedy would occur. At last I began weakly, “Anarchy …” “That is not governance, but the lack of it. I taught you that it precedes all governance. Now list the seven sorts.” “Attachment to the person of the monarch. Attachment to a bloodline or other sequence of succession. Attachment to the royal state. Attachment to a code legitimizing the governing state. Attachment to the law only. Attachment to a greater or lesser board of electors, as framers of the law. Attachment to an abstraction conceived as including the body of electors, other bodies giving rise to them, and numerous other elements, largely ideal.” “Tolerable. Of these, which is the earliest form, and which the highest?” “The development is in the order given, Master,” I said. “But I do not recall that you ever asked before which was highest.” Master Malrubius leaned forward, his eyes burning brighter than the coals of the fire. “Which is highest, Severian? ~ Gene Wolfe, #NFDB
657:It is not of advantage for us to indulge a sentimental attitude towards the past. For one thing, in even the very best living tradition there is always a mixture of good and bad, and much that deserves criticism; and for another, tradition is not a matter of feeling alone. Nor can we safely, without very close examination, dig ourselves in stubbornly to a few dogmatic notions, for what is a healthy belief at one point may, unless it is one of the few fundamental things, be a pernicious prejudice at another. Nor should we cling to traditions as a way of assuring our superiority over less favored peoples. What we can do is to use our minds, remembering that a tradition without intelligence is not worth having, to discover what is the best life for us not as a political abstraction, but as a particular people in a particular place; what in the past is worth preserving and what should be rejected; and what conditions, within our power to bring about, would foster the society that we desire. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
658:My identity as Abba’s child is not an abstraction or a tap dance into religiosity. It is the core truth of my existence. Living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness profoundly affects my perception of reality, the way I respond to people and their life situations. How I treat my brothers and sisters from day to day, whether they be Caucasian, African, Asian, or Hispanic; how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street; how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike; how I deal with ordinary people in their ordinary unbelief on an ordinary day will speak the truth of who I am more poignantly than the pro-life sticker on the bumper of my car. We are not for life simply because we are warding off death. We are sons and daughters of the Most High and maturing in tenderness to the extent that we are for others—all others—to the extent that no human flesh is strange to us, to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no “others. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
659:Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”
<...>
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. ~ T S Eliot,#NFDB
660:In the Middle Ages, this conflict between the Platonic and Aristotelian views of the relationship between mathematics and the world began to re-emerge after the sleep of centuries. The question became intricately entwined with the labyrinthine syntheses of Aristotelian and Platonic ideas within early Christian theology. Influential thinkers like Augustine and Boethius implicitly supported the Platonic emphasis upon the primary character of mathematics. Both of them pointed to the fact that things were created in the beginning 'according to measure, number, and weight' or 'according to the pattern of numbers'. This they took to exhibit an intrinsic feature of the mind of God and thus mathematics took its place as an essential part of the medieval quadrivum without which the search for all knowledge was impaired. Yet Boethius later veered towards the Aristotelian viewpoint that some act of mental abstraction occurs en route from physics to mathematics which renders these two subjects qualitatively distinct. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
661:It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man. Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
662:Instead, the battle is joined at the level of pure abstraction. The issue, the newest Right tells us, is freedom itself, not the doings of the subprime lenders or the ways the bond-rating agencies were compromised over the course of the last decade. Details like that may have crashed the economy, but to the renascent Right they are almost completely irrelevant. What matters is a given politician’s disposition toward free markets and, by extension, toward the common people of the land, whose faithful vicar the market is. Now, there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom. What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero. ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
663:Tout comme sa réserve, sa « modestie » ou son « innocence », la pudeur de la femme n’est qu’un simple ingrédient de sa qualité sexuellement attirante, et l’on peut la ranger parmi les caractères tertiaires de son sexe (cf. § 10). Nous reviendrons du reste sur ce point dans le prochain chapitre. La pudeur masculine, elle, ne présente pas d’aspect ou d’usage « fonctionnel ». Parmi les preuves attestant que la pudeur féminine est un phénomène sexuel, et non éthique, il y a le fait bien connu que la pudeur envers leur propre nudité cesse complètement chez les femmes dès qu’elles se retrouvent entre elles, et donne même lieu au plaisir de l’exhibitionnisme (à moins qu’intervienne quelque complexe d’infériorité, dont la crainte d’avoir un corps moins beau et moins désirable que les autres). La pudeur masculine, au contraire, ne disparaît pas parce que des hommes sont entre eux (on fait ici abstraction de ce qui caractérise des civilisations en voie de « primitivisation », ce qui est le cas de la civilisation contemporaine). ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
664:I think it's an indulgence to [write] the other [non-linear] way. I think it's a kind of cowardice. There are places in anyone's books that are going to be easier than other parts. And if when you come to a part that's difficult and think, 'Hm, I'll skip that,' all you're doing is lining up these problems that are going to wait for you and kick you in the ass. So I'm very rigorous with myself. I won't allow myself to go on to a fun bit, like the sex. I think if you write big books like I do, and don't write in a linear fashion, something inevitably gets screwed up in the emotional flow. In Coldheart Canyon there are many characters, and each character has its own arc. The arcs start at divergent points, but they converge at roughly the same point. So what you try to do is induce in the reader an incredible feeling of excitement, because everybody's arcs are resolving because they're encountering one another, right? It's not that they're resolving in an abstraction. They're resolving because A meets B meets C and so on. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
665:I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if Jesus said "I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
666:Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horrors of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex. ~ J G Ballard, #NFDB
667:But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?
He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, I intuit it. But -- they are purposelessly cruel... is that it? No, God, he thought. I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.
Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction : race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, hounor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. ~ Philip K Dick,#NFDB
668:...we need other people to achieve individuality. For others to play this role for me, they have to be available to me in an unmediated way, not via a representation that is tailored to my psychic comfort. And conversely, I would have to make myself available to them in a way that puts myself at risk, not shying from a confrontation between different evaluative outlooks. For it is through such confrontations that we are pulled out of our own heads and forced to justify ourselves. In doing so, we may revise our take on things. The deepening of our understanding, and our affections, requires partners in triangulation: other people as other people, in relation to whom we may achieve an earned individuality of outlook.
Absent such differentiation, there is a certain flattening of the human landscape. When [our shared spaces] are saturated with mass media, our attention is appropriated in such a way that the Public—an abstraction—comes to stand in for concrete others, and it becomes harder for us to show up for one another as individuals. ~ Matthew B Crawford,#NFDB
669:When we are looking for an enemy, we often start by projecting ourselves on an abstract scene, within which the world has disappeared. Let us ask ourselves the same question, but starting from the neighbourhood where we live, from the company where we work, from the professional sector we are familiar with. Then the answer is clear; then the front lines can be distinctly seen, and who is on what side can easily be determined. This is because the question of the confrontation, the properly political question, only makes sense in a given world, in a substantial world. For those who are nowhere, cybernetic philosophers or metropolitan hipsters, the political question never makes sense. It refuses itself to them and leaves them walking backward into abstraction. And that is the price to pay for so much superficiality. As compensation, they will prefer to juggle with some great folkloric significance, to give themselves some post-Maoist or post-situationist thrills.Or, perhaps they will accommodate their nothingness with the last glosses of the ultra-left logorrhoea ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
670:China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
671:DOLIST is similar to Perl's foreach or Python's for. Java added a similar kind of loop construct with the "enhanced" for loop in Java 1.5, as part of JSR-201. Notice what a difference macros make. A Lisp programmer who notices a common pattern in their code can write a macro to give themselves a source-level abstraction of that pattern. A Java programmer who notices the same pattern has to convince Sun that this particular abstraction is worth adding to the language. Then Sun has to publish a JSR and convene an industry-wide "expert group" to hash everything out. That process--according to Sun--takes an average of 18 months. After that, the compiler writers all have to go upgrade their compilers to support the new feature. And even once the Java programmer's favorite compiler supports the new version of Java, they probably still can't use the new feature until they're allowed to break source compatibility with older versions of Java. So an annoyance that Common Lisp programmers can resolve for themselves within five minutes plagues Java programmers for years. ~ Peter Seibel (2005) Practical Common Lisp., #NFDB
672:It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, – for a man lost, – do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
673:Mathematical methods present... two advantages. Their terminology is precise and concentrated, in a fashion which ordinary language cannot afford to adopt. Further, the symbols which result from their employment have implications which, when brought to light, yield new knowledge. This is deductively reached, but it is none the less new knowledge. With greater precision than is usual, ordinary language may be made to do some, if not a great deal, of this work for which mathematical methods are alone quite appropriate. If ordinary language can do part of it an advantage may be gained. The difficulty that attends mathematical symbolism is the accompanying tendency to take the symbol as exhaustively descriptive of reality. Now it is not so descriptive. It always embodies an abstraction. It accordingly leads to the use of metaphors which are inadequate and generally untrue. It is only qualification by descriptive language of a wider range that can keep this tendency in check. ~ Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, Preface to Einstein and the Universe: a Popular Exposition of the Famous Theory (1922) by Charles Nordmann., #NFDB
674:In this country, lesbianism is a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.
When the going gets rough, will we abandon our so-called comrades in a flurry of racist/heterosexist/what-have-you panic? To whose camp, then, should the lesbian of color retreat? Her very presence violates the ranking and abstraction of oppression. Do we merely live hand to mouth? Do we merely struggle with the "ism" that's sitting on top of our heads?
The answer is: yes, I think first we do; and we must do so thoroughly and deeply. But to fail to move out from there will only isolate us in our own oppression- will only insulate, rather than radicalize us. ~ Cherr e L Moraga,#NFDB
675:This liberal intellectual polarity that "race issues" and "class issues" are opposites, are completely separate from each other, and that one or the other must be the main thing, is utterly useless! We have to really get it that race issues aren't the opposite of class issues. That race is always so electrically charged, so filled with mass power, precisely because it's about raw class. That's why revolutionaries and demagogues can both potentially tap into so much power using it. Or get burned.
You can't steer yourself in real politics, not in amerikkka and not in this global imperialism, without understanding race. "Class" without race in North America is an abstraction. And vice-versa. Those who do not get this are always just led around by the nose, the manipulated without a clue – and it is true that many don't want any more from life than this. But wising up on race only means seeing all the class issues that define race and charge it with meaning. Why should it be so hard to understand that capitalism, which practically wants to barcode our assholes, has always found it convenient to color-code its classes? ~ J Sakai,#NFDB
676:Life was rich with possibility, or life was possibly rich...She felt incandescent with the news.
Cold sun. Jack in the pulpits nosing out of the still-frozen mud. Lotto lay watching the world incrementally wake up. They had been married for seventeen years, she lived in the deepest room in his heart, and sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself, abstraction of her before the physical being.
But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of the sudden, the dark whip at the center of her, how, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. She put her cold hand on his stomach, which he was sunning to banish the winter's white. 'Vain,' she said.
'An actor in a playwright's hide,' he said. 'I'll never not be vain.'
'Oh well, it's you,' she said. 'You're desperate for the love of strangers, to be seen.'
'You see me,' he said. And he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased.
'I do,' she said. 'Now please, talk.'
She stretched her arms over heads...she looked at him, savoring her own knowing, his unknowing... ~ Lauren Groff,#NFDB
677:A man matters, his experiences matter, but in a city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves, and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.“
„There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the balanced lever of gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence; one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach deep into the inner workings and, coming out of the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone. So one denies their existence, just as the average citizen denies the air, maintaining that it is empty space. But all these things that one denied, these colorless, odorless,tasteless, weightless, and morally indefinable things such as water, air, space, money, and the passing of time, turn out in truth to be the most important things of all, and this gives life a certain spooky quality. ~ Robert Musil,#NFDB
678:Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.” Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me. Yet he added, scrupulous, “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
679:The almost complete, but temporary, loss of self that was involved - a loss of self present in all intense sexual encounters - doubled as an open door through which one could enter new areas of thought, as if one had left one’s old self behind, as if within this new, amorphous territory, in which one was no longer one’s previous self but had not yet become anything else, infinite modes of discovery became possible. The intimacy of our nakedness made us feel, or at least gave the illusion, that we were so much more directly engaged, both in dialogue with the larger world of ideas and with each other. This directness of being intertwined, exhausted and sated, of drifting in and out of sleep and having the strains of our discussions, of our nighty lessons, freely intermixed with half-remembered dreams forms the basis for a different kind of learning, learning that enters not only through the mind but also through skin and sweat and pores. In this way ideas are divested of their previously cold abstraction and instead gain heat, momentum and complicity. This is the deep learning, and there is no conduit for it other than one’s intimate and ongoing personal experience. ~ Jacob Wren, #NFDB
680:Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective, they
turn against power the deterrent that it used so well for such a long time. Because in the
end, throughout its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every
referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true
and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange,
the iron law of its power. Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction,
disconnection, deterritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the reality
principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value, all real
equivalence of production and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unreality of the
stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Well, today it is this same logic that is even
more set against capital. And as soon as it wishes to combat this disastrous spiral by
secreting a last glimmer of reality, on which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does
nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation. ~ Jean Baudrillard,#NFDB
681:The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father. Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
682:You first taught me the great principle "Begin where you are." I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and "all the blessings of this life." You turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said, "Why not begin with this?" And it worked. Apparently you have never guessed how much. That cushiony moss, that coldness and sound and dancing light were no doubt the very minor blessings compared with "the means of grace and the hope of glory." But then they were manifest. So far as they were concerned, sight had replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory, they were an exposition of the glory itself." Yet you were not - or so it seemed - telling me that "Nature," or "the beauties of Nature," manifest the glory. No such abstraction as "Nature" comes into it. I was learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or understanding, we give it different names - goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and mood is pleasure. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
683:Religion answers directly to the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong. It also takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand. We no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation-the powers that created us, not those into whose lives we accidentally fell. Our life ceases to be a reflexive dialogue with the standards of our wives, husbands, friends, and leaders and becomes instead measured by standards of the highest heroism, ideals truly fit to lead us on and beyond ourselves. In this way we fill ourselves with independent values, can make free decisions, and, most importantly, can lean on powers that really support us and do not oppose us. The personality can truly begin to emerge in religion because God, as an abstraction, does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers necessary for self-justification. What greater security than to lean confidently on God, on the Fount of creation, the most terrifying power of all? If God is hidden and intangible, all the better: that allows man to expand and develop by himself. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
684:The process of de-materialization of value is part of the general process of abstraction that is the general trend of capitalism. Marx’s theory of value is based on the concept of abstract labour: labour time is the source and the measure of value. This implies that, from the point of view of valorization, the concrete usefulness of the working activity is irrelevant. What counts is the abstract work–time, not the concrete contents of productive activity. In the sphere of the market, things are not considered according to their usefulness, but only in terms of their exchangeability. Similarly, in the sphere of language, words are exchanged and valued according to their performativity, that is, their pragmatic efficiency. It is not truth, but effectiveness, against which we measure value in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, as opposed to hermeneutics, is the methodology of social communication, particularly in the age of pervasive media: when information flows are pervading every space of the public discourse and imagination, simulation takes the central place in the emanation of the shared hallucination we call the ‘world’. Signs are exchanged with signs, not with real things. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
685:…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. ~ Bret Easton Ellis, #NFDB
686:The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.
...
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
...
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. To resume:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe. This is, many would say, impossible. In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptuous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.
This, many would say, is equally impossible. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB
687:You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you?" You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates and invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?) ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
688:The idea of the “people,” as the fount of legitimate order ... has been of some service to the left-liberal intellectual in our time, in his endeavor to wipe out the past, and to find a basis for political obligation that looks only to the present and the future. ... The idea is usually combined with the fantasy that the intellectual has some peculiar faculty of hearing, and also articulating, the “voice of the people.” This self-delusion, which has persisted unaltered since the days of the French Revolution, expresses the intellectual’s concern to be reunited with the social order from which his own thinking has so tragically separated him. He wishes to redeem himself from his “outsideness.” Unfortunately, however, he succeeds in uniting himself not with society, but only with another intellectual abstraction—“the people”—designed according to impeccable theoretical requirements, precisely in order to veil the intolerable reality of everyday life. “The people” does not exist. Even if it did exist, it would be authority for nothing, since it would have no concrete basis on which to build its legitimacy. Nobody can speak for the people. Nobody can speak for anyone. The truth, however, strives to be uttered, and may find expression, now on these lips, now on those. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
689:Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted. ~ Gregory Bateson, #NFDB
690:It is—their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. [...] Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia. Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they—these madmen—respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur. […] They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
691:Rage is a powerful thing. People get upset over many things. Frustrating jobs, small paychecks, bad hours. People want things; people feel humiliated by others who have the things they want; people feel deprived and powerless. All this gives fuel to rage. The anger builds and builds and if there is no outlet for it, pretty soon it transforms the person. They walk around like a loaded gun, ready to go off if only they could find the right target. They want to hurt something. They need it.” He refilled his glass and topped mine off. “Humans tend to segregate the world: enemies on one side, friends on the other. Friends are people we know. Enemies are the Other. You can do just about anything to the Other. It doesn’t matter if this Other is actually guilty of any crimes, because it’s a matter of emotion, not logic. You see, angry people aren’t interested in justice. They just want an excuse to vent their rage.” Doolittle sighed. “And once you become their Other, you’re no longer a person. You’re just an idea, an abstraction of everything that’s wrong with their world. Give them the slightest excuse, and they will tear you down. And the easiest way for them to target you as this Other is to find something that’s different about you. Color of your skin. The way you speak. The place you’re from. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
692:Look at all the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart- and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. The king was the country; how could he possibly expect it go into battle without him? But now... Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he's started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousand for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means nothing; human life means nothing. We're ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go. ~ Tana French, #NFDB
693:[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality]
In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.
Error is the price we pay for progress.
In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR] ~ Alfred North Whitehead,#NFDB
694:But the man who, by dint of long study and sober reflection, has succeeded in training his mind not to detect evil in anything, to consider all human actions with the utmost indifference, to regard them all as the inevitable consequences of a power - however it's defined - which is sometimes good and sometimes perverse but always irresistible, and gives rise to both what men approve and to what they condemn and never allows anything to distract or thwart its operations, such a man, I say, as you will agree, sir, may be as happy behaving as I behave as you are in the career which you follow. Happiness is an abstraction, a product of the imagination. It is one manner of being moved and depends exclusively on our way of seeing and feeling. Apart from the satisfaction of our needs, there is no single thing which makes all men happy. Every day we observe one man made happy by the circumstance which makes his neighbour supremely miserable. There is therefore nothing which guarantees happiness. It can only exist for us in the form given to it by our physical constitution and our philosophical principles. [...] Nothing in the world is real, nothing which merits praise or blame, nothing deserving reward or punishment, nothing which is unlawful here and perfectly legal five hundred leagues away, in other words, there is no unchanging, universal good. ~ Marquis de Sade, #NFDB
695:Joan Of Arc
She and the fire
fight adjectives. Their concreteness
deflects reification
by language. She simply is
a pronoun. It may signify
say, my wife (coming from me
'she' often does) or, yes
a medieval French woman, her being
so roughly abridged
by the pronoun, as brutally fed
to the fire. Regarding the fire
dazzling, heaving, devouring
won't do. It only suggests
a familiar occurrence: ouch
when flame touches skin. Indeed
flame doesn't suffice (rhymes with lame)
and a pyre, much more poetic,
based on the transcripts based on
wordy statements. So much
reliance on the makeshift engine
of abstraction, language. She
did, I think, end in fire, but hero
saint, witch, schizophrenic
won't do. Will numbers rectify
the flaws of alphabetical signs: 1412
to 1431? Historians can't be certain
56
about either: no records
other than her reserved guess
on the first day of trial
apropos birth, and her famed death
also contested by theorists
of bad conspiracies. So I can't
force the ephemeral stuff
of her matter into a mould (a poem)
with description, facts
or even an attempted evocation. She
floats and evades
perhaps - if I may hazard a simile like her ashes, diffused
by an English guard over the Seine.
~ Ali Alizadeh,#NFDB
696:A scene will not be vivid if the writer gives too few details to stir and guide the reader's imagination; neither will it be vivid if the language the writer uses is abstract instead of concrete. If the writer says "creatures" instead of "snakes," if in an attempt to impress us with fancy talk he uses Latinate terms like "hostile maneuvers" instead of sharp Anglo-Saxon words like "thrash," "coil," "spit," "hiss," and "writhe," if instead of the desert's sand and rocks he speaks of the snakes' "inhospitable abode," the reader will hardly know what picture to conjure up on his mental screen. These two faults, insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail, are common, in fact all but universal, in amateur writing. Another is the failure to run straight at the image; that is, the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: "Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks." Compare: "She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting." The phrase "two snakes were fighting" is more abstract than, say, "two snakes whipped and lashed, striking at each other." ...Generally speaking, though no laws are absolute in fiction, vividness urges that almost every occurrence of of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
697:In the days of his health and strength, Owen would have confidently refuted this picture of hopelessness, but he was tired and ill. His room now remained unheated most of the time and he was racked with coughs and ominous chest pains. In the long, miserable hours when sleep would not come, he found his eyes turning to that mouldy stain upon the wall, and he began to harbour dark thoughts.
What was all this talk of the soul anyway? It could not be weighed or measured; die surgeon never discovered it. In any case it could not grant insight into stock market prices, could create no visible wealth. Indeed, there were brilliant people with titles like 'professor', people whose name trailed endless letters, who even after the most rigorous deliberations, most elegant applications of logic, doubted that such a thing as the soul existed at all.
And after all, was not The City full of Smugsbys who possessed no discernible soul, yet lived after their fashion? The Great Mystery was nothing to them. They did not seek the Great Answer; they were not aware that there had ever been a Great Question! What business had he, a starving wretch, in seeking to nurture through his writings an invisible, odourless, weightless abstraction of dubious commercial value, when the very process merely drew attention away from the 'real' business of getting on?
"The White Road ~ Ron Weighell,#NFDB
698:Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the starry sky. They were the notes of Oak´s flute. It came from the direction of a small dark object under the hedge - a shephard´s hut - now presenting an outline to which an unintiated person might have been puzzled to attach either meaning or use. ... Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. ... Oak´s motions, though they had a quiet energy, were slow, and their deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied tha his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. His special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static. ... Oak was an intensely human man: indee, his humanity tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been that his flock should end in mutton - that a day could find a shepherd an arrant traitor to his gentle sheep. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
699:By giving full expression to the contradiction between civil society and the state, the French Revolution radically transformed both its terms. To put it differently: dualism was not abolished but, rather, displaced within the space delimited by the two poles of the contradiction. This created a new split between 'man', a member of civil society, and the 'citizen', a member of the state. It is only by 'abstracting' from his condition as man and his insertion into the organization of civil society that the political subject can become a citizen and make his entry into the political community: it is only as a 'sheer, blank individual' who accepts the fact that the political is divorced from the social that he can take part in the life of the state, which is based on the freedom and equality of its citizens.
(...)
The political state is 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the etymology of the word; it appears as the residue or the 'precipitate' of the constitutive movement by means of which civil society transcends its own limits to attain political existence, while leaving its internal differences intact, or, rather, transforming them into mere 'differences of social life' 'without significance in political life'.
The state is incapable of substantially affecting the contents of civil society, for it is, precisely, a product of civil society's abstraction from itself. ~ Stathis Kouvelakis,#NFDB
700:In any case, it is a mistake to equate concreteness with things. An individual object is the unique phenomenon it is because it is caught up in a mesh of relations with other objects. It is this web of relations and interactions, if you like, which is 'concrete', while the object considered in isolation is purely abstract. In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx sees the abstract not as a lofty, esoteric notion, but as a kind of rough sketch of a thing. The notion of money, for example, is abstract because it is no more than a bare, preliminary outline of the actual reality. It is only when we reinsert the idea of money into its complex social context, examining its relations to commodities, exchange, production and the like, that we can construct a 'concrete' concept of it, one which is adequate to its manifold substance. The Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition, by contrast, makes the mistake of supposing that the concrete is simple and the abstract is complex. In a similar way, a poem for Yury Lotman is concrete precisely because it is the product of many interacting systems. Like Imagist poetry, you can suppress a number of these systems (grammar, syntax, metre and so on) to leave the imagery standing proudly alone; but this is actually an abstraction of the imagery from its context, not the concretion it appears to be. In modern poetics, the word 'concrete' has done far more harm than good. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
701:The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf's Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian. He had described the human being the previous autumn as no more than 'a ridiculous "cosmic bacterium" (eine lächerliche "Weltraumbakterie")'. Human life and suffering was, thus, of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made — perhaps it was only thus possible to make them — without consideration for any human plight. As he had told Guderian during the winter crisis, feelings of sympathy and pity for the suffering of his soldiers had to be shut out. For Hitler, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the 'heroic struggle' for the survival of the people. ~ Ian Kershaw, #NFDB
702:We are often told, that in the critical periods of history it is the national soul which counts: that "where there is no vision, the people perish." No nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does not emerge with soul unstained. If this be so, it becomes a part of true patriotism to keep the spiritual life, both of the individual citizen and of the social group, active and vigorous; its vision of realities unsullied by the entangled interests and passions of the time. This is a task in which all may do their part. The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. It is therefore the function of a practical mysticism to increase, not diminish, the total efficiency, the wisdom and steadfastness, of those who try to practise it. It will help them to enter, more completely than ever before, into the life of the group to which they belong. It will teach them to see the world in a truer proportion, discerning eternal beauty beyond and beneath apparent ruthlessness. It will educate them in a charity free from all taint of sentimentalism; it will confer on them an unconquerable hope; and assure them that still, even in the hour of greatest desolation, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
703:Oh, it is true enough. I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a rough soldier), and so I will speak my mind, regardless of your pleasure, and without hoping or intending to get your pardon. Why, Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more harm than good in the world." The sergeant looked down the mead in critical abstraction. "Probably some one man on an average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet—your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you—you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more—the susceptible person myself possibly among them—will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
704:We have considered the problem of mental fragmentation and arbitrariness that results when our contact with the world is mediated by representations: representations collapse the basic axis of proximity and distance by which an embodied being orients in the world and draws a horizon of relevance around itself. We noted the prominence of a design philosophy that severs the bonds between action and perception, as in contemporary automobiles that insulate us from the sensorimotor contingencies by which an embodied being normally grasps reality. The case of machine gambling gave us a heightened example of this kind of abstraction, and made clear how such a design philosophy can be turned to especially disturbing purposes in the darker precincts of “affective capitalism,” where our experiences are manufactured for us. We saw that the point of these experiences is often to provide a quasi-autistic escape from the frustrations of life, and that they are especially attractive in a world that lacks a basic intelligibility because it seems to be ordered by “vast impersonal forces” that are difficult to bring within view on a first-person, human scale. I argued that all of this tends to sculpt a certain kind of contemporary self, a fragile one whose freedom and dignity depend on its being insulated from contingency, and who tends to view technology as magic for accomplishing this. For such a self, choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way. ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB
705:(On choosing to write the book in third person, and using his name Norman as the nom de plume)
NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.
Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name — everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice. ~ Norman Mailer,#NFDB
706:In the past few thousand years—a mere split second in evolutionary time—humanity has achieved incredible advances in the differentiation of consciousness. We have developed a realization that mankind is separate from other forms of life. We have conceived of individual human beings as separate from one another. We have invented abstraction and analysis—the ability to separate dimensions of objects and processes from each other, such as the velocity of a falling object from its weight and its mass. It is this differentiation that has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its environment. But complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this underdeveloped component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
707:I believe creeds aren't worth the paper they are written on...But I still believe in God.
I believe that if you look at my life, you'll only sometimes see what I believe.
I believe that if we have two coats, we should give one away (though I don't do it).
Today I don't believe in anything; tomorrow who knows.
I sometimes believe in God- one who existed before time, beyond gender or fathom.
Make of heaven and earth and ginger (all good things), whales, two-hundred-foot cliffs, cloud banks, shipwrecks,
And in Jesus Christ, God's only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost- how?
Born of a fourteen-year-old, Mary, scared out of her wits.
Was crucified, dead, and buried, and I used to believe in the penal substitution theory of atonement, but now I just see a violent death and struggle to see how violence can ever be redemptive...
He descended into hell, or was hell all around him all the time?
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into safety of abstraction, away from having to feel this, from dealing with this,
And sits, maybe sprawls, on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
I believe in me; I believe in the Spirit, Sophia, wisdom...
The holy catholic (i.e., everybody) Church;
The Communion of saints; does this mean me?
LOVE
The Forgiveness of sins (but I still feel shame); (don't you?)
The Resurrection of the body.
I believe in singing the body electric
And the life everlasting,
A life we find right here in our midst ~ Peter Rollins,#NFDB
708:I believe creeds aren't worth the paper they are written on...But I still believe in God.
I believe that if you look at my life, you'll only sometimes see what I believe.
I believe that if we have two coats, we should give one away (though I don't do it).
Today I don't believe in anything; tomorrow who knows.
I sometimes believe in God- one who existed before time, beyond gender or fathom.
Maker of heaven and earth and ginger (all good things), whales, two-hundred-foot cliffs, cloud banks, shipwrecks,
And in Jesus Christ, God's only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost- how?
Born of a fourteen-year-old, Mary, scared out of her wits.
Was crucified, dead, and buried, and I used to believe in the penal substitution theory of atonement, but now I just see a violent death and struggle to see how violence can ever be redemptive...
He descended into hell, or was hell all around him all the time?
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into safety of abstraction, away from having to feel this, from dealing with this,
And sits, maybe sprawls, on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
I believe in me; I believe in the Spirit, Sophia, wisdom...
The holy catholic (i.e., everybody) Church;
The Communion of saints; does this mean me?
LOVE
The Forgiveness of sins (but I still feel shame); (don't you?)
The Resurrection of the body.
I believe in singing the body electric
And the life everlasting,
A life we find right here in our midst ~ Peter Rollins,#NFDB
709:…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing…. ~ Bret Easton Ellis, #NFDB
710:Let’s think about the fake sense of urgency that pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse on violence: in it, abstraction and graphic (pseudo)concreteness coexist in the staging of the scene of violence-against women, blacks, the homeless, gays . . . “A woman is rpaed every six seconds in this country” and “In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, ten children will die of hunger” are just two examples. Underlying all this is a hypocritical sentiment of moral outrage. Just this kind of pseudo-urgency was exploited by Starbucks a couple of years ago when, at store entrances, posters greeting costumers pointed out that a portion of the chain’s profits went into health-care for the children of Guatemala, the source of their coffee, the inference being that with every cup you drink, you save a child’s life.
There is a fundamental anti-theoretical edge to these urgent injunctions. There is no time to reflect: we have to act now. Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich, living in their secluded virtual world, not only do not deny or ignore the harsh reality outside the area-they actively refer to it all the time. As Bill Gates recently put it: “What do the computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying of dysentery?”
Against this fake urgency, we might want to place Marx’s wonderful letter to Engels of 1870, when, for a brief moment, it seemed that a European revolution was again at the gates. Marx’s letter conveys his sheer panic: can’t the revolution wait for a couple of years? He hasn’t yet finished his ‘Capital’. ~ Slavoj i ek,#NFDB
711:Are you a god, then?" Sokrates asked.
"What is a god?" Ikaros threw back instantly. They both sat up and leaned forward eagerly. Sokrates looked like, well, a philosopher. Ikaros was, frankly, gorgeous, more gorgeous than even Jathery pretending to be Hermes, because he was more mature. But there was no question he was a philosopher too, with that avidity in his face, twin to Sokrates's own.
"None of my old definitions will work, unless we allow that you and Porphyry and Athene are some other kind of being, and that there are unchanging unseeking perfect gods that are different," Sokrates said.
"The One," Ikaros said. "And I used the word angels in the New Concordance, for those other kinds of being. But perfection is a dynamic attribute."
"How can it be? The nature of perfection--"
"Perfect things can become more perfect, endlessly.""Excellence, yes, but perfection implies completeness."
Porphyry and I looked past them and smiled at each other. There was something satisfying to the soul in the way they so immediately became utterly absorbed in the argument. Sokrates caught the smile as Ikaros becan to explain the nature of dynamic perfection, which was exactly the kind of abstraction Ikarians and Psycheans love. "Wait," he said. "We're arguing with each other when we have an expert here."
"I'm not an expert," Porphyry said, throwing up his hands.
"But you admit you are a god?"
"Yes..." Porphyry admitted, tentatively.
"Then you must know what a god is," Sokrates said, with a brisk nod. "Please enlighten us. ~ Jo Walton,#NFDB
712:The industrial revolution has held in contempt not only the 'obsolete skills' of those classes, but the concern for quality, for responsible workmanship and good work, that supported their skills. For the principle of good work it substituted a secularized version of the heroic tradition: the ambition to be a 'pioneer' of science or technology, to make a 'breakthrough' that will 'save the world' from some 'crisis' (which now is usually the result of some previous 'breakthrough').
The best example we have of this kind of hero, I am afraid, is the fallen Satan of Paradise Lost--Milton having undoubtedly having observed in his time the prototypes of industrial heroism. This is a hero who instigates and influences the actions of others, but does not act himself. His heroism is of the mind only--escaped as far as possible, not only from divine rule, from its place in the order of creation or the Chain of Being, but also from the influence of material creation:
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n
This would-be heroism is guilty of two evils that are prerequisite to its very identity: hubris and abstraction. The industrial hero supposes that 'mine own mind hath saved me'--and moreover that it may save the world. Implicit in this is the assumption that one's mind is one's own, and that it may choose its own place in the order of things; one usurps divine authority, and thus, in classic style, becomes the author of results that one can neither foresee nor control. ~ Wendell Berry,#NFDB
713:A woman's ability to achieve depends on childlessness or childcare. In America, where we don't believe in an underclass to do 'women's work', women themselves become the underclass. For love. Nobody doubts the love is real. It's for our children. But we are supposed to do it invisibly and never mention it. Alfred North Whitehead, who wasn't a woman after all, said that the truth of a society is what cannot be said. And women's work still cannot be said. It's called whining -- even by other women. It's called self-indulgence -- even by other women. Perhaps women writer are hated because abstraction makes oppression possible and we refuse to be abstract. How can we be? Our struggles are concrete: food, fire, babies, a room of one's own. These basics are rare -- even for the privileged. It is nothing short of a miracle every time a woman with a child finishes a book.
Our lives -- from the baby to the writing desk -- are the lives of the majority of humanity: never enough time to think, eternal exhaustion. The cared-for male elite, with female slaves to tend their bodily needs, can hardly credit our difficulties as 'real'. 'Real' is the deficit, oil wars in the Middle East, or how much of our children's milk the Pentagon shall get.
This is the true division in the world today: between those who carelessly say 'Third World' believing themselves part of the '¨First', and those who know they are the Third World -- wherever they live.
Women everywhere are the 'Third World', In my country, where most women do not feel part of what matters, they are thirdly third, trapped in the myth of being 'first'. ~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
714:One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB
715:A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
716:In his Principles of Psychology, James already criticized what he took to be the artificial and deeply misleading traditional empiricist accounts of experience. Experience does not consist of discrete atomic units that simply follow or are associated with each other. This is an intellectualist abstraction of philosophers, not an account of concrete experience as it is lived. James emphasizes the dynamic, flowing quality of the “stream of experience” – what he sometimes called the “muchness” and pluralistic variety of experience. Contrary to Hume and those influenced by him, James argued that we experience “relations,” “continuity,” and “connections” directly. We experience activity – its tensions, resistances, and tendencies. We feel “the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as [we feel] the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve” (James 1997, p. 282). He does not denigrate or underestimate the importance of our conceptual activity, but concepts are never quite adequate to capture the concreteness of experience. To say this is not to claim that there is something about experience that is in principle knowable, but that we cannot know. Rather, it is to affirm that there is more to experience than knowing. James criticizes the epistemological prejudice, which assumes that the only or primary role that experience plays in our lives is to provide us with knowledge. Paraphrasing Hamlet, James might well have said to his fellow philosophers: “There are more things in experience than are dreamt of in your philosophy. ~ Richard J Bernstein, #NFDB
717:Endangered Species
Even this
brief thought is endless. A
man speaks as if unaware of the
erotic life of the ampersand. In the
isolate field he comes to count one by
one the rare butterflies as they
die. He says witness is to say what
you mean as if you mean it. So many
of them are the color of the leaves
they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a
word by which he means to make a claim
about grace. I have in my
life said many things I did not
exactly mean. Walk
graceless through the field. Graceless so
the insects leap up into the blank
page where the margins fill
with numbers that speak diminishment.
Absence as it nears also offers astonishment.
Absence riddles even this
briefest thought, here
is your introduction to desire, time's
underneath where the roots root down
into nothing like loose threads
hanging from the weaving's underside.
No one seeing the roots
can guess
at the field above. Green
equation that ends in yellow
occasions. Theory is
insubstantial. The eye latches on
to the butterflies as they fly
and the quick heart follows, not
a root in nothing but a thread across
abstraction. They fly away.
What in us follows we do not name.
What the butterflies pull out us
as in battle horses pull
chariot, we do not
name. But there is none, no battle,
no surge, no retreat, a field
full not of danger, but the endangered,
where dust-wings pull from us
what we thought we lost, what theory
denies, where in us ideas go to die,
and thought with the quaking grass quakes.
Some call it breath but I'm still breathing.
So empty I know I'm not any emptier.
On slim threads they pull it out me,
disperse-no
one takes notes-disappear, & ~ Dan Beachy Quick,#NFDB
718:By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode - what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is a culmination of our experiences in a way that we - biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions - can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction. ~ Paul Murray, #NFDB
719:There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures would be for dealing with this experience of loss. I resent that. At the same time, I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death of their lovers, friends, and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. I worry because of the urgency of the situations, because of seeing death coming in from the edges of abstraction where those with the luxury of time have cast it. I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.
But, bottom line, this is my own feelings of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room. ~ David Wojnarowicz,#NFDB
720:Of the seven Archons that had combined to form the Milky Way mind, Orion had been the Archon whose verve and remorseless drive inspired and frightened and tempted the others into cooperation. Of the twenty-five Authorities forming the long-lost Orion Arm, the Benedictine was the most significant and influential of the ancient forefathers. The Benedictines were combination of three Dominions, issuing from the Collective at the Praesepe Cluster, the Abstraction at Orion Nebula, and the Empyrean at the Hyades Cluster. The Empyreans issued from a world called Eden, allegedly outside Hyades itself, and had displaced the original inhabitants of Hyades, a rude confederation of Virtues, Hosts, and races who names even devout paleohistorians could not with certainty invoke. Occupying the debris of the oldest archival strata were traces of the legendary founder of this Domination, an Empyrean called the Judge of Ages. He was the direct lineal ancestor of the memory chains of the last-known warlord of the Milky Way. Variations of him existed everywhere, of course; he was the base template for nearly every emissary form known in the Milky Way, and the founder of the Count-to-Infinity cliometric which had replaced the Cold Equations of the Interregnum. But such emissaries had been sent to Andromeda and rejected, even destroyed. No recent version of the countless copies would do, nor was there time to send to the core of the Milky Way, where the vast warlord Archon was last known to have been active. Once of the necromancers—call her Alcina—sought his ghost where others had overlooked, in one of the oldest archives, well preserved, amid the Austerity of the Cygnus Arm. Alcina reconstructed him, mind and body, comparing this core to many other records, carefully parsing away amendments and mythical excrescences of later editors. And Menelaus Montrose came to life once more, swearing. ~ John C Wright, #NFDB
721:In our own day anonymity has acquired a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized: it has an almost epigrammatic significance. People not only write anonymously, they sign their anonymous works: they even talk anonymously...Nowadays one can talk with any one, and it must be admitted that people's opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity. The same person will say the most contradictory things and, with the utmost calm, make a remark, which coming from him is a bitter satire on his own life. The remark itself may be sensible enough, and of the kind that sounds well at a meeting, and may serve in a discussion preliminary to coming to a decision, in much the same way that paper is made out of rags. But all these opinions put together do not make one human, personal opinion such as you may hear from quite a simple man who talks about very little but really does talk. People's remarks are so objective, so all all-inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses them, and where human speech is concerned that is the same as acting 'on principle'. And so our talk becomes like the public, a pure abstraction. There is no longer any one who knows how to talk, and instead, objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous, just as machinery makes man superfluous. In Germany they even have phrase-books for the use of lovers, and it will end with lovers sitting together talking anonymously. In fact there are hand-books for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
722:Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. ~ T S Eliot,#NFDB
723:As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself.
Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money.
What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-corroding. ~ Lewis Mumford,#NFDB
724:In this desert everything begins to flower again. "The terrifying significance of an unpremeditated cry of
joy cannot be understood while the long night of faith and reason endures." This night is drawing to a
close, and a dawn will break which is not the dawn of revolution but of insurrection. Insurrection is, in
itself, an asceticism which rejects all forms of consolation. The insurgent will not be in agreement with
other men except in so far as, and as long as, their egotism coincides with his. His real life is led in
solitude where he will assuage, without restraint, his appetite for existing, which is his only reason for
existence.
In this respect individualism reaches a climax. It is the negation of everything that denies the individual
and the glorification of everything that exalts and ministers to the individual. What, according to Stirner,
is good? "Everything of which I can make use." What am I, legitimately, authorized to do? "Everything of
which I am capable." Once again, rebellion leads to the justification of crime. Stirner not only has
attempted to justify crime (in this respect the terrorist forms of anarchy are directly descended from him),
but is visibly intoxicated by the perspectives that he thus reveals. "To break with what is sacred, or rather
to destroy the sacred, could become universal. It is not a new revolution that is approaching—but is not a
powerful, proud, disrespectful, shameless, conscienceless crime swelling like a thundercloud on the
horizon, and can you not see that the sky, heavy with foreboding, is growing dark and silent?" Here we
can feel the somber joy of those who create an apocalypse in a garret. This bitter and imperious logic can
no longer be held in check, except by an I which is determined to defeat every form of abstraction and
which has itself become abstract and nameless through being isolated and cut off from its roots. There are
no more crimes and no more imperfections, and therefore no more sinners. We are all perfect. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
725:[...] l’esprit occidental est presque entièrement d’essence chrétienne dans tout ce qu’il a de positif. Il n’est pas au pouvoir des hommes de se défaire, par leurs propres moyens, c’est-à-dire par de simples idéologies, d’une si profonde hérédité ; leurs intelligences s’exercent selon des habitudes séculaires, même lorsqu’elles inventent des erreurs. On ne peut faire abstraction de cette formation intellectuelle et mentale, si diminuée soit-elle (1) ; s’il en est ainsi, et si le point de vue traditionnel subsiste inconsciemment même chez ceux qui estiment ne plus devoir se réclamer d’aucune tradition, ou chez ceux qui, par simple souci d’impartialité, veulent se placer en dehors du point de vue chrétien ou juif, comment pourrait-on supposer que les éléments constitutifs d’une autre tradition puissent être interprétés dans leur véritable sens ? N’est-il pas frappant que les opinions courantes sur l’Islam par exemple, soient à peu près identiques chez la majorité des Occidentaux, qu’ils se disent chrétiens ou qu’ils se flattent de ne plus l’être ? Les réserves qu’ils formulent à l’égard de l’Islam, — pour ne rien dire des cas d’ignorance pure et simple ou d’une hostilité franchement moderniste, — proviennent généralement beaucoup moins d’une juste appréciation des choses, qu’elles ne sont le fait d’une hérédité mentale et psychique, qui subsiste dans la pensée occidentale et qui souvent n’y est plus autre chose que le résidu de la vraie spiritualité chrétienne."
1. Les erreurs philosophiques elles-mêmes ne seraient pas concevables, si elles ne représentaient la négation de certaines vérités, et si ces négations n’étaient des réactions directes ou indirectes contre certaines limitations formelles de la tradition ; on voit par là qu’aucune erreur, philosophique ou religieuse, ne peut prétendre à une parfaite indépendance et autonomie vis-à-vis de la tradition ou de la conception traditionnelle qu’elle rejette ou qu’elle défigure.
"Christianisme et Islam", in Etudes Traditionnelles numéro spécial Tradition islamique, 1934. ~ Frithjof Schuon,#NFDB
726:Une nouvelle génération, donc, subit simplement l'état de choses ; elle ne se pose aucun vrai problème, et de la « libération » dont elle jouit, elle fait un usage à tous points de vue stupide. Quand cette jeunesse prétend qu'elle n'est pas comprise, la seule réponse à lui donner c'est qu'il n'y a justement rien à comprendre en elle, et que, s'il existait un ordre normal, il s'agirait uniquement de la remettre à sa place sans tarder, comme on fait avec les enfants, lorsque sa stupidité devient fatigante, envahissante et impertinente. Le soi-disant anticonformisme de certaines attitudes, abstraction faite de leur banalité, suit du reste une espèce de mode, de nouvelle convention, de sorte qu'il s'agit précisément du contraire d'une manifestation de liberté. Pour différents phénomènes envisagés par nous dans les pages précédentes, tels que par exemple le goût de la vulgarité et certaines formes nouvelles des mœurs, on peut se référer, dans l'ensemble, à cette jeunesse-là ; en font partie les fanatiques des deux sexes pour les braillards, les « chanteurs » épileptiques, au moment où nous écrivons pour les séances collectives de marionnettes représentées par les ye-ye sessions, pour tel ou tel « disque à succès » et ainsi de suite, avec les comportements correspondants. L'absence, chez ceux-là, du sens du ridicule rend impossible d'exercer sur eux une influence quelconque, si bien qu'il faut les laisser à eux-mêmes et à leur stupidité et estimer que si par hasard apparaissent, chez ce type de jeunes, quelques aspects polémiques en ce qui concerne, par exemple, l'émancipation sexuelle des mineurs et le sens de la famille, cela n'a aucun relief. Les années passant, la nécessité, pour la plupart d'entre eux, de faire face aux problèmes matériels et économiques de la vie fera sans doute que cette jeunesse-là, devenue adulte, s'adaptera aux routines professionnelles, productives et sociales d'un monde comme le monde actuel ; ce qui, d'ailleurs, la fera passer simplement d'une forme de nullité à une autre forme de nullité. Aucun problème digne de ce nom ne vient se poser. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
727:First of all, let us not all be too glib in our statements about the will of God. God’s will is a profound and holy mystery, and the fact that we live our everyday lives engulfed in this mystery should not lead us to underestimate its holiness. We dwell in the will of God as in a sanctuary. His will is the cloud of darkness that surrounds His immediate presence. It is the mystery in which His divine life and our created life become “one spirit,” since, as St. Paul says, “Those who are joined to the Lord are one spirit” (I Corinthians 6: 17).
There are religious men who have become so familiar with the concept of God’s will that their familiarity has bred an apparent contempt. It has made them forget that God’s will is more than a concept. It is a terrible and transcendent reality, a secret power which is given to us, from moment to moment, to be the life of our life and the soul of our own soul’s life. It is the living flame of God’s own Spirit, in Whom our own soul’s flame can play, if it wills, like a mysterious angel. God’s will is not an abstraction, not a machine, not an esoteric system. It is a living concrete reality in the lives of men, and our souls are created to burn as flames within His flame. The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself. It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of an old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God. What we call the “will of God” is the movement of His love and wisdom, ordering and governing all free and necessary agents, moving movers and causing causes driving drivers and ruling those who rule, so that even those who resist Him carry out His will without realizing that they are doing so In all His acts God orders all things whether good or evil for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
728:Now when I say “I,” it seems hollow to me. I can’t manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for on one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.
Lucid, forlorn, consciousness is walled-up; it perpetuates itself. Nobody lives there any more. A little while ago someone said “me,” said my consciousness. Who? Outside there were streets, alive with known smells and colours. Now nothing is left but anonymous walls, anonymous consciousness. That is what there is: walls, and between the walls, a small transparency, alive and impersonal. Consciousness exists as a tree, as a blade of grass. It slumbers, it grows bored. Small fugitive presences populate it like birds in the branches. Populate it and disappear. Consciousness forgotten, forsaken between these walls, under this grey sky. And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. It dilutes, scatters itself, tries to lose itself on the brown wall, along the lamp post or down there in the evening mist. But it never forgets itself. That is its lot. There is a stifled voice which tells it: “The train leaves in two hours,” and there is the consciousness of this voice. There is also consciousness of a face. It passes slowly, full of blood, spattered, and its bulging eyes weep. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere. It vanishes; a bent body with a bleeding face replaces it, walks slowly away, seems to stop at each step, never stops. There is a consciousness of this body walking slowly in a dark street. It walks but it gets no further away. The dark street does not end, it loses itself in nothingness. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere. And there is consciousness of a stifled voice which says: “The Self-Taught Man is wandering through the city.”
Not the same city, not between these toneless walls, the Self-Taught Man walks in a city where he is not forgotten. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,#NFDB
729:Because money is convertible into all other things, it infects them with the same feature, turning them into commodities—objects that, as long as they meet certain criteria, are seen as identical. All that matters is how many or how much. Money, says Seaford, 'promotes a sense of homogeneity among things in general.' All things are equal, because they can be sold for money, which can in turn be used to buy any other thing.
In the commodity world, things are equal to the money that can replace them. Their primary attribute is their 'value'—an abstraction. I feel a distancing, a letdown, in the phrase, 'You can always buy another one.' Can you see how this promotes an antimaterialism, a detachment from the physical world in which each person, place, and thing is special, unique? No wonder Greek philosophers of this era [when modern money originated] began elevating the abstract over the real, culminating in Plato's invention of a world of perfect forms more real than the world of the senses. No wonder to this day we treat the physical world so cavalierly. No wonder, after two thousand years' immersion in the mentality of money, we have become so used to the replaceability of all things that we behave as if we could, if we wrecked the planet, simply buy a new one.
[...]
The development of monetary abstraction fits into a vast meta-historical context. Money could not have developed without a foundation of abstraction in the form of words and numbers. Already, number and label distance us from the real world and prime our minds to think abstractly. To use a noun already implies an identity among the many things so named; to say there are five of a thing makes each a unit. We begin to think of objects as representatives of a category, and not unique beings in themselves. So, while standard, generic categories didn't begin with money, money vastly accelerated their conceptual dominance. Moreover, the homogeneity of money accompanied the rapid development of standardized commodity goods for trade. Such standardization was crude in preindustrial times, but today manufactured objects are so nearly identical as to make the lie of money into the truth. ~ Charles Eisenstein,#NFDB
730:Class Quality Abstract Data Types Have you thought of the classes in your program as abstract data types and evaluated their interfaces from that point of view? Abstraction Does the class have a central purpose? Is the class well named, and does its name describe its central purpose? Does the class's interface present a consistent abstraction? Does the class's interface make obvious how you should use the class? Is the class's interface abstract enough that you don't have to think about how its services are implemented? Can you treat the class as a black box? Are the class's services complete enough that other classes don't have to meddle with its internal data? Has unrelated information been moved out of the class? Have you thought about subdividing the class into component classes, and have you subdivided it as much as you can? Are you preserving the integrity of the class's interface as you modify the class? Encapsulation Does the class minimize accessibility to its members? Does the class avoid exposing member data? Does the class hide its implementation details from other classes as much as the programming language permits? Does the class avoid making assumptions about its users, including its derived classes? Is the class independent of other classes? Is it loosely coupled? Inheritance Is inheritance used only to model "is a" relationships—that is, do derived classes adhere to the Liskov Substitution Principle? Does the class documentation describe the inheritance strategy? Do derived classes avoid "overriding" non-overridable routines? Are common interfaces, data, and behavior as high as possible in the inheritance tree? Are inheritance trees fairly shallow? Are all data members in the base class private rather than protected? Other Implementation Issues Does the class contain about seven data members or fewer? Does the class minimize direct and indirect routine calls to other classes? Does the class collaborate with other classes only to the extent absolutely necessary? Is all member data initialized in the constructor? Is the class designed to be used as deep copies rather than shallow copies unless there's a measured reason to create shallow copies? ~ Steve McConnell, #NFDB
731:Because money is convertible into all other things, it infects them with the same feature, turning them into commodities—objects that, as long as they meet certain criteria, are seen as identical. All that matters is how many or how much. Money, says Seaford, 'promotes a sense of homogeneity among things in general.' All things are equal, because they can be sold for money, which can in turn be used to buy any other thing.
In the commodity world, things are equal to the money that can replace them. Their primary attribute is their 'value'—an abstraction. I feel a distancing, a letdown, in the phrase, 'You can always buy another one.' Can you see how this promotes an antimaterialism, a detachment from the physical world in which each person, place, and thing is special, unique? No wonder Greek philosophers of this era [when modern money originated] began elevating the abstract over the real, culminating in Plato's invention of a world of perfect forms more real than the world of the senses. No wonder to this day we treat the physical world so cavalierly. No wonder, after two thousand years' immersion in the mentality of money, we have become so used to the replaceability of all things that we behave as if we could, if we wrecked the planet, simply buy a new one.
[...]
The development of monetary abstraction fits into a vast meta-historical context. Money could not have developed without a foundation of abstraction in the form of words and numbers. Already, number and label distance us from the real world and prime our minds to think abstractly. To use a noun already implies an identity among the many things so named; to say there are five of a thing makes each a unit. We begin to think of objects as representatives of a category, and not unique beings in themselves. So, while standard, generic categories didn't begin with money, money vastly accelerated their conceptual dominance. Moreover, the homogeneity of money accompanied the rapid development of standardized commodity goods for trade. Such standardization was crude in preindustrial times, but today manufactured objects are so nearly identical as to make the lie of money into the truth. ~ Charles Eisenstein,#NFDB
732:It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.
By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person. ~ Lionel Shriver,#NFDB
733:higher mind or late vision logic ::: Even more rare, found stably in less than 1% of the population and even more emergent is the turquoise altitude.
Cognition at Turquoise is called late vision-logic or cross-paradigmatic and features the ability to connect meta-systems or paradigms, with other meta-systems. This is the realm of coordinating principles. Which are unified systems of systems of abstraction to other principles. ... Aurobindo indian sage and philosopher offers a more first-person account of turquoise which he called higher-mind, a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamism capable of formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming of all of which a spontaneous inherient knowledge.
Self-sense at turquoise is called Construct-aware and is the first stage of Cook-Greuter's extension of Loveigers work on ego-development. The Construct-aware stage sees individuals for the first time as exploring more and more complex thought-structures with awareness of the automatic nature of human map making and absurdities which unbridaled complexity and logical argumentation can lead. Individuals at this stage begin to see their ego as a central point of reference and therefore a limit to growth. They also struggle to balance unique self-expressions and their concurrent sense of importance, the imperical and intuitive knowledge that there is no fundamental subject-object separation and the budding awareness of self-identity as temporary which leads to a decreased ego-desire to create a stable self-identity. Turquoise individuals are keenly aware of the interplay between awareness, thought, action and effects. They seek personal and spiritual transformation and hold a complex matrix of self-identifications, the adequecy of which they increasingly call into question. Much of this already points to Turquoise values which embrace holistic and intuitive thinking and alignment to universal order in a conscious fashion.
Faith at Turquoise is called Universalising and can generate faith compositions in which conceptions of Ultimate Reality start to include all beings. Individuals at Turquoise faith dedicate themselves to transformation of present reality in the direction of transcendent actuality. Both of these are preludes to the coming of Third Tier. ~ Essential Integral, L4.1-54, Higher Mind,#NFDB
734:As more complex forms of knowledge emerge and an economic surplus is built up, experts devote themselves full-time to the subjects of their expertise, which, with the development of conceptual machineries, may become increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Experts in these rarefied bodies of knowledge lay claim to a novel status. They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality. They are, literally, universal experts. This does not mean that they claim to know everything, but rather that they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does. Other men may continue to stake out particular sectors of reality, but they claim expertise in the ultimate definitions of reality as such. This stage in the development of knowledge has a number of consequences. The first, which we have already discussed, is the emergence of pure theory. Because the universal experts operate on a level of considerable abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life, both others and they themselves may conclude that their theories have no relation whatever to the ongoing life of the society, but exist in a soft of Platonic heaven of ahistorical and asocial ideation. This is, of course, an illusion, but it can have great socio-historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality-defining and reality-producing processes. A second consequence is a strengthening of traditionalism in the institutionalized actions thus legitimated, that is, a strengthening of the inherent tendency of institutionalization toward inertia.91 Habitualization and institutionalization in themselves limit the flexibility of human actions. Institutions tend to persist unless they become “problematic.” Ultimate legitimations inevitably strengthen this tendency. The more abstract the legitimations are, the less likely they are to be modified in accordance with changing pragmatic exigencies. If there is a tendency to go on as before anyway, the tendency is obviously strengthened by having excellent reasons for doing so. This means that institutions may persist even when, to an outside observer, they have lost their original functionality or practicality. One does certain things not because they work, but because they are right—right, that is, in terms of the ultimate definitions of reality promulgated by the universal experts. ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
735:I have given a brief explanation of the various meanings of dharma according to the Abhidharma, but what I want to say next is much more important. In Mahayana Buddhism, and especially in Dōgen Zenji's teachings, the meaning of dharma has more depth. According to the concepts we accept, we think that everything exists as objects outside the self. For example, we usually think that all phenomenal things that appear before our eyes, or this twentieth-century human society, have existence outside our individual self. We believe that when we are born we appear on this world's stage, and when we die we leave that stage. All of us think this way. But the truth is that this common-sense concept is questionable. Mahayana Buddhism began from a reexamination of this common-sense attitude. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I am looking at this cup now. You are also looking at the same cup. We think that we are looking at the very same cup, but this is not true. I am looking at it from my angle, with my eyesight, in the lighting that occurs where I am sitting, and with my own feelings or emotions. Furthermore, the angle, my feeling, and everything else is changing from moment to moment. This cup I am looking at now is not the same one that I will be looking at in the next moment. Each of you is also looking at it from your own angle, with your eyesight, with your own feelings, and these also are constantly changing. This is the way actual life experience is. However, if we use our common-sense way of thinking, we think we are looking at the very same cup. This is an abstraction and not the reality of life. Abstract concepts and living reality are entirely different. The Buddhist view is completely different from our ordinary thinking. Western philosophy's way of thinking is also based on abstractions. It assumes that all of us are seeing the same cup. Greek philosophers went further and further in their abstractions until they came up with the concept of the idea that cannot be seen or felt. One example is Venus, the goddess of beauty. In the real world, no woman is as well-proportioned as Venus, or embodies perfect beauty as she does. Yet the Greeks idealized beauty and created a statue of Venus, just as they had thought of the "idea" of a circle that is abstracted from something round. In other words, the Greek way of thinking is abstraction to the highest degree. Buddhism is different. Buddhism puts emphasis on life, the actual life experience of the reality of the self. ~ D gen, #NFDB
736:It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can BE no difference any- where that doesn't MAKE a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.
There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means. Shadworth Hodgson keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known-as.' But these forerunners of pragmatism used it in fragments: they were preluders only. Not until in our time has it generalized itself, become conscious of a universal mission, pretended to a conquering destiny. I believe in that destiny, and I hope I may end by inspiring you with my belief.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.
At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the 'temperament' of philosophy. Teachers of the ultra-rationalistic type would be frozen out, much as the courtier type is frozen out in republics, as the ultramontane type of priest is frozen out in protestant lands. Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand. ~ William James,#NFDB
737:These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus.
Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home
town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist
partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town.
Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the
direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men?
I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer.
I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The
universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis.
To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,#NFDB
738:As a special branch of general philosophy, pathogenesis had never been explored. In my opinion it had never been approached in a strictly scientific fashion--that is to say, objectively, amorally, intellectually.
All those who have written on the subject are filled with prejudice. Before searching out and examining the mechanism of causes of disease, they treat of 'disease as such', condemn it as an exceptional and harmful condition, and start out by detailing the thousand and one ways of combating it, disturbing it, destroying it; they define health, for this purpose, as a 'normal' condition that is absolute and immutable.
Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.
Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope.
What convention calls health is, after all, no more than this or that passing aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction, a special case already experienced, recognized, defined, finite, extracted and generalized for everybody's use. Just as a word only finds its way into the Dictionary Of The French Academy when it is well worn stripped of the freshness of its popular origin or of the elegance of its poetic value, often more than fifty years after its creation (the last edition of the learned Dictionary is dated 1878), just as the definition given preserves a word, embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is noble, hypocritical and arbitrary--a pose it never assumed in the days of its vogue, while it was still topical, living and meaningful--so it is that health, recognized as a public Good, is only the sad mimic of some illness which has grown unfashionable, ridiculous and static, a solemnly doddering phenomenon which manages somehow to stand on its feet between the helping hands of its admirers, smiling at them with its false teeth. A commonplace, a physiological cliche, it is a dead thing. And it may be that health is death itself.
Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet. ~ Blaise Cendrars,#NFDB
739:Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects.
...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.
The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close. ~ Stephen Fry,#NFDB
740:On nous dira sans doute que la réalité d'un Dieu créateur n'a pas été démontrée ; mais, outre qu'il n'est pas difficile de démontrer cette réalité avec des arguments proportionnés à sa nature, – mais inaccessible pour cette raison même à certains esprits, – le moins qu'on puisse dire est que l'évolution n'a jamais été démontrée par qui que ce soit, et pour cause ; on admet l'évolution transformante à titre de postulat utile et provisoire, comme on admettra n'importe quoi, pourvu qu'on ne se sente pas obligé d'admettre la primauté de l'Immatériel, puisque celui-ci échappe au contrôle de nos sens. Quand on part de la constatation de ce mystère immédiatement tangible qu'est la subjectivité ou l'intelligence, il est pourtant facile de concevoir que l'origine de l'Univers est, non la matière inerte et inconsciente mais une Substance spirituelle qui, de coagulation en coagulation et de segmentation en segmentation, – et autres projection à la fois manifestantes et limitatives, – produit en fin de compte la matière en la faisant émerger d'une substance plus subtile, mais déjà éloignée de la Substance principielle. On nous objectera qu'il n'y a là aucune preuve, à quoi nous répondons – outre que le phénomène de la subjectivité comporte précisément cette preuve, abstraction faite d'autres preuves intellectuelles possibles, mais dont l'Intellection n'a nul besoin, – à quoi nous répondons donc qu'il y a infiniment moins de preuve à cette absurdité inconcevable qu'est l'évolutionnisme, lequel fait sortir le miracle de la conscience d'un tas de terre ou de cailloux, métaphoriquement parlant.
[...] L'intelligence séparée de sa source supra-individuelle s'accompagne ipso facto de ce manque de sens des proportions qu'on appelle l'orgueil ; inversement, l'orgueil empêche l'intelligence devenue rationalisme de remonter à sa source ; il ne peut que nier l'Esprit et le remplacer par la matière ; c'est de celle-ci qu'il fait jaillir la conscience, dans la mesure où il ne peut la nier en la réduisant -- et les essais ne manquent pas -- à une sorte de matière particulièrement raffinée ou "évoluée"(1).(...)
(1) Que l'on parle d' "énergie" plutôt que de "matière" -- et autres subtilités de ce genre -- ne change rien au fond du problème et ne fait que reculer les limites de la difficulté. Notons qu'un soi-disant "sociobiologiste"-- ce mot est tout un programme -- a poussé l'ingéniosité jusqu'à remplacer la matière par des "gênes" dont l'égoïsme aveugle, combiné avec un instinct de fournis ou d'abeilles, aurait fini par constituer non seulement les corps mais aussi la conscience et en fin de compte l'intelligence humaine, miraculeusement capable de disserter sur les gênes qui se sont amusés à la produire. » ~ Frithjof Schuon,#NFDB
741:The moment when Pippin and Beregond hear the Black Riders and see them swoop on Faramir in ‘The Siege of Gondor’, V/4, is typical:
Suddenly as they talked they were stricken dumb, frozen as it were to listening stones. Pippin cowered down with his hands pressed to his ears; but Beregond… remained there, stiffened, staring out with starting eyes. Pippin knew the shuddering cry that he had heard: it was the same that he had heard long ago in the Marish of the Shire, but now it was grown in power and hatred, piercing the heart with a poisonous despair.
The last phrase is a critical one. The Ringwraiths work for the most part not physically but psychologically, paralysing the will, disarming all resistance. This may have something to do with the process of becoming a wraith yourself. That can happen as a result of a force from outside. As Gandalf points out, explaining the Morgul-knife, if the splinter had not been cut out, ‘you would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’. But more usually the suspicion is that people make themselves into wraiths. They accept the gifts of Sauron, quite likely with the intention of using them for some purpose which they identify as good. But then they start to cut corners, to eliminate opponents, to believe in some ‘cause’ which justifies everything they do. In the end the ‘cause’, or the habits they have acquired while working for the ‘cause’, destroys any moral sense and even any remaining humanity. The spectacle of the person ‘eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction has been so familiar throughout the twentieth century as to make the idea of the wraith, and the wraithing-process, horribly recognizable, in a way non-fantastic.
The realism of this image of evil is increased by the examples we have of people on their way to becoming wraiths themselves. We have just the start of this, enough to be ominous, in the cases of Bilbo and Frodo, and the others mentioned above. Gollum is much further along the road, though in The Lord of the Rings Gollum, detached from the Ring many years before, is possibly beginning to recover, as is shown by the fact that he has started to call himself by his old name, Sméagol, the name he had when he used to be a hobbit, and is also occasionally and significantly able to say ‘I’. There is a striking dialogue between what one might call his hobbit-personality (Sméagol) and his Ring-personality (Gollum, ‘my precious’) in ‘The Passage of the Marshes’, which makes the point that the two are at least connected: one can imagine the one developing out of the other, pure evil growing out of mere ordinary human weakness and selfishness.
However, the best example of ‘wraithing’ in The Lord of the Rings must be
Saruman. ~ Tom Shippey,#NFDB
742:And so when the generation, which itself desired to level and to be emancipated, to destroy authority and at the same time itself, has, through the scepticism of the principle association, started the hopeless forest fire of abstraction; when as a result of levelling with this scepticism, the generation has rid itself of the individual and of everything organic and concrete, and put in its place 'humanity' and the numerical equality of man and man: when the generation has, for a moment, delighted in this unlimited panorama of abstract infinity, unrelieved by even the smallest eminence, undisturbed by even the slightest interest, a sea of desert; then the time has come for work to begin, for every individual must work for himself, each for himself. No longer can the individual, as in former times, turn to the great for help when he grows confused. That is past; he is either lost in the dizziness of unending abstraction or saved for ever in the reality of religion. Perhaps very many will cry out in despair, but it will not help them--already it is too late...Nor shall any of the unrecognizable presume to help directly or to speak directly or to teach directly at the head of the masses, in order to direct their decisions, instead of giving his negative support and so helping the individual to make the decision which he himself has reached; any other course would be the end of him, because he would be indulging in the short-sighted compassion of man, instead of obeying the order of divinity, of an angry, yet so merciful, divinity. For the development is, in spite of everything, a progress because all the individuals who are saved will receive the specific weight of religion, its essence at first hand, from God himself. Then it will be said: 'behold, all is in readiness, see how the cruelty of abstraction makes the true form of worldliness only too evident, the abyss of eternity opens before you, the sharp scythe of the leveller makes it possible for every one individually to leap over the blade--and behold, it is God who waits. Leap, then, into the arms of God'. But the 'unrecognizable' neither can nor dares help man, not even his most faithful disciple, his mother, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life: they must make the leap themselves, for God's love is not a second-hand gift. And yet the 'unrecognizable' neither can nor dares help man, not even his most faithful disciple, his mother, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life: they must make the leap themselves, for God's love is not a second-hand gift. And yet the 'unrecognizable' (according to his degree) will have a double work compared with the 'outstanding' man (of the same degree), because he will not only have to work continuously, but at the same time labour to conceal his work. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
743:For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
744:A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this?-And-how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses...what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse the truth...?
But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?
He thought, it is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, inuit it. But-they are purposely cruel...is that it? No. God, he thought, I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.
Their view; it is cosmic. Not of man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Gute, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they-these madmen-respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.
And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. it is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate-confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small...and you will escape the jealousy of the great. ~ Philip K Dick,#NFDB
745:There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things.
And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right?
But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you deal with that." And the answer is yeah, there is in fact. And that's what a lot of religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you, is the solution to that. One is, approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore, instead. You expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge.
And you wouldn't have a cortex which, you know, is ridiculously disproportionate, if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. We explore. That can make you the master of a situation, so you can be the master of something like fire without being terrified of it.
One of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kali, is offer sacrifices. So you can say, well why would you offer sacrifices to something you're afraid of. And it's because that is what you do, that's always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you.
One example is that you're worried about your future. Maybe you're worried about your job, or who you're going to marry, or your family, there's a whole category of things to be worried about, so you're worried about your future. SO what're you doing in university? And the answer is you're sacrificing your free time in the present, to the cosmos so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile upon you. And that's one of the fundamental discoveries of the human race. And it's a big deal, that discovery: by changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future. ~ Jordan Peterson,#NFDB
746:There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things.
And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right?
But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you deal with that." And the answer is yeah, there is in fact. And that's what a lot of religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you, is the solution to that. One is, approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore, instead. You expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge.
And you wouldn't have a cortex which, you know, is ridiculously disproportionate, if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. We explore. That can make you the master of a situation, so you can be the master of something like fire without being terrified of it.
One of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kali, is offer sacrifices. So you can say, well why would you offer sacrifices to something you're afraid of. And it's because that is what you do, that's always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you.
One example is that you're worried about your future. Maybe you're worried about your job, or who you're going to marry, or your family, there's a whole category of things to be worried about, so you're worried about your future. SO what're you doing in university? And the answer is you're sacrificing your free time in the present, to the cosmos so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile upon you. And that's one of the fundamental discoveries of the human race. And it's a big deal, that discovery: by changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future. ~ Jordan B Peterson,#NFDB
747:Thanks to suffering and madness, I have had a finer, richer life than any of you, and I wish to go to my death with dignity, as befits the great moment after which all dignity and majesty cease. Let my body be my ark and my death a long floating on the waves of eternity. A nothing amid nothingness. What defense have I against nothingness but this ark in which I have tried to gather everything that was dear to me, people, birds, animals, and plants, everything that I carry in my eye and in my heart, in the triple-decked ark of my body and soul. Like the pharaohs in the majestic peace of their tombs, I wanted to have all those things with me in death, I wanted everything to be as it was before; I wanted the birds to sing for me forever, I wanted to exchange Charon's bark for another, less desolate and less empty; I wanted to ennoble eternity's unconscionable void with the bitter herbs that spring from the heart of man, to ennoble the soundless emptiness of eternity with the cry of the cuckoo and the song of the lark. All I have done is to develop that bitter poetic metaphor, carry it with passionate logic to its ultimate consequence, which transforms sleep into waking (and the converse); lucidity into madness (and the converse); life into death, as though there were no borderline, and the converse; death into eternity, as if they were not one and the same thing. Thus my egoism is only the egoism of human existence, the egoism of life, counterweight to the egoism of death, and, appearances to the contrary, my consciousness resists nothingness with an egoism that has no equal, resists the outrage of death with the passionate metaphor of the wish to reunite the few people and the bit of love that made up my life. I have wanted and still want to depart this life with specimens of people, flora and fauna, to lodge them all in my heart as in an ark, to shut them up behind my eyelids when they close for the last time. I wanted to smuggle this pure abstraction into nothingness, to sneak it across the threshold of that other abstraction, so crushing in its immensity: the threshold of nothingness. I have therefore tried to condense this abstraction, to condense it by force of will, faith, intelligence, madness, and love (self-love), to condense it so drastically that its specific weight will be such as to life it like a balloon and carry it beyond the reach of darkness and oblivion. If nothing else survives, perhaps my material herbarium or my notes or my letters will live on, and what are they but condensed, materialized idea; materialized life: a paltry, pathetic human victory over immense, eternal, divine nothingness. Or perhaps--if all else is drowned in the great flood--my madness and my dream will remain like a northern light and a distant echo. Perhaps someone will see that light or hear that distant echo, the shadow of a sound that was once, and will grasp the meaning of that light, that echo. Perhaps it will be my son who will someday publish my notes and my herbarium of Pannonian plants (unfinished and incomplete, like all things human). But anything that survives death is a paltry, pathetic victory over the eternity of nothingness--a proof of man's greatness and Yahweh's mercy. Non omnis moriar. ~ Danilo Ki, #NFDB
748:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83],#NFDB
749:The Undivided Wholeness of All Things
Most mind-boggling of all are Bohm's fully developed ideas about wholeness. Because everything in the cosmos is made out of the seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order, he believes it is as meaningless to view the universe as composed of "parts, " as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water out of which they flow. An electron is not an "elementary particle. " It is just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement. Dividing reality up into parts and then naming those parts is always arbitrary, a product of convention, because subatomic particles, and everything else in the universe, are no more separate from one another than different patterns in an ornate carpet. This is a profound suggestion. In his general theory of relativity Einstein astounded the world when he said that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a giant step further. He says that everything in the universe is part of a continuum. Despite the apparent separateness of things at the explicate level, everything is a seamless extension of everything else, and ultimately even the implicate and explicate orders blend into each other. Take a moment to consider this. Look at your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp beside you. And at the dog resting at your feet. You are not merely made of the same things. You are the same thing. One thing. Unbroken. One enormous something that has extended its uncountable arms and appendages into all the apparent objects, atoms, restless oceans, and twinkling stars in the cosmos. Bohm cautions that this does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass. Things can be part of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between "things" is meaningless. He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into "things" is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In attempts to correct this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement "things, " he prefers to call them "relatively independent subtotalities. "10 Indeed, Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction. ~ Michael Talbot,#NFDB
750:We have now completed our view of the path of Knowledge and seen to what it leads. First, the end of Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of division. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality; in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him. It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all relations. Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge [511] [T1], #index,#NFDB
751:So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after; and the understanding of politics we are investigating has the disadvantage of being, in the strict sense, preposterous.
Let us consider the matter first in relation to scientific hypothesis, which I have taken to play a role in scientific activity in some respects similar to that of an ideology in politics. If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted. The concrete situation does not appear until the specific hypothesis, which is the occasion of empiricism being set to work, is recognized as itself the creature of owing how to conduct a scientific inquiry.
Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its tum, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently bow to interpret it.
Now, just as a cookery book presupposes somebody who knows how to cook, and its use presupposes somebody who already knows how to use it, and just as a scientific hypothesis springs from a knowledge of how to conduct a scientific investigation and separated from that knowledge is powerless to set empiricism profitably to work, so a political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premeditated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge (abstract and generalized) of a concrete manner of attending to the arrangements of a society. The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behaviour in which those purposes are already hidden. It does not exist in advance of political activity, and by itself it is always an insufficient guide. Political enterprises, the ends to be pursued, the arrangements to be established (all the normal ingredients of a political ideology), cannot be premeditated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs. Indeed, it often reflects no more than a discovered ability to do something which is then translated into an authority to do it. ~ Michael Oakeshott,#NFDB
752:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #NFDB
753:Fragment Of A Meditation
Not yet the thirtieth year, the thirtieth
Station where time reverses his light heels
To rim both ways, and makes of forward back;
Whose long coordinates are birth and death
And zero is the origin of breath:
Not yet the thirtieth year of gratitude,
Not yet suffering but a year's lack,
All thanks that mid-mortality is done,
That the new breath on the invisible track
Winds anciently into my father's blood.
In the beginning the irresponsible Verb
Connived with chaos whence I've seen it start
Riddles in the head for the nervous heart
To count its beat on: all beginnings run
Like water the easiest way or like birds
Fly on their cool imponderable flood.
Then suddenly the noon turns afternoon
And afternoon like an ill-written page
Will fade, until the very stain of light
Gathers in all the venom of the nightThe equilibrium of the thirtieth age.
The thirtieth, not yet the thirtieth year
Of wonders, revelations, whispers, signs:
Impartial dumb truths of sound and sight
Known beyond speech, immune to common fear.
Already the wind whistles the revelations
Of the time, but I'll go back seventy years
And more to the great Administrations:
Yet six had gone and all the public men
Whom doctrine and an evil nature made
Were only errand boys beaten by the sun
While Henry Adams fuddled in the shade.
I've heard what they said, in the running tap
Drawing water, their watery words, clear
Like a sad harlot's useless lucid pap
26
(I've heard the lion of S Street get his cheer),
I understood it, the general syllable
In a private ear, lost. . . .
For who can tell
What the goat calls to the heifer, or the hen
Even to the cock her love? At thirty years
The years of the Christ, one will perceive, know,
Report new verity with a certain pen.
In the decade from eighteen-fifty-one
Where was Calhoun whose bristled intellect
Sumner the refined one did not admire?
I am convinced 'twas Calhoun who divined
How the great western star's last race would run
Unbridled round our personal defect,
Grinding its ash with engines of its mind.
'Too Southern and too simple,' his death's head
Uttered a Dies Irae that last day
When Senator Mason in a voice to stun
Read off his speech; then put Calhoun to bed.
They put him in his grave. Does the worm say
In the close senate of tempestuous clay
That his intellect makes too difficult
The grave, as his enemies our life?
It's quiet there, for the worm's one fault
Is not discourtesy (give worms their dues)
In case the guest hurried by mortal strife
Enter the house in muddy overshoes.
It was a time of tributes; let me pay
Tribute to a man grandfather knew well
(Or so 'twas said, but one can never tell),
A stocky man but slight, no symmetry
Of face and eye, yet a distinction
Of the poet against the world; he dreamed the soul
Of the wide world and prodigies to come;
Exemplar of dignity, a gentleman
Who raised the black flag of the lower mind;
Hated in life by all; in death praised;
I cannot yet begin to understand
Why we are proud that an ancestor knew
27
The crazy Poe, who was not of our kindBats in the belfry that round and round flew
In vapors not quite wholesome for the mind.
After Calhoun the local tenements
Of nature, tempered to the exigencies
Of air and fire, blurred with the public sense,
Diffused, while the Black Republicans
Took a short memory to their hot desire,
And honor turned a common entity
Crying decisions from the evening news.
Yet in a year, at thirty, one shall see
The wisdom of history, how she takes
Each epoch by the neck and, growling, shakes
It like a rat while she faintly mews.
Perhaps at the age of thirty one shall see
In the wide world the prodigies to come:
The long-gestating Christ, the Agnulus
Of time, got in the belly of Abstraction
By Ambition, a bull of pious use.
O Pasiphael mother of god, lest nature,
Peritonitis or morning sickness stunt
The growth of god in an unwholesome juice,
Eat cannon and cornflakes, that the lamb,
Spaceless as snow, may spare the rational earth
(Weary of prodigies and the Holy Runt)
A second prodigious, two-legged birth.
The signs and portents screaming in the air,
The nativity in my thirtieth year
Will glow in the heavens, the myriad fireflies
At the holy hour hovering round the house
Will stream in the night like flaming hair,
And man will scurry with averted eyes
Crouching, peering, silent, a drunken mouse.
The orange groves will blossom, the shining Sierras
Kindle all night far as Los Angeles;
With a noise, threatening, of wandering bees
Coining, angry with the air of their carouse,
The lamb through the sandpaper gates of life
(Made rougher by the bull's intenser strife)
Will leap, while the wild-eyed Pasiphae
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By the inscrutable wrath of glory stung
Hears the Wise Men come swiftly from the sea.
The bull smoothly rolls his powerful tongue.
~ Allen Tate,#NFDB
754:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#NFDB
755:Captain Craig
I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town
Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,
Or called him by his name, or looked at him
So curiously, or so concernedly,
As they had looked at ashes; but a few—
Say five or six of us—had found somehow
The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,
Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,
By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life
And in his way had shared, with all mankind,
Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,
By some resplendent metamorphosis,
Whatever he was not. And after time,
When it had come sufficiently to pass
That he was going patch-clad through the streets,
Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid
Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve,
And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,
Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”
He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on,
And after it moved others—one or two;
For Captain Craig, before the day was done,
Got back to the scant refuge of his bed
And shivered into it without a curse—
Without a murmur even. He was cold,
And old, and hungry; but the worst of it
Was a forlorn familiar consciousness
That he had failed again. There was a time
When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,
And he could do no more, that he might ask
Of whom he would. But once had been enough,
And soon there would be nothing more to ask.
He was himself, and he had lost the speed
He started with, and he was left behind.
There was no mystery, no tragedy;
And if they found him lying on his back
Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,—
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Well, once upon a time there was a man—
Es war einmal ein König, if it pleased him.
And he was right: there were no men to blame:
There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune—
A note that able-bodied men might sound
Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.
They might have made him sing by feeding him
Till he should march again, but probably
Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;
They found it more melodious to shout
Right on, with unmolested adoration,
To keep the tune as it had always been,
To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.
He must have understood that afterwards—
When we had laid some fuel to the spark
Of him, and oxidized it—for he laughed
Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,
And then, for gratitude, made game of us:
“You are the resurrection and the life,”
He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;
O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”
We were not quite accoutred for a blast
Of any lettered nonchalance like that,
And some of us—the five or six of us
Who found him out—were singularly struck.
But soon there came assurance of his lips,
Like phrases out of some sweet instrument
Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt
“No penitential shame for what had come,
No virtuous regret for what had been,—
But rather a joy to find it in his life
To be an outcast usher of the soul
For such as had good courage of the Sun
To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;
And on the bottom of it, like a king,
For longer time than I dare chronicle,
Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized
His opportunity. My friends got out,
Like brokers out of Arcady; but I—
May be for fascination of the thing,
Or may be for the larger humor of it—
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Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.
When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze
Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled
At me and then continued, earnestly:
“Your friends have had enough of it; but you,
For a motive hardly vindicated yet
By prudence or by conscience, have remained;
And that is very good, for I have things
To tell you: things that are not words alone—
Which are the ghosts of things—but something firmer.
“First, would I have you know, for every gift
Or sacrifice, there are—or there may be—
Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind
We feel for what we take, the larger kind
We feel for what we give. Once we have learned
As much as this, we know the truth has been
Told over to the world a thousand times;—
But we have had no ears to listen yet
For more than fragments of it: we have heard
A murmur now and then, and echo here
And there, and we have made great music of it;
And we have made innumerable books
To please the Unknown God. Time throws away
Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows
No death denies not one: the books all count,
The songs all count; and yet God’s music has
No modes, his language has no adjectives.”
“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;
“But what has this that you are saying now—
This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk—
To do with you and me?” The Captain raised
His hand and held it westward, where a patched
And unwashed attic-window filtered in
What barren light could reach us, and then said,
With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines
The sun. Behold it. We go round and round,
And wisdom comes to us with every whirl
We count throughout the circuit. We may say
The child is born, the boy becomes a man,
The man does this and that, and the man goes,—
But having said it we have not said much,
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Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think,
That it will be the end of anything
When I am gone? There was a soldier once
Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.
Sad friends went after, and they brought him home
And had a brass band at his funeral,
As you should have at mine; and after that
A few remembered him. But he was dead,
They said, and they should have their friend no more.—
However, there was once a starveling child—
A ragged-vested little incubus,
Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all
Capacity for childhood’s happiness—
Who started out one day, quite suddenly,
To drown himself. He ran away from home,
Across the clover-fields and through the woods,
And waited on a rock above a stream,
Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived,
Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,
There came along a man who looked at him
With such an unexpected friendliness,
And talked with him in such a common way,
That life grew marvelously different:
What he had lately known for sullen trunks
And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,
Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind
That once had made the loneliest of all
Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;
And water that had called him once to death
Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man,
Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.
Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you:
Good occupation for a sonneteer,
Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,
But small work for a soldier. By the way,
When you are weary sometimes of your own
Utility, I wonder if you find
Occasional great comfort pondering
What power a man has in him to put forth?
‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,
Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’
Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;
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‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods
He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,
Turning the broken mould, year after year.’…
“I turned a little furrow of my own
Once on a time, and everybody laughed—
As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not
The First Intelligence, which we have drawn
In our competitive humility
As if it went forever on two legs,
Had some diversion of it: I believe
God’s humor is the music of the spheres—
But even as we draft omnipotence
Itself to our own image, we pervert
The courage of an infinite ideal
To finite resignation. You have made
The cement of your churches out of tears
And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:
The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored
So long with unavailing compromise
Will crumble down to dust and blow away,
And younger dust will follow after them;
Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled
First atom of the least that ever flew
Shall be by man defrauded of the touch
God thrilled it with to make a dream for man
When Science was unborn. And after time,
When we have earned our spiritual ears,
And art’s commiseration of the truth
No longer glorifies the singing beast,
Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,—
Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,
Through time, through flesh, a music that is true.
For wisdom is that music, and all joy
That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think,
The burden of it in a thousand ways;
But as the bitterness that loads your tears
Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,
The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,
Make bitterness your buoyance of the world.
And at the fairest and the frenziedest
Alike of your God-fearing festivals,
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You so compound the truth to pamper fear
That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith
You clamor for the food that shadows eat.
You call it rapture or deliverance,—
Passion or exaltation, or what most
The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness
Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch
For something larger, something unfulfilled,
Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have
Never, until you learn to laugh with God.”
And with a calm Socratic patronage,
At once half sombre and half humorous,
The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs
And fixed his eyes on something far away;
Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd,
And at the moment unendurable
For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.
“But the brass band?” I said, not quite at ease
With altruism yet.—He made a sort
Of reminiscent little inward noise,
Midway between a chuckle and a laugh,
And that was all his answer: not a word
Of explanation or suggestion came
From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left,
I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow
And had the world-wide air to breathe again,—
Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth
And honored the endurance of his hand—
Whether or not, securely closeted
Up there in the stived haven of his den,
The man sat laughing at me; and I felt
My teeth grind hard together with a quaint
Revulsion—as I recognize it now—
Not only for my Captain, but as well
For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth;
Albeit I could swear, at the same time,
That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes.
I question if in tremors or in tears
There be more guidance to man’s worthiness
Than—well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes
It humors us to think that we possess
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By some divine adjustment of our own
Particular shrewd cells, or something else,
What others, for untutored sympathy,
Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives
To catch—like cheerful sinners to catch faith;
And I have not a doubt but I assumed
Some egotistic attribute like this
When, cautiously, next morning I reduced
The fretful qualms of my novitiate,
For most part, to an undigested pride.
Only, I live convinced that I regret
This enterprise no more than I regret
My life; and I am glad that I was born.
That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found
The faces of my comrades all suffused
With what I chose then to denominate
Superfluous good feeling. In return,
They loaded me with titles of odd form
And unexemplified significance,
Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,”
“Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,”
“Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one more
That I remember, and a dozen more
That I forget. I may have been disturbed,
I do not say that I was not annoyed,
But something of the same serenity
That fortified me later made me feel
For their skin-pricking arrows not so much
Of pain as of a vigorous defect
In this world’s archery. I might have tried,
With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate
What they had only snapped at and thereby
Made out of my best evidence no more
Than comfortable food for their conceit;
But patient wisdom frowned on argument,
With a side nod for silence, and I smoked
A series of incurable dry pipes
While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care,
Things that I wished he wouldn’t. Killigrew,
Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass,
Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made
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Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.
It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats
That night, but I have rather to believe
As I lay turning, twisting, listening,
And wondering, between great sleepless yawns,
What possible satisfaction those dead leaves
Could find in sending shadows to my room
And swinging them like black rags on a line,
That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness
Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned
In fearing to believe what I believed,
And I was paying for it.—Whimsical,
You think,—factitious; but “there is no luck,
No fate, no fortune for us, but the old
Unswerving and inviolable price
Gets paid: God sells himself eternally,
But never gives a crust,” my friend had said;
And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats,
And with half mad minuteness analyzed
The Captain’s attitude and then my own,
I felt at length as one who throws himself
Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark,
And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up
And opens them again, what seems at first
An unfamiliar sunlight in his room
And in his life—as if the child in him
Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew
Some prowling superfluity of child
In me had found the child in Captain Craig
And let the sunlight reach him. While I slept,
My thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams,
And in the morning it was with me still.
Through March and shifting April to the time
When winter first becomes a memory
My friend the Captain—to my other friend’s
Incredulous regret that such as he
Should ever get the talons of his talk
So fixed in my unfledged credulity—
Kept up the peroration of his life,
Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think,
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Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh
Sometimes, and then again he made me weep
Almost; for I had insufficiency
Enough in me to make me know the truth
Within the jest, and I could feel it there
As well as if it were the folded note
I felt between my fingers. I had said
Before that I should have to go away
And leave him for the season; and his eyes
Had shone with well-becoming interest
At that intelligence. There was no mist
In them that I remember; but I marked
An unmistakable self-questioning
And a reticence of unassumed regret.
The two together made anxiety—
Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see
No more of him for six or seven months,
And I was there to tell him as I might
What humorous provision we had made
For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town.
That finished—with a few more commonplace
Prosaics on the certified event
Of my return to find him young again—
I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us,
Nor over much at odds with destiny.
At any rate, save always for a look
That I had seen too often to mistake
Or to forget, he gave no other sign.
That train began to move; and as it moved,
I felt a comfortable sudden change
All over and inside. Partly it seemed
As if the strings of me had all at once
Gone down a tone or two; and even though
It made me scowl to think so trivial
A touch had owned the strength to tighten them,
It made me laugh to think that I was free.
But free from what—when I began to turn
The question round—was more than I could say:
I was no longer vexed with Killigrew,
Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig;
But I was eased of some restraint, I thought,
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Not qualified by those amenities,
And I should have to search the matter down;
For I was young, and I was very keen.
So I began to smoke a bad cigar
That Plunket, in his love, had given me
The night before; and as I smoked I watched
The flying mirrors for a mile or so,
Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint,
They gave me of the woodland over west,
A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years
Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail,
With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky;
And yawning out of that I set myself
To face again the loud monotonous ride
That lay before me like a vista drawn
Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,#NFDB
756:The Princess (Part 2)
At break of day the College Portress came:
She brought us Academic silks, in hue
The lilac, with a silken hood to each,
And zoned with gold; and now when these were on,
And we as rich as moths from dusk cocoons,
She, curtseying her obeisance, let us know
The Princess Ida waited: out we paced,
I first, and following through the porch that sang
All round with laurel, issued in a court
Compact of lucid marbles, bossed with lengths
Of classic frieze, with ample awnings gay
Betwixt the pillars, and with great urns of flowers.
The Muses and the Graces, grouped in threes,
Enringed a billowing fountain in the midst;
And here and there on lattice edges lay
Or book or lute; but hastily we past,
And up a flight of stairs into the hall.
There at a board by tome and paper sat,
With two tame leopards couched beside her throne,
All beauty compassed in a female form,
The Princess; liker to the inhabitant
Of some clear planet close upon the Sun,
Than our man's earth; such eyes were in her head,
And so much grace and power, breathing down
From over her arched brows, with every turn
Lived through her to the tips of her long hands,
And to her feet. She rose her height, and said:
'We give you welcome: not without redound
Of use and glory to yourselves ye come,
The first-fruits of the stranger: aftertime,
And that full voice which circles round the grave,
Will rank you nobly, mingled up with me.
What! are the ladies of your land so tall?'
'We of the court' said Cyril. 'From the court'
She answered, 'then ye know the Prince?' and he:
'The climax of his age! as though there were
One rose in all the world, your Highness that,
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He worships your ideal:' she replied:
'We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear
This barren verbiage, current among men,
Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.
Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem
As arguing love of knowledge and of power;
Your language proves you still the child. Indeed,
We dream not of him: when we set our hand
To this great work, we purposed with ourself
Never to wed. You likewise will do well,
Ladies, in entering here, to cast and fling
The tricks, which make us toys of men, that so,
Some future time, if so indeed you will,
You may with those self-styled our lords ally
Your fortunes, justlier balanced, scale with scale.'
At those high words, we conscious of ourselves,
Perused the matting: then an officer
Rose up, and read the statutes, such as these:
Not for three years to correspond with home;
Not for three years to cross the liberties;
Not for three years to speak with any men;
And many more, which hastily subscribed,
We entered on the boards: and 'Now,' she cried,
'Ye are green wood, see ye warp not. Look, our hall!
Our statues!--not of those that men desire,
Sleek Odalisques, or oracles of mode,
Nor stunted squaws of West or East; but she
That taught the Sabine how to rule, and she
The foundress of the Babylonian wall,
The Carian Artemisia strong in war,
The Rhodope, that built the pyramid,
Clelia, Cornelia, with the Palmyrene
That fought Aurelian, and the Roman brows
Of Agrippina. Dwell with these, and lose
Convention, since to look on noble forms
Makes noble through the sensuous organism
That which is higher. O lift your natures up:
Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
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And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble. Leave us: you may go:
Today the Lady Psyche will harangue
The fresh arrivals of the week before;
For they press in from all the provinces,
And fill the hive.'
She spoke, and bowing waved
Dismissal: back again we crost the court
To Lady Psyche's: as we entered in,
There sat along the forms, like morning doves
That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch,
A patient range of pupils; she herself
Erect behind a desk of satin-wood,
A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed,
And on the hither side, or so she looked,
Of twenty summers. At her left, a child,
In shining draperies, headed like a star,
Her maiden babe, a double April old,
Aglaïa slept. We sat: the Lady glanced:
Then Florian, but not livelier than the dame
That whispered 'Asses' ears', among the sedge,
'My sister.' 'Comely, too, by all that's fair,'
Said Cyril. 'Oh hush, hush!' and she began.
'This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides,
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets: then the monster, then the man;
Tattooed or woaded, winter-clad in skins,
Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate;
As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here
Among the lowest.'
Thereupon she took
A bird's-eye-view of all the ungracious past;
Glanced at the legendary Amazon
As emblematic of a nobler age;
Appraised the Lycian custom, spoke of those
That lay at wine with Lar and Lucumo;
Ran down the Persian, Grecian, Roman lines
Of empire, and the woman's state in each,
How far from just; till warming with her theme
She fulmined out her scorn of laws Salique
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And little-footed China, touched on Mahomet
With much contempt, and came to chivalry:
When some respect, however slight, was paid
To woman, superstition all awry:
However then commenced the dawn: a beam
Had slanted forward, falling in a land
Of promise; fruit would follow. Deep, indeed,
Their debt of thanks to her who first had dared
To leap the rotten pales of prejudice,
Disyoke their necks from custom, and assert
None lordlier than themselves but that which made
Woman and man. She had founded; they must build.
Here might they learn whatever men were taught:
Let them not fear: some said their heads were less:
Some men's were small; not they the least of men;
For often fineness compensated size:
Besides the brain was like the hand, and grew
With using; thence the man's, if more was more;
He took advantage of his strength to be
First in the field: some ages had been lost;
But woman ripened earlier, and her life
Was longer; and albeit their glorious names
Were fewer, scattered stars, yet since in truth
The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,
Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,
But Homer, Plato, Verulam; even so
With woman: and in arts of government
Elizabeth and others; arts of war
The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace
Sappho and others vied with any man:
And, last not least, she who had left her place,
And bowed her state to them, that they might grow
To use and power on this Oasis, lapt
In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight
Of ancient influence and scorn.
At last
She rose upon a wind of prophecy
Dilating on the future; 'everywhere
Who heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
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Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind:
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:
And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth
Should bear a double growth of those rare souls,
Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.'
She ended here, and beckoned us: the rest
Parted; and, glowing full-faced welcome, she
Began to address us, and was moving on
In gratulation, till as when a boat
Tacks, and the slackened sail flaps, all her voice
Faltering and fluttering in her throat, she cried
'My brother!' 'Well, my sister.' 'O,' she said,
'What do you here? and in this dress? and these?
Why who are these? a wolf within the fold!
A pack of wolves! the Lord be gracious to me!
A plot, a plot, a plot to ruin all!'
'No plot, no plot,' he answered. 'Wretched boy,
How saw you not the inscription on the gate,
LET NO MAN ENTER IN ON PAIN OF DEATH?'
'And if I had,' he answered, 'who could think
The softer Adams of your Academe,
O sister, Sirens though they be, were such
As chanted on the blanching bones of men?'
'But you will find it otherwise' she said.
'You jest: ill jesting with edge-tools! my vow
Binds me to speak, and O that iron will,
That axelike edge unturnable, our Head,
The Princess.' 'Well then, Psyche, take my life,
And nail me like a weasel on a grange
For warning: bury me beside the gate,
And cut this epitaph above my bones;
~Here lies a brother by a sister slain,
All for the common good of womankind.~'
'Let me die too,' said Cyril, 'having seen
And heard the Lady Psyche.'
I struck in:
'Albeit so masked, Madam, I love the truth;
Receive it; and in me behold the Prince
Your countryman, affianced years ago
To the Lady Ida: here, for here she was,
730
And thus (what other way was left) I came.'
'O Sir, O Prince, I have no country; none;
If any, this; but none. Whate'er I was
Disrooted, what I am is grafted here.
Affianced, Sir? love-whispers may not breathe
Within this vestal limit, and how should I,
Who am not mine, say, live: the thunderbolt
Hangs silent; but prepare: I speak; it falls.'
'Yet pause,' I said: 'for that inscription there,
I think no more of deadly lurks therein,
Than in a clapper clapping in a garth,
To scare the fowl from fruit: if more there be,
If more and acted on, what follows? war;
Your own work marred: for this your Academe,
Whichever side be Victor, in the halloo
Will topple to the trumpet down, and pass
With all fair theories only made to gild
A stormless summer.' 'Let the Princess judge
Of that' she said: 'farewell, Sir--and to you.
I shudder at the sequel, but I go.'
'Are you that Lady Psyche,' I rejoined,
'The fifth in line from that old Florian,
Yet hangs his portrait in my father's hall
(The gaunt old Baron with his beetle brow
Sun-shaded in the heat of dusty fights)
As he bestrode my Grandsire, when he fell,
And all else fled? we point to it, and we say,
The loyal warmth of Florian is not cold,
But branches current yet in kindred veins.'
'Are you that Psyche,' Florian added; 'she
With whom I sang about the morning hills,
Flung ball, flew kite, and raced the purple fly,
And snared the squirrel of the glen? are you
That Psyche, wont to bind my throbbing brow,
To smoothe my pillow, mix the foaming draught
Of fever, tell me pleasant tales, and read
My sickness down to happy dreams? are you
That brother-sister Psyche, both in one?
You were that Psyche, but what are you now?'
'You are that Psyche,' said Cyril, 'for whom
I would be that for ever which I seem,
731
Woman, if I might sit beside your feet,
And glean your scattered sapience.'
Then once more,
'Are you that Lady Psyche,' I began,
'That on her bridal morn before she past
From all her old companions, when the kind
Kissed her pale cheek, declared that ancient ties
Would still be dear beyond the southern hills;
That were there any of our people there
In want or peril, there was one to hear
And help them? look! for such are these and I.'
'Are you that Psyche,' Florian asked, 'to whom,
In gentler days, your arrow-wounded fawn
Came flying while you sat beside the well?
The creature laid his muzzle on your lap,
And sobbed, and you sobbed with it, and the blood
Was sprinkled on your kirtle, and you wept.
That was fawn's blood, not brother's, yet you wept.
O by the bright head of my little niece,
You were that Psyche, and what are you now?'
'You are that Psyche,' Cyril said again,
'The mother of the sweetest little maid,
That ever crowed for kisses.'
'Out upon it!'
She answered, 'peace! and why should I not play
The Spartan Mother with emotion, be
The Lucius Junius Brutus of my kind?
Him you call great: he for the common weal,
The fading politics of mortal Rome,
As I might slay this child, if good need were,
Slew both his sons: and I, shall I, on whom
The secular emancipation turns
Of half this world, be swerved from right to save
A prince, a brother? a little will I yield.
Best so, perchance, for us, and well for you.
O hard, when love and duty clash! I fear
My conscience will not count me fleckless; yet-Hear my conditions: promise (otherwise
You perish) as you came, to slip away
Today, tomorrow, soon: it shall be said,
These women were too barbarous, would not learn;
They fled, who might have shamed us: promise, all.'
732
What could we else, we promised each; and she,
Like some wild creature newly-caged, commenced
A to-and-fro, so pacing till she paused
By Florian; holding out her lily arms
Took both his hands, and smiling faintly said:
'I knew you at the first: though you have grown
You scarce have altered: I am sad and glad
To see you, Florian. ~I~ give thee to death
My brother! it was duty spoke, not I.
My needful seeming harshness, pardon it.
Our mother, is she well?'
With that she kissed
His forehead, then, a moment after, clung
About him, and betwixt them blossomed up
From out a common vein of memory
Sweet household talk, and phrases of the hearth,
And far allusion, till the gracious dews
Began to glisten and to fall: and while
They stood, so rapt, we gazing, came a voice,
'I brought a message here from Lady Blanche.'
Back started she, and turning round we saw
The Lady Blanche's daughter where she stood,
Melissa, with her hand upon the lock,
A rosy blonde, and in a college gown,
That clad her like an April daffodilly
(Her mother's colour) with her lips apart,
And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes,
As bottom agates seen to wave and float
In crystal currents of clear morning seas.
So stood that same fair creature at the door.
Then Lady Psyche, 'Ah--Melissa--you!
You heard us?' and Melissa, 'O pardon me
I heard, I could not help it, did not wish:
But, dearest Lady, pray you fear me not,
Nor think I bear that heart within my breast,
To give three gallant gentlemen to death.'
'I trust you,' said the other, 'for we two
Were always friends, none closer, elm and vine:
But yet your mother's jealous temperament-Let not your prudence, dearest, drowse, or prove
733
The Danaïd of a leaky vase, for fear
This whole foundation ruin, and I lose
My honour, these their lives.' 'Ah, fear me not'
Replied Melissa; 'no--I would not tell,
No, not for all Aspasia's cleverness,
No, not to answer, Madam, all those hard things
That Sheba came to ask of Solomon.'
'Be it so' the other, 'that we still may lead
The new light up, and culminate in peace,
For Solomon may come to Sheba yet.'
Said Cyril, 'Madam, he the wisest man
Feasted the woman wisest then, in halls
Of Lebanonian cedar: nor should you
(Though, Madam, ~you~ should answer, ~we~ would ask)
Less welcome find among us, if you came
Among us, debtors for our lives to you,
Myself for something more.' He said not what,
But 'Thanks,' she answered 'Go: we have been too long
Together: keep your hoods about the face;
They do so that affect abstraction here.
Speak little; mix not with the rest; and hold
Your promise: all, I trust, may yet be well.'
We turned to go, but Cyril took the child,
And held her round the knees against his waist,
And blew the swollen cheek of a trumpeter,
While Psyche watched them, smiling, and the child
Pushed her flat hand against his face and laughed;
And thus our conference closed.
And then we strolled
For half the day through stately theatres
Benched crescent-wise. In each we sat, we heard
The grave Professor. On the lecture slate
The circle rounded under female hands
With flawless demonstration: followed then
A classic lecture, rich in sentiment,
With scraps of thunderous Epic lilted out
By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies
And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever: then we dipt in all
That treats of whatsoever is, the state,
734
The total chronicles of man, the mind,
The morals, something of the frame, the rock,
The star, the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower,
Electric, chemic laws, and all the rest,
And whatsoever can be taught and known;
Till like three horses that have broken fence,
And glutted all night long breast-deep in corn,
We issued gorged with knowledge, and I spoke:
'Why, Sirs, they do all this as well as we.'
'They hunt old trails' said Cyril 'very well;
But when did woman ever yet invent?'
'Ungracious!' answered Florian; 'have you learnt
No more from Psyche's lecture, you that talked
The trash that made me sick, and almost sad?'
'O trash' he said, 'but with a kernel in it.
Should I not call her wise, who made me wise?
And learnt? I learnt more from her in a flash,
Than in my brainpan were an empty hull,
And every Muse tumbled a science in.
A thousand hearts lie fallow in these halls,
And round these halls a thousand baby loves
Fly twanging headless arrows at the hearts,
Whence follows many a vacant pang; but O
With me, Sir, entered in the bigger boy,
The Head of all the golden-shafted firm,
The long-limbed lad that had a Psyche too;
He cleft me through the stomacher; and now
What think you of it, Florian? do I chase
The substance or the shadow? will it hold?
I have no sorcerer's malison on me,
No ghostly hauntings like his Highness. I
Flatter myself that always everywhere
I know the substance when I see it. Well,
Are castles shadows? Three of them? Is she
The sweet proprietress a shadow? If not,
Shall those three castles patch my tattered coat?
For dear are those three castles to my wants,
And dear is sister Psyche to my heart,
And two dear things are one of double worth,
And much I might have said, but that my zone
Unmanned me: then the Doctors! O to hear
The Doctors! O to watch the thirsty plants
735
Imbibing! once or twice I thought to roar,
To break my chain, to shake my mane: but thou,
Modulate me, Soul of mincing mimicry!
Make liquid treble of that bassoon, my throat;
Abase those eyes that ever loved to meet
Star-sisters answering under crescent brows;
Abate the stride, which speaks of man, and loose
A flying charm of blushes o'er this cheek,
Where they like swallows coming out of time
Will wonder why they came: but hark the bell
For dinner, let us go!'
And in we streamed
Among the columns, pacing staid and still
By twos and threes, till all from end to end
With beauties every shade of brown and fair
In colours gayer than the morning mist,
The long hall glittered like a bed of flowers.
How might a man not wander from his wits
Pierced through with eyes, but that I kept mine own
Intent on her, who rapt in glorious dreams,
The second-sight of some Astræan age,
Sat compassed with professors: they, the while,
Discussed a doubt and tost it to and fro:
A clamour thickened, mixt with inmost terms
Of art and science: Lady Blanche alone
Of faded form and haughtiest lineaments,
With all her autumn tresses falsely brown,
Shot sidelong daggers at us, a tiger-cat
In act to spring.
At last a solemn grace
Concluded, and we sought the gardens: there
One walked reciting by herself, and one
In this hand held a volume as to read,
And smoothed a petted peacock down with that:
Some to a low song oared a shallop by,
Or under arches of the marble bridge
Hung, shadowed from the heat: some hid and sought
In the orange thickets: others tost a ball
Above the fountain-jets, and back again
With laughter: others lay about the lawns,
Of the older sort, and murmured that their May
Was passing: what was learning unto them?
736
They wished to marry; they could rule a house;
Men hated learned women: but we three
Sat muffled like the Fates; and often came
Melissa hitting all we saw with shafts
Of gentle satire, kin to charity,
That harmed not: then day droopt; the chapel bells
Called us: we left the walks; we mixt with those
Six hundred maidens clad in purest white,
Before two streams of light from wall to wall,
While the great organ almost burst his pipes,
Groaning for power, and rolling through the court
A long melodious thunder to the sound
Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies,
The work of Ida, to call down from Heaven
A blessing on her labours for the world.
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon, and blow,
Blow him again to me;
While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.
Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest, on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west
Under the silver moon:
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
757:
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than the pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men's knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?
More serene than Cordelia's countenance?
More full of visions than a high romance?
What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!
Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!
Silent entangler of a beauty's tresses!
Most happy listener! when the morning blesses
Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes
That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise.
But what is higher beyond thought than thee?
Fresher than berries of a mountain tree?
More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal,
Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle?
What is it? And to what shall I compare it?
It has a glory, and naught else can share it:
The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy,
Chasing away all worldliness and folly;
Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder,
Or the low rumblings earth's regions under;
And sometimes like a gentle whispering
Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing
That breathes about us in the vacant air;
So that we look around with prying stare,
Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning,
And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning;
To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended,
That is to crown our name when life is ended.
Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice,
And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice!
Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things,
And die away in ardent mutterings.
No one who once the glorious sun has seen,
And all the clouds, and felt his bosom clean
For his great Maker's presence, but must know
What 'tis I mean, and feel his being glow:
Therefore no insult will I give his spirit,
By telling what he sees from native merit.
O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven- Should I rather kneel
Upon some mountain-top until I feel
A glowing splendour round about me hung,
And echo back the voice of thine own tongue?
O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my ardent prayer,
Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air,
Smooth'd for intoxication by the breath
Of flowering bays, that I may die a death
Of luxury, and my young spirit follow
The morning sun-beams to the great Apollo
Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear
The o'erwhelming sweets, 'twill bring to me the fair
Visions of all places: a bowery nook
Will be elysium- an eternal book
Whence I may copy many a lovely saying
About the leaves, and flowers- about the playing
Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid;
And many a verse from so strange influence
That we must ever wonder how, and whence
It came. Also imaginings will hover
Round my fire-side, and haply there discover
Vistas of solemn beauty, where I'd wander
In happy silence, like the clear Meander
Through its lone vales; and where I found a spot
Of awfuller shade, or an enchanted grot,
Or a green hill o'erspread with chequer'd dress
Of flowers, and fearful from its loveliness,
Write on my tablets all that was permitted,
All that was for our human senses fitted.
Then the events of this wide world I'd seize
Like a strong giant, and my spirit teaze
Till at its shoulders it should proudly see
Wings to find out an immortality.
Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep
Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.
O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.
Then will I pass the countries that I see
In long perspective, and continually
Taste their pure fountains. First the realm I'll pass
Of Flora, and old Pan: sleep in the grass,
Feed upon apples red, and strawberries,
And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees;
Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places,
To woo sweet kisses from averted faces,-
Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white
Into a pretty shrinking with a bite
As hard as lips can make it: till agreed,
A lovely tale of human life we'll read.
And one will teach a tame dove how it best
May fan the cool air gently o'er my rest;
Another, bending o'er her nimble tread,
Will set a green robe floating round her head,
And still will dance with ever varied ease,
Smiling upon the flowers and the trees:
Another will entice me on, and on
Through almond blossoms and rich cinnamon;
Till in the bosom of a leafy world
We rest in silence, like two gems upcurl'd
In the recesses of a pearly shell.
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts: for lo! I see afar,
O'ersailing the blue cragginess, a car
And steeds with streamy manes- the charioteer
Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear:
And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly
Along a huge cloud's ridge; and now with sprightly
Wheel downward come they into fresher skies,
Tipt round with silver from the sun's bright eyes.
Still downward with capacious whirl they glide;
And now I see them on the green-hill's side
In breezy rest among the nodding stalks.
The charioteer with wond'rous gesture talks
To the trees and mountains; and there soon appear
Shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear,
Passing along before a dusky space
Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase
Some ever- fleeting music on they sweep.
Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep:
Some with upholden hand and mouth severe;
Some with their faces muffled to the ear
Between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom,
Go glad and smilingly athwart the gloom;
Some looking back, and some with upward gaze;
Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways
Flit onward- now a lovely wreath of girls
Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls;
And now broad wings. Most awfully intent
The driver of those steeds is forward bent,
And seems to listen: O that I might know
All that he writes with such a hurrying glow.
The visions all are fled- the car is fled
Into the light of heaven, and in their stead
A sense of real things comes doubly strong,
And, like a muddy stream, would bear along
My soul to nothingness: but I will strive
Against all doubtings, and will keep alive
The thought of that same chariot, and the strange
Journey it went.
Is there so small a range
In the present strength of manhood, that the high
Imagination cannot freely fly
As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds,
Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds
Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows? Here her altar shone,
E'en in this isle; and who could paragon
The fervid choir that lifted up a noise
Of harmony, to where it aye will poise
Its mighty self of convoluting sound,
Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,
Eternally around a dizzy void?
Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd
With honors; nor had any other care
Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair.
Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse,
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
Its gathering waves- ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,- were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,- no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large
The name of one Boileau!
O ye whose charge
It is to hover round our pleasant hills!
Whose congregated majesty so fills
My boundly reverence, that I cannot trace
Your hallowed names, in this unholy place,
So near those common folk; did not their shames
Affright you? Did our old lamenting Thames
Delight you? Did ye never cluster round
Delicious Avon, with a mournful sound,
And weep? Or did ye wholly bid adieu
To regions where no more the laurel grew?
Or did ye stay to give a welcoming
To some lone spirits who could proudly sing
Their youth away, and die? 'Twas even so:
But let me think away those times of woe:
Now 'tis a fairer season; ye have breathed
Rich benedictions o'er us; ye have wreathed
Fresh garlands: for sweet music has been heard
In many places;- some has been upstirr'd
From out its crystal dwelling in a lake,
By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake,
Nested and quiet in a valley mild,
Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild
About the earth: happy are ye and glad.
These things are doubtless: yet in truth we've had
Strange thunders from the potency of song;
Mingled indeed with what is sweet and strong,
From majesty: but in clear truth the themes
Are ugly clubs, the Poets' Polyphemes
Disturbing the grand sea. A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme of power;
'Tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.
The very archings of her eye-lids charm
A thousand willing agents to obey,
And still she governs with the mildest sway:
But strength alone though of the Muses born
Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,
Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres
Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs,
And thorns of life; forgetting the great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.
Yet I rejoice: a myrtle fairer than
E'er grew in Paphos, from the bitter weeds
Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds
A silent space with ever sprouting green.
All tenderest birds there find a pleasant screen,
Creep through the shade with jaunty fluttering,
Nibble the little cupped flowers and sing.
Then let us clear away the choking thorns
From round its gentle stem; let the young fawns,
Yeaned in after times, when we are flown,
Find a fresh sward beneath it, overgrown
With simple flowers: let there nothing be
More boisterous than a lover's bended knee;
Nought more ungentle than the placid look
Of one who leans upon a closed book;
Nought more untranquil than the grassy slopes
Between two hills. All hail delightful hopes!
As she was wont, th' imagination
Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone,
And they shall be accounted poet kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.
O may these joys be ripe before I die.
Will not some say that I presumptuously
Have spoken? that from hastening disgrace
'Twere better far to hide my foolish face?
That whining boyhood should with reverence bow
Ere the dread thunderbolt could reach? How!
If I do hide myself, it sure shall be
In the very fane, the light of Poesy:
If I do fall, at least I will be laid
Beneath the silence of a poplar shade;
And over me the grass shall be smooth shaven;
And there shall be a kind memorial graven.
But off Despondence! miserable bane!
They should not know thee, who athirst to gain
A noble end, are thirsty every hour.
What though I am not wealthy in the dower
Of spanning wisdom; though I do not know
The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow
Hither and thither all the changing thoughts
Of man: though no great minist'ring reason sorts
Out the dark mysteries of human souls
To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls
A vast idea before me, and I glean
Therefrom my liberty; thence too I've seen
The end and aim of Poesy. 'Tis clear
As anything most true; as that the year
Is made of the four seasons- manifest
As a large cross, some old cathedral's crest,
Lifted to the white clouds. Therefore should I
Be but the essence of deformity,
A coward, did my very eye-lids wink
At speaking out what I have dared to think.
Ah! rather let me like a madman run
Over some precipice; let the hot sun
Melt my Dedalian wings, and drive me down
Convuls'd and headlong! Stay! an inward frown
Of conscience bids me be more calm awhile.
An ocean dim, sprinkled with many an isle,
Spreads awfully before me. How much toil!
How many days! what desperate turmoil!
Ere I can have explored its widenesses.
Ah, what a task! upon my bended knees,
I could unsay those- no, impossible!
Impossible!
For sweet relief I'll dwell
On humbler thoughts, and let this strange assay
Begun in gentleness die so away.
E'en now all tumult from my bosom fades:
I turn full hearted to the friendly aids
That smooth the path of honour; brotherhood,
And friendliness the nurse of mutual good.
The hearty grasp that sends a pleasant sonnet
Into the brain ere one can think upon it;
The silence when some rhymes are coming out;
And when they're come, the very pleasant rout:
The message certain to be done to-morrow.
'Tis perhaps as well that it should be to borrow
Some precious book from out its snug retreat,
To cluster round it when we next shall meet.
Scarce can I scribble on; for lovely airs
Are fluttering round the room like doves in pairs;
Many delights of that glad day recalling,
When first my senses caught their tender falling.
And with these airs come forms of elegance
Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance,
Careless, and grand-fingers soft and round
Parting luxuriant curls;- and the swift bound
Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.
Thus I remember all the pleasant flow
Of words at opening a portfolio.
Things such as these are ever harbingers
To trains of peaceful images: the stirs
Of a swan's neck unseen among the rushes:
A linnet starting all about the bushes:
A butterfly, with golden wings broad parted,
Nestling a rose, convuls'd as though it smarted
With over pleasure- many, many more,
Might I indulge at large in all my store
Of luxuries: yet I must not forget
Sleep, quiet with his poppy coronet:
For what there may be worthy in these rhymes
I partly owe to him: and thus, the chimes
Of friendly voices had just given place
To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace
The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.
It was a poet's house who keeps the keys
Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung
The glorious features of the bards who sung
In other ages- cold and sacred busts
Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts
To clear Futurity his darling fame!
Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim
At swelling apples with a frisky leap
And reaching fingers, 'mid a luscious heap
Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane
Of liny marble, and thereto a train
Of nymphs approaching fairly o'er the sward:
One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward
The dazzling sun-rise: two sisters sweet
Bending their graceful figures till they meet
Over the trippings of a little child:
And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild
Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.
See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping
Cherishingly Diana's timorous limbs;-
A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims
At the bath's edge, and keeps a gentle motion
With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean
Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er
Its rocky marge, and balances once more
The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam
Feel all about their undulating home.
Sappho's meek head was there half smiling down
At nothing; just as though the earnest frown
Of over thinking had that moment gone
From off her brow, and left her all alone.
Great Alfred's too, with anxious, pitying eyes,
As if he always listened to the sighs
Of the goaded world; and Kosciusko's worn
By horrid suffrance- mightily forlorn.
Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,
Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean
His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!
For over them was seen a free display
Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone
The face of Poesy: from off her throne
She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell.
The very sense of where I was might well
Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast; so that the morning light
Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay,
Resolving to begin that very day
These lines; and howsoever they be done,
I leave them as a father does his son.
THE END
(lines 250-1): An idea, says Leigh Hunt... "of as lovely and powerful a nature in embodying an abstraction, as we ever remember to have seen put into words."
(line 354): Leigh Hunt's house: he says ... the poem "originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures," -- "many a bust from Shout," as Shelley wrote to Mrs. Gisborne. In Hunt's Correspondence (Volume i, page 289) we read "Keats's Sleep and Poetry is a description of a parlour that was mine, no bigger than an old mansion's closet." Charles Cowden Clarke says (Gentleman's Magazine, February 1874) "It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had been made up for him on the sofa." ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Crowell publ. 1895. by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes
~ Chaucer
,#NFDB
758:The Book Of Annandale
Partly to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends—
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gaze—and went upstairs;
And there, in the one room that he could call
His own, he found a sort of meaningless
Annoyance in the mute familiar things
That filled it; for the grate’s monotonous gleam
Was not the gleam that he had known before,
The books were not the books that used to be,
The place was not the place. There was a lack
Of something; and the certitude of death
Itself, as with a furtive questioning,
Hovered, and he could not yet understand.
He knew that she was gone—there was no need
Of any argued proof to tell him that,
For they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the leaves and snow; and still there was
A doubt, a pitiless doubt, a plunging doubt,
That struck him, and upstartled when it struck,
The vision, the old thought in him. There was
A lack, and one that wrenched him; but it was
Not that—not that. There was a present sense
Of something indeterminably near—
The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness
That would not be foreboding. And if not,
What then?—or was it anything at all?
Yes, it was something—it was everything—
But what was everything? or anything?
Tired of time, bewildered, he sat down;
But in his chair he kept on wondering
That he should feel so desolately strange
And yet—for all he knew that he had lost
More of the world than most men ever win—
So curiously calm. And he was left
Unanswered and unsatisfied: there came
No clearer meaning to him than had come
275
Before; the old abstraction was the best
That he could find, the farthest he could go;
To that was no beginning and no end—
No end that he could reach. So he must learn
To live the surest and the largest life
Attainable in him, would he divine
The meaning of the dream and of the words
That he had written, without knowing why,
On sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather. There it was—
There in his desk, the record he had made,
The spiritual plaything of his life:
There were the words no eyes had ever seen
Save his; there were the words that were not made
For glory or for gold. The pretty wife
Whom he had loved and lost had not so much
As heard of them. They were not made for her.
His love had been so much the life of her,
And hers had been so much the life of him,
That any wayward phrasing on his part
Would have had no moment. Neither had lived enough
To know the book, albeit one of them
Had grown enough to write it. There it was,
However, though he knew not why it was:
There was the book, but it was not for her,
For she was dead. And yet, there was the book.
Thus would his fancy circle out and out,
And out and in again, till he would make
As if with a large freedom to crush down
Those under-thoughts. He covered with his hands
His tired eyes, and waited: he could hear—
Or partly feel and hear, mechanically—
The sound of talk, with now and then the steps
And skirts of some one scudding on the stairs,
Forgetful of the nerveless funeral feet
That she had brought with her; and more than once
There came to him a call as of a voice—
A voice of love returning—but not hers.
Whose he knew not, nor dreamed; nor did he know,
Nor did he dream, in his blurred loneliness
Of thought, what all the rest might think of him.
276
For it had come at last, and she was gone
With all the vanished women of old time,—
And she was never coming back again.
Yes, they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the frozen leaves and the cold earth,
Under the leaves and snow. The flickering week,
The sharp and certain day, and the long drowse
Were over, and the man was left alone.
He knew the loss—therefore it puzzled him
That he should sit so long there as he did,
And bring the whole thing back—the love, the trust,
The pallor, the poor face, and the faint way
She last had looked at him—and yet not weep,
Or even choose to look about the room
To see how sad it was; and once or twice
He winked and pinched his eyes against the flame
And hoped there might be tears. But hope was all,
And all to him was nothing: he was lost.
And yet he was not lost: he was astray—
Out of his life and in another life;
And in the stillness of this other life
He wondered and he drowsed. He wondered when
It was, and wondered if it ever was
On earth that he had known the other face—
The searching face, the eloquent, strange face—
That with a sightless beauty looked at him
And with a speechless promise uttered words
That were not the world’s words, or any kind
That he had known before. What was it, then?
What was it held him—fascinated him?
Why should he not be human? He could sigh,
And he could even groan,—but what of that?
There was no grief left in him. Was he glad?
Yet how could he be glad, or reconciled,
Or anything but wretched and undone?
How could he be so frigid and inert—
So like a man with water in his veins
Where blood had been a little while before?
How could he sit shut in there like a snail?
What ailed him? What was on him? Was he glad?
277
Over and over again the question came,
Unanswered and unchanged,—and there he was.
But what in heaven’s name did it all mean?
If he had lived as other men had lived,
If home had ever shown itself to be
The counterfeit that others had called home,
Then to this undivined resource of his
There were some key; but now … Philosophy?
Yes, he could reason in a kind of way
That he was glad for Miriam’s release—
Much as he might be glad to see his friends
Laid out around him with their grave-clothes on,
And this life done for them; but something else
There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed it,
And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff
Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries
That his half-tutored thought would half-project.
What was it, then? Had he become transformed
And hardened through long watches and long grief
Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing
That brooded like a man, breathed like a man,—
Did everything but ache? And was a day
To come some time when feeling should return
Forever to drive off that other face—
The lineless, indistinguishable face—
That once had thrilled itself between his own
And hers there on the pillow,—and again
Between him and the coffin-lid had flashed
Like fate before it closed,—and at the last
Had come, as it should seem, to stay with him,
Bidden or not? He were a stranger then,
Foredrowsed awhile by some deceiving draught
Of poppied anguish, to the covert grief
And the stark loneliness that waited him,
And for the time were cursedly endowed
With a dull trust that shammed indifference
To knowing there would be no touch again
Of her small hand on his, no silencing
Of her quick lips on his, no feminine
Completeness and love-fragrance in the house,
No sound of some one singing any more,
278
No smoothing of slow fingers on his hair,
No shimmer of pink slippers on brown tiles.
But there was nothing, nothing, in all that:
He had not fooled himself so much as that;
He might be dreaming or he might be sick,
But not like that. There was no place for fear,
No reason for remorse. There was the book
That he had made, though.… It might be the book;
Perhaps he might find something in the book;
But no, there could be nothing there at all—
He knew it word for word; but what it meant—
He was not sure that he had written it
For what it meant; and he was not quite sure
That he had written it;—more likely it
Was all a paper ghost.… But the dead wife
Was real: he knew all that, for he had been
To see them bury her; and he had seen
The flowers and the snow and the stripped limbs
Of trees; and he had heard the preacher pray;
And he was back again, and he was glad.
Was he a brute? No, he was not a brute:
He was a man—like any other man:
He had loved and married his wife Miriam,
They had lived a little while in paradise
And she was gone; and that was all of it.
But no, not all of it—not all of it:
There was the book again; something in that
Pursued him, overpowered him, put out
The futile strength of all his whys and wheres,
And left him unintelligibly numb—
Too numb to care for anything but rest.
It must have been a curious kind of book
That he had made it: it was a drowsy book
At any rate. The very thought of it
Was like the taste of some impossible drink—
A taste that had no taste, but for all that
Had mixed with it a strange thought-cordial,
So potent that it somehow killed in him
The ultimate need of doubting any more—
Of asking any more. Did he but live
279
The life that he must live, there were no more
To seek.—The rest of it was on the way.
Still there was nothing, nothing, in all this—
Nothing that he cared now to reconcile
With reason or with sorrow. All he knew
For certain was that he was tired out:
His flesh was heavy and his blood beat small;
Something supreme had been wrenched out of him
As if to make vague room for something else.
He had been through too much. Yes, he would stay
There where he was and rest.—And there he stayed;
The daylight became twilight, and he stayed;
The flame and the face faded, and he slept.
And they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the tight-screwed lid of a long box,
Under the earth, under the leaves and snow.
II
Look where she would, feed conscience how she might,
There was but one way now for Damaris—
One straight way that was hers, hers to defend,
At hand, imperious. But the nearness of it,
The flesh-bewildering simplicity,
And the plain strangeness of it, thrilled again
That wretched little quivering single string
Which yielded not, but held her to the place
Where now for five triumphant years had slept
The flameless dust of Argan.—He was gone,
The good man she had married long ago;
And she had lived, and living she had learned,
And surely there was nothing to regret:
Much happiness had been for each of them,
And they had been like lovers to the last:
And after that, and long, long after that,
Her tears had washed out more of widowed grief
Than smiles had ever told of other joy.—
But could she, looking back, find anything
That should return to her in the new time,
And with relentless magic uncreate
280
This temple of new love where she had thrown
Dead sorrow on the altar of new life?
Only one thing, only one thread was left;
When she broke that, when reason snapped it off,
And once for all, baffled, the grave let go
The trivial hideous hold it had on her,—
Then she were free, free to be what she would,
Free to be what she was.—And yet she stayed,
Leashed, as it were, and with a cobweb strand,
Close to a tombstone—maybe to starve there.
But why to starve? And why stay there at all?
Why not make one good leap and then be done
Forever and at once with Argan’s ghost
And all such outworn churchyard servitude?
For it was Argan’s ghost that held the string,
And her sick fancy that held Argan’s ghost—
Held it and pitied it. She laughed, almost,
There for the moment; but her strained eyes filled
With tears, and she was angry for those tears—
Angry at first, then proud, then sorry for them.
So she grew calm; and after a vain chase
For thoughts more vain, she questioned of herself
What measure of primeval doubts and fears
Were still to be gone through that she might win
Persuasion of her strength and of herself
To be what she could see that she must be,
No matter where the ghost was.—And the more
She lived, the more she came to recognize
That something out of her thrilled ignorance
Was luminously, proudly being born,
And thereby proving, thought by forward thought,
The prowess of its image; and she learned
At length to look right on to the long days
Before her without fearing. She could watch
The coming course of them as if they were
No more than birds, that slowly, silently,
And irretrievably should wing themselves
Uncounted out of sight. And when he came
Again, she might be free—she would be free.
Else, when he looked at her she must look down,
Defeated, and malignly dispossessed
281
Of what was hers to prove and in the proving
Wisely to consecrate. And if the plague
Of that perverse defeat should come to be—
If at that sickening end she were to find
Herself to be the same poor prisoner
That he had found at first—then she must lose
All sight and sound of him, she must abjure
All possible thought of him; for he would go
So far and for so long from her that love—
Yes, even a love like his, exiled enough,
Might for another’s touch be born again—
Born to be lost and starved for and not found;
Or, at the next, the second wretchedest,
It might go mutely flickering down and out,
And on some incomplete and piteous day,
Some perilous day to come, she might at last
Learn, with a noxious freedom, what it is
To be at peace with ghosts. Then were the blow
Thrice deadlier than any kind of death
Could ever be: to know that she had won
The truth too late—there were the dregs indeed
Of wisdom, and of love the final thrust
Unmerciful; and there where now did lie
So plain before her the straight radiance
Of what was her appointed way to take,
Were only the bleak ruts of an old road
That stretched ahead and faded and lay far
Through deserts of unconscionable years.
But vampire thoughts like these confessed the doubt
That love denied; and once, if never again,
They should be turned away. They might come back—
More craftily, perchance, they might come back—
And with a spirit-thirst insatiable
Finish the strength of her; but now, today
She would have none of them. She knew that love
Was true, that he was true, that she was true;
And should a death-bed snare that she had made
So long ago be stretched inexorably
Through all her life, only to be unspun
With her last breathing? And were bats and threads,
Accursedly devised with watered gules,
282
To be Love’s heraldry? What were it worth
To live and to find out that life were life
But for an unrequited incubus
Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown down
Till she had thrown down fear and overcome
The woman that was yet so much of her
That she might yet go mad? What were it worth
To live, to linger, and to be condemned
In her submission to a common thought
That clogged itself and made of its first faith
Its last impediment? What augured it,
Now in this quick beginning of new life,
To clutch the sunlight and be feeling back,
Back with a scared fantastic fearfulness,
To touch, not knowing why, the vexed-up ghost
Of what was gone?
Yes, there was Argan’s face,
Pallid and pinched and ruinously marked
With big pathetic bones; there were his eyes,
Quiet and large, fixed wistfully on hers;
And there, close-pressed again within her own,
Quivered his cold thin fingers. And, ah! yes,
There were the words, those dying words again,
And hers that answered when she promised him.
Promised him? … yes. And had she known the truth
Of what she felt that he should ask her that,
And had she known the love that was to be,
God knew that she could not have told him then.
But then she knew it not, nor thought of it;
There was no need of it; nor was there need
Of any problematical support
Whereto to cling while she convinced herself
That love’s intuitive utility,
Inexorably merciful, had proved
That what was human was unpermanent
And what was flesh was ashes. She had told
Him then that she would love no other man,
That there was not another man on earth
Whom she could ever love, or who could make
So much as a love thought go through her brain;
And he had smiled. And just before he died
283
His lips had made as if to say something—
Something that passed unwhispered with his breath,
Out of her reach, out of all quest of it.
And then, could she have known enough to know
The meaning of her grief, the folly of it,
The faithlessness and the proud anguish of it,
There might be now no threads to punish her,
No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood,
The life, the very soul of her.
Yes, Yes,
They might come back.… But why should they come back?
Why was it she had suffered? Why had she
Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate
That close without those hovering clouds of gloom
And through them here and there forever gleamed
The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory,
Which was of its own radiance good proof
That all the rest was darkness and blind sight?
And who was she? The woman she had known—
The woman she had petted and called “I”—
The woman she had pitied, and at last
Commiserated for the most abject
And persecuted of all womankind,—
Could it be she that had sought out the way
To measure and thereby to quench in her
The woman’s fear—the fear of her not fearing?
A nervous little laugh that lost itself,
Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts
An instant there that ever she should ask
What she might then have told so easily—
So easily that Annandale had frowned,
Had he been given wholly to be told
The truth of what had never been before
So passionately, so inevitably
Confessed.
For she could see from where she sat
The sheets that he had bound up like a book
And covered with red leather; and her eyes
Could see between the pages of the book,
Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And she could read
284
As well as if she had them in her hand,
What he had written on them long ago,—
Six years ago, when he was waiting for her.
She might as well have said that she could see
The man himself, as once he would have looked
Had she been there to watch him while he wrote
Those words, and all for her.… For her whose face
Had flashed itself, prophetic and unseen,
But not unspirited, between the life
That would have been without her and the life
That he had gathered up like frozen roots
Out of a grave-clod lying at his feet,
Unconsciously, and as unconsciously
Transplanted and revived. He did not know
The kind of life that he had found, nor did
He doubt, not knowing it; but well he knew
That it was life—new life, and that the old
Might then with unimprisoned wings go free,
Onward and all along to its own light,
Through the appointed shadow.
While she gazed
Upon it there she felt within herself
The growing of a newer consciousness—
The pride of something fairer than her first
Outclamoring of interdicted thought
Had ever quite foretold; and all at once
There quivered and requivered through her flesh,
Like music, like the sound of an old song,
Triumphant, love-remembered murmurings
Of what for passion’s innocence had been
Too mightily, too perilously hers,
Ever to be reclaimed and realized
Until today. Today she could throw off
The burden that had held her down so long,
And she could stand upright, and she could see
The way to take, with eyes that had in them
No gleam but of the spirit. Day or night,
No matter; she could see what was to see—
All that had been till now shut out from her,
The service, the fulfillment, and the truth,
And thus the cruel wiseness of it all.
285
So Damaris, more like than anything
To one long prisoned in a twilight cave
With hovering bats for all companionship,
And after time set free to fight the sun,
Laughed out, so glad she was to recognize
The test of what had been, through all her folly,
The courage of her conscience; for she knew,
Now on a late-flushed autumn afternoon
That else had been too bodeful of dead things
To be endured with aught but the same old
Inert, self-contradicted martyrdom
Which she had known so long, that she could look
Right forward through the years, nor any more
Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold
The glitter of dead summer on the grass,
Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees
Across the intervale where flashed along,
Black-silvered, the cold river. She had found,
As if by some transcendent freakishness
Of reason, the glad life that she had sought
Where naught but obvious clouds could ever be—
Clouds to put out the sunlight from her eyes,
And to put out the love-light from her soul.
But they were gone—now they were all gone;
And with a whimsied pathos, like the mist
Of grief that clings to new-found happiness
Hard wrought, she might have pity for the small
Defeated quest of them that brushed her sight
Like flying lint—lint that had once been thread.…
Yes, like an anodyne, the voice of him,
There were the words that he had made for her,
For her alone. The more she thought of them
The more she lived them, and the more she knew
The life-grip and the pulse of warm strength in them.
They were the first and last of words to her,
And there was in them a far questioning
That had for long been variously at work,
Divinely and elusively at work,
With her, and with the grace that had been hers;
They were eternal words, and they diffused
A flame of meaning that men’s lexicons
286
Had never kindled; they were choral words
That harmonized with love’s enduring chords
Like wisdom with release; triumphant words
That rang like elemental orisons
Through ages out of ages; words that fed
Love’s hunger in the spirit; words that smote;
Thrilled words that echoed, and barbed words that clung;—
And every one of them was like a friend
Whose obstinate fidelity, well tried,
Had found at last and irresistibly
The way to her close conscience, and thereby
Revealed the unsubstantial Nemesis
That she had clutched and shuddered at so long;
And every one of them was like a real
And ringing voice, clear toned and absolute,
But of a love-subdued authority
That uttered thrice the plain significance
Of what had else been generously vague
And indolently true. It may have been
The triumph and the magic of the soul,
Unspeakably revealed, that finally
Had reconciled the grim probationing
Of wisdom with unalterable faith,
But she could feel—not knowing what it was,
For the sheer freedom of it—a new joy
That humanized the latent wizardry
Of his prophetic voice and put for it
The man within the music.
So it came
To pass, like many a long-compelled emprise
That with its first accomplishment almost
Annihilates its own severity,
That she could find, whenever she might look,
The certified achievement of a love
That had endured, self-guarded and supreme,
To the glad end of all that wavering;
And she could see that now the flickering world
Of autumn was awake with sudden bloom,
New-born, perforce, of a slow bourgeoning.
And she had found what more than half had been
The grave-deluded, flesh-bewildered fear
287
Which men and women struggle to call faith,
To be the paid progression to an end
Whereat she knew the foresight and the strength
To glorify the gift of what was hers,
To vindicate the truth of what she was.
And had it come to her so suddenly?
There was a pity and a weariness
In asking that, and a great needlessness;
For now there were no wretched quivering strings
That held her to the churchyard any more:
There were no thoughts that flapped themselves like bats
Around her any more. The shield of love
Was clean, and she had paid enough to learn
How it had always been so. And the truth,
Like silence after some far victory,
Had come to her, and she had found it out
As if it were a vision, a thing born
So suddenly!—just as a flower is born,
Or as a world is born—so suddenly.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson,#NFDB
50 Integral Yoga
24 Philosophy
18 Christianity
13 Occultism
11 Psychology
9 Poetry
6 Yoga
5 Theosophy
4 Fiction
2 Hinduism
2 Cybernetics
1 Science
1 Mysticism
1 Integral Theory
1 Education
1 Buddhism
1 Baha i Faith
1 Alchemy
60 Sri Aurobindo
15 Plotinus
14 The Mother
11 Nolini Kanta Gupta
9 Satprem
8 Plato
7 Paul Richard
6 Jordan Peterson
5 William Wordsworth
5 Carl Jung
4 H P Lovecraft
3 Swami Krishnananda
3 Rudolf Steiner
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
3 Alice Bailey
3 Aleister Crowley
3 A B Purani
2 Vyasa
2 Swami Vivekananda
2 Norbert Wiener
2 James George Frazer
2 Edgar Allan Poe
20 The Synthesis Of Yoga
7 The Life Divine
6 Maps of Meaning
6 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
5 Wordsworth - Poems
5 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
5 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
4 The Secret Doctrine
4 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
4 Lovecraft - Poems
3 The Study and Practice of Yoga
3 The Human Cycle
3 Record of Yoga
3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
3 Letters On Poetry And Art
3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
3 Essays Divine And Human
3 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
2 Vishnu Purana
2 The Problems of Philosophy
2 Theosophy
2 The Golden Bough
2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
2 Talks
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
2 Mysterium Coniunctionis
2 Magick Without Tears
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Letters On Yoga I
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Cybernetics
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
2 Bhakti-Yoga
2 Agenda Vol 03
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mystic realities cannot be reached by the scientific consciousness, because they are far more subtle than the subtlest object that science can contemplate. The neutrons and positrons are for science today the finest and profoundest object-forces; they belong, it is said, almost to a borderl and where physics ends. Nor for that reason is a mystic reality something like a mathematical abstraction, -n for example. The mystic reality is subtler than the subtlest of physical things and yet, paradoxical to say, more concrete than the most concrete thing that the senses apprehend.
Furthermore, being so, the mystic domain is of infinitely greater potency than the domain of intra-atomic forces. If one comes, all on a sudden, into contact with a force here without the necessary preparation to hold and handle it, he may get seriously bruised, morally and physically. The adventure into the mystic domain has its own toll of casualtiesone can lose the mind, one can lose one's body even and it is a very common experience among those who have tried the path. It is not in vain and merely as a poetic metaphor that the ancient seers have said
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
As he read in college the rationalistic Western philosophers of the nineteenth century, his boyhood faith in God and religion was unsettled. He would not accept religion on mere faith; he wanted demonstration of God. But very soon his passionate nature discovered that mere Universal Reason was cold and bloodless. His emotional nature, dissatisfied with a mere abstraction, required a concrete support to help him in the hours of temptation. He wanted an external power, a guru, who by embodying perfection in the flesh would still the commotion of his soul. Attracted by the magnetic personality of Keshab, he joined the Brahmo Samaj and became a singer in its choir. But in the Samaj he did not find the guru who could say that he had seen God.
In a state of mental conflict and torture of soul, Narendra came to Sri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. He was then eighteen years of age and had been in college two years. He entered the Master's room accompanied by some light-hearted friends. At Sri Ramakrishna's request he sang a few songs, pouring his whole soul into them, and the Master went into samadhi. A few minutes later Sri Ramakrishna suddenly left his seat, took Narendra by the hand, and led him to the screened verandah north of his room. They were alone. Addressing Narendra most tenderly, as if he were a friend of long acquaintance, the Master said: "Ah! You have come very late. Why have you been so unkind as to make me wait all these days? My ears are tired of hearing the futile words of worldly men. Oh, how I have longed to pour my spirit into the heart of someone fitted to receive my message!" He talked thus, sobbing all the time. Then, standing before Narendra with folded hands, he addressed him as Narayana, born on earth to remove the misery of humanity. Grasping Narendra's hand, he asked him to come again, alone, and very soon. Narendra was startled. "What is this I have come to see?" he said to himself. "He must be stark mad. Why, I am the son of Viswanath Dutta. How dare he speak this way to me?"
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
1 Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of abstractions, the Brilliant.
Mandukya Upanishad 4.
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Mind finds fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of the individual is firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experience.
This mixing with life may, however, be pursued for the sake of the individual mind and with an entire indifference to the forms of the material existence or the uplifting of the race. This indifference is seen at its highest in the Epicurean discipline and is not entirely absent from the Stoic; and even altruism does the works of compassion more often for its own sake than for the sake of the world it helps. But this too is a limited fulfilment. The progressive mind is seen at its noblest when it strives to elevate the whole race to its own level whether by sowing broadcast the image of its own thought and fulfilment or by changing the material life of the race into fresh forms, religious, intellectual, social or political, intended to represent more nearly that ideal of truth, beauty, justice, righteousness with which the man's own soul is illumined. Failure in such a field matters little; for the mere attempt is dynamic and creative. The struggle of Mind to elevate life is the promise and condition of the conquest of life by that which is higher even than Mind.
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The spirit of the age demands this new gospel. Mankind needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of the human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; human life too reaches its highest term, its summum bonum, in embodying the spiritual consciousness here on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness. Many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this ideal before humanity and more and more insistently and clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point out-as some, purists one may call them, have done-that in poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in trying to make it human and terrestrial, he has diminished and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy. Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not necessary that one should find in his ideas and experiences and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of a Yogic consciousness. Still his major perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.
Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of ecstasy. This experience is the very core of Vaishnavism and for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping voice will say, there comes the dilution and adulteration)in the sense that problems exist for himsocial, political, economic, national, humanitarianwhich have to be faced and solved: these are not merely mundane, but woven into the texture of the fundamental problem of human destiny, of Soul and Spirit and God. A Vaishnava was, in spite of his acceptance of the world, an introvert, to use a modern psychological phrase, not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but in the neutral scientific sense. He looks upon the universe' and human life as the play of the Lord, as an actuality and not mere illusion indeed; but he does not participate or even take interest in the dynamic working out of the world process, he does not care to know, has no need of knowing that there is a terrestrial purpose and a diviner fulfilment of the mortal life upon earth. The Vaishnava dwells more or less absorbed in the Vaikuntha of his inner consciousness; the outer world, although real, is only a symbolic shadowplay to which he can but be a witness-real, is only a nothing more.
0 1961-06-06, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And when the body makes this movement (gesture of stepping back from physical appearances)what to call it? This movement of fusion (is it fusion?), of no longer being a separate body, of being the Divine there is something which. There is a sort of abstraction of something (and even that is putting it too concretely). And sometimes it succeeds, the body floats in the Light; sometimes its only partial. Sometimes all the inner consciousness is there, full and total but HERE things remain as they are, stupid, stupid, utterly stupid! Blind, in shifting sands, painful (and its not a thought, its not even a sensation; I dont know what it is).
And THERE the conscious will can do nothing. Nothing. All it could do it has done, and it continues to do all it can at each minute, and its nothing, it is not THATwhat is it??
0 1962-07-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Here, Ill give you an example: A. wrote to tell me, If you know how to get in touch with Agni,1 let me know, because I need him! I gave the natural reply, that whats needed is aspiration for progress, a will for perfection, and that you kindle the fire by burning your desires. I told him this in a way I call very concrete. Well, he answered (laughing), Ohhh! Youre living in abstractions. Thats not what I want, I want a living goda personality, you see!
Thats how people are.
0 1962-10-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Beyond the musical zone lies thought: thoughts, organized thoughts for plays and books, abstractions for philosophies. But what used to interest me particularly were the combinations that give birth to novels or plays.
That is the third zone.
0 1963-08-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The "doctor" is not an abstraction here, but the person who watches and will watch over Mother up to the end.
After "death" or at the time of "death."
0 1966-06-29, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because otherwise, we are lost in abstractions.
Yes, and with abstractions, you use words that mean something else, thats all.
But how do YOU perceive consciousness?
0 1969-07-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know that I sent my Sannyasin to Paris, and the publisher of the Gold-Washer didnt want it. He found it was speculations, abstractions.2
Oh! Is this gentleman of yours an idiot?
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"All that is the most vital and important for you will appear to be abstractions and speculations." A friend of Satprem's in the same publishing house gave him this explanation: "Were you writing about Vietnam, the Black problem, LSD, the Third World or Marcuse, we would a priori be interested, even if we disagreed with you. But capital letters frighten us. Social peace is a topic; Peace isn't."
Gallimard, who will not reply.
0 1971-04-17, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One could say that it is far more difficult to go from the mental to the supramental life than to go from a certain psychic emotion in life something that is like a reflection, a luminous emanation of the divine Presence in matterto the supramental consciousness; it is much easier to go from that into the supramental consciousness than to go from the highest intellectual speculation to any supramental vibration. Perhaps it is the word that misleads us! Perhaps it is because we call it supramental that we expect to reach it through a higher intellectual mental activity. But the reality is quite different. With this very high and pure and lofty intellectual activity, one seems to go towards a kind of cold, powerless abstraction, an icy light that is surely very remote from life and still further away from the experience of the supramental reality.
The new substances that is spreading and acting in the world contains a warmth, a power, a joy so intense that all intellectual activity seems cold and dry beside it. And that is why the less one talks about these things, the better it is. A single instant, a single impulse of deep and true love, a single minute of deep communion with the divine Grace brings you much closer to the goal than all possible explanations.
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian outlook, it is said, is at a double remove from this type of humanism. It has not the pagan GrrecoRoman humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity. Its spirit can be rendered in the vigorous imagery of Blake: it surrounds itself with cold floods of abstraction and the forests of solitude.
The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; and even his love for the bird or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred to another receptacle and flowing in another direction. Itis a play of the human heart, only refined and widened; there is no change in kind.
03.03 - A Stainless Steel Frame, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the old worldnot so old however, for the landslide started in fact with the First World Warevil there was and abundantly in man and in man's society, but it was not accepted as virtue or even as an acceptable or inevitable thing. It was tolerated, suffered, and generally with a heavy heart. Indeed the heart was sound, it was the flesh only that was weak. There was an idealism, an aspiration and although one could not always live up to it, yet one did not deny it or spurn it; one endeavoured as best one could, even though in leisure hours, in the inner mind and consciousness at least, to obey and follow its dictates. It is the Nazi theory of life that broughtto the very forefront and installed in the consciousness ofman Evil as Good, Falsehood as Truth. That is pragmatism with a vengeance. Whatever leads to success, to worldly success, that is to say, brings you wealth, prosperity, power to rule over men and things, enriches you in your possessionvittena, as the Upanishad terms it that is Good, that is Truth. All the rest are mental conceptions, notions, abstractions, day-dreams meant to delude you, take you away from the road to your fulfilment and achievement. That is how we have listened to the voice of Mephistopheles and sold away our soul.
The government of a country is, as we know, the steel frame that holds together the life of its people: it is that that gives the primary stability and security, scope and free play to all its activities. In India it was the pride of the British that they built up such a frame; and although that frame sometimes seemed almost to throttle the nation in its firm and rigid grip, still today we are constrained to recognise that it was indeed a great achievement: Pax Britannica was in fact a very efficient reality. The withdrawal of the power that was behind us has left the frame very shaky; and our national government is trying hard to set it up again, streng thening, reinforcing, riveting wherever and however necessary. But the misfortune is that the steel has got rusted and worn out from inside.
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
With cold floods of abstraction and
the forests of solitude.
03.09 - Buddhism and Hinduism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Buddhists deny likewise the real existence of general ideas: according to them only individuals are real existences, general ideas are mere abstractions. The Hindus, on the other hand, like Plato who must have been influenced by them, affirm the reality of general ideas-although real need not always mean material.
(IV) The Vedic Rishis declared with one voice that all existence is built upon delight, all things are born out of delight and move from delight to delight, and delight is their final culmination. Buddha said misery is the hallmark of things created; sorrow is the marrow and pith and the great secret of existence. Sabbe samkhara anichcha. Sabbe samkhara dukkha. Sabbe dhamma anatta.1
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance at its origins, we find at the source the Grco-Roman culture. It was pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one the earlierphase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intuitive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race; finely sensitive and yet very self-consciousearth-bound and mind-boundas a creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or the play of reason and intellectual understanding moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough that the Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a new light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope, an alert curiosity, a keener understanding; it is, as I have said, the beginning of that modern mentality which is known as the scientific outlook, that is to say, study of facts and induction from given data, observation and experience and experiment instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by a priori theorising and abstraction and deduction and dogmatism.
We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances: but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat, the imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation, organisation, stabilisation the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that agestalwarts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams of
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The old intellectualism generally and on the whole, was truly formal and even to a great extent verbal. In other words, it sought to find norms and categories in the mind itself and impose them upon, objects, objects of experience, external or internal. The first discovery of the pure mind, the joy of indulging in its own free formations led to an abstraction that brought about a cleavage between mind and nature, and when a harmony was again attempted between the two, it meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon another (Matter), a subsumption of the latter under the former. Such scholastic formalism, although it has the appearance of a movement of pure intellect, free from the influence of instinctive or emotive reactions, cannot but be, at bottom, a mythopoeic operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly objective in the scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find Nature's own categories the constants, as they are called and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider here and which does not change the fundamental position. We say then that the objectivity of the scientific outlook, as distinguished from the abstract formalism of old-world intellectualism, has given a new degree of mental growth and is the basis of themechanistic methodology of which we have been speaking. '
Indeed, what we lay stress upon is the methodology of modern scientific knowledge the apparatus of criticism and experimentation.
10.04 - Transfiguration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the mental world we meet abstractions, lifeless ideas, forms without a soul. In reality, however, all movements in man, all forces in nature are more than mere movements and forces, they are personalities, embodiments of conscious beings. Indeed the Puranic tradition has elaborated this conception almost to its extreme limit. Those people crowded the world with an infinite number of Gods and Goddesses. They speak of 33 crores of Gods. The earth is the playfield of all godlings.
In this way we come very far from the Supreme Brahman, the Mayavadin's inane Unity. The Puranic multiplicity is perhaps a corrective of the Vedantin's empty Absolute.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
Eighth. When the "will to live" vanishes, then the "Sons of Necessity" cease from objective manifestation. This is logically inevitable, and its working out can be seen in every case of entifed objectivity. When the Thinker on his own plane withdraws his attention from his little system within the three worlds and gathers within himself all his forces, then physical plane existence comes to an end and all returns within the causal consciousness; this is as much an abstraction in the three worlds of the Thinker as the Absolute is in the threefold solar system of the Logos. This demonstrates on the physical plane in the withdrawing from out of the top of the head of the radiant etheric body and the consequent disintegration of the physical. The framework goes and the dense physical form falls apart; the pranic life is abstracted bodily from out of the dense sheath, and the stimulation of the fires of matter ceases to be. The latent fire of the atom remains; it is inherent, but the form is made by the action of the two fires of matteractive and latent, radiatory and inherentaided by the fire of the second Logos, and when they are separated the form falls apart. This is a picture in miniature of the essential duality of all things acted upon by Fohat.
[86]
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First. The life that had animated the physical form (both dense and etheric) and which had its starting point in the permanent atom and from thence "pervaded the moving and the unmoving" (in God, the Heavenly Man, and the human being, as well as in the atom of matter) is withdrawn entirely within the atom upon the plane of abstraction. This "plane of abstraction" is a different one for the entities involved:
a. For the physical permanent atom, it is the atomic level.
--
In the system, the same process is followed by the solar Logos; from His high place of abstraction, He ceases to be attracted by His body of manifestation. He withdraws His interest and the two pairs of opposites, the spirit and the matter of the vehicle, dissociate. With this dissociation the solar system, that "Son of Necessity," or of desire, ceases to be, and passes out of objective existence.
Third. This leads finally, to the scattering of the atoms of the etheric body into their primordial condition. The subjective life, the synthesis of will and love taking active form, is withdrawn. The partnership is dissolved. The form then breaks up; the magnetism that has held it in coherent shape is no longer present, and dissipation is complete. Matter persists, but the form no longer persists.
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The Mahadeva aspect or the first Logos (who embodies cosmic will) is controlled by the Law of Synthesis, the cosmic law governing the tendency to unification; only in this case, it is not the unification of matter and Spirit, but the unification of the seven into the three, and into the one. These three figures primarily stand for Spirit, [148] for quality, for principle, and not so primarily for matter, although matter, being inspired by spirit, conforms. The Law of Synthesis has a direct connection with One Who is still higher than our Logos, and is the law of control exercised by Him upon the Logos of our system. This is a spiritual relationship that tends to abstraction or to that synthesis of the spiritual elements that will result in their conscious return (the whole point lying in that word "conscious") to their cosmic point of synthesis, or of unification with their source. Their source is the ONE ABOUT WHOM NAUGHT MAY BE SAID, as we have earlier seen.
Therefore, in connection with the first Logos, we can sum up as we did with the other Logoi:
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This rule must not be carried too far in detail as long as man's mind is of its present calibre. The mystery lies in the realisation that all is carried on in a divine co-operation that has its base outside the system. Hence too the fact that the first Logos is called the Destroyer, because He is abstraction, if viewed from below upwards. His work is the synthesis of Spirit with Spirit, their [149] eventual abstraction from matter, and their unification with their cosmic source. Hence also He is the one who brings about pralaya or the disintegration of form,the form from which the Spirit has been abstracted.
If we carry the analogy down to the microcosm a glimpse can be gained of the same idea and hence ability to comprehend with greater facility. The Ego (being to the man on the physical plane what the Logos is to His system) is likewise the animating will, the destroyer of forms, the producer of pralaya and the One Who withdraws the inner spiritual man from out of his threefold body; he draws them to himself the centre of his little system. The Ego is extra-cosmic as far as the human being on the physical plane is concerned, and in the realisation of this fact may come elucidation of the true cosmic problem involving the Logos and "the spirits in prison," as the Christian puts it.
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In the two lower planes in the three worlds the astral and the physical the five subplanes of human endeavour are the five highest. The two lowest subplanes, the sixth and seventh, are what we might express as "below the threshold," and concern forms of life beneath the human altogether. We have a corroborating analogy in the fact that the two earliest root-races in this round are not definitely human, and that it is the third root-race which is really human for the first time. Counting, therefore, from the bottom upwards it is only the third subplane on the physical and the astral planes which mark the commencement of human effort, leaving five subplanes to be subdued. On the mental plane the five lower subplanes have to be subjugated during purely human evolution. When the consciousness is centred on the fifth subplane (counting from below upwards) then the planes of abstractionfrom the standpoint of man in the three worldssupervene the two subplanes of synthesis, demonstrating through the synthesis of the five senses. In the evolution of the Heavenly Man we have exactly the same thing: the five planes of endeavour, the five lower planes of the solar system, and the two higher planes of abstraction, the spiritual or monadic and the divine, or logoic.
[188]
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It can be noted that we have not summed up the two planes of abstraction on the atmic and the buddhic planes, the reason being that they mark a degree of realisation which is the property of initiates of higher degree [189] than that of the adept, and which is beyond the concept of the evolving human unit, for whom this treatise is written.
We might here, for the sake of clarity, tabulate the five different aspects of the five senses on the five planes, so that their correspondences may be readily visualised, using the above table as the basis:
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d. Tasting. He tastes then finally and discriminates, for taste is the great sense that begins to hold sway during the discriminating process that takes place when the illusory nature of matter is in process of realisation. Discrimination is the educatory process to which the Self subjects itself in the process of developing intuition that faculty whereby the Self recognises its own essence in and under all forms. Discrimination concerns the duality of nature, the Self and the not-self, and is the means of their differentiation in the process of abstraction; the intuition concerns unity and is the capacity of the Self to contact other selves, and is not a faculty whereby the not-self is contacted. Hence, its rarity these days owing to the intense individualisation of the Ego, and its identification with the forma necessary identification at this particular time. As the sense of taste on the higher planes is developed, it leads one to ever finer distinctions till one is finally led through the form, right to the heart of one's nature.
e. Smelling is the faculty of keen perception that eventually brings a man back to the source from whence he came, the archetypal plane, the plane where his true home is to be found. A perception of difference has been cultivated that has caused a divine discontent within the [202] heart of the Pilgrim in the far country; the prodigal son draws comparisons; he has developed the other four senses, and he utilises them. Now comes in the faculty of vibratory recognition of the home vibration, if it might be so expressed. It is the spiritual counterpart of that sense which in the animal, the pigeon and other birds, leads them back unerringly to the familiar spot from whence they originally came. It is the apprehension of the vibration of the Self, and a swift return by means of that instinct to the originating source.
1.00f - DIVISION F - THE LAW OF ECONOMY, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
1. abstraction,
2. Spiritual liberation,
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
thing horribly alive into the beautiful abstraction of the Trinity
idea. But the reconciliation might have taken place on a quite
1.01 - Introduction, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
And even that which is visible may dwell beyond the range of our perceptions if it exceeds our proportions. The vaster it is in its totality, the less ephemeral in its duration, the less is it perceptible to us. Thus the earth which we inhabit is visible to our eyes solely in its details and we can compass the knowledge of it in its totality only by a method of abstraction and by an appeal to means that belong to the order of mathematical or geometrical perceptions and are borrowed, therefore, from faculties of consciousness which are supersensuous. The same law holds good with greater reason for that which we call, without knowing where it commences or ends, the universe.
And towards what does our Science tend, if not towards the indirect discovery, surpassing the means of observation with which our senses provide us, of realities more and more essential and permanent, less and less incidental and, because incidental, therefore visible?
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
belief intellectually. We have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with
accurate descriptive information, but serves to undermine our belief in the utility and meaning of existence.
--
the following question: how can the current state of experience be conceptualized in abstraction, with
regards to its meaning? [which means its (subjective, biologically-predicated, socially-constructed)
1.01 - Necessity for knowledge of the whole human being for a genuine education., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Rather than groping about in abstractions, lets just look at specifics; we shall examine one particular characteristic in human nature the temperament. Lets begin by looking not at a childs temperament, which of course offers us no choicewe have to educate each human being regardless of temperament (and well speak later about the childrens temperaments)but lets begin rather by looking at the teachers temperament. The teacher enters the school and meets the child with a very specific tem- peramentcholeric, sanguine, melancholic, or phlegmatic. The question is: As educators, what can we do to control our own temperaments; how can we perhaps educate ourselves in relation to our own temperament? To answer this question we must first look directly at the fundamental question: How does a teachers temperament affect the child, just by being what it is?
The Choleric Temperament
1.020 - The World and Our World, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
What is an individual, which we call the percipient? It is an abstracted group of characters, tentatively isolated from a larger set or group of characters to which these former really belong an act that has been perpetrated mysteriously for the purpose of playing a drama, we may say. We have falsely isolated ourselves. Even that isolation is not a real isolation, because a mere abstraction of a few characters from a group of larger characters cannot be regarded as real. It is only a closing of one's eyes to certain existent conditions. We can ignore the presence of things and conditions which are not conducive to our present purpose, but why this purpose itself has arisen is a very difficult thing to answer. This is maya, as they call it, a peculiar jugglery that has been projected by no one. Neither can we say that God created it, nor can we say that we created it. It is somewhere; and how it has come, neither can we say, nor can anyone else say. The inscrutability of the relationship between the individual and the cosmic, the difficulty in ascertaining the connection between appearance and reality this is called maya. To put it in more plain terms, the relationship between the subject and the object is itself difficult to understand.
We cannot understand what our connection is with anything at all, and so we are in a helpless condition. Therefore we cannot even control the mind, because controlling the mind is an adjustment of the modifications of the mind in respect of the object of its cognition, and the object of its cognition is not properly understood because of its unintelligible character. Everything then becomes difficult, and our efforts become a source of failure in the end. Success does not seem to be forthcoming, because it is not clear to us what is the right direction that we have to take.
What is the mind to do, what are we to do, what is anyone to do in this prescription of yoga called 'mind-control'? Are we to subjugate the object, destroy the object, absorb the object into ourselves, or abstract the mind from the object and not cognise it? In an act of mind-control, what is to be done? Are we satisfied if we merely become unaware of the existence of the object, which is what is usually known as abstraction of the senses and the mind from objects, or is there anything to be done in respect of the object itself? This question arises on account of the necessity to understand the extent of influence the object exerts upon the subject, and the extent of influence that the subject exerts upon the object.
For all practical purposes, we can agree with the author of the Panchadasi and conclude that we need not interfere with the scheme of things from the point of view of Ishvara's creation. People can be there, and things can be there they have to be there. We have to change our attitude, which means to say we have to reorganise the method of the working of our own mind inside, in respect of existent objects outside. This is only a tentative answer, and not the final answer, because we have not yet finally given the judgement as to the nature of things. We have temporarily accepted the existence of a world outside us, just as we temporarily accept the meaning of an 'x' in an equation in algebra. Though the 'x' itself may have no meaning ultimately, it is a necessary assumption which solves the question, and afterwards it cancels itself.
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
This is because the original terms also are not really impersonal abstractions. In delight of Brahman there is an Enjoyer of
delight, in consciousness of Brahman a Conscient, in existence
1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
except as an abstraction, a sum or a void. Therefore it has to
be gradually led from its own manner to that which exceeds it.
1.02 - Karmayoga, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Vedanta and Yoga to life. To many who take their knowledge of Hinduism secondh and this may seem a doubtful definition. It is ordinarily supposed by "practical" minds that Vedanta as a guide to life and Yoga as a method of spiritual communion are dangerous things which lead men away from action to abstraction. We leave aside those who regard all such beliefs as mysticism, self-delusion or imposture; but even those who reverence and believe in the high things of Hinduism have the impression that one must remove oneself from a full human activity in order to live the spiritual life. Yet the spiritual life finds its most potent expression in the man who lives the ordinary life of men in the strength of the Yoga and under the law of the Vedanta. It is by such a union of the inner life and the outer that mankind will eventually be lifted up and become mighty and divine. It is a delusion to suppose that Vedanta contains no inspiration to life, no rule of conduct, and is purely metaphysical and quietistic. On the contrary, the highest morality of which humanity is capable finds its one perfect basis and justification in the teachings of the Upanishads and the Gita. The characteristic doctrines of the Gita are nothing if they are not a law of life, a dharma, and even the most transcendental aspirations of the
Vedanta presuppose a preparation in life, for it is only through life that one can reach to immortality. The opposite opinion is due to certain tendencies which have bulked large in the history and temperament of our race. The ultimate goal of our religion is emancipation from the bondage of material Nature and freedom from individual rebirth, and certain souls, among the highest we have known, have been drawn by the attraction of the final hush and purity to dissociate themselves from life and bodily action in order more swiftly and easily to reach the goal. Standing like
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
approach system (and its equivalent, in abstraction) generates (1) alternative sequences of behavior, whose
goal is the production of a solution to the present dilemma; (2) alternative conceptualizations of the desired
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what. The left-hemisphere gets increasingly involved, as translation up the hierarchy of abstraction
occurs.
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duplicate their actions. In this manner, we obtain the skills of others. Our capacity for abstraction allows us
to take our facility for imitation one step farther, however: we can learn to imitate not only the precise
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Play transcends imitation, in that it is less context-bound; it allows for the abstraction of essential
principles from specific (admirable) instances of behavior allows for the initial establishment of a more
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any less brilliant just that his level of abstraction was different.) Ideas, after all, come from somewhere
they do not arise, spontaneously, from the void. Every complex psychological theory has a lengthy period
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knowledge is not representational, in its basic form) and to (potential) modification, in abstraction.
Knowing how information, generated in the course of exploratory activity, can nonetheless be transferred
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of increasing abstraction has allowed the knowing what system to generate a representation, in
imagination, of the implicit predicates of behavior governed by the knowing how system. Generation of
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how activity procedure through a complex, lengthy process of abstraction. Action and imitation of
action developmentally predates explicit description or discovery of the rules governing action. Adaptation
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explicit consciousness itself: procedure is established, then represented, then altered in abstraction, then
practiced; the procedure changes, as a consequence of the abstracted and practiced modification; this
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is represented schematically in Figure 13: abstraction of Wisdom, and the Relationship of Such
abstraction to Memory. (Only a few of the interactions between the stages of knowledge are indicated,
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Each succeeding stage of abstraction modifies all others, as our ability to speak, for example, has expanded
our capacity to play. As the process of abstraction continues and information vital for survival is
represented evermore simply and efficiently what is represented transforms from the particulars of any
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Figure 13: abstraction of Wisdom, and the Relationship of Such abstraction to Memory
The fact that the many stories we live by can be coded and transmitted at different levels of
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considered, with regard to the additional complicating fact of the multi-level embodiment and abstraction
of stories? So far we have considered the ends and the means of a given framework of reference (a
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of phenomena. However, we can also shift levels of abstraction which means, can voluntarily focus our
attention, when necessary, on stories that map out larger or smaller areas of space-time (excuse the
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Our capacity for abstraction allows us to derive the constituent elements of successful adaptation
itself, from observation of behavioral patterns that are constantly played out in the world as it actually
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hierarchy of abstraction, might be the category of all objects to be feared, or all objects that are
dangerous when approached in one fashion, but beneficial when approached in another.
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analysis. The process is just begininng, in abstraction, in Mesopotamia and Egypt; as will be demonstrated,
it is the ancient Israelites who bring it most clearly to fruition, with potent and lasting effect. It does not
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Representation of culture, the known, is simple, comparatively; is second-order abstraction, depiction of
that which has already been made subject to order. Representation of culture is encapsulation of that to
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could be represented in abstraction, in drama, in story. More abstract narrative representation of the target
of the heroic sacrifice then came to portray the emergence of the beneficient goddess, capable of
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Shakespeare portrayed dramatically up one level of abstraction, towards the philosophical (or even the
empirical). Freud moved information about behavior from the implicit narrative to the explicit theory (or, at
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abstraction allows us to represent and duplicate that pattern, as an end. The highest level abstractions
therefore allow us to represent the most universally applicable behavioral pattern: that characterizing the
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of abstraction, are also able to lose face, rather than life, although they act out this loss, in behavioral
routines, rather than in verbal or imagistic battles (rather than through argument). It is the capacity to
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
20:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
21:Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered, what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited, craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed. Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine. This capital point gained, it has to be taught to desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and enthroned for ever. But last, most difficult for it, more difficult than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right and desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance. Thus trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul's seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
1.02 - The 7 Habits An Overview, #The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, #Stephen Covey, #unset
If I were independent, physically, I could pretty well make it on my own. Mentally, I could think my own thoughts, I could move from one level of abstraction to another. I could think creatively and analytically and organize and express my thoughts in understandable ways. Emotionally, I would be validated from within. I would be inner directed. My sense of worth would not be a function of being liked or treated well.
It's easy to see that independence is much more mature than dependence. Independence is a major achievement in and of itself. But independence is not supreme.
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Who is Ishvara? Janmdyasya yatah "From whom is the birth, continuation, and dissolution of the universe," He is Ishvara "the Eternal, the Pure, the Ever-Free, the Almighty, the AllKnowing, the All-Merciful, the Teacher of all teachers"; and above all, Sa Ishvarah anirvachaniyapremasvarupah "He the Lord is, of His own nature, inexpressible Love." These certainly are the definitions of a Personal God. Are there then two Gods the "Not this, not this," the Sat-chit-nanda, the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss of the philosopher, and this God of Love of the Bhakta? No, it is the same Sat-chit-ananda who is also the God of Love, the impersonal and personal in one. It has always to be understood that the Personal God worshipped by the Bhakta is not separate or different from the Brahman. All is Brahman, the One without a second; only the Brahman, as unity or absolute, is too much of an abstraction to be loved and worshipped; so the Bhakta chooses the relative aspect of Brahman, that is, Ishvara, the Supreme Ruler. To use a simile: Brahman is as the clay or substance out of which an infinite variety of articles are fashioned. As clay, they are all one; but form or manifestation differentiates them. Before every one of them was made, they all existed potentially in the clay, and, of course, they are identical substantially; but when formed, and so long as the form remains, they are separate and different; the clay-mouse can never become a clay-elephant, because, as manifestations, form alone makes them what they are, though as unformed clay they are all one.
Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara.
10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The recoil from the normal, the rich and lush physico-mental expression of human consciousness and experience has been so radical and complete that it has catapulted us into an opposite extreme of bareness and nudity, at the most into a world of pure signs and symbols of notches and blotches, the disjointed mimics and inarticulate groans of a deaf and dumb man. The process of abstraction has gone so far that it has now been reduced to an absurdity. It has its parallel in the movement that led man away from the world of Maya to the Transcendent featureless Brahman. In either case the reason is that the link that joins the two ends could not be founda living truth that is of the Transcendent, yet denying not, but affirming in a new manner the mayic existence. That is because man till now sought to create from a level of consciousness, by a force of consciousness that is not adequate to the task; for it belongs still to the mental region, to this inferior hemisphere although at present it seems to be the acme and topmost hemisphere in the scale. It is not an extension or intensification of the mind and its capacities that will solve the problem: a radical change in the very nature of the mind, a reversal of the mental consciousnessa turning of it inside out as it were, an opening out and up is needed to discover the true source of the Light. Therefore it has been said that man must transcend himself, find a new status in the other hemisphere. In fact there is a domain, a status of being and consciousness, a master-force which when revealed and made active will remould inevitably and spontaneously human creation and expression as a reality embodying the Highest. It is the world of Idea-Force which Sri Aurobindo has named Supermind: it is beyond the mind, even the highest mind: it is the typal concentration of the Supreme Consciousness. It is the fulcrum for the Supreme Consciousness to create and express a new formulation of the Truth in the world of matter. The mind, the highest mind, in its attempt to grasp the Supreme Reality is prone to reject, annul and efface the Cosmic Reality. The Supermind has no need to do that. It links the two ends in a supreme and miraculous synthesis negating neither, giving the full value to each, for the two are united, concentrated in its substance. Thus is found the golden bridge uniting earth and heaven.
The physical mind, with its satellite, the human speech, must indeed be rescued from the thraldom of the animal life, the life of the ordinary senses. They should be put under the regimen of the new consciousness, the status of the Idea-Force. The action of that consciousness will create its own norm and pattern adequate for expressing and embodying suprasensuous realities. It will not have to depend upon allegories and parables, symbols and signs seized from ordinary life. What exactly this will be is difficult to say at present. Evidently there is likely to be an intermediary creationa passage leading from the sensuous to the supra-sensuous, the higher not totally rejecting the lower or primitive formula, the lower not altogether englobing and swallowing the higher.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
codification are the advantages granted by abstraction per se ease of communication, facilitation of
transformation and formal declaration of (historically-sanctified) principles useful in mediation of
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
born. abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions,
mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure and eternal Knowledge.
4:What justification, of logic or of experience, can be asserted in support of the one extreme which cannot be met by an equally cogent logic and an equally valid experience at the other end? The world of Matter is affirmed by the experience of the physical senses which, because they are themselves unable to perceive anything immaterial or not organised as gross Matter, would persuade us that the suprasensible is the unreal. This vulgar or rustic error of our corporeal organs does not gain in validity by being promoted into the domain of philosophical reasoning. Obviously, their pretension is unfounded. Even in the world of Matter there are existences of which the physical senses are incapable of taking cognisance. Yet the denial of the suprasensible as necessarily an illusion or a hallucination depends on this constant sensuous association of the real with the materially perceptible, which is itself a hallucination. Assuming throughout what it seeks to establish, it has the vice of the argument in a circle and can have no validity for an impartial reasoning.
1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
We must not suffer ourselves to Le caught by the prestige of words or taken in the snare of abstractions.
If the original unity is beyond our comprehension, not less so is the dual origin.
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
situations. Our capacity for abstraction is capable of disrupting our unconscious that is, imagistic and
procedural social identity, upsetting our emotional stability, and undermining our integrity (that is, the
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The ever-expanding human capacity for abstraction central to human consciousness has enabled
us to produce self-models sufficiently complex and extended to take into account the temporal boundaries
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modifiable and increasingly vulnerable. In a way, this is the whole point of abstraction, and the very
capacity to learn. Words deceptively simple and harmless are sufficient to create disruption and
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The process of increased abstraction allows for increasing self-understanding (self-consciousness) at
least in potential and for the prediction of the behaviors of others [which is a capacity integrally linked to
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with imitation and ends with verbal abstraction, increases the permanent behavioral and abstract logical
repertoire of the individuals that form that group. The sum total of such behavioral patterns (and second
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of increasing abstraction and representation is equivalent to development of higher consciousness
(especially if the ever-more enlightened words are in fact utopian wish transformed back down the
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The major advantage of increased abstraction of representation apart from ease of communication is
increased adaptive flexibility: alterations in abstract thought can proceed as if as if a game, without
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semantic/episodic representation of that behavior, means abstraction and hierarchical organization of
knowledge hard-won in the physical battle for survival, and consequent capacity for immmediate
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developmental chain of abstraction can be applied to undermine the stability of its foundation. The modern
and verbally-sophisticated individual is therefore always in danger of sawing off the branch on which he or
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The ever-expanding human capacity for abstraction has enabled us as a species, and as individuals
to produce self-models that include the temporal boundaries of existence. We have become able to imagine
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concrete example of a unity that is at the same time a plurality can be used in abstraction, to represent the
hypothetical pretemporal state itself, where everything that would be more than one thing still existed in
1.04 - The Praise, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Integral Yoga
a syntax evasive to a level of abstraction but also because the style
would be heavy, littered with adverbs such as "completely,"
1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Similarly, before Matter was, before its forms were manifested, there was in the possibility of these forms an eternal principle of Matter. And there where all form disappears and leaves only abstractions of pure Mind, does not this principle of Matter still subsist? Is it not the very substance and, so to speak, the matter of that Mind?
It is therefore beyond Matter and Mind, Force and Will, Consciousness and Unconsciousness and in all these that we must seek a cause for the existence of the worlds.
1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
catharsis is not just an abstraction which automatically produces nothing
but catharsis. He is also a human being, and although his thinking may be
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in and through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for continually the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation. Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this' defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On the other side. Science and Art and the knowledge of life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expressions-all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
fought in abstraction, image and in the course of genuine earthly combat portrayed in mythology as
spiritual war, played out in heaven (which is the place where transpersonal ideas exist). The Deity who
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dispute cascade, with each failure, down the chain of abstraction: from the word, to the image, to the deed
and those who will not let their outdated identities and beliefs die, when they must, kill themselves instead.
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Semantic cognition, feeding on narrative the bridge between the episode and the pure verbal abstraction
derives rules from behavior. Application of the rules alters the environment, including procedural and
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ending with verbal abstraction. To what end are all behaviors (and representations of those behaviors)
archetypally subjugated? Towards establishment of a state a spiritual kingdom that allows the
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makes it easily memorable, and accessible as a shared point of reference. The benefits of its abstraction
communicability and potential for rapid generalization makes it a potent force for the establishment and
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this constitutes the centrally defining pattern of human abstraction and behavior. The simplest and most
basic day-to-day human activities, invariably goal-directed, are necessarily predicated upon conscious or
1.05 - Vishnu as Brahma creates the world, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Whilst he (Brahmā) formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was. meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning with ignorance, and consisting of darkness. From that great being appeared fivefold Ignorance, consisting of obscurity, illusion, extreme illusion, gloom, utter darkness[2]. The creation of the creator thus plunged in abstraction, was the fivefold (immovable) world, without intellect or reflection, void of perception or sensation, incapable of feeling, and destitute of motion[3]. Since immovable things were first created, this is called the first creation. Brahmā, beholding that it was defective, designed another; and whilst he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested, to the products of which the term Tiryaksrotas is applied, from their nutriment following a winding course[4]. These were called beasts, &c., and their characteristic was the quality of darkness, they being destitute of knowledge, uncontrolled in their conduct, and mistaking error for wisdom; being formed of egotism and self-esteem, labouring under the twenty-eight kinds of imperfection[5], manifesting inward sensations, and associating with each other (according to their kinds).
Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahmā again meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the quality of goodness, termed Ūrddhasrotas[6]. The beings thus produced in the Ūrddhasrotas creation were endowed with pleasure and enjoyment, uneñcumbered internally or externally, and luminous within and without. This, termed the creation of immortals, was the third performance of Brahmā, who, although well pleased with it, still found it incompetent to fulfil his end. Continuing therefore his meditations, there sprang, in consequence of his infallible purpose, the creation termed Arvāksrotas, from indiscrete nature. The products of this are termed Arvāksrotasas[7], from the downward current (of their nutriment). They abound with the light of knowledge, but the qualities of darkness and of foulness predominate. Hence they are afflicted by evil, and are repeatedly impelled to action. They have knowledge both externally and internally, and are the instruments (of accomplishing the object of creation, the liberation of soul). These creatures were mankind.
1.06 - Gestalt and Universals, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
at nothing in particular, as in the condition of abstraction of a
yogi, 1 when it shows an almost perfect periodicity.
1.06 - The Desire to be, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
The word, Thought, says too much and too little,too much if that conscient thought is meant which appears at the term of progressive evolution, and too little if it means a pure abstraction of the being previous to its coming into existence. This abstraction may very well define the essence of all its possibilities, but not its power to act and to become. To become implies not only pure thought, but tendency, effort, or, to express all in a single word, if that be possibledesire.
For desire represents in the being that first active form of Thought in which we must seek for the initial spring conscient or inconscient of its energies, the obscure genesis of its will and that first spontaneity of fundamental egoism by which the I of the relativity manifests.
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But this Finite itself must necessarily be relative. And it is only by an abstraction of the mind that we can conceive thus of the world at each moment of its progressive evolution. None of these moments exists in itself, no number is the last of numbers. Between the absolute Infinite and the perfect Finite, universal relativity defines itself progressively in the course of an indefinite manifestation.
If follows that at no moment does the world contain the total manifestation of the numberless virtualities of the Absolute, but at each moment it is the field of realisation for a new series of possibilities.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
In other words, the deep structures of worldspaces (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and transpersonal) show cross-cultural and largely invariant features at a deep level of abstraction, whereas the surface structures (the actual subjects and objects in the various worldspaces) are naturally and appropriately quite different from culture to culture. Just as the human mind universally grows images and symbols and concepts (even though the actual contents of those structures vary considerably), so the human spirit universally grows intuitions of the Divine, and those developmental signifieds unfold in an evolutionary and reconstructible fashion, just like any other holon in the Kosmos (and their referents are just as real as any other similarly disclosed data).
In the past few decades there has been a concerted effort on the part of many researchers (such as Stanislav Grof, Roger Walsh, Frances Vaughan, Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, Daniel Goleman, Charles Tart, Donald Rothberg, Michael Zimmerman, Seymour Boorstein, Mark Epstein, David Lukoff, Michael Washburn, Joel Funk, John Nelson, John Chirban, Robert Forman, Francis Lu, Michael Murphy, Mark Waldman, James Fadiman, myself, and others)21 to rationally reconstruct the higher stages of transpersonal or contemplative development-stages that continue naturally or normally beyond the ego and centaur if arrest or fixation does not occur.
1.07 - The Primary Data of Being, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
It is in the movement that we have the mingling and the becoming concrete of these two abstractions, one of pure extent and the other of duration, one of simultaneity and the other of becoming, one of concomitance and the other of succession. Mingling and becoming concrete they form the very substance of all reality.
What abstract movement in Time is for indivisible unity,the condition of its subjective manifestation,concrete movement in Space is for the multiple and divisible,the condition of objective manifestation.
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In the relative all is relative. When we speak of Space and Time, we are under these abstractions defining the most general categories to which all the possible modes and forms of simultaneity and succession can be reduced.
To these abstract modes there correspond, in the objective world, concrete states of substance and of being, states which extend in an indefinite series from the first transcendences to our own physical domain.
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
A person who gives assent to untrue dogma, or who pays all his attention and allegiance to one true dogma in a comprehensive system, while neglecting the others (as many Christians concentrate exclusively on the humanity of the Second Person of the Trinity and ignore the Father and the Holy Ghost), runs the risk of limiting in advance his direct apprehension of Reality. In religion as in natural science, experience is determined only by experience. It is fatal to prejudge it, to compel it to fit the mould imposed by a theory which either does not correspond to the facts at all, or corresponds to only some of the facts. Do not strive to seek after the true, writes a Zen master, only cease to cherish opinions. There is only one way to cure the results of belief in a false or incomplete theology and it is the same as the only known way of passing from belief in even the truest theology to knowledge or primordial Factselflessness, docility, openness to the datum of Eternity. Opinions are things which we make and can therefore understand, formulate and argue about. But to rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the sense or comprehended by the understanding is to be content, in the words of St. John of the Cross, with what is less than God. Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who have ceased to cherish opinionseven opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.
Up then, noble soul! Put on thy jumping shoes which are intellect and love, and overleap the worship of thy mental powers, overleap thine understanding and spring into the heart of God, into his hiddenness where thou art hidden from all creatures.
1.080 - Pratyahara - The Return of Energy, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
What happens in pratyahara is mentioned in the sutra: svaviaya asaprayoge cittasya svarpnukra iva indriy pratyhra (II.54). There are two changes that take place in this action of the senses in their abstraction from the objects. Firstly, they are disconnected from contact with the object due to the withdrawal of the consciousness which is animating the senses. Secondly, which is more important, the senses turn back to the mind and assume the character of the mind. Cittasya svarupanukarah means the senses accompanying the mind in its essential nature. They become almost one with the mind. In the usual activity of the senses, they are not one with the mind. They drag the mind out from its own chambers and then compel it to contemplate an external object, in which case the mind is something like a slave of the senses; the master has himself come under the subjection of the servants. But in pratyahara, this is not what is happening. The master is recognised and his worth is known. The senses return. They do not return of their own accord. If the gas in the engine is completely removed, the vehicle will not move. The gas is the motive force, and that motive force is the consciousness that is attending upon the activity of the senses. If the supply of energy behind the movement of a vehicle is withdrawn, the vehicle cannot move. And, as long as the supply is there, the vehicle cannot be stopped. The vehicle may be said to be the senses which are running towards some objective. They cannot be stopped in their activities unless the energy is withdrawn. That energy is the consciousness.
Therefore, first and foremost, what is required is a severance of the attention of consciousness in respect of the movement of the senses towards objects. The attention is diverted. That is why sometimes, when we are deeply thinking over some important matter, even if we may be looking at some object, we may not see it. Our eyes may be open; it may appear that we are gazing at something, but we are seeing nothing at all on account of the fact that the energy that is necessary for the cognition of an object is withdrawn. There cannot be perception when the attention is diverted in some other way. Thus, in pratyahara there is first a diversion of attention from one place to another place. We have to find out what that place is, which is the object of meditation.
1.081 - The Application of Pratyahara, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The omnipresence of the spirit should preclude any kind of withdrawal. Also, there is the doctrine of devotion which recognises the presence of God in everything, and the all-pervading characteristic of God would not demand a withdrawal of the mind from anything, inasmuch as God is present everywhere. Next, there is a doubt that the abstraction of the mind may mean a kind of psychological introversion, which is what is objected to by psychoanalysts, because the introverted attitude is the opposite of the extroverted one, and it is equally bad as bad as the extroverted attitude. Whether we are tied up inwardly or bound outwardly, it makes no difference anyhow we are bound. And, topping the list there is the painful aspect of it, because it is impossible for the mind not to think of that which it desires. If it is not to think of what it desires, then of what is it to think? What else are we to think what we dont like? We are expecting the mind to wipe out the thought of things from its memory, including even those thoughts which it wants and regards as valuable and worthwhile. What else is it to think, if everything is removed from its memory? All these are the difficulties.
Questions of this type all arise because of an improper grounding in a philosophical background, which is the preparatory stage of the practice of yoga. Yoga is a practical implementation of a doctrine of the universe. An outlook of things is at the background of this very technique. This is what is perhaps meant by the oft-repeated teaching of the Bhagavadgita that yoga should be preceded by samkhya. Here the words yoga and samkhya do not mean the technical classical jargons. They simply mean the theory and the practice. E tebhihit s
--
In every branch of learning there is the theory aspect and the practical aspect, whether it is in mathematics, or physics, or any other aspect of study. Here it is of a similar nature. Why is it that the mind is to be withdrawn from the object? The answer to this question is in the theoretical aspect which is the philosophy. What is wrong with the mind in its contemplation on things? Why should we not think of an object? Why we should not think of an object cannot be answered now, at this stage, when we have actually taken up this practice. We ought to have understood it much earlier. When we have started walking, it means that we already know why we are walking and where is our destination. We cannot start walking and say, Where am I walking to? Why did we start walking without knowing the destination? Likewise, if our question as to why this is necessary at all is not properly answered within our own self, then immediately there will be repulsion from the mind and it will say, You do not know what you are doing. You are merely troubling me. Then the mind will not agree to this proposal of abstraction.
Hence, there should be a very clear notion before we set about doing things; and this is a principle to be followed in every walk of life. Without knowing what is to be done, why do we start doing anything? Even if it is cooking, we must know the theory first. What is it about? We cannot run about higgledy-piggledy without understanding it. The purpose of the withdrawal of the mind or the senses from the objects is simple; and that simple answer to this question is that the nature of things does not permit the notion that the mind entertains when it contacts an object. The idea that we have in our mind at the time of cognising an object is not in consonance with the nature of Truth. This is why the mind is to be withdrawn from the object. There is a peculiar definition which the mind imposes upon the object of sense at the time of cognising it, for the purpose of contacting it, etc. This definition is contrary to the true nature of that object. If we call an ass a dog, that would not be a proper definition; it would be a misunderstanding of its real essence. The object of sense is not related to the subject of perception in the manner in which the subject is defining it or conceiving it.
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Thus, in the effecting of the pratyahara or the abstraction of the mind from the objects, we have to consider the thinking aspect, the willing aspect and also the feeling aspect. What are we thinking about that object towards which we are moving? What is the amount of will that we have exercised in fulfilling our wish? What is the deep-seated feeling that we have got in respect of it? All these three have to be isolated threadbare, if possible. The thinking, the willing and the feeling, though they all work together almost simultaneously, are three different aspects, and they can be pulled out independently like threads from a cloth. The most difficult thing to tackle is feeling, and less difficult to encounter is the will, and still less is the aspect of thinking. Therefore, in the beginning, it would be to the advantage of the seeker to analyse the easier aspect namely, the thinking aspect. What are we thinking about that object? Why did we go towards it? What is our intention behind it? Then we can go to the other aspect, which is the will. We have a determination for the purpose of confirming the attitude that we have adopted on account of a thought in respect of that object. But the deepest aspect of it is the emotion the feeling.
No pratyahara can be effective unless all these three aspects are properly analysed and isolated from the nature of the object. Though the mind may not be thinking about the object, there may be feeling towards it; then there is no pratyahara. Not only that the thinking, willing, feeling aspect has also a subconscious element in it, which also is to be probed into before complete mastery is gained. There may be a subtle restlessness at the time of the effecting of this practice. That restlessness may be due to the presence of a subconscious like for that very object from which the mind has been consciously withdrawn, which aspect is pointed out in a verse of the Bhagavadgita: rasavarjam rasopy asya para dv nivartate (B.G. II.59). The mind and the senses appear to be withdrawn from the objects of sense in pratyahara, it is true. But how do we know that the mind and the senses have no taste for the object? Hence, pratyahara is not merely a physical isolation or even a conscious disconnection of oneself from the object, but is an emotional detachment that is necessary wherein alone is it possible to have no taste for a thing. The taste may go to the feeling; and as long as the taste is present, there is every possibility of the other aspects rising once again into action. As long as the root is there, there is every chance of the sprout coming up one day or the other.
1.08 - Civilisation and Barbarism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even in its negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be useful in the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism. But Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in the front of culture; poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence, adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion; the ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious spirit. But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking for abstract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should be, a discovery of the real reality of things by which human existence can learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection. Poetry and art had become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and ornaments of life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of truth and beauty and of the living idea and the secret divinity in things concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe. Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. They have learned or are learning from the example of Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism,for it can be called by no other name,that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his standard and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment itself made a business, this is commercialism. To the natural unredeemed economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity or an ostentation and a means of advertisement. His idea of civilisation is comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade following the flag, his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialised industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production. The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.
1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
pletely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction
and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
What then is maho arnas? Is it the great sea of general being, substance of general existence out of which the substance of thought & speech are formed? It is possible; but such an interpretation is not entirely in consonance with the context of this passage. The suggestion I shall advance will therefore be different. Mahas, as a neuter adjective, means great,maho arnas, the great water; but mahas may be equally a noun and then maho arnas will mean Mahas the sea. In some passages again, mahas is genitive singular or accusative plural of a noun mah; maho arnas may well be the flowing stream or flood of Mah, as in the expression vasvo arnavam, the sea of substance, in a later Sukta.We are therefore likely to remain in doubt unless we can find an actual symbolic use of either word Mah or Mahas in a psychological sense which would justify us in supposing this Maho Arnas to be a sea of substance of knowledge rather than vaguely the sea of general substance of being. For this is the significance which alone entirely suits the actual phraseology of the last Rik of the Sukta. We find our clue in the Taittiriya Upanishad. It is said there that there are three recognised vyahritis of the Veda, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swah, but the Rishi Mahachamasya affirmed a fourth. The name of this doubtful fourth vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being & pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond the ordinary attainment of our actual human consciousness that it is hardly considered in Vedic thought a vyahriti, whatever one or two thinkers may have held to the contrary. What do we know of this Mahas from Vedantic or later sources? Bhuh, Bhuvah, Swar of the Veda rest substantially upon the Annam, Prana, Manas, matter, life & mind of the Upanishads. But the Upanishads speak of a fourth state of being immediately aboveManas, preceding it therefore & containing it, Vijnanam, ideal knowledge, and a fifth immediately above Vijnanam, Ananda or Bliss. Physically, these five are the pancha kshitayah, five earths or dwelling-places, of the Rig Veda and they are the pancha koshas, five sheaths or bodies of the Upanishads. But in our later Yogic systems we recognise seven earths, seven standing grounds of the soul on which it experiences phenomenal existence. The Purana gives us their names [the names of the two beyond the five already mentioned], Tapas and Satya, Energy&Truth. They are the outward expressions of the two psychological principles, Self-Awareness &Self-Being (Chit&Sat) which with Ananda, Self-Bliss, are the triune appearance in the soul of the supreme Existence which the Vedanta calls Brahman. Sat, Chit & Ananda constitute to Vedantic thought the parardha or spiritual higher half [of] our existence; in less imaginative language, we are in our supreme existence self-existence, self-awareness & self-delight. Annam, Prana & Manas constitute to Vedantic thought the aparardha or lower half; again, in more abstract speech, we are in our lower phenomenal existence mind, life & matter. Vijnana is the link; standing in ideal knowledge we are aware, looking upward, of our spiritual existence, looking downward, we pour it out into the three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvah & Swar, mental, vital & material existence, the phenomenal symbols of our self-expression. Objectively vijnana becomes mahat, the great, wide or extended state of phenomenal being,called also brihat, likewise signifying vast or great,into which says the Gita, the Self or Lord casts his seed as into a womb in order to engender all these objects & creatures. The Self, standing in vijnanam or mahat, is called the Mahan Atma, the great Self; so that, if we apply the significance [of] these terms to the Vedic words mah, mahas, mahi, mahn, then, even accepting mahas as an adjective and maho arnas in the sense of the great Ocean, it may very well be the ocean of the ideal or pure ideative state of existence in true knowledge which is intended, the great ocean slumbering in our humanity and awakened by the divine inspiration of Saraswati. But have we at all the right to read these high, strange & subtle ideas of a later mysticism into the primitive accents of the Veda? Let us at least support for a while that hypothesis. We may very well ask, if not from the Vedic forefa thers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich & concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied & lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities & abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible suggestion but the one hypothesis in lawful possession of the field, unless a foreign source or a later mixed ideation can be proved. At present this later ideation may be assumed, it has not been & cannot be proved. The agelong tradition of India assigns the Veda as the source & substance of our theosophies; Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad & Purana as only the interpretation & later expression; the burden of disproof rests on those who negative the tradition.
Vjebhir vjinvat and maho arnas are therefore fixed in their significance. The word vashtu in the tenth Rik offers a difficulty. It is equivalent to vahatu, says the Brahmana; to kmayatu, says Sayana; but, deferring to the opinion of the Brahmana, he adds that it means really kmayitw vahatu. Undoubtedly the root va means in classical Sanscrit to desire; but from the evidence of the classical Sanscrit we have it established that in more ancient times its ordinary meaning must have been to subdue or control; for although the verb has lost this sense in the later language, almost all its derivatives bear that meaning & the sense of wish, will or desire only persists in a few of them, va, wish and possibly va, a woman. It is this sense which agrees best with the context of the tenth rik and is concealed in the vahatu of the Brahmanas. There is no other difficulty of interpretation in the passage.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Is it not, indeed, to this conception that the abstractions of the mechanical view of things tend when, disengaging itself from the sensible forms of substance, it reduces all its notions to that of a pure energy which in the language of philosophy is indistinguishable from absolute substance?
To this state of pure energy or of pure will which is that of the absolute manifestation, are opposed the different states of the relative manifestation in which is worked out progressively the disjunction of the categories of Time and Space.
1.10 - On our Knowledge of Universals, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
Let us consider first the knowledge of universals by acquaintance. It is obvious, to begin with, that we are acquainted with such universals as white, red, black, sweet, sour, loud, hard, etc., i.e. with qualities which are exemplified in sense-data. When we see a white patch, we are acquainted, in the first instance, with the particular patch; but by seeing many white patches, we easily learn to abstract the whiteness which they all have in common, and in learning to do this we are learning to be acquainted with whiteness. A similar process will make us acquainted with any other universal of the same sort. Universals of this sort may be called 'sensible qualities'. They can be apprehended with less effort of abstraction than any others, and they seem less removed from particulars than other universals are.
We come next to relations. The easiest relations to apprehend are those which hold between the different parts of a single complex sense-datum.
For example, I can see at a glance the whole of the page on which I am writing; thus the whole page is included in one sense-datum. But I perceive that some parts of the page are to the left of other parts, and some parts are above other parts. The process of abstraction in this case seems to proceed somewhat as follows: I see successively a number of sense-data in which one part is to the left of another; I perceive, as in the case of different white patches, that all these sense-data have something in common, and by abstraction I find that what they have in common is a certain relation between their parts, namely the relation which I call 'being to the left of'. In this way I become acquainted with the universal relation.
In like manner I become aware of the relation of before and after in time. Suppose I hear a chime of bells: when the last bell of the chime sounds, I can retain the whole chime before my mind, and I can perceive that the earlier bells came before the later ones. Also in memory I perceive that what I am remembering came before the present time. From either of these sources I can abstract the universal relation of before and after, just as I abstracted the universal relation 'being to the left of'. Thus time-relations, like space-relations, are among those with which we are acquainted.
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Our knowledge of such relations, though it requires more power of abstraction than is required for perceiving the qualities of sense-data, appears to be equally immediate, and (at least in some cases) equally indubitable. Thus there is immediate knowledge concerning universals as well as concerning sense-data.
Returning now to the problem of _a priori_ knowledge, which we left unsolved when we began the consideration of universals, we find ourselves in a position to deal with it in a much more satisfactory manner than was possible before. Let us revert to the proposition 'two and two are four'. It is fairly obvious, in view of what has been said, that this proposition states a relation between the universal 'two' and the universal 'four'. This suggests a proposition which we shall now endeavour to establish: namely, _All _a priori_ knowledge deals exclusively with the relations of universals_. This proposition is of great importance, and goes a long way towards solving our previous difficulties concerning _a priori_ knowledge.
1.10 - The Revolutionary Yogi, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realization nor something glimpsed somewhere above, no abstraction, it was positive, the only positive reality although not a spatial physical world, pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial. . . . What it [this experience] brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom.117 Sri Aurobindo had gone straight into what the Buddhists call Nirvana, what the Hindus call the Silent Brahman or That; the Tao of the Chinese; the Transcendent, the Absolute, or the Impersonal of the Westerners. He had reached that famous "liberation" (mukti), which is considered the "peak" of all spiritual life what could there be beyond the Transcendent? Sri Aurobindo could tangibly verify the words of the great Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna:
"If we live in God, the world disappears; if we live in the world, God exists no longer." The gulf he had tried to bridge between Matter and Spirit had split open again before his unveiled eyes. The Western and Eastern spiritualists were right in assigning a life beyond as the sole destination of man's effort: paradise, Nirvana, or liberation
1.11 - On Intuitive Knowledge, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
It is usually through particular instances that we come to be able to see the general principle. Only those who are practised in dealing with abstractions can readily grasp a general principle without the help of instances.
In addition to general principles, the other kind of self-evident truths are those immediately derived from sensation. We will call such truths
1.11 - The Change of Power, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
We have therefore come to a new change of power. A new power such as there has never been since the first anthropoids, a tidal wave of power that has nothing to do with our little philosophical and spiritual meditations of past ages, a worldwide, collective and perhaps universal phenomenon as radically new as the first surge of thought upon the world, when mind took over from the simian order and overthrew all its laws and instinctual mechanisms. But here and this is really the characteristic of the new world being born the power is not a power of abstraction, not a talent for getting a bird's-eye view of things and reducing the scattered data of the world into an equation in order to make a synthesis, which is always wobbly the mind has turned everything into abstraction; it lives in an image of the world, a yellow or blue reflection of the great bubble, like a man inside a glass statue not a discursive and contingent power that only adds and subtracts, not a gathering of knowledge that never makes a whole. It is a direct power of the truth of each instant and each thing harmonized with the total truth of the millions of instants and things, a power to enter the truth of each gesture and each circumstance, which accords with all other gestures and circumstances because Truth is one and the Self is unique, and if this point is touched, everything else is instantly touched, like cell and cell of the same body. It is a tremendous power of concretization of Truth, acting directly upon the same Truth contained in each point of space and each second of time, or rather, compelling each moment, each circumstance, each gesture, each cell of matter to yield its truth, its right note, its own innate power buried under all the layers of our vital and mental accretions a tremendous truing of the world and each being. We could say a tremendous Movement of realization the world is not real! It is a distorted appearance, a mental approximation, which looks more like a nightmare, a black and white translation of something we still have not seized. We do not have our real eyes yet! For, in the end, there is only one reality, and that is the reality of Truth a truth that has grown, that had to protect itself behind walls, to limit and dim itself under one shell or another, one bubble or another, to make itself felt by a caterpillar or a man, then bursts open in its own Sunlight when the wings of the great Self we always were begin to open.
But this change of power, this transition from the indirect and abstract truths of the mind to the direct and concrete Truth of the great Self is obviously not effected on the summits of the Spirit it has nothing to do with mental gymnastics, just as the other power had nothing to do with the ape's skills. It is effected in a most down-to-earth way, in everyday life, in the minuscule, the futility of the moment, which is futile only to us, if we understand that a speck of dust contains as much truth as the totality of all space, and just as much power. It therefore applies itself to utterly material mechanisms. The play takes place in the substance. Therefore it comes up against age-old resistances, against a bubble that is perhaps the first self-defensive bubble of the protoplasm in its water hole. But in the end resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover,26 and we do not know, finally, if there is a single shadow and pain that does not secretly build up the very power we are trying to manifest. If it emerged too soon, truth would be incomplete, or unbearable for the other animalcules that share our water hole and which would soon disgorge it we are a single human body, we always forget, and our mistakes or slowness are the mistakes and slowness of the world. But if we can win a victory here, in this little point of matter, each of us human beings has a formidable task to carry out, if he understands. Being born in this world is a far more powerful mystery than we had thought.
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather
Kena Upanishad: Commentary - III
1.12 - Love The Creator, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
With these two abstractions, as with all those by which the mind tries to cross the abyss between the absolute reality and the facts of the relative, it is only in their opposition to each other that we can form any clear idea of them and they have no meaning except in regard to each other. In relation to desire love is all that has not egoistic desire, that does not resolve to be separated, distinct, individual, that does not manifest itself for its own sake, that does not tend towards exclusive consciousness, that does not know any other self than the Self universal and unique. It is therefore all that in the being appears and affirms itself least, that remains most invisible, most hidden, that does not know itself; everything that in this world of blindness, division, conflict, pain tends towards the light of unity and the joy of harmony. Or rather it is the principle in which all that egoism transforms into suffering, is changed back into joy.
Therefore the suffering of the creature is a witness to the fact that the desire which formed it is only a deformation of love, and that from the beginning in the heart of immense desire there lived already, yet more immense, the aspiration of love. Certainly it was not love that took the initiative of that beginning, but without love that beginning would never have come to an end.
1.13 - Reason and Religion, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight, an absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and a descent of the Divine into man. All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. Nor does that experience proceed by anything like rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light. The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; the delight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding. The surrender to God is the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light, will, power and love and his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in the ordinary conduct of mundane existence. Wherever religion really finds itself, wherever it opens itself to its own spirit,there is plenty of that sort of religious practice which is halting, imperfect, half-sincere, only half-sure of itself and in which reason can get in a word,its way is absolute and its fruits are ineffable.
Reason has indeed a part to play in relation to this highest field of our religious being and experience, but that part is quite secondary and subordinate. It cannot lay down the law for the religious life, it cannot determine in its own right the system of divine knowledge; it cannot school and lesson the divine love and delight; it cannot set bounds to spiritual experience or lay its yoke upon the action of the spiritual man. Its sole legitimate sphere is to explain as best it can, in its own language and to the rational and intellectual parts of man, the truths, the experiences, the laws of our suprarational and spiritual existence. That has been the work of spiritual philosophy in the East andmuch more crudely and imperfectly doneof theology in the West, a work of great importance at moments like the present when the intellect of mankind after a long wandering is again turning towards the search for the Divine. Here there must inevitably enter a part of those operations proper to the intellect, logical reasoning, inferences from the data given by rational experience, analogies drawn from our knowledge of the apparent facts of existence, appeals even to the physical truths of science, all the apparatus of the intelligent mind in its ordinary workings. But this is the weakest part of spiritual philosophy. It convinces the rational mind only where the intellect is already predisposed to belief, and even if it convinces, it cannot give the true knowledge. Reason is safest when it is content to take the profound truths and experiences of the spiritual being and the spiritual life, just as they are given to it, and throw them into such form, order and language as will make them the most intelligible or the least unintelligible to the reasoning mind. Even then it is not quite safe, for it is apt to harden the order into an intellectual system and to present the form as if it were the essence. And, at best, it has to use a language which is not the very tongue of the suprarational truth but its inadequate translation and, since it is not the ordinary tongue either of the rational intelligence, it is open to non-understanding or misunderstanding by the ordinary reason of mankind. It is well-known to the experience of the spiritual seeker that even the highest philosophising cannot give a true inner knowledge, is not the spiritual light, does not open the gates of experience. All it can do is to address the consciousness of man through his intellect and, when it has done, to say, I have tried to give you the truth in a form and system which will make it intelligible and possible to you; if you are intellectually convinced or attracted, you can now seek the real knowledge, but you must seek it by other means which are beyond my province.
1.14 - The Supermind as Creator, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
17:In Supermind knowledge in the Idea is not divorced from will in the Idea, but one with it - just as it is not different from being or substance, but is one with the being, luminous power of the substance. As the power of burning light is not different from the substance of the fire, so the power of the Idea is not different from the substance of the Being which works itself out in the Idea and its development. In our mentality all are different. We have an idea and a will according to the idea or an impulsion of will and an idea detaching itself from it; but we differentiate effectually the idea from the will and both from ourselves. I am; the idea is a mysterious abstraction that appears in me, the will is another mystery, a force nearer to concreteness, though not concrete, but always something that is not myself, something that I have or get or am seized with, but am not. I make a gulf also between my will, its means and the effect, for these I regard as concrete realities outside and other than myself. Therefore neither myself nor the idea nor the will in me are self-effective. The idea may fall away from me, the will may fail, the means may be lacking, I myself by any or all of these lacunae may remain unfulfilled.
18:But in the Supermind there is no such paralysing division, because knowledge is not self-divided, force is not self-divided, being is not self-divided as in the mind; they are neither broken in themselves, nor divorced from each other. For the Supermind is the Vast; it starts from unity, not division, it is primarily comprehensive, differentiation is only its secondary act. Therefore whatever be the truth of being expressed, the idea corresponds to it exactly, the will-force to the idea, - force being only power of the consciousness, - and the result to the will. Nor does the idea clash with other ideas, the will or force with other will or force as in man and his world; for there is one vast Consciousness which contains and relates all ideas in itself as its own ideas, one vast Will which contains and relates all energies in itself as its own energies. It holds back this, advances that other, but according to its own preconceiving Idea-Will.
1.19 - The Curve of the Rational Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But reason seeks to understand and interpret life by one kind of symbol only, the idea; it generalises the facts of life according to its own strongly cut ideative conceptions so that it may be able to master and arrange them, and having hold of an idea it looks for its largest general application. And in order that these ideas may not be a mere abstraction divorced from the realised or realisable truth of things, it has to be constantly comparing them with facts. It has to be always questioning facts so that it may find the ideas by which they can be more and more adequately explained, ordered and managed, and it has always to be questioning ideas in order, first, to see whether they square with actual facts and, secondly, whether there are not new facts to suit which they must be modified or enlarged or which can be evolved out of them. For reason lives not only in actual facts, but in possibilities, not only in realised truths, but in ideal truths; and the ideal truth once seen, the impulse of the idealising intelligence is to see too whether it cannot be turned into a fact, cannot be immediately or rapidly realised in life. It is by this inherent characteristic that the age of reason must always be an age of progress.
So long as the old method of mentalising life served its purpose, there was no necessity for men in the mass to think out their way of life by the aid of the reason. But the old method ceased to serve its purpose as soon as the symbols, types, institutions it created became conventions so imprisoning truth that there was no longer a force of insight sufficient to deliver the hidden reality from its artificial coatings. Man may for a time, for a long time even, live by the mere tradition of things whose reality he has lost, but not permanently; the necessity of questioning all his conventions and traditions arises, and by that necessity reason gets her first real chance of an entire self-development. Reason can accept no tradition merely for the sake of its antiquity or its past greatness: it has to ask, first, whether the tradition contains at all any still living truth and, secondly, whether it contains the best truth available to man for the government of his life. Reason can accept no convention merely because men are agreed upon it: it has to ask whether they are right in their agreement, whether it is not an inert and false acquiescence. Reason cannot accept any institution merely because it serves some purpose of life: it has to ask whether there are not greater and better purposes which can be best served by new institutions. There arises the necessity of a universal questioning, and from that necessity arises the idea that society can only be perfected by the universal application of the rational intelligence to the whole of life, to its principle as to its details, to its machinery and to the powers that drive the machine.
1.2.1.04 - Mystic Poetry, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Mystic poetry has a perfectly concrete meaning, much more than intellectual poetry which is much more abstract. The nature of the intellect is abstraction; spirituality and mysticism deal with the concrete by their very nature.
8 December 1936
1.2.1.06 - Symbolism and Allegory, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is a considerable difference between symbolism and allegory; they are not at all the same thing. Allegory comes in when a quality or other abstract thing is personalised and the allegory proper should be something carefully stylised and deliberately sterilised of the full aspect of embodied life, so that the essential meaning or idea may come out with sufficient precision and force of clarity. One can find this method in the old mystery plays and it is a kind of art that has its value. Allegory is an intellectual form; one is not expected to believe in the personalisation of the abstract quality, it is only an artistic device. When in an allegory as in Spensers Faerie Queene the personalisation, the embodiment takes first place and absorbs the major part of the minds interest, the true style and principle of this art have been abandoned. The allegorical purpose here becomes a submerged strain and is really of secondary importance, our search for it a by-play of the mind; we read for the beauty and interest of the figures and movements presented to us, not for this submerged significance. An allegory must be intellectually precise and clear in its representative figures as well as in their basis, however much adorned with imagery and personal expression; otherwise it misses its purpose. A symbol expresses on the contrary not the play of abstract things or ideas put into imaged form, but a living truth or inward vision or experience of things, so inward, so subtle, so little belonging to the domain of intellectual abstraction and precision that it cannot be brought out except through symbolic images the more these images have a living truth of their own which corresponds intimately to the living truth they symbolise, suggests the very vibration of the experience itself, the greater becomes the art of the symbolic expression. When the symbol is a representative sign or figure and nothing more, then the symbolic approaches nearer to an intellectual method, though even then it is not the same thing as allegory. In mystic poetry the symbol ought to be as much as possible the natural body of the inner truth or vision, itself an intimate part of the experience.
16-18 November 1933
--
Lord, what an incorrigible mentaliser and allegorist you are! If the bird were either consciousness or the psychic or light, it would be an allegory and all the mystic beauty would be gone. A living symbol and a mental allegorical symbol are not the same thing. You cant put a label on the Bird of Marvel any more than on the Bird of Fire or any other of the fauna or flora or population of the mystic kingdoms. They can be described, but to label them destroys their life and makes them only stuffed specimens in an allegorical museum. Mystic symbols are living things, not abstractions. Why insist on killing them? Jyoti has described the Bird and told you all that is necessary about him the rest you have to feel and live inside, not dissect and put the fragments into neatly arranged drawers.
8 August 1936
1.22 - Dominion over different provinces of creation assigned to different beings, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
The supreme condition of Brahma, which is meditated by the Yogis in the commencement of their abstraction, as invested with form, is Viṣṇu, composed of all the divine energies, and the essence of Brahma, with whom the mystic union that is sought, and which is accompanied by suitable elements, is effected[7] by the devotee whose whole mind is addressed to that object. This Hari, who is the most immediate of all the energies of Brahma, is his embodied shape, composed entirely of his essence; and in him therefore is the whole world interwoven; and from him, and in him, is the universe; and he, the supreme lord of all, comprising all that is perishable and imperishable, bears upon him all material and spiritual existence, identified in nature with his ornaments and weapons.
Maitreya said:-
1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
1.41 - Isis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Church as well as to the pale abstractions of her theology.
Certainly in art the figure of Isis suckling the infant Horus is so
1.42 - This Self Introversion, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
There is only one point of theory which matters to our practice. We may readily concur that the Augoeides, the "Genius" of Socrates, and the "Holy Guardian Angel" of Abramelin the Mage, are identical. But we cannot include this "Higher Self"; for the Angel is an actual Individual with his own Universe, exactly as man is; or, for the matter of that, a bluebottle. He is not a mere abstraction, a selection from, and exaltation of, one's own favorite qualities, as the "Higher Self" seems to be. The trouble is (I think) that the Hindu passion for analysis makes them philosophize any limited being out of existence.
This matter is of importance, because it influences one's attitude to invocation. I can, for instance, work myself up to a "Divine Consciousness," in which I can understand, and act, as I cannot in my normal state. I become "inspired;" I feel, and I express, ideas of almost illimitable exaltation. But this is totally different from the "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," which is the special aim of the Adeptus Minor. It is ruin to that Work if one deceives oneself by mistaking one's own "energized enthusiasm" for external communication. The parallel on the physical plane is the difference between Onanism and Sexual Intercourse.
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
life. The samadhi reached after efforts looks like abstraction from
the external activities. A person might be so abstracted or live
1.43 - Dionysus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of
imagination, to clo the her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery
1.43 - The Holy Guardian Angel is not the Higher Self but an Objective Individual, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I have tended rather to elaborate this theme, because of the one personally important question which arises in more recent letters; for I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order. He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood. He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term "Higher Self" implies "a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion."
It it were not so, there would be no point in The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
1.550 - 1.600 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
When the real, effortless, permanent, happy nature is realised it will be found to be not inconsistent with the ordinary activities of life. The samadhi reached after efforts looks like abstraction from the external activities. A person might be so abstracted or live freely among people without detriment to his Peace and Happiness because that is his true nature or the Self.
21st December, 1938
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
Thus, if you go deep into silence, you can reach a level of consciousness on which it is not impossible for you to receive answers to all your questions. And if there is one who is consciously open to the plenary truth of the supermind, in constant contact with it, he can certainly answer any question that is worth an answer from the supramental Light. The queries put must come from some sense of the truth and reality behind things. There are many questions and much debated problems that are cobwebs woven of mere mental abstractions or move on the illusory surface of things. These do not pertain to real knowledge; they are a deformation of knowledge, their very substance is of the ignorance. Certainly the supramental knowledge may give an answer, its own answer, to the problems set by the minds ignorance; but it is likely that it would not be at all satisfactory or perhaps even intelligible to those who ask from the mental level. You must not expect the supramental to work in the way of the mind or demand that the knowledge in truth should be capable of being pieced together with the half-knowledge in ignorance. The scheme of the mind is one thing, but Supermind is quite another and it would no longer be supramental if it adapted itself to the exigencies of the mental scheme. The two are incommensurable and cannot be put together.
When the consciousness has attained to supramental joys, does it no longer take interest in the things of the mind?
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
But it is as with gymnastics. You make all kinds of movements to form your body and make it strong, but that does not mean that you are going to spend all your life lifting weights and exercising on parallel bars! You may continue to do that as a pastime, as a profession, but surely it is not the supreme goal. For the mind it is the same thing. To have a mind capable of progressing, of adapting itself to a new life, of opening itself to higher forces, it must be put through all kinds of gymnastics. That is why children are sent to school, it is not in order that they may remember all that they learnwho remembers what he has learnt? When they are obliged to teach others, later on, they have to relearn it all, they have forgotten everything. It comes back quickly, but they have forgotten it. But if they had never gone to school, if they had never learned and had to begin everything well, when you begin to do parallel bars at forty-five, it hurts, doesnt it? It is the same thing for the brain, it lacks plasticity. Do you know what the best gymnastics is? It is to have a daily conversation with a metaphysician because there is nothing concrete there, you cannot concentrate on something that has a form, an objective reality; indeed, everything is carried on exclusively with words in a field of abstraction, it is purely mental gymnastics. And if you can enter into the mental formation of a metaphysician and are able to understand and answer him, it is perfect gymnastics!
(A mathematician disciple:) The same thing applies to mathematicians, I suppose?
1956-08-01 - Value of worship - Spiritual realisation and the integral yoga - Symbols, translation of experience into form - Sincerity, fundamental virtue - Intensity of aspiration, with anguish or joy - The divine Grace, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is precisely that part of the being which is not satisfied with abstractions and with escaping from life and evading it and leaving it as it is. It is that part of the being which wants to be integral, wants to be integrally transformed or at any rate to participate integrally in the inner adoration.
In every normal being there is the necessity, the needan absolute need to translate into a physical form what he feels and wants internally. I consider those who always want to evade life in order to have self-realisation as abnormal and incomplete. And in fact, these are usually weak natures. But those who have strength, force and a kind of healthy equilibrium in themselves, feel an absolute need to realise materially their spiritual realisation; they are not satisfied with going away into the clouds or into worlds where forms no longer exist. They must have their physical consciousness and even their body participate in their inner experience.
1957-01-02 - Can one go out of time and space? - Not a crucified but a glorified body - Individual effort and the new force, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned.
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a mathematician working out a cosmic sum in numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment a problem in relations of principles and the balance of forces: but also we should speak of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of universal and particular harmonies, a child, a poet. The side of thought is not enough; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped: Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow moulds unless they are filled with the breath of Gods delight.
These things are images, but all is an image. abstractions give us the pure conception of Gods truths; images give us their living reality.
If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence.
--
One must pass beyond all forms, even the most subtle forms of consciousness, far beyond the forms of thought, the forms of consciousness, to be able to have this impression of being outside space and time. This is what generally happens to people who enter into samadhi the true samadhi and when they come back to their normal consciousness, they dont remember anything, for, in fact, there was nothing they could remember. This is what Sri Aurobindo says here: If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction, the one reasonable end would be annihilation. For it is obvious that if one goes out of time and space, all separate existence automatically ceases.
There, now. So one can, without much result!
1957-01-23 - How should we understand pure delight? - The drop of honey - Action of the Divine Will in the world, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He says: If one could imagine. It is simply to give a more concrete approach than intellectual abstractions. He says: If you can imagine, for example, a honeycomb, well. a honeycomb which would have the capacity to taste itself and at the same time each drop of honey; not only to taste itself as honey, but to taste itself in each drop, being each drop of the honeycomb, and if each one of these drops could taste all the others, itself and all the others, and at the same time if each drop could taste, could have the taste of the whole honeycomb as if it were itself.
So, it would be a honeycomb capable of tasting itself and tasting in detail all the drops in the honeycomb, and each drop capable of tasting itself and all the others individually and the honeycomb as a whole, as itself. It is a very precise image. Only you must have some power of imagination!
1958-05-14 - Intellectual activity and subtle knowing - Understanding with the body, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It could be said that it is much more difficult to pass from the mental to the supramental life than to pass from a certain psychic emotion in life something that is like a reflection, a luminous emanation of the divine Presence in matterto the supramental consciousness; it is much easier to pass from that into the supramental consciousness than to pass from the highest intellectual speculation to any supramental vibration. Perhaps it is the word that misleads us! Perhaps it is because we call it supramental that we expect to reach it through a higher intellectual mental activity? But the fact is very different. With this very high, very pure, very noble intellectual activity, one seems to move towards a kind of cold, powerless abstraction, a frozen, an icy light which is surely very remote from life and still further away from the experience of the supramental reality.
In this new substance which is spreading and acting in the world, there is a warmth, a power, a joy so intense that all intellectual activity seems cold and dry beside it. And that is why the less one talks about these things the better it is. A single moment, a single impulse of deep and true love, an instant of the understanding which lies in the divine Grace brings you much closer to the goal than all possible explanations.
1958-11-05 - Knowing how to be silent, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or a constructed figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony formula. The hard logical and intellectual notion of truth as a single idea which all must accept, one idea or system of ideas defeating all other ideas or systems, or a single limited fact or single formula of facts which all must recognise, is an illegitimate transference from the limited truth of the physical field to the much more complex and plastic field of life and mind and spirit.
In the evolution of the spiritual man there must necessarily be many stages and in each stage a great variety of individual formations of the being, the consciousness, the life, the temperament, the ideas, the character. The nature of instrumental mind and the necessity of dealing with the life must of itself create an infinite variety according to the stage of development and the individuality of the seeker. But, apart from that, even the domain of pure spiritual self-realisation and self-expression need not be a single white monotone, here can be a great diversity in the fundamental unity; the supreme Self is one, but the souls of the Self are many and, as is the souls formation of nature, so will be its spiritual self-expression. A diversity in oneness is the law of the manifestation; the supramental unification and integration must harmonise these diversities, but to abolish them is not the intention of the Spirit in Nature.
1f.lovecraft - Medusas Coil, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
suddenly swerved from abstractions to the personal application he must
have had in mind from the start.
1f.lovecraft - Poetry and the Gods, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring
chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which
1f.lovecraft - The Battle that Ended the Century, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
exhibit as abstraction of an Eradicated Pudding.
In the third round the fight grew really rough; several ears and other
1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
signs of unusual abstraction, and spent as much time as he possibly
could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, it was stated, in a
1.jk - Sleep And Poetry, #Keats - Poems, #John Keats, #Poetry
(lines 250-1): An idea, says Leigh Hunt... "of as lovely and powerful a nature in embodying an abstraction, as we ever remember to have seen put into words."
(line 354): Leigh Hunt's house: he says ... the poem "originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures," -- "many a bust from Shout," as Shelley wrote to Mrs. Gisborne. In Hunt's Correspondence (Volume i, page 289) we read "Keats's Sleep and Poetry is a description of a parlour that was mine, no bigger than an old mansion's closet." Charles Cowden Clarke says (Gentleman's Magazine, February 1874) "It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had been made up for him on the sofa."
1.poe - Eureka - A Prose Poem, #Poe - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The consideration here involved presents to my own mind no embarrassment whatever -but this fact does not blind me to the possibility of its being obscure to those who may have been less in the habit of dealing with abstractions: -and, upon the whole, it may be as well to look at the matter from one or two other points of view.
The absolute, irrelative particle primarily created by the Volition of God, must have been in a condition of positive normality, or rightfulness -for wrongfulness implies relation. Right is positive; wrong is negative -is merely the negation of right; as cold is the negation of heat -darkness of light. That a thing may be wrong, it is necessary that there be some other thing in relation to which it is wrong -some condition which it fails to satisfy; some law which it violates; some being whom it aggrieves. If there be no such being, law, or condition, in respect to which the thing is wrong and, still more especially, if no beings, laws, or conditions exist at all -then the thing cannot be wrong and consequently must be right. Any deviation from normality involves a tendency to return to it. A difference from the normal -from the right -from the just -can be understood as effected only by the overcoming a difficulty; and if the force which overcomes the difficulty be not infinitely continued, the ineradicable tendency to return will at length be permitted to act for its own satisfaction. Upon withdrawal of the force, the tendency acts. This is the principle of reaction as the inevitable consequence of finite action. Employing a phraseology of which the seeming affectation will be pardoned for its expressiveness, we may say that Reaction is the return from the condition of as it is and ought not to be into the condition of as it was, originally, and therefore ought to be: -and let me add here that the absolute force of Reaction would no doubt be always found in direct proportion with the reality -the truth -the absoluteness -of the originality -if ever it were possible to measure this latter: -and, consequently, the greatest of all conceivable reactions must be that produced by the tendency which we now discuss -the tendency to return into the absolutely original -into the supremely primitive. Gravity, then, must be the strongest of forces -an idea reached a priori and abundantly confirmed by induction. What use I make of the idea, will be seen in the sequel.
1.rb - Pauline, A Fragment of a Question, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
Seeks out abstractions; I would have one joy,
But one in life, so it were wholly mine,
1.wby - The Gift Of Harun Al-Rashid, #Yeats - Poems, #William Butler Yeats, #Poetry
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of parmenides;
1.ww - Book Eighth- Retrospect--Love Of Nature Leading To Love Of Man, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The idea, or abstraction of the kind.
An idler among academic bowers,
1.ww - Book Fourth [Summer Vacation], #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Little, in this abstraction, did I see;
Remembered less; but I had inward hopes
1.ww - Book Sixth [Cambridge and the Alps], #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
On the relation those abstractions bear
To Nature's laws, and by what process led,
--
Of those abstractions to a mind beset
With images and haunted by herself,
1.ww - The Excursion- IV- Book Third- Despondency, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
From that abstraction I was roused,--and how?
Even as a thoughtful shepherd by a flash
--
All that abstraction furnished for my needs
Or purposes, nor scrupled to proclaim,
1.ww - The Excursion- IX- Book Eighth- The Parsonage, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Amid his calm abstractions, would admit
That not the slender privilege is theirs
2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Infinite existence, infinite non-being or boundless finite, all are to us original indeterminates or indeterminables; we can assign to them no distinct characters or features, nothing which would predetermine their determinations. To describe the fundamental character of the universe as Space or Time or Space-Time does not help us; for even if these are not abstractions of our intelligence which we impose by our mental view on the cosmos, the mind's necessary perspective of its picture, these too are indeterminates and carry in themselves no clue to the origin of the determinations that take place in them; there is still no explanation of the strange process by which things are determined or of their powers, qualities and properties, no revelation of their true nature, origin and significance.
Actually to our Science this infinite or indeterminate Existence reveals itself as an Energy, known not by itself but by its works, which throws up in its motion waves of energism and in them a multitude of infinitesimals; these, grouping themselves to form larger infinitesimals, become a basis for all the creations of the Energy, even those farthest away from the material basis, for the emergence of a world of organised Matter, for the emergence of Life, for the emergence of Consciousness, for all the still unexplained activities of evolutionary Nature. On the original process are erected a multitude of processes which we can observe, follow, can take advantage of many of them, utilise; but they are none of them, fundamentally, explicable. We know now that different groupings and a varying number of electric infinitesimals can produce or serve as the constituent occasion - miscalled the cause, for here there seems to be only a necessary antecedent condition - for the appearance of larger atomic infinitesimals of different natures, qualities, powers; but we fail to discover how these different dispositions can come to constitute these different atoms, - how the differentiae in the constituent occasion or cause necessitate the differentiae in the constituted outcome or result. We know also that certain combinations of certain invisible atomic infinitesimals produce or occasion new and visible determinations quite different in nature, quality and power from the constituent infinitesimals; but we fail to discover, for instance, how a fixed formula for the combination of oxygen and hydrogen comes to determine the appearance of water which is evidently something more than a combination of gases, a new creation, a new form of substance, a material manifestation of a quite new character. We see that a seed develops into a tree, we follow the line of the process of production and we utilise it; but we do not discover how a tree can grow out of a seed, how the life and form of the tree come to be implied in the substance or energy of the seed or, if that be rather the fact, how the seed can develop into a tree. We know that genes and chromosomes are the cause of hereditary transmissions, not only of physical but of psychological variations; but we do not discover how psychological characteristics can be contained and transmitted in this inconscient material vehicle. We do not see or know, but it is expounded to us as a cogent account of Nature-process, that a play of electrons, of atoms and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic; but we fail to discover or appreciate how such material movements could have composed or necessitated the composition of these highest points of thought and literature: the divergence here of the determinants and the determination becomes so wide that we are no longer able to follow the process, much less understand or utilise. These formulae of Science may be pragmatically correct and infallible, they may govern the practical how of Nature's processes, but they do not disclose the intrinsic how or why; rather they have the air of the formulae of a cosmic Magician, precise, irresistible, automatically successful each in its field, but their rationale is fundamentally unintelligible.
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: That is not your consciousness, that is the result of your consciousness. Do you think consciousness is a mere abstraction so that it exists nowhere?
In a way, you can say that everything exists in consciousness, even space, etc. In fact, everything exists in consciousness and it exists nowhere outside of it. Then you come to Shankara's position: Everything, therefore, is Maya illusion. That is the most logical conclusion unless you admit, like the materialists, that everything comes from Matter.
--
Sri Aurobindo: How do you see? Only through your mind, is it not? You can only say that these things like Matter, etc. represent themselves in this way to the human mind. And what is Time, when you come to deal with subtler things? It is not a mere abstraction; it is a force, you can say it is the action of a force. It acts and produces effects by itself without any other factor.
Time, you can say, is consciousness in action working in eternity and space is consciousness as being in self-extension.
2.01 - The Object of Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5:The thought, since it is not the highest or strongest part of Nature, not even the sole or deepest index to Truth, ought not to follow its own exclusive satisfaction or take that for the sign of its attainment to the supreme Knowledge. It is here as the guide, up to a certain point, of the heart, the life and the other members but it cannot be a substitute for them; it has to see not only what is its own ultimate satisfaction but whether there is not an ultimate satisfaction intended also for these other members. An exclusive path of abstract thought would be justified, only if the object of the Supreme Will in the universe has been nothing more than a descent into the activity of the ignorance operated by the mind as blinding instrument and jailor through false idea and sensation and an ascent into the quiescence of knowledge equally operated by the mind through correct thought as enlightening instrument and saviour. But the chances are that there is an aim in the world less absurd and aimless, an impulse towards the Absolute less dry and abstract, a truth of the world more large and complex, a more richly infinite height of the Infinite. Certainly, an abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation; for, abstract it moves towards an absolute abstraction and these are the only two abstractions that are absolutely absolute. But a concrete ever deepening wisdom waiting on more and more riches of infinite experience and not the confident abstract logic of the narrow and incompetent human mind is likely to be the key to a divine suprahuman knowledge. The heart, the will, the life and even the body, no less than the thought, are forms of a divine Conscious-Being and indices of great significance. These too have powers by which the soul can return to its complete self-awareness or means by which It can enjoy it. The object of the Supreme Will may well be a culmination in which the whole being is intended to receive its divine satisfaction, the heights enlightening the depths, the material Inconscient revealed to itself as the Divine by the touch of the supreme Superconscience.
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.
2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But although thus indeterminable to Mind, because of its absoluteness and infinity, we discover that this Supreme and Eternal Infinite determines itself to our consciousness in the universe by real and fundamental truths of its being which are beyond the universe and in it and are the very foundation of its existence. These truths present themselves to our conceptual cognition as the fundamental aspects in which we see and experience the omnipresent Reality. In themselves they are seized directly, not by intellectual understanding but by a spiritual intuition, a spiritual experience in the very substance of our consciousness; but they can also be caught at in conception by a large and plastic idea and can be expressed in some sort by a plastic speech which does not insist too much on rigid definition or limit the wideness and subtlety of the idea. In order to express this experience or this idea with any nearness a language has to be created which is at once intuitively metaphysical and revealingly poetic, admitting significant and living images as the vehicle of a close, suggestive and vivid indication, - a language such as we find hammered out into a subtle and pregnant massiveness in the Veda and the Upanishads. In the ordinary tongue of metaphysical thought we have to be content with a distant indication, an approximation by abstractions, which may still be of some service to our intellect, for it is this kind of speech which suits our method of logical and rational understanding; but if it is to be of real service, the intellect must consent to pass out of the bounds of a finite logic and accustom itself to the logic of the Infinite. On this condition alone, by this way of seeing and thinking, it ceases to be paradoxical or futile to speak of the Ineffable: but if we insist on applying a finite logic to the Infinite, the omnipresent Reality will escape us and we shall grasp instead an abstract shadow, a dead form petrified into speech or a hard incisive graph which speaks of the Reality but does not express it. Our way of knowing must be appropriate to that which is to be known; otherwise we achieve only a distant speculation, a figure of knowledge and not veritable knowledge.
The supreme Truth-aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this founds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature, self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory, Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept.
--
A certain difficulty arises for our mind in reconciling these different faces or fronts of the One Self and Spirit, because we are obliged to use abstract conceptions and defining words and ideas for something that is not abstract, something that is spiritually living and intensely real. Our abstractions get fixed into differentiating concepts with sharp lines between them: but the Reality is not of that nature; its aspects are many but shade off into each other. Its truth could only be rendered by ideas and images metaphysical and yet living and concrete, - images which might be taken by the pure Reason as figures and symbols but are more than that and mean more to the intuitive vision and feeling, for they are realities of a dynamic spiritual experience. The impersonal truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure reason, but there is another side of truth which belongs to the spiritual or mystic vision and without that inner vision of realities the abstract formulation of them is insufficiently alive, incomplete. The mystery of things is the true truth of things; the intellectual presentation is only truth in representation, in abstract symbols, as if in a cubist art of thought-speech, in geometric figure. It is necessary in a philosophic inquiry to confine oneself mostly to this intellectual presentation, but it is as well to remember that this is only the abstraction of the Truth and to seize it completely or express it completely there is needed a concrete experience and a more living and full-bodied language.
Here it becomes opportune to see how in this aspect of the Reality we must regard the relation we have discovered between the One and the Many; this amounts to a determination of the true connection between the individual and the Divine Being, between the Soul and the Ishwara. In the normal theistic conception the Many are created by God; made by him as a potter might make a vessel, they are dependent on him as are creatures on their creator. But in this larger view of the Ishwara the Many are themselves the Divine One in their inmost reality, individual selves of the supreme and universal Self-Existence, eternal as he is eternal but eternal in his being: our material existence is indeed a creation of Nature, but the soul is an immortal portion of the Divinity and behind it is the Divine Self in the natural creature. Still the One is the fundamental Truth of existence, the Many exist by the One and there is therefore an entire dependence of the manifested being on the Ishwara. This dependence is concealed by the separative ignorance of the ego which strives to exist in its own right, although at every step it is evidently dependent on the cosmic Power that created it, moved by it, a part of its cosmic being and action; this effort of the ego is clearly a misprision, an erroneous reflection of the truth of the self-existence that is within us. It is true that there is something in us, not in the ego but in the self and inmost being, that surpasses cosmic Nature and belongs to the Transcendence. But this too finds itself independent of Nature only by dependence on a higher Reality; it is through self-giving or surrender of soul and nature to the Divine Being that we can attain to our highest self and supreme Reality, for it is the Divine Being who is that highest self and that supreme Reality, and we are self-existent and eternal only in his eternity and by his self-existence. This dependence is not contradictory of the Identity, but is itself the door to the realisation of the Identity, - so that here again we meet that phenomenon of duality expressing unity, proceeding from unity and opening back into unity, which is the constant secret and fundamental operation of the universe. It is this truth of the consciousness of the Infinite that creates the possibility of all relations between the many and the One, among which the realisation of oneness by the mind, the presence of oneness in the heart, the existence of oneness in all the members is a highest peak, and yet it does not annul but confirms all the other personal relations and gives them their fullness, their complete delight, their entire significance. This too is the magic, but also the logic of the Infinite.
2.03 - The Pyx, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
weary of abstractions, of attentuations, of the
wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself
2.06 - On Beauty, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The other day there was a talk about the arpa devas gods without form and the rpa devas and their planes. Sri Aurobindo explained that it was merely a mental way of dealing with those things. Beauty is not merely an abstraction of the mind. Of course, the mind can create a sort of division and think of beauty as an abstraction. It seems merely an idea without, as it were, any power behind it. But if you go to the plane above mind you find that all things that are abstractions in the mind are Powers and Realities there. There you find that Beauty is a power of the Supreme.
Disciple: I want to know what connection this power of beauty has with Vaishnavism. Bhakti begins with emotion. Is there a connection between Bhakti and this power of beauty?
--
Sri Aurobindo: Why on the higher plane only? Do you think that beauty is not a power? Do you believe that it is a mental abstraction?
Disciple: I can understand that it is a power in a certain sense on the mental, vital and physical planes. But what is it on the plane higher than the mind?
--
But what is your idea of beauty? What is beauty? Is it an abstraction?
Disciple: No, it is not an abstraction.
Sri Aurobindo: What is it then? When you say "There is beauty in the rose," is it something apart from the rose itself? What do you mean by it?
2.06 - Two Tales of Seeking and Losing, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Everything his hands touch is transformed into gold. So the story of Doctor Faust mingles also with that of King Midas, in the card of the Ace of Coins, which portrays the terrestrial globe turned into a sphere of solid gold, made arid in its abstraction into money, inedible and unlivable.
"Do you already regret having signed the pact with the Devil?"
2.07 - The Supreme Word of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the weakness of the kinetic and the emotional religions is that they are too much absorbed in some divine Personality and in the divine values of the finite. And, even when they have a conception of the infinite Godhead, they do not give us the full satisfaction of knowledge because they do not follow it out into its most ultimate and supernal tendencies. These religions fall short of a complete absorption in the Eternal and the perfect union by identity, - and yet to that identity in some other way, if not in the abstractive, since there all oneness has its basis, the spirit that is in man must one day arrive. On the other hand, the weakness of a contemplative quietistic spirituality is that it arrives at this result by a too absolute abstraction and in the end it turns into a nothing or a fiction the human soul whose aspiration was yet all the time the whole sense of this attempt at union; for without the soul and its aspiration liberation and union could have no meaning. The little that this way of thinking recognises of his other powers of existence, it relegates to an inferior preliminary action which never arrives at any full or satisfying realisation in the Eternal and Infinite. Yet these things too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the strong yearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition
340
2.08 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
Ideas are abstractions, notions which are supposed to correspond to realities, and as long as ideas correspond to realities, they are valid. I have an idea that there is a building in front of me. This idea is a valid idea, because it corresponds with the real existence of the building outside. So, the validity of my idea depends upon the reality of the object which is in front of it, but my idea itself has no reality. It is borrowed reality. It hangs on the existence of something else outside, in this case, the building. So, if the idea of the Ultimate Reality or God is to hang on the existence of another thing, God is not a real being. This is a very subtle difficulty that may trouble the minds of even sincere seekers. Dont you think that the world is real? It is not merely real, it is very, very real, hard to the core, flint-like and no one can gainsay that it is. Perhaps that alone is.
God is an idea that has been introduced in our minds by our ancestors, by our books, by our scriptures, by our professors and our teachers and parents, and somehow, we have been forced by the logic of this teaching to believe there should be such a thing as an other-worldly existence and we have somehow reconciled ourselves to itGod must be there. But we are accepting the existence of God against our own will. We are hungry and thirsty and this hunger and thirst of the body is more real than the idea of God. No one can say that it is not so, whatever be our devotion to God. This is so even in the case of advanced seekers and sincere Sadhaks (aspirants). This subject is the principal theme of Platos doctrine.
2.08 - The God of Love is his own proof, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
What is the ideal of the lover who has quite passed beyond beyond the idea of selfishness, of bartering and bargaining, and who knows no fear? Even to the great God such a man will say, I will give You my all, and I do not want anything from You; indeed there is nothing that I can call my own. When a man has acquired this conviction, his ideal becomes one of perfect love, one of perfect fearlessness of love. The highest ideal of such a person has no narrowness of particularity about it; it is love universal, love without limits and bonds, love itself, absolute love. This grand ideal of the religion of love is worshipped and loved absolutely as such without the aid of any symbols or suggestions. This is the highest form of Para-Bhakti, the worship of such an all-comprehending ideal as the ideal; all the other forms of Bhakti are only stages on the way to reach it. All our failures and all our successes in following the religion of love are on the road to the reallsatlon of that one ideal. Object after object is taken up, and the inner ideal is successively projected on them all; and all such external objects are found inadequate as exponents of the everexpanding inner ideal, and are naturally rejected one after another. At last the aspirant begins to think that it is vain to try to realise the ideal in external objects, that all external objects are as nothing when compared with the ideal itself; and, in course of time, he acquires the power of realising the highest and the most generalised abstract ideal entirely as an abstraction that is to him quite alive and real. When the devotee has reached this point, he is no more impelled to ask whether God can be demonstrated or not, whether He is omnipotent and omniscient or not. To him He is only the God of Love: He is the highest ideal of love, and that is sufficient for all his purposes; He, as love, is self-evident; it requires no proofs to demonstrate the existence of the beloved to the lover. The magistrate-Gods of other forms of religion may require a good deal of proof to prove Them; but the Bhakta does pot and cannot think of such Gods at all. To him God exists entirely as love. None, O beloved, loves the husb and for the husbands sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the husb and that the husb and is loved; none, O beloved, loves the wife for the wifes sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the wife that the wife is loved. It is said by some that selfishness is the only motive power in regard to all human activities. That also is love lowered by being particularised. When I think of myself as comprehending the Universal, there can surely be no selfishness in me; but when I, by mistake, think that I am a little something, my love becomes particularised and narrowed.
The mistake consists in making the sphere of love narrow and contracted. All things in the universe are of divine origin and deserve to be loved; it has, however, to be borne in mind that the love of the whole includes the love of the parts. This whole is the God of the Bhaktas and all the other Gods, Fathers in Heaven, or Rulers, or Creators, and all theories and doctrines and books have no purpose and no meaning for them, seeing that they have, through their supreme love and devotion, risen above those things altogether. When the heart is purified and cleansed and filled to the brim with the divine nectar of love, all other ideas of God become simply puerile, and are rejected as being inadequate or unworthy. Such is indeed the power of Para-Bhakti or Supreme Love; and the perfected Bhakta no more goes to see God in temples and churches; he knows no place where he will not find Him. He finds Him in the temple as well as out of the temple; he finds Him in the saints saintliness as well as in the wicked mans wickedness, because he has Him already seated in glory in his own heart, as the one Almighty, inextinguishable Light of Love, which is ever shining and eternally present.
2.0 - THE ANTICHRIST, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.--Fancy no
one's having thought Kant's Categorical Imperative _dangerous to life!_
--
translated an existence conceived entirely in symbols and abstractions
into their own crudities, in order at least to be able to understand
2.1.02 - Nature The World-Manifestation, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
same time. It cannot be the truth that man belongs to one world and men in their mutability to another or that in seeing the changes and variations of the species tiger we are seeing the world in one way and when we see the persistence of type of the species we are knowing it in a different way. These artificial problems are the result of looking at words and concepts instead of things; we concentrate on the words and concepts "sameness" and "change", see that they represent as abstractions ideas that stand opposed to each other, imagine that they are as opposed in fact as in our minds, are incompatible and therefore cannot coexist in the same world or cannot be true at the same time or in the same world-perception. As a matter of fact there is no such incompatibility; something that is permanently the same may be in constant change of its details of existence without losing its constant fundamental sameness. There is no reason why something should not be transient (not therefore unreal) in many of its phenomena, yet permanent in itself, in its being, whether that permanence be only a duration in time or eternal.
No doubt, two worlds may meet, world of mind or spirit enter into world of Matter, but then their elements combine into one world, a world let us say of mind-informed or spirit-governed
2.1.03 - Man and Superman, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For mind is the man, mind cramped into a body and entangled in the intricate machinery of a laborious and precarious physical organism which helps it less than it hampers. Mind's only data for knowledge are the motions of terrestrial life, the motions and processes of the physical world and its own processes and motions. Its notions about other things are merely speculations, guesses, imaginations; it thinks about them by means of abstractions, it cannot grasp anything concrete. It can observe life and know it by observation and inferences from observation or it can know by theory; it can find out its constituent parts and its processes. Its knowledge of itself is of the same
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sense-data and though like a kite it can fly high into an air of abstractions, it is held to the earth of sense by a string of great strength; if that string is broken it drifts lazily [in] the clouds and always it falls back by natural gravitation to its original earth basis - only so can it receive strength to go farther. Its field is the air and sky of the finite, it cannot ascend into the stratosphere of the spiritual vision, still less can it move at ease in the Infinite.
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2.11 - The Modes of the Self, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The place of the divine Personality in our synthesis will best be considered when we come to speak of the Yoga of devotion; it is enough here to indicate that it has its place and keeps it in the integral Yoga even when liberation has been attained. There are practically three grades of the approach to the personal Deity; the first in which He is conceived with a particular form or particular qualities as the name and form of the Godhead which our nature and personality prefers365; a second in which He is the one real Person, the All-Personality, the Ananta-guna; a third in which we get back to the ultimate source of all idea and fact of personality in that which the Upanishad indicates by the single word Lie without fixing any attri butes. It is there that our realisations of the personal and the impersonal Divine meet and become one in the utter Godhead. For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.
When in That we live and have our being, we can possess it in both its modes, the Impersonal in a supreme state of being and consciousness, in an infinite impersonality of self-possessing power and bliss, the Personal by the divine nature acting through the individual soul-form and by the relation between that and its transcendent and universal Self. We may keep even our relation with the personal Deity in His forms and names; if, for instance, our work is predominantly a work of Love it is as the Lord of Love that we can seek to serve and express Him, but we shall have at the same time an integral realisation of Him in all His names and forms and qualities and not mistake the front of Him which is prominent in our attitude to the world for all the infinite Godhead.
2.15 - On the Gods and Asuras, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Disciple: I do not suppose Plato meant a mental abstraction by his Idea. It may mean "creative conception".
Sri Aurobindo: Plato had very mathematical ideas about these things. If he meant by it the creative conception then there are several things in it. First of all, it is not a mental idea but what I call the Real-Idea: that is, Idea with a Reality and a Power. Now, corresponding to every form there is what may be called the archetype, the type-form, and it already exists in the Real-Idea before it exists in matter. Everything exists first in consciousness and then in matter.
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Disciple: They say that all abstractions belong to the Arupa Loka. For instance, the idea of beauty.
Sri Aurobindo: Beauty is not an abstraction. It is a power of the Supreme on the plane above the Mind. On the mental plane you have abstractions. It is the mind's way of representing realities of planes higher than its own, but behind these abstractions there is a reality. On the plane above the mind there are no abstractions; there are realities and powers. For instance, you form an abstract idea in the mind about the Supermind. When you get to the Supermind you find it is not an abstraction at all. It is more intensely concrete than Matter, something quite overwhelming in its concreteness. That is why I called it the Real-Idea and not an abstract idea. In that sense there is nothing more concrete than God. If we were on the pure mental plane we would find Mind quite concrete and real. But as we are on the physical plane we always think that mind is abstract.
Before the Supermind Matter dwindles into a shadow!
2.1.7.08 - Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I am unable to follow your criticism. I find nothing pompous or bombastic in the line unless it is the resonance of the word fortuitous and the many closely packed ts that give you the impression. But fortuitous cannot be sacrificed as it exactly hits the meaning I want. Also I fail to see what is abstract and especially mental in it. Neither a travesty nor sovereignty are abstract things and the images here are all concrete, as they should be to express the inner visions sense of concreteness of subtle things. The whole passage is of course about mental movements and mental powers, therefore about what the intellect sees as abstractions, but the inner vision does not feel them as that. To it mind has a substance and its energies and actions are very real and substantial things. Naturally there is a certain sense of scorn in this passage, for what the Ignorance regards as its sovereignty and positive truth has been exposed by the sceptic ray as fortuitous and unreal.
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2.24 - The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But this objection is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of spiritual knowledge. Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or a constructed figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony formula. The hard logical and intellectual notion of truth as a single idea which all must accept, one idea or system of ideas defeating all other ideas or systems, or a single limited fact or single formula of facts which all must recognise, is an illegitimate transference from the limited truth of the physical field to the much more complex and plastic field of life and mind and spirit.
This transference has been responsible for much harm; it brings into thought narrowness, limitation, an intolerance of the necessary variation and multiplicity of view-points without which there can be no totality of truth-finding, and by the narrowness and limitation much obstinacy in error. It reduces philosophy to an endless maze of sterile disputes; religion has been invaded by this misprision and infected with credal dogmatism, bigotry and intolerance. The truth of the spirit is a truth of being and consciousness and not a truth of thought: mental ideas can only represent or formulate some facet, some mindtranslated principle or power of it or enumerate its aspects, but to know it one has to grow into it and be it; without that growing and being there can be no true spiritual knowledge. The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one, everywhere it follows the same general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual being; for these are the imperatives of the spiritual consciousness. But also there are, based on those imperatives, numberless possibilities of variation of experience and expression: the centralisation and harmonisation of these possibles, but also the intensive sole following out of any line of experience are both of them necessary movements of the emerging spiritual Conscious-Force within us. Moreover, the accommodation of mind and life to the spiritual truth, its expression in them, must vary with the mentality of the seeker so long as he has not risen above all need of such accommodation or such limiting expression. It is this mental and vital element which has created the oppositions that still divide spiritual seekers or enter into their differing affirmations of the truth that they experience. This difference and variation is needed for the freedom of spiritual search and spiritual growth: to overpass differences is quite possible, but that is most easily done in pure experience; in mental formulation the difference must remain until one can exceed mind altogether and in a highest consciousness integralise, unify and harmonise the many-sided truth of the Spirit.
2.25 - The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We have now completed our view of the path of Knowledge and seen to what it leads. First, the end of Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of division. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality; in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him. It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all relations.
Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
2.25 - The Triple Transformation, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
At its highest the thinking mind is drawn always towards the impersonal; in its search it becomes conscious of a spiritual essence, an impersonal Reality which expresses itself in all these outward signs and characters but is more than any formation or manifesting figure. It feels something of which it becomes intimately and invisibly aware, - a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme Beauty, a supreme Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch, less and less impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and concrete, the touch and pressure of an Eternity and Infinity which is all this that is and more. There is a pressure from this Impersonality that seeks to mould the whole mind into a form of itself; at the same time the impersonal secret and law of things becomes more and more visible. The mind develops into the mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a direct experience. As a result the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil, impersonal; there is a similar tranquillising influence on the parts of life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete; for the mental change leads more naturally towards an inner status and an outer quietude, but, poised in this purifying quietism, not drawn like the vital parts towards a discovery of new life-energies, does not press for a full dynamic effect on the nature.
A higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance; for the tendency of the spiritualised mind is to go on upwards and, since above itself the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into a vast formless and featureless impersonality that it enters.
2.3.02 - The Supermind or Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
One has already begun to disappear. Mind acts by representations and constructions, by the separation and weaving together of its constructed data; it can make a synthetic construction and see it as the 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 selfexceeding and transformation, and this is only possible either by a higher Light descending into it or by its ascent, the taking up or immergence of it into a higher Light of existence. In Matter, descending below Mind, we arrive at the acme of the principle of fragmentation and division; the One, though secretly there, is lost to knowledge and we get the fullness of the Ignorance,
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3.01 - THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
another world is born. abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and
inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time,
3.02 - The Motives of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Therefore that there may be at all any possibility of a Yoga of devotion, we must assume first that the supreme Existence is not an abstraction or a state of existence, but a conscious Being; secondly, that he meets us in the universe and is in some way immanent in it as well as its source, - otherwise, we should have to go out of cosmic life to meet him; thirdly, that he is capable of personal relations with us and must therefore be not incapable of personality; finally, that when we approach him by our human emotions, we receive a response in kind. This does not mean that the nature of the Divine is precisely the same as our human nature though upon a larger scale, or that it is that nature pure of certain perversions and God a magnified or else an ideal Man. God is not and cannot be an ego limited by his qualities as we are in our normal consciousness. But on the other hand our human consciousness must certainly originate and have been derived from the Divine; though the forms which it takes in us may and must be other than the divine because we are limited by ego, not universal, not superior to our nature, not greater than our qualities and their workings, as he is, still our human emotions and impulses must have behind them a Truth in him of which they are the limited and very often, therefore, the perverse or even the degraded forms. By approaching him through our emotional being we approach that Truth, it comes down to us to meet our emotions and lift them towards it; through it our emotional being is united with him.
Secondly, this supreme Being is also the universal Being and our relations with the universe are all means by which we are prepared for entering into relation with him. All the emotions with which we confront the action of the universal existence upon us, are really directed towards him, in ignorance at first, but it is by directing them in growing knowledge towards him that we enter into more intimate relations with him, and all that is false and ignorant in them will fall away as we draw nearer towards unity. To all of them he answers, taking us in the stage of progress in which we are; for if we met no kind of response or help to our imperfect approach, the more perfect relations could never be established. Even as men approach him, so he accepts them and responds too by the divine Love to their bhakti, tathaiva bhajate. Whatever form of being, whatever qualities they lend to him, through that form and those qualities he helps them to develop, encourages or governs their advance and in their straight way or their crooked draws them towards him. What they see of him is a truth, but a truth represented to them in the terms of their own being and consciousness, partially, distortedly, not in the terms of its own higher reality, not in the aspect which it assumes when we become aware of the complete Divinity. This is the justification of the cruder and more primitive elements of religion and also their sentence of transience and passing. They are justified because there is a truth of the Divine behind them and only so could that truth of the Divine be approached in that stage of the developing human consciousness and be helped forward; they are condemned, because to persist always in these crude conceptions and relations with the Divine is to miss that closer union towards which these crude beginnings are the first steps, however faltering.
3.03 - The Spirit Land, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
There are to be seen in this world, first, the spiritual archetypes of all things and beings which are present in the physical and in the soul world. Imagine the picture of a painter existing in the mind before it is painted. This gives an analogy to what is meant by the expression archetype. It does not concern us here that the painter has perhaps not had such an Archetype in his mind before he paints, and that it only gradually develops and becomes complete during the practical work. In the real "World of Spirit" there are such Archetypes for all things, and the physical things and beings are copies of these Archetypes. When any person who trusts only his outer senses denies this archetypal world, and holds Archetypes to be merely abstractions which the intellect, by comparing the objects of the senses, arrives at, it is quite to be understood; for such a one simply cannot see in this higher world; he
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3.04 - The Way of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is the ordinary movement by which what may be at first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes on the hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga, the inner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual source of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the sentiment and passion, all the moods and experiences of love concentrated on a supreme object of desire and intensified a hundredfold beyond the highest acme of intensity possible to a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life, the illumination by an unseized vision, the unsatisfied yearning for a single object of the heart's desire, the intense impatience of all that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the obstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of all beauty and delight in a single form. And there are all the many moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation, the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of the inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly an intense spiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding lotus of the spirit. And as the intensity of its seeking is beyond the highest power of the normal human emotions, so also the delight and the final ecstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination and beyond expression by speech. For this is the delight of the Godhead that passes human understanding. Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form of the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any and all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which admit the greatest intensity, are always those by which he can be most intensely pursued and possessed with the profoundest ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart and therefore apart from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being in the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other than its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.
3.05 - The Divine Personality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The nature of the philosophical intellect is to move among ideas and to give them a sort of abstract reality of their own apart from all their concrete representations which affect our life and personal consciousness. Its bent is to reduce these representations to their barest and most general terms and to subtilise even these if possible into some final abstraction. The pure intellectual direction travels away from life. In judging things it tries to get back from their effects on our personality and to arrive at whatever general and impersonal truth may be behind them; it is inclined to treat that kind of truth as the only real truth of being or at least as the one superior and permanent power of reality. Therefore it is bound by its own nature to end in its extremes at an absolute impersonality and an absolute abstraction. This is where the ancient philosophies ended. They reduced everything to three abstractions, existence, consciousness and bliss of being, and they tended to get rid of the two of these three which seemed dependent on the first and most abstract, and to throw all back into a pure featureless existence from which everything else had been discharged, all representations, all values, except the one infinite and timeless fact of being. But the intellect had still one farther possible step to take and it took it in Buddhistic philosophy. It found that even this final fact of existence was only a representation; it abstracted that also and got to an infinite zero which might be either a void or an eternal inexpressible.
The heart and life, as we know, have an exactly opposite law. They cannot live with abstractions; they can find their satisfaction only in things that are concrete or can be made seizable; whether physically, mentally or spiritually, their object is not something which they seek to discriminate and arrive at by intellectual abstraction; a living becoming of it or a conscious possession and joy of their object is what they seek. Nor is it the satisfaction of an abstract mind or impersonal existence to which they respond, but the joy and the activity of a being, a conscious Person in us, whether finite or infinite, to whom the delights and powers of his existence are a reality. Therefore when the heart and life turn towards the Highest and the Infinite, they arrive not at an abstract existence or non-existence, a Sat or else a Nirvana, but at an existent, a Sat Purusha, not merely at a consciousness, but at a conscious Being, a Chaitanya Purusha, not merely at a purely impersonal delight of the Is, but at an infinite I Am of bliss, an Anandamaya Purusha; nor can they immerge and lose his consciousness and bliss in featureless existence, but must insist on all three in one, for delight of existence is their highest power and without consciousness delight cannot be possessed. That is the sense of the supreme figure of the intensest Indian religion of love, Sri Krishna, the All-blissful and All-beautiful.
The intelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and values, a spiritual artist and poet. Therefore the severest intellectual philosophy admits the Saguna, the divine Person, only as the supreme cosmic symbol; go beyond it to reality and you will arrive, it says, at last to the Nirguna, the pure Impersonal. The rival philosophy asserts the superiority of the Saguna; that which is impersonal is, it will perhaps say, only the material, the stuff of his spiritual nature out of which he manifests the powers of his being, consciousness and bliss, all that expresses him; the impersonal is the apparent negative out of which he looses the temporal variations of his eternal positive of personality. There are evidently here two instincts, or, if we hesitate to apply that word to the intellect, two innate powers of our being which are dealing each in its own manner with the same Reality.
3.05 - The Physical World and its Connection with the Soul and Spirit-Lands, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
Spirit remains merely a shadowy conception of the mind without being or life, an empty abstraction, to him who does not picture it in this way. And the same may be said in reference to what one calls the Spirit of the Age (Zeitgeist). The spiritual outlook, in fact, is through this, extended over a variety of other beings, both lower and higher, who live in the environment of man without his being able to perceive them with his bodily senses. But those who have powers of spiritual sight perceive such beings and can describe them. To the lower kinds belong those designated by the spiritual investigator, as salamanders, sylphs, undines, and gnomes. It is quite to be understood that anyone who is inclined to admit the validity of physical vision only, regards such beings as the offspring of a wild hallucination and superstition. They can of course never become visible to the physical eye for they have no physical bodies. The superstition does not consist in regarding such beings as real, but in believing that they appear in a way perceptible to the physical senses. Beings with such forms cooperate in the building of the world, and one comes into connection with
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3.1.02 - Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is not much profit in mental and intellectual speculations about what precisely the results would be of the introduction of a supramental principle and a supramental organisation and order in the earth-consciousness and the earth-life. In all probability the speculations would be quite beside the mark or, even where they hit on some broad lines, would draw them wrong and all awry and out of proportion; for the intellectual mind is a different and inferior power of consciousness; it is analytical and synthetic, pulling things to pieces and putting them together in order to understand and deal with them, proceeding by representation and abstraction and formulas and schematic figures; it imposes a rigid logic on an illogical world in order to bring about a fixed and mechanical order; it cuts up, divides, compares, contrasts, confronts one element of existence contradictorily with another; classifies according to similarity and difference. In the end it produces a system of things explained and intelligible; but each such system is only a segment of truth dried up into
Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental
3.2.06 - The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real worldonly when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above,no abstractionit was positive, the only positive realityalthough not a spatial physical world, pervading, occupying or rather flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial. I cannot say there was anything exhilarating or rapturous in the experience, as it then came to me,the ineffable Ananda I had years afterwards,but what it brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. I lived in that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience, a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness from above. But meanwhile realisation added itself to realisation and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which illusion1 is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.
Now that is the whole trouble in my approach to Mayavada. Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale. It came unasked, unsought for, though quite welcome. I had no least idea about it before, no aspiration towards it, in fact my aspiration was towards just the opposite, spiritual power to help the world and do my work in it, yet it camewithout even a May I come in or a By your leave. It just happened and settled in as if for all eternity or as if it had been really there always. And then it slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self! How then could I accept Mayavada or persuade myself to pit against the Truth imposed on me from above the logic of Shankara?
3.2.08 - Bhakti Yoga and Vaishnavism, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I cannot say much about the Vaishnava idea of the form of Krishna. Form is the basic means of manifestation and without it it may be said that the manifestation of anything is not complete. Even if the Formless logically precedes Form, yet it is not illogical to assume that in the Formless, Form is inherent and already existent in a mystic latency, otherwise how could it be manifested? For any other process would be the creation of the non-existent, not manifestation. If so, it would be equally logical to assume that there is an eternal form of Krishna, a spirit body. As for the highest Reality, it is no doubt absolute Existence, but is it only that? Absolute Existence as an abstraction may exclude everything else from itself and amount to a sort of very positive zero; but Absolute Existence as a realitywho shall define and say what is or is not in its inconceivable depths, its illimitable Mystery? Mind can ordinarily conceive of the Absolute Existence only as a negation of its own concepts spatial, temporal or other. But it cannot tell what is at the basis of manifestation or what manifestation is or why there is any manifestation at all out of its positive zero and the Vaishnavas, we must remember, do not admit this conception as the absolute and original truth of the Divine. It is therefore not rigidly impossible that what we conceive and perceive as spatial form may correspond to some mysterious power of the spaceless Absolute. I do not say all that as a definite statement of Truth, I am only pointing out that the Vaishnava position on its own ground is far from being logically or metaphysically untenable.
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3.5.01 - Aphorisms, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned.
The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.
We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a mathematician working out a cosmic sum in numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment a problem in relations of principles and the balance of forces: but also we should speak of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of universal and particular harmonies, a child, a poet. The side of thought is not enough; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped: Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow moulds unless they are filled with the breath of Gods delight.
These things are images, but all is an image. abstractions give us the pure conception of Gods truths; images give us their living reality.
If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence.
3.5.03 - Reason and Society, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A pragmatic mentalism would not be in its essential principle other than the attempt already made by the race to make the intellectual Reason the governor of life, but this has been done hitherto by a reason preoccupied with the external fact and subjected to it; mind has attempted to read the law of life and its possibilities and organise life anew within those limits by invention, device, regulation, mechanisms of many kinds, or it has attempted to govern life by mental ideals of an abstract order, such as democracy or socialism, and devise an appropriate machinery materialising that mental abstraction so as to make the dominance of the idea practical and viable. A subjectivist pragmatic mentalism would try to act more subtly and plastically on life; it would seek for "truth of being", some idea or ideal of its perfection or practice or efficiency, right way of being or living, and attempt to let that grow in the individual and govern his nature, grow in the collective life and govern its formations. Or it would place the development and organisation of the mental life of man as the primary consideration and life and society as a convenience for this true aim of human existence. A new civilisation no longer vitalistic or mainly political and economic, but intellectual, cultural, idealistic, taking up the ancient ideal of man, the perfected mental being in an ennobled life and sound body, a great expansion of human mind and intellect, a mankind more mentally alive, even a human race grown capable of culture and not only of a greater external civilisation, thus fulfilling on a large human and universal scale the tendencies which in the past appeared only in a few favoured countries and epochs and even then imperfectly and mostly in a cultured class, might be the consequence of this change. That prospect has its attractions, and for the humanist and the intellectual it is in one form or another their utopia of the future. But this would not really
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abstraction, it has no reality and no effective power; it is only an index, a figure. It can become effective only by taking up life and catching hold of some vital force to effectuate it, but usually it ends by [ . . . ], exhausting or stereotyping and sterilising the force it uses; or it can become effective only when it canalises and brings out into action of mind and life an inner truth of being, a truth of spirit and it is then powerful only so long as it replenishes itself from its spiritual source and so keeps itself true and alive.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Each discipline has, and must have, a certain vocabulary of its own: thousands of words that refer to its data on the lowest level of abstraction. These represent the "concrete manipulable objects" mentioned on page 82 of Mr. Koler's article. (For psychology and the humanities they include emotions, feelings, values.) The point however is, first, that each discipline now has, but in most cases does not need to have, a set of words which represents the grouping, the classification of its low-level words. These are the "abstract words" in the reference above, comprising part of each discipline's vocabulary. These many diverse abstract vocabularies cause the disorganized complexity of modern education and thought, producing much of the confusion in the students' minds. They require a vast amount of memorization, conceal meaning, and prevent understanding.
Our model of unified science corrects this situation: It accepts the data of each of the sciences and humanities, and the vocabularies which denotate them. It also accepts many "game tree" classifications such as the taxonomic series, and all others which are logically compatible with each other. It then classifies these diverse sets of data and classifications in a single manner and vocabulary: The manner and vocabulary in which the chemical elements were classified by Mendeleyev and Maier a century ago, and which have since been improved by many others . . . (See fold-out chart and Figure IV-11).
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Note well that the Sub-strata or ontogenetic stages shown here are human abstraction levels. They include--and, in fact, presuppose--the mental levels of the highest animal Periods. Human Period 1, for instance, is shown to have a single Sub-stratum; but that is in addition to all of the highest animals' Sub-strata. This basic and strategic truth is recognized by all the great religions, but was deplorably ignored by Charles Darwin and most biologists since Darwin. It is officially ignored by Dialectical Materialists, who base their claim to being "scientific" on this and similar aberrations of the one-field specialists. In practice, however, human abstraction ceilings are carefully observed and utilized by Dialectical Materialists, as shown in their strategically graded levels of communication: agitation, propaganda, officia1 theory (for intellectuals), and secret theory (for high Party leaders). It is by means of agitation, on the lowest level of human abstraction, that they incite what they call the masses against courageous, conscientious testers of intelligence. (See Chapters II and V.)
Turning back now to Figure IV-l, the second Period has two inter-locked braces: the lower one includes most first Period tools and foods, though usually somewhat modified; and the upper brace adds new ones: some seeds are planted and grown instead of just eaten; some small animals--such as pigs, sheep, fowls--are tended and bred. New kinds of equipment for this agriculture are represented by the upper brace. The society consists of a few nomadic villages, and two social Strata.
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Turning again to Figure IV-2, our explanation of how this came about is this: The first Stratum consists of the unmutated descendants of Period 1 people--though somewhat modified by the new foods and technology. (Unmutated descent is symbolized by the solid leftward arrows.) The much smaller upper Stratum, however, consists of a few descendants who have undergone a complex of so-called pleiotropic mutations, producing the psycho-physiological capability of conceptualizing and executing the new and more complex relations which we call Lower Agriculture and Higher Hunting. It also produces the capability of helping the unmutated relatives and neighbors, the Majority, to participate in, rather than to sabotage, these slow, difhcult and often tedious operations. This new psycho-genetic set of capabilities is summed up and called (for now) a higher level of abstraction, though other factors are involved besides abstraction.1
This second human abstraction level appears phenotypically by way of an additional ontogenetic stage, and is symptomatized by what Johnson O'Connor calls a higher vocabulary ceiling, presently to be described.5 (Mutated descent is symbolized in our figure by dotted rightward arrows.) Period 2 thus consists of two social Strata: the big, ancient, unmutated yet modified Majority, undergoing one human ontogenetic development-stage; and the small mutated Minority, undergoing two development stages. These are the two Sub-strata of Sub-stratum 2, and are labeled 1 and 2 respectively.
The postulated psycho-genetic process characterizing human evolution is now clear: both of the second Period's Strata produce unmutated descendants, represented by the two solid leftward arrows. Both of them also produce mutated descendants: the first Stratum goes on mutating some descendants with the capability of two human abstraction levels. These join the unmutated descendants of Stratum 2 by what is incorrectly called just social mobility, though it is genetico-social mobility: the capability is inborn or genetic; the opportunity of realizing this capability is social, political, and legal.
Meanwhile, the second Stratum is producing its own mutations, Stratum 3 shown by the dotted arrow. This literally new kind of people displays a third human abstraction capability, generated by way of an additional ontogenetic development stage or Sub-stratum.
This new Minority invents the techniques and tools and institutions of Period 3, the Middle Agriculturalists and Lower Pastoralists. It adds these to the traditional tools and techniques, and to the Majority who use them, modifying some and eliminating others in the process. (This mutated innovator is the kind of son who, according to the so-called Oedipus myths, has to kill his father or has to be killed by him.6 This psycho-genetic hypothesis makes such myths understandable, on other than sexual grounds.)
This is an extremely simple and straight-forward theory, as Figure IV-2 shows: Each human level of abstraction is characterized by the capacity to conceptualize, reflect upon and organize all preceding levels of thought and action. abstraction levels are thus quantized, discontinuous jumps of capability. They are postulated to emerge by genetic mutation and to be transmitted genetically. Being genotypes, and thus potentials or capabilities, their phenotypic actualization occurs only in habitats whose highest vocabulary level and behavior level is equal to, or higher than, the genotype's (potential) abstraction ceiling.
Social Strata.
Each person's habitat is centered upon and controlled by his physical family or its cultural equivalent. This controller is surrounded by its friends and neighbors, who tend to display the same abstraction ceiling in their behavior and vocabulary. Collectively, this socio-cultural habitat is called a social Stratum or social class. This habitat displays the same abstraction ceiling as that of its unmutated descendant, the above person in question. Genetic mutations, however, are constantly occurring, as are variations in habitat properties.
The Basis of Social Mobility.
Since some increase and others lower the offspring's abstraction ceilings, these variations produce the usual more or less normal distribution of abilities, with various ranges of spread. The result is an overlapping of Stratum actualities such that the most able members of a given Stratum equal or exceed the average of the next higher Stratum, and that its least able members fall below the next lower Stratum's average. This overlapping results in genetic-social mobility, upward and downward.
It follows that when mobility is blocked long and effectively, it results in anomalous relations between controller and work component, and thus in breakdown or disintegration of the system. It also follows that when mobility is artificially generated, forcing large numbers of unmutated, actually low-potential minds into control positions, the society transmutes down to the corresponding Period.
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The characteristic numbers in Figure IV-2 represent the cultural equivalents of biotic characteristic numbers, Figures II-14 and II-15: In the center position is humankind's kingdom or Major Stratum 7. Above it is the individual's or group's social class or Stratum number; that of its potential abstraction ceiling. At the bottom is their society's Period number, and at the left, the number of the individual's or group's actual, phenotypic abstraction level at the time in question; the number of its Sub-stratum or onto-genetic level.
Implicit in this abstraction hierarchy is the following exceedingly important fact: human beings are by definition unable to grasp abstraction levels higher than their own abstraction ceilings; unable to understand, often even to become aware of, and never to operate on levels of abstraction higher than their own abstraction ceilings. (Hence the loneliness, frustration, impotence, and sometimes martyrdom of great and good men and women throughout human history.) These characteristic numbers and some of their consequences appear below in the Periodic Table of Human Cultures and in our mappings of the web-of-mind.8
By postulating three more cumulative "repetitions" of this process, we obtain human Periods 4, 5, and 6 with the correct number of Strata and Sub-strata in each Period; the correct kinds of tools, foods, social positions, and vocabulary levels in each Stratum; the correct kinds and amounts of control; and the correct kinds and amounts of socio-genetic mobility among the Strata Skipping Periods 4 and 5 for lack of space, we come to our own Period 6, Lower Industrialists.
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I predict that investigation will disclose a high correlation between these five vocabulary levels and the five lower socio-genetic Strata described by Warner and associates. This correlation is represented in Figure IV-1's upper right-hand corner by a series of interlocking braces. These indicate that the community displays a linguistic System-hierarchy; a linguacline. (This holds not just for Period 6 but for all human Periods except the first; but in ever lesser degrees.) This concept should greatly facilitate the very important study of linguistics, and be improved by it in turn.Since some increase and others lower the offspring's abstraction ceilings, these variations produce the usual more or less normal distribution of abilities, with various ranges of spread. The result is an overlapping of Stratum actualities such that the most able members of a given Stratum equal or exceed the average of the next higher Stratum, and that its least able members fall below the next lower Stratum's average. This overlapping results in genetic-social mobility, upward and downward.
It follows that when mobility is blocked long and effectively, it results in anomalous relations between controller and work component, and thus in breakdown or disintegration of the system. It also follows that when mobility is artificially generated, forcing large numbers of unmutated, actually low-potential minds into control positions, the society transmutes down to the corresponding Period.
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The characteristic numbers in Figure IV-2 represent the cultural equivalents of biotic characteristic numbers, Figures II-14 and II-15: In the center position is humankind's kingdom or Major Stratum 7. Above it is the individual's or group's social class or Stratum number; that of its potential abstraction ceiling. At the bottom is their society's Period number, and at the left, the number of the individual's or group's actual, phenotypic abstraction level at the time in question; the number of its Sub-stratum or onto-genetic level.
Implicit in this abstraction hierarchy is the following exceedingly important fact: human beings are by definition unable to grasp abstraction levels higher than their own abstraction ceilings; unable to understand, often even to become aware of, and never to operate on levels of abstraction higher than their own abstraction ceilings. (Hence the loneliness, frustration, impotence, and sometimes martyrdom of great and good men and women throughout human history.) These characteristic numbers and some of their consequences appear below in the Periodic Table of Human Cultures and in our mappings of the web-of-mind.8
By postulating three more cumulative "repetitions" of this process, we obtain human Periods 4, 5, and 6 with the correct number of Strata and Sub-strata in each Period; the correct kinds of tools, foods, social positions, and vocabulary levels in each Stratum; the correct kinds and amounts of control; and the correct kinds and amounts of socio-genetic mobility among the Strata Skipping Periods 4 and 5 for lack of space, we come to our own Period 6, Lower Industrialists.
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As the braces in Figure IV-1 imply, I further predict discovery of a vocabulary level in the position and shape indicated by the dotted line I have drawn into Figure IV-3. This level will be displayed by the highest socio-genetic Stratum in Period 6. I also predict that at least one still higher level will be discovered. And finally that the new words which characterize each higher vocabulary level will be found to lie one level of abstraction higher than the highest of the preceding vocabulary ceiling. It follows th~.t the communities of every human Period after the first will be found to constitute what I propose to call a linguacline; and that the human Periods' top Strata form one too.
Space limitation permits mention of just one more item in the enormous array of evidence supporting our assembly of these data. Each Stratum's number is directly correlated with the economic value of its locality or neighborhood; and that, with its desireability in the eyes of the community.9 The geographic distribution of the socio-genetic Strata thus constitutes a geocline.
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The Kingdom of Man is a single, inter-fertile species. This species displays six major psychogenetic Strata or sub-species, divided into at least twenty-one phenotypically distinct forms, a different set of forms for each Stratum in each of the 6 Periods in which it occurs. Each of these six Strata or sub-species is characterized by a series of ontogenetic stages or Sub-strata, numerically equal to the number of the Stratum in which they occur. Each Stratum is characterized by a genetically determined abstraction ceiling which no amount of training can exceed, but which is displayed phenotypically only through habitat-supplied training and education, at least equalling the abstraction ceiling in question. Each level of abstraction attained by an individual is expressed by the correct use of a distinctive vocabulary level and by the capacity to understand and control verbal behavior on all levels lower than its own.
The human psycho-genetic tree displays the distinctive form of a network or reticulum, Figure IV-2: the reason is that some descendents of older human sub-species regularly mutate into higher psycho-genetic sub-species. Such complete convergence happens rarely, if ever, in animals or plants. The reason is, of course, that we are discussing a single trait-complex, the one summed up under the heading levels of abstraction, but including levels of patience, tenacity, and the capacity to relate theory and practice to each other. Each Period's hierarchy of trait complexes is transmitted and altered genetically as a pleiotropic gene-complex. It is expressed phenotypically by a corresponding hierarchy of habitats (called social Strata), controlled by persons of an equal or higher psychogenetic organization. Mutations occur in all Strata and result in upward and downward social mobility.
Human Strata behave like, and have to be classed as, true, highly dynamic sub-species. Their enormous mutation rates disrupt rigid caste systems, shattering the control structures of societies that do not admit their ever-emerging natural aristocracies to control positions. On the other hand, societies which do accomodate their ever-renewed natural aristocracies transmute themselves into higher and higher human Periods, each displaying a higher controlling socio-genetic Stratum.
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About 10% of the student body (left-hand entry) has the inborn abstraction ceiling of Stratum 5. But it has outstanding capabilities in other respects--say in various forms of art, athletics, or leadership. The roughly 5% of the student body from sub-Literate and Literate societies (right-hand entry) resemble the 10% in psycho-genetic ways, but differ from, and can thus contri bute to, all of the other students ethnically.
Under the guidance of the Minority faculty and main student body, the Majority's students, Internal and External are strongly benefitted by them and by each other; and they in turn strongly benefit the two Minority groups. This is indicated by the five coaction symbols between these representatives of the Majority and Minority. This will now be demonstrated.
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This is as far as I paraphrase my notes. It should, however, be pointed out parenthetically that these students' sporadic attendance at public institutions also serves the important function of veiling their strategic schools' existence. This veiling is not arbitrary: the Majority people--as Figures IV-2, IV-3, and IV-4 indicate--having lower abstraction ceilings, are more or less aphasic and agnosic to the Minority's highest and most important levels of abstraction. They do not clearly understand the culture's need for such exclusive schools. So, if they knew of these schools' existence, they would demand open admission to them, breaking them down to the Majority's lower ceilings, as diagrammed below. This would, in time, bring to the Soviet Union what Lippmann calls the "functional derangement between the mass of the people [Majority] and the government [Minority] ."
To prevent this, and yet maintain such special schooling openly, the authorities would be obliged to explain and massively advocate the cybernetically efFective relation between Majority and Minority. But this would seriously hamper their currently successful disorganization of education abroad, not to mention openly contradicting their promise of "classless" society some day in the Soviet Union. Both of these unacceptable alternatives have been avoided by keeping secret the existence of Soviet schools for Philosopher Kings.
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The second conclusion would be the one predicted by Unified Science: The fairest and most objective tests will show virtue to be quite evenly distributed among all social Strata. But they will show a great skewing of talent-distribution, where talent is predominantly identified with abstraction ceilings. (This skewing occurs both empirically and ex hypothesi: in Unified Science the distribution of social Strata is based upon the distribution of abstraction ceilings, as shown in Figures IV-2 and IV-4.)
The third conclusion follows inexorably: the use of fair and objective tests results in a vast preponderance of high Stratum (Minority) students in those schools and universities which are designed to train young people for "the government of society." It is therefore natural that the Stratum representation in such schools should approximate the ones shown in Figures IV-6 and IV-7, beginning to settle that question too.29
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So also in regard to their various psycho-social Strata: equality of opportunity for people with unequal inborn abstraction ceilings is approached by careful provision of corresponding training situations. During the first few years (preceding and up to the attainment of the first human abstraction ceiling) a single institution, Kindergarten, and the first few grades, provides equality of opportunity for all Strata.36 Figure IV-3 shows graphically humankind's initial state of intellectual identity (zero), and its divergence into Strata during ontogeny. As the childrens' creodes separate--as Stratum after Stratum approaches its abstraction ceiling, levels out, and is surpassed by the people with higher inborn abstraction ceilings--each Stratum enters the corresponding set of educational institutions. Namely, the kind of institution designed to provide for it the opportunity to realize its inborn capacities to the fullest degree: apprenticeships, craft schools, trade schools, secretarial schools, high schools, preparatory schools, (European) gymnasia, junior colleges, colleges, institutes of technology, graduate schools, post-doctoral training courses, institutes for advanced study, and so forth.
In Figure IV-2, Period 6 (Lower Industrialists) displays six Strata, each characterized by the corresponding number of Substrata. The highest Sub-stratum in each case (including the first one) is reached by, and only by, utilizing opportunities for continuous, persistent development of inborn capabilities.
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What are these changes in curriculum and classroom styles? They involve a lowering of abstraction ceilings and of vocabulary levels; a lowering of the essential training for which the College was established, and which every Industrial civilization's Minority has got to have if their culture is to survive, let alone to advance.
That these changes are hated is natural. And they are hated not just by professors, but by the qualified students of both Minority and Majority, whom they prevent from receiving the high-level training for which they have the inborn capacity, and which they must get if they are to fill the leadership vacuum, correct the system's cybernetic derangement, and halt our society's catastrophic decline.47
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Bergson has already stated the [illegitimate] specialist's inclination to conceive of his subject matter in terms of his method rather than the other way around. [But] he had not pointed out in any detail . . . the various slights of hand [read unconscious mistakes) which turn abstractions from processes into factorial [empirical] entities assumed to partake in the process as such. . . Where the statistical method is used, not for its legitimate end of clarifying the structure of large bodies of relevant data but of predicting the structure of human events to come, [illegitimate] specialistic attitudes are characterized by an inclination to reduce events to mere occurrences, focusing on their comparative numbers without questioning the basis of comparison used, remaining blind to the specific event-nature of each, and never inquiring into those elemental processes behind them-revelation of which would invalidate the cherished technique from the start.51
He then touches upon the heart of the danger in which illegitimate specialists involve our culture; the self perpetuating cybernetic structure displayed in Figure IV-10, which Mr. Stafford Beer has called the meta-threat: "The circularity of the method, a closed system inaccessible to any such observations as would interfere with its own premises..." The specialist's conscious input comes from his own non-systemic field. His detector screens out inputs from the rest of the system of which he is studying a part; and from other functionally related ones. His conscious (subjective] output goes to his own traditional field, though his objective outputs may go disastrously to others as what he calls "side effects." These are, however, screened out by his detector, preventing him from becoming aware of and correcting his mistakes; also, from listening to or understanding those who try to point them out. We shall return to these figures in Chapter V.
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8. To my knowledge no measurement of this most important criterion of intelligence, abstraction ceilings, has yet been standardized and tested. The reason probably is that intelligence testers become increasingly vulnerable as their data become increasingly incomprehensible to their clients. Note, for example, the violence directed against conscientious testers who publish careful findings which can offend but cannot be demonstrated to sections of the Majority; violence directed by political activists against scientists such as Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein. This crucially important subject will be dealt with in the concluding chapter.
9. Warner, W. Lloyd and Paul Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 1941.
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Theory becomes a social force only when it has gripped the masses, Marx declared. But the masses have, by definition, 1, 2, 3 and 4~ human level.s of abstraction, while theory includes levels 5, 6, and 7 (see Figures IV-1 to 4). To grip the masses, theory has to be transposed to every level. For without transposition, theory cannot grip the masses and is sterile. And who knows how to transpose theory better than organized specialists and generalists?
It is not, however, primarily scientists, but leaders of the great public who can execute prescriptions, carry out the patterns of action now being formulated. Their training is provided for in the New University's School of Management, shown on the left-hand side of Figure IV-9.
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21. This fact cannot be judged or even seen from the perspective of any one-field specialist: it seems to belong to anthropology, but it involves higher levels of abstraction. These include anthropology itself as a datum; also modern religion, philosophy, science, and ideology in general. This inclusiveness was predicted by Leibniz for the Universal Characteristic, of which the Periodic coordinate system is a model. (See Leibniz Selections, Phillip P. Wiener, editor. Scribner's, New York, 1951.)
22. Robinson, John A. T., Honest to God, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1963.
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He sets them forth as follows: "The first is to look over the empirical universe and pick out certain general phenomena which are found in many different disciplines, . . . to build up general theoretical models relevant to these phenomena. The second approach is to arrange the empirical fields in a hierarchy of organization of their basic `individual' or unit behavior, and . . . to develop a level of abstraction appropriate to each."
These two approaches result in the same thing, Unified Science: The Systems-hierarchy turns out to consist of Major Periods and Periodicity to recur within each Major Period, albeit in ever changing empirical forms. Boulding's two methods are, however, entirely diverse: the first belongs to the inductive-empirical, the second to the deductive-theoretical mode of thought, graphically shown in Figure 5-1.5
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abstraction ceiling The highest abstraction-level (q.v.). In ontogeny, the abstraction ceiling is the individual's highest level at the time in question, and is indicated at the left of his Characteristic Number (q.v.). The Stratum ceiling is the highest level reached by the average Stratum member, and is indicated at the top of his characteristic Number. The Period ceiling is the highest level reached by the Period's top Stratum, and is indicated at the bottom of the characteristic number. (See Figure IV-2.)
abstraction, levels of In sentient systems (res cogitans), which conduct simulation of systems behavior, the controller reflects upon, abstracts simulated outputs (see Feedback, double, triple, etc.), then abstracts simulation of its reflection, and so forth in an abstraction hierarchy. This is a Systems-hierarchy (q.v.) composed of levels of abstraction. (See Feedback, double, triple, etc.)
Allopathy (n.) (Greek for "making the other sick"; coined term) The coaction (q.v.) in which the activity of the system's work component (q.v.) is unaffected, but that of its controller (q.v.) is decreased. Allopathy, written ( 0 , - ), is the characteristic of Group I in all Periodic Tables. (It was first discovered theoretically, then empirically.)
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Being (n.) sentient. (Res cogitans) Sentience is the capacity of a being or system to simulate systems behavior, as also to simulate simulation; that is, to simulate the behavior of sentient systems, living or mechanical, such as computers. Sentient systems thus form a systems-hierarchy (q.v.) such, that each higher member of the hierarchy accurately simulates the behavior of lower members than itself. (See Simulation.) The hierarchy evolves by emergence (through mutation, maturation, training or invention) of ever higher levels of abstraction (q.v.). Simulation of the behavior of higher by lower members of the hierarchy is called mimesis (q.v.). The part of the universe excluded from Western science in the l7th century by mutual consent of scientists and theologians.
Biocenose (n.) A living community, usually including abiotic, plant and animal components. (See Biome, Ecosystem.)
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Feedback, double, triple, etc. A closed system of simulated responses which enables a system to reflect upon perceived phenomena and also upon the simulated actions called thoughts. In this manner, a number of possible actions can be imagined and the best one implemented: the one which will presumably come closest to the system's goal. Feedbacks may be double, triple, quadruple, etc., according to the number of levels of abstraction involved. C.f. abstraction, levels of.
Feedback, negative Feedback which decreases the deviation of a system's output from its norm or goal. C.f. Constancy effector.
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Mimesis (n.) (Ref. Toynbee, A. J., A Study of History) Simulation, within a Systems-hierarchy (q.v.), of the behavior of higher members by lower members of the hierarchy. Since lower members by definition lack the structure which enacts the system's highest levels of abstraction (q.v.), mimesis is confined to those aspects of behavior which lie beneath their abstraction ceiling (q.v.). Mimesis is seen by higher members of the hierarchy as inept, valuable, dangerous, ludicrous, cute, etc. depending upon the situation. None the less, mimesis is essential to the coherence and operation of societies in all human Periods: Even in the lowest, it characterizes much activity of children and young people (lower Sub-strata).--Understanding of mimesis by the top Strata is important to society's control, confidence and trust (q.v.), which are necessary conditions for social stability and Omega-ward development. C.f. Class cooperation, Symbiosis, vertical Front.
Minority, creative A controlling class in a society which cooperates with the society's working class, thereby either transmuting the whole society to a higher Period (q.v.) or forming a vertical front (q.v.) and transforming predation and parasitism (q.v.) into symbiosis (q.v.). Term coined by Arnold Toynbee. C.f. Minority, dominant, Control, function.
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Ontogeny, stage of Development stage of the individual or entity (particle, atom, molecule, geoid system, plant, animal, or person) . In all cases, the individual's ontogeny recapitulates its species' evolution or phylogeny (q.v.). This is a concrete formulation of Haeckel's Law, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". C.f. Substratum and Ontogeny, ceiling of. Note, however, that specifically human ontogenetic stages, as here expounded and numbered, are mental. (C.f. abstraction, levels of.) Preceding stages, those of embryonic development, are shared with the highest animals.
Ordination (coined term as here used) (n.) The relation of greater, equal, or less, whose mathematical symbol is the combination of < or > and =; namely < = >. Ordination is particularly relevant to the relation of work component and controller in a system, because of its immediate relation to the General Periodic Law (q.v.).--If coaction is positive and ordinatlon is upward, (such that lower Strata and Sub-strata are acting as work component X, higher as controller Y ( X < Y )), the system is in the state of evolution or genesis (q.v.). If ordination is equal or downward ( X >= Y ), the system is in the state of devolution; of breakdown or disintegration (q.v.)--This is a paraphrasis of the Second Periodic Law*, of which the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the special case ( X >= Y )--Systems which appear to have no work component or controller may thus be viewed as members of a second special case ( X = Y ). The third case ( X < Y ) involves increasing organization or ectropy (q.v.). *R = f ( < = > ), where R is the property called volution, the class whose members are evolution, devolution, stability.
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Signal (n.) A physical carrier o information. A communications input into a system which changes its behavior or prevents change which would otherwise occur. Signals vary from level to level of the System-hierarchy (q.v.): Below the level of sentient beings (q.v.), power signals and communication signals are identical. Above the lowest level of sentient beings (which include higher animals) the ratio or signal input to control output increases in quantum jumps form level to level of abstraction. (See abstraction, levels of).
Signalloid (adj.) (coined term.) An organism that is capable of receiving signals at a distance. Criterion of the second and higher Periods of animal ecosystems.
3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As in Indian, so in Greek philosophy the first question for thought was the problem of the One and the Many. We see everywhere a multiplicity of things and beings; is it real or only phenomenal or practical, māyā, vyavahāra? Has individual man, for instance,-the question which concerns us most nearly,-an essential and immortal existence of his own or is he simply a phenomenal and transient result in the evolution or play of some one original principle, Matter, Mind, Spirit, which is the only real reality of existence? Does unity exist at all and, if so, is it a unity of sum or of primordial principle, a result or an origin, a oneness of totality or a oneness of nature or a oneness of essence,-the various standpoints of Pluralism, of Sankhya, of Vedanta? Or if both the One and the Many are real, what are the relations between these two eternal principles of being, or are they reconciled in an Absolute beyond them? These are no barren questions of logic, no battle of cloudy metaphysical abstractions, as the practical and sensational man would have us contemptuously believe; for on our answer to them depends our conception of God, of existence, of the world and of human life and destiny.
Heraclitus, differing in this, as Mr. Ranade reminds us, from Anaximander who like our Mayavadins denied true reality to the Many and from Empedocles who thought the All to be alternately one and many, believed unity and multiplicity to be both of them real and coexistent. Existence is then eternally one and eternally many,-even as Ramanuja and Madhwa have concluded, though in a very different spirit and from a quite different standpoint. Heraclitus' view arose from his strong concrete intuition of things, his acute sense of universal realities; for in our experience of the cosmos we do find always and inseparably this eternal coexistence and cannot really escape from it. Everywhere our gaze on the Many reveals to us an eternal oneness, no matter what we fix on as the principle of that oneness; yet is that unity inoperative except by the multiplicity of its powers and forms, nor do we anywhere see it void of or apart from its own multiplicity. One Matter, but many atoms, plasms, bodies; one Energy, but many forces; one Mind or at least Mind-stuff, but many mental beings; one Spirit, but many souls. Perhaps periodically this multiplicity goes back, is dissolved into, is swallowed up by the One from which it was originally evolved; but still the fact that it has evolved and got involved again, compels us to suppose a possibility and even a necessity of its renewed evolution: it is not then really destroyed. The Adwaitin by his Yoga goes back to the One, feels himself merged, believes that he has got rid of the Many, proved perhaps their unreality; but it is the achievement of an individual, of one of the Many, and the Many go on existing in spite of it. The achievement proves only that there is a plane of consciousness on which the soul can realise and not merely perceive by the intellect the oneness of the Spirit, and it proves nothing else. Therefore, on this truth of eternal oneness and eternal multiplicity Heraclitus fixes and anchors himself; from his firm acceptance of it, not reasoning it away but accepting all its consequences, flows all the rest of his philosophy.
36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Integral Yoga
We find more objectivity than mere abstraction in the language and thoughts of the ancients. So they seem to be prone to materialism. But as a matter of fact, their abstract ideas were not merely based on syllogistic reasoning. Those ideas were to them as living, true, clear and manifest as a material object. They did not consider the subtle world visionary, rather they took the subtle world for the raison d'tre of the material world. So they found no difficulty in expressing the subtle concepts of their experiences through gross symbols. Even we, the moderns, at times do the same. For instance, in poetry the poet has to resort to images and allegories in order to express the deep and intense inspiration of his own heart. Has not the Vaishnava literature tried to give expressions to supra physical realisations through the symbols of earthly experiences?
"A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts." - Solomon
3.7.1.09 - Karma and Freedom, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But we insist and say that we have a will which is aware of a however heavily burdened freedom and can shape to its own purpose and change by its effort environment and upbringing and the formations of heredity and even our apparently immutable common nature. But this will and its effort, is it not itself an instrument, even a mechanical engine of Nature, the active universal energy, and is not its freedom an arbitrary illusion of our mentality which lives in each moment of the present and separates it by ignorance, by an abstraction of the mind from its determining past, so that I seem at every critical moment to exercise a free and virgin choice, while all the time my choice is dominated by its own previous formation and by all that obscure past which I ignore? Granted that Nature works through our will and can create and change, can, that is to say, produce a new formation out of the stuff she has provided for her workings, is it not by a past impulsion and a continuous energy from it that the thing is done? That is the first idea of Karma. Certainly, our present will must come in as one though not by any means the sole element of the act and formation, but in this view it is not a free ever-new will, but in the first place a child and birth of all the past nature, our action, our present karma the result of an already formed shape of the force of that nature, swabhava. And in the second place our will is an instrument constantly shaped and used by something greater than ourselves. Only if there is a soul or self which is not a creation, but a master of Nature, not a formation of the stream of universal energy, but itself the former and creator of its own Karma, are we justified in our claim of an actual freedom or at least in our aspiration to a real liberty. There is the whole heart of the debate, the nodus and escape of this perplexed issue.
But here the critical negative analytic thinker, ancient nihilistic Buddhist or modern materialist, comes in to take away the basis of any actual freedom in our earthly or in any possible heavenly existence. The Buddhist denied the existence of a Self free and infinite; that, he thought, was only a sublimation of the idea of ego, an imposition, adhyropa, or gigantic magnified shadow thrown by the falsehood of our personality on eternal Non-Existence. But as for the soul, there is no soul, but only a stream of forms, ideas and sensations, and as the idea of a chariot is only a name for the combination of planks and pole and wheels and axles, so is the idea of individual soul or ego only a name for the combination or continuity of these things.Nor is the universe itself anything other than such a combination, sa
3.7.2.03 - Mind Nature and Law of Karma, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The second movement of mind running on the lines of life comes into prominent action when man evolves out of his experience the idea of a mental rule, standard, ideal, a concretised abstraction which is suggested at first by life experience, but goes beyond, transcends the actual needs and demands of the vital energy and returns upon it to impose some ideal mental rule, some canon embodying a generalised conception of Right on the law of life. For its essence is the discovery or belief of the mind that in all things there is a right rule, a right standard, a right way of thought, will, feeling, perception, action other than that of the intuition of vital nature, other than that of the first dealings of mind seeking only to profit by the vital nature with a mainly vital motive,for it has discovered a way of the reason, a rule of the self-governing intelligence. This brings into the seeking of vital pleasure and profit, artha, kma, the power of the conception of a mental truth, justice, right, the conception of Dharma. The greater practical part of the Dharma is ethical, it is the idea of the moral law. The first mind movement is non-moral or not at all characteristically moral, has only, if at all, the conception of a standard of action justified by custom, the received rule of life and therefore right, or a morality indistinguishable from expediency, accepted and enforced because it was found necessary or helpful to efficiency, power, success, to victory, honour, approval, good fortune. The idea of Dharma is on the contrary predominantly moral in its essence. Dharma on its heights holds up the moral law in its own right and for its own sake to human acceptance and observance. The larger idea of Dharma is indeed a conception of the true law of all energies and includes a conscience, a rectitude in all things, a right law of thought and knowledge, of aesthesis, of all other human activities and not only of our ethical action. But yet in the notion of Dharma the ethical element has tended always to predominate and even to monopolise the concept of Right which man creates,because ethics is concerned with action of life and his dealing with his vital being and with his fellow-men and that is always his first preoccupation and his most tangible difficulty, and because here first and most pressingly the desires, interests, instincts of the vital being find themselves cast into a sharp and very successful conflict with the ideal of Right and the demand of the higher law. Right ethical action comes therefore to seem to man at this stage the one thing binding upon him among the many standards raised by the mind, the moral claim the one categorical imperative, the moral law the whole of his Dharma.
At first however the moral conceptions of man and the direction and output and the demand of return of the ethical energy in him get themselves inextricably mixed with his vital conceptions and demands and even afterwards lean on them very commonly and very considerably for a support and incentive. Human morality first takes up an enormous mass of customary rules of action, a conventional and traditional practice much of which is of a very doubtful moral value, gives to it an imperative sanction of right and slips into the crude mass or superimposes on it, but still as a part of one common and equal code, the true things of the ethical ideal. It appeals to the vital being, his desires, hopes and fears, incites man to virtue by the hope of rewards and the dread of punishment, imitating in this device the method of his crude and fumbling social practice: for that, finding its law and rule which, good or bad, it wishes to make imperative as supposing it to be at least the best calculated for the order and efficiency of the community, opposed by mans vital being, bribes and terrifies as well as influences, educates and persuades him to acceptance. Morality tells man, accommodating itself to his imperfection, mostly through the mouth of religion, that the moral law is imperative in itself, but also that it is very expedient for him personally to follow it, righteousness in the end the safest policy, virtue the best paymaster in the long run,for this is a world of Law or a world ruled by a just and virtuous or at least virtue-loving God. He is assured that the righteous man shall prosper and the wicked perish and that the paths of virtue lie through pleasant places. Or, if this will not serve, since it is palpably false in experience and even man cannot always deceive himself, it offers him a security of vital rewards denied here but conceded in some hereafter. Heaven and hell, happiness and suffering in other lives are put before him as the bribe and the menace. He is told, the better to satisfy his easily satisfied intellect, that the world is governed by an ethical law which determines the measure of his earthly fortunes, that a justice reigns and this is justice, that every action has its exact rebound and his good shall bring him good and his evil evil. It is these notions, this idea of the moral law, of righteousness and justice as a thing in itself imperative, but still needing to be enforced by bribe and menace on our human nature,which would seem to show that at least for that nature they are not altogether imperative,this insistence on reward and punishment because morality struggling with our first unregenerate being has to figure very largely as a mass of restraints and prohibitions and these cannot be enforced without some fact or appearance of a compelling or inducing outward sanction, this diplomatic compromise or effort at equivalence between the impersonal ethical and the personal egoistic demand, this marriage of convenience between right and vital utility, virtue and desire,it is these accommodations that are embodied in the current notions of the law of Karma.
4.04 - Conclusion, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
vegetable and inorganic abstractions, into a microcosm. These
addenda have a high frequency in anthropomorphic divinities,
4.22 - The supramental Thought and Knowledge, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The intellectual thought refines and sublimates to a rarefied abstractness; the supramental thought as it rises in its height increases to a greater spiritual concreteness. The thought of the intellect presents itself to us as an abstraction from something seized by the mind sense and is as if supported in a void and subtle air of mind by an intangible force of the intelligence. It has to resort to a use of the mind's power of image if it wishes to make itself more concretely felt and seen by the soul sense and soul vision. The supramental thought, on the contrary, presents always the idea as a luminous substance of being, luminous stuff of consciousness taking significative thought form and it therefore creates no such sense of a gulf between the idea and the real as we are liable to feel in the mind, but is itself a reality, it is real-idea and the body of a reality. It has as a result, associated with it when it acts according to its own nature, a phenomenon of spiritual light other than the intellectual clarity, a great realising force and a luminous ecstasy. It is an intensely sensible vibration of being, consciousness and Ananda.
The supramental thought, as has already been indicated, has three elevations of its intensity, one of direct thought vision, another of interpretative vision pointing to and preparing the greater revelatory idea-sight, a third of representative vision recalling as it were to the spirit's knowledge the truth that is called out more directly by the higher powers. In the mind these things take the form of the three ordinary powers of the intuitive mentality, -- the suggestive and discriminating intuition, the inspiration and the thought that is of the nature of revelation. Above they correspond to three elevations of the supramental being and consciousness and, as we ascend, the lower first calls down into itself and is then taken up into the higher, so that on each level all the three elevations are reproduced, but always there predominates in the thought essence the character that belongs to that level's proper form of consciousness and spiritual substance. It is necessary to bear this in mind; for otherwise the mentality, looking up to the ranges of the supermind as they reveal themselves, may think it has got the vision of the highest heights when it is only the highest range of the lower ascent that is being presented to its experience. At each height, sanoh sanum arkhat, the powers of the supermind increase in intensity, range and completeness.
4.23 - The supramental Instruments -- Thought-process, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But 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 therefore 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. Truths of consciousness and of essential being are to the supermind the very stuff of reality, more intimately and, as one might almost say, densely real than outward movement and form of being, although these too are to it movement and form of the reality and not, as they are to a certain action of the spiritualised mind, an illusion. The idea too is to it real-idea, stuff of the reality of conscious being, full of power for the substantial rendering of the truth and therefore for creation.
And again, while the pure ideative mind tends to build up arbitrary systems which are mental and partial constructions of the truth, the supermind is not bound by any representation of system, though it is perfectly able to represent and to arrange and construct in the living substance of the truth for the pragmatic purposes of the Infinite. The mind when it gets free from its exclusivenesses, systematisings, attachment to its own constructions, is at a loss in the infiniteness of the infinite, feels it as a chaos, even if a luminous chaos, is unable any longer to formulate and therefore to think and act decisively because all, even the most diverse or contradictory things, point at some truth in this infinity and yet nothing it can think is entirely true and all its formulations break down under the test of new suggestions from the infinite. It begins to look on the world as a phantasmagory and thought as a chaos of scintillations out of the luminous indefinite. The mind assailed by the vastness and freedom of the supramental loses itself and finds no firm footing in the vastness. The supermind, on the contrary, can in its freedom construct harmonies of its thought and expression of being on the firm ground of reality while still holding its infinite liberty and rejoicing in its self of infinite vastness. All that it thinks, as all that it is and does and lives, belongs to the truth, the right, the vast, satyam, rtam, brhat.
4.26 - The Supramental Time Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is necessary in order to understand the phenomena of the supramental time consciousness to realise very firmly certain truths which are strange to our ordinary mentality or presented to it only as constructions of the metaphysical intellect, intelligible but unsubstantial abstractions as all mere philosophical statements must be, but to the supermind are realised experience and the normal and natural truth of the consciousness in which it lives, moves, acts and manifests its being. It is only in their light that we can grasp the truth and reality and the manifestation of things in time, otherwise only an illusion or else a flux of transient, inexplicable and incalculable actualities, and the law, source and order of their manifestation, otherwise only a process of inscrutable Law or else a play of chance and probabilities and possibilities. The truths that reveal the inner meaning and way of the universe are of a spiritual and supramental order. It is difficult however to express them at all in a language adapted to the mental intellect and one can at most try to indicate.
The first of the truths that thus becomes real to the consciousness is the truth of infinite being, a thing abstract to
5.04 - Supermind and the Life Divine, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Even its first immediate effect would be on all who are capable the possibility of entering into the truth-consciousness and changing all the movements of the nature more and more into the movements of the supramental truth, truth of thought, truth of will, truth in the feelings, truth in the acts, true conditions of the whole being even to the body, eventually transformation, a divinising change. For those who could so open themselves and remain open, there would be no limitation to this development and even no fundamental difficulty; for all difficulties would be dissolved by the pressure of the supramental light and power from above pouring itself into the mind and the life-force and the body. But the result of the supramental descent need not be limited to those who could thus open themselves entirely and it need not be limited to the supramental change; there could also be a minor or secondary transformation of the mental being within a freed and perfected scope of the mental nature. In place of the human mind as it now is, a mind limited, imperfect, open at every moment to all kinds of deviation from the truth or missing of the truth, all kinds of error and openness even to the persuasions of a complete falsehood and perversion of the nature, a mind blinded and pulled down towards inconscience and ignorance, hardly arriving at knowledge, an intellect prone to interpret the higher knowledge in abstractions and indirect figures seizing and holding even the messages of the higher intuition with an uncertain and disputed grasp, there could emerge
566
6.08 - THE CONTENT AND MEANING OF THE FIRST TWO STAGES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[758] In this wise Dorn solved the problem of realizing the unio mentalis, of effecting its union with the body, thereby completing the second stage of the coniunctio. We would say that with this production of a physical equivalent the idea of the self had taken shape. But the alchemist associated his work with something more potent and more original than our pale abstraction. He felt it as a magically effective action which, like the substance itself, imparted magical qualities. The projection of magical qualities indicates the existence of corresponding effects on consciousness, that is to say the adept felt a numinous effect emanating from the lapis, or whatever he called the arcane substance. We, with our rationalistic minds, would scarcely attri bute any such thing to the pictures which the modern man makes of his intuitive vision of unconscious contents. But it depends on whether we are dealing with the conscious or with the unconscious. The unconscious does in fact seem to be influenced by these images. One comes to this conclusion when one examines more closely the psychic reactions of the patients to their own drawings: they do have in the end a quietening influence and create something like an inner foundation. While the adept had always looked for the effects of his stone outside, for instance as the panacea or golden tincture or life-prolonging elixir, and only during the sixteenth century pointed with unmistakable clarity to an inner effect, psychological experience emphasizes above all the subjective reaction to the formation of images, andwith a free and open mindstill reserves judgment in regard to possible objective effects.227
6.09 - THE THIRD STAGE - THE UNUS MUNDUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[773] The next quality, therefore, which we have to consider is its physical nature. Although the alchemists attached the greatest importance to this, and the stone was the whole raison dtre of their art, yet it cannot be regarded as merely physical since it is stressed that the stone was alive and possessed a soul and spirit, or even that it was a man or some creature like a man. And although it was also said of God that the world is his physical manifestation, this pantheistic view was rejected by the Church, for God is Spirit and the very reverse of matter. In that case the Christian standpoint would correspond to the unio mentalis in the overcoming of the body. So far as the alchemist professed the Christian faith, he knew that according to his own lights he was still at the second stage of conjunction, and that the Christian truth was not yet realized. The soul was drawn up by the spirit to the lofty regions of abstraction; but the body was de-souled, and since it also had claims to live the unsatisfactoriness of the situation could not remain hidden from him. He was unable to feel himself a whole, and whatever the spiritualization of his existence may have meant to him he could not get beyond the Here and Now of his bodily life in the physical world. The spirit precluded his orientation to physis and vice versa. Despite all assurances to the contrary Christ is not a unifying factor but a dividing sword which sunders the spiritual man from the physical. The alchemists, who, unlike certain moderns, were clever enough to see the necessity and fitness of a further development of consciousness, held fast to their Christian convictions and did not slip back to a more unconscious level. They could not and would not deny the truth of Christianity, and for this reason it would be wrong to accuse them of heresy. On the contrary, they wanted to realize the unity foreshadowed in the idea of God by struggling to unite the unio mentalis with the body.
[774] The mainspring of this endeavour was the conviction that this world was in a morbid condition and that everything was corrupted by original sin. They saw that the soul could be redeemed only if it was freed by the spirit from its natural attachment to the body, though this neither altered nor in any way improved the status of physical life. The Microcosm, i.e., the inner man, was capable of redemption but not the corrupt body. This insight was reason enough for a dissociation of consciousness into a spiritual and a physical personality. They could all declare with St. Paul: O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?236 They therefore strove to find the medicine that would heal all the sufferings of the body and the disunion of the soul, the
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[775] This solution was a compromise to the disadvantage of physis, but it was nevertheless a noteworthy attempt to bridge the dissociation between spirit and matter. It was not a solution of principle, for the very reason that the procedure did not take place in the real object at all but was a fruitless projection, since the caelum could never be fabricated in reality. It was a hope that was extinguished with alchemy and then, it seems, was struck off the agenda for ever. But the dissociation remained, and, in quite the contrary sense, brought about a far better knowledge of nature and a sounder medicine, while on the other hand it deposed the spirit in a manner that would paralyse Dorn with horror could he see it today. The elixir vitae of modern science has already increased the expectation of life very considerably and hopes for still better results in the future. The unio mentalis, on the other hand, has become a pale phantom, and the veritas Christiana feels itself on the defensive. As for a truth that is hidden in the human body, there is no longer any talk of that. History has remorselessly made good what the alchemical compromise left unfinished: the physical man has been unexpectedly thrust into the foreground and has conquered nature in an undreamt-of way. At the same time he has become conscious of his empirical psyche, which has loosened itself from the embrace of the spirit and begun to take on so concrete a form that its individual features are now the object of clinical observation. It has long ceased to be a life-principle or some kind of philosophical abstraction; on the contrary, it is suspected of being a mere epiphenomenon of the chemistry of the brain. Nor does the spirit any longer give it life; rather is it conjectured that the spirit owes its existence to psychic activity. Today psychology can call itself a science, and this is a big concession on the part of the spirit. What demands psychology will make on the other natural sciences, and on physics in particular, only the future can tell.
APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Liber LXXXIV. (84) [] - Vel Chanokh. ::: A brief abstraction of the Symbolic representation of the Universe derived by Dr. John Dee through the Scrying of Sir Edward Kelly. Part-published in Equinox VII, p. 229 & VIII, p. 99.
Liber XC. (90) [A] - Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus. ::: An account of Initiation, and an indication as to those who are suitable for the same. Equinox VI, p. 17.
Blazing P2 - Map the Stages of Conventional Consciousness, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Subject: abstractions (Ideality: Inference, generalization, hypothesis, proposition, ideals,
values); Mutuality/interpersonalism (Role consciousness; mutual reciprocity); Inner states
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Object: abstractions; Mutuality/Interpersonalism; Inner states, subjectivity, selfconsciousness
Underlying Structure: System/complex
Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Truth: No matter what level of abstraction and what level of cognitive insight one gains, one
is always separated from the underlying seamless reality or ultimate truth71
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Level of abstraction
Holonomic, paradoxical epistemology
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Level of abstraction
Holonomic
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
fully initiated Judaean Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with
the ancient Aryan Dwijas. The worship of the "god in the ark" dates only from David; and for a
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i. 28). In Hinduism -- the "Holy of Holies" is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personae are
Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the
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mind. Even in the Zohar -- far less metaphysical than any other symbolism -- the idea is an abstraction
and nothing more. Thus, when the Zohar (iii., 290) says: "All that which exists, all that which has
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calculations. IT stands, in its character of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the universal abstraction,
entirely by ITSELF and independent of every other Power whether noumenal or phenomenal. IT "is
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
that which is subject to perception) is finite and periodical. As an eternal abstraction it is the EVERPRESENT; as a manifestation, it is finite both in the coming direction and the opposite, the two being
the alpha and omega of successive reconstructions. Kosmos -- the NOUMENON -- has nought to do
--
but both: being, on the plane of absolute abstraction, the ever-incognisable Deity, which is void only
to finite minds,* and on that of mayavic perception, the Plenum, the absolute Container of all that is,
--
that we can most easily imagine, immovable in its abstraction and uninfluenced by either the presence
or absence in it of an objective Universe. It is without dimension, in every sense, and self-existent.
--
Secret Doctrine the figure and number 4 are the male symbol only on the highest plane of abstraction;
on the plane of matter the 3 is the masculine and the 4 the female: the upright and the horizontal in the
--
ever hidden, and its first emanations are the most complete abstractions mind can conceive. These
abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material Universe which presents itself
--
quickly than is necessary; for they ignore the metaphysical abstractions which are the only
conceivable cause of physical concretions. These abstractions become more and more concrete as they
approach our plane of existence, until finally they phenomenalise in the form of the material Universe,
--
the gods, including Brahma, have to die at the end of the "Age of Brahma"; the abstraction called
Parabrahm alone -- whether we call it Ensoph, or Herbert Spencer's Unknowable -- being "the One
--
say, the Buddhistic concrete aspect of the abstraction called in Hindu philosophy Mulaprakriti. It is
the body of the Soul, and that which Ether would be to Akasa, the latter being the informing principle
--
universal Time and a conditioned one (Khandakala). One is the abstraction or noumenon of infinite
time (Kala); the other its phenomenon appearing periodically, as the effect of Mahat (the Universal
--
Intelligence, impregnating chaos. This, however, occurs on the plane of metaphysical abstraction, or
rather the plane whereon that which we call a metaphysical abstraction is a reality. The Virgin-egg
being in one sense abstract Egg-ness, or the power of becoming developed through fecundation, is
--
and potency" of all the Universe. Though the idea per se is, of course, an abstraction, a symbolical
mode of expression, it is a symbol truly, as it suggests the idea of infinity as an endless circle. It brings
--
begets them all. . . . . What! unable either to measure the first abstraction yielded to you
by the Deity, or to get hold of it, you still hope to subject to your measurements the
--
not the fire, heat, and motion of physical science, but the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the
soul, of the essence of these material manifestations -- the "things in themselves," which, as modern
--
from the other. Sesha or Ananta, "the couch of Vishnu," is an allegorical abstraction, symbolizing
infinite Time in Space, which contains the germ and throws off periodically the efflorescence of this
--
the "spirit" of ELECTRICITY, which is the LIFE of the Universe. As an abstraction, we call it the
ONE LIFE; as an objective and evident Reality, we speak of a septenary scale of manifestation, which
--
follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the
spiritual. Thus, corresponding to the Sephirothal Crown (or upper triad) there are the three elemental
--
Spirit per se is an unconscious negative abstraction. Its purity is inherent, not acquired by merit;
hence, as already shown, to become the highest Dhyan Chohan it is necessary for each Ego to attain to
--
Nirvanic state is a passage of Spirit back to the ideal abstraction of Be-ness which has no relation to
the plane on which our Universe is accomplishing its cycle.
--
Elohim is a 'general abstraction'; what we call in mathematics 'a constant co-efficient' or a 'general
function' entering into all construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, (the astroDhyanic and) Elohistic figures." To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so, it is an abstraction to
our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim or
Dhyanis are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the
other -- since that which is the surviving Entity in us is partly the direct emanation from, and partly
--
** "The giving reality to abstractions is the error of Realism. Space and Time are frequently viewed as
separated from all the concrete experiences of the mind, instead of being generalizations of these in
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
suppositions and abstractions, but realities, and the only acting realities whose attri butes can be
determined with the help of direct observation and induction." ("Sur la distinction des Forces,"
--
domain of metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction -- at any rate for physical Science -- and has
nought to do with physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance.
--
to say about these two abstractions.
-------------"What is Force?" argues this great man of Science, "what is it from a strictly scientific stand-point, and
--
form by the abstraction of caloric, and again converted into a firm solid, the particles of
which would cling together with a force proportional to their augmented affinity for
--
form, nor the elemental atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, the entitative abstractions of matter in
its highly attenuated state, as existing at present in scientific minds; nor, again, the compound
--
be left unapproached. It is an abstraction, on the verge of which human reason -- however trained to
metaphysical subtleties -- trembles, threatening to collapse. This may be demonstrated to any
--
their great metaphysical abstractions, cannot be entered upon. Hence, we merely state that only seven
of our planets are as intimately related to our globe, as the Sun is to all
--
As symbols representing abstractions, "the physicist bases reasoned hypotheses of the origin of things .
. . . and sees three needs in what he terms creation: (a) a place wherein to create; (b) a medium by
--
Yet these "phantoms of the mind" are in truth no greater abstractions than the abstract ideas in general
upon evolution and physical development -- e.g., Gravity, Matter, Force, etc. -- on which the exact
--
Numbers," "Shekinah" is sexless, and the purest abstraction, a State, like Nirvana, not subject or object
or anything except an absolute PRESENCE.
--
metaphysical abstraction of the original Kabalistic thought -- Ain-Soph-Shekinah-Adam-Kadmon, and
all that follows -- that we oppose, but the crystallization of all these into the highly unphilosophical,
--
the Sephiroth too much as individualities, but to avoid at the same time seeing in them abstractions.
"We shall never arrive at the truth," he says, "much less the power of associating with those celestials,
--
Thus the whole structure of Modern Science is built on a kind of "mathematical abstraction," on a
Protean "Substance which eludes the senses," (Dubois Reymond,) and on effects, the shadowy and
BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; then their
types became chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical Cosmic phenomena -- the
--
gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the objective expression of the abstraction: living Entities
and the models formed on that divine prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical Sephiroth or "the
BS 1 - Introduction to the Idea of God, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
A great dramatist, like Shakespearewe know that what he wrote is fiction. Then we say, fiction isnt true. But then you think, well, wait a minute. Maybe its true like numbers are true. Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think that numbers arent true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, because the abstraction is so insanely powerful.
Once you have mathematics, youre just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. Its not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. You take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and you think, well, its not true, because its fiction. But then you think, wait a minutewhat kind of explanation is that? Maybe its more true than nonfiction. It takes the story that needs to be told about you, and the story that needs to be told about you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and it abstracts that out, and says, heres something thats a key part of the human experience as such. Its an abstraction from this underlying, noisy substrate. People are affected by it because they see that the thing thats represented is part of the pattern of their being. Thats the right way to think about it.
With these old stories these ancient storiesit seems, to me, like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. Its like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again, and at the end of that processit took God only knows how long. Theyve traced some fairy tales back 10,000 years, in relatively unchanged form.
--
Were watching each other act in the world, and then the question is, how long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense, is as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems, and thats a long time. Thats some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. Weve been watching each other, trying to figure out what were up to, across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into your bodieswhich is why we can dance with each other, for example. Understanding isnt just something that you have as an abstraction. Its something that you act out. Thats what children are doing, when theyre learning to rough-and-tumble play. Theyre learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious waylearning to cooperate and compete. Thats all instantiated right into their body. Its not abstract knowledge, and they dont know that theyre doing that. Theyre just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform.
Section III
--
You could say theres a principle that the dominant person manifests, and then you might say that principle shines forth even more brightly, if you know 10 people who are dominant and powerful. Then you could extract out what dominance means from that. You can extract what power means from that, and then you can divorce the concept from the people. We had to do that, at some point, because we can say power, in the human context, and we can imagine what that means. But its divorced from any specific manifestation of power. How the hell did we do that? Thats so complicated. If youre a chimp, the power is in another chimp. Its not some damn abstraction.
Think about it. Were in these hierarchies, many of them across centuries. Were trying to figure out what the guiding principle is. Were trying to extract out the core of the guiding principles, and we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being. Thats God. Its an abstracted ideal, and it manifests itself in personified form. Thats ok, because what were trying to get at is, in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual. Were trying to figure out what that means. You need an embodiment. You need an ideal thats abstracted, that you could act out, that would enable you to understand what that means. Thats what weve been driving at. Thats the first hypothesis. Im going to go over some of the attri butes of this abstracted ideal that weve formalized as God, but thats the first hypothesis: a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself, first, as a concrete pattern of behavior thats characteristic of a single individual and then its a set of individuals, and then its an abstraction from that set, and then you have the abstraction, and its so important.
Heres a political implication: One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be Godliterally to be deified and put into a temple. You can see why that might happen, because thats someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy, who has a tremendous amount of power and influence. The Christian response to that was, never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself. Its brilliant. You can see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that, so that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to a divine principle, for lack of a better word. Even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. We still believe that, because we believe our Prime Minister is subordinate to the damn law.
--
Part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary, aesthetic, and evolutionary perspective is to extract out something of value thats practical. One of the rules that I have when Im lecturing is that I dont want to tell anybody anything that they cant use. I think of knowledge as a tool. Its something to implement in the world. Were tool-using creatures, and our knowledge is tools. We need tools to work in the world. We need tools to regulate our emotions, to make things better, to put an end to suffering to the degree that we can, to live with ourselves properly, and to stand up properly. You need the tools to do that. So I dont want to do anything in this lecture series that isnt practical. I want you to come away having things put together in a way that you can immediately apply. Im not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Its gotta make sense, because the more restrictions on your theory, the better. I want it all laid out causally, so that B follows A and B precedes C. That way its understandable and doesn't require any unnecessary leap of faith.
Another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible is that youre called upon to believe things that no one can believe. Thats no good, because thats a form of lie, as far as I can tell. Then you have to scrap the whole thing, because, in principle, the whole thing is about truth. If you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lieshow in the world are you going to get anywhere with that? I dont want any uncertainty at the bottom of thisor I dont want any more than I have to leave in it, because I cant get any farther than that. Its going to make sense rationally. Even though science is in flux, I dont want it to be pushing up against what we know to be scientifically untrue. Thats something of a dangerous parameter. If it isnt working with evolutionary theory, for example, then I think that its not a good enough solution.
--
Its a funny thing that the Bible has a story, because it wasnt written as a class: it was assembled from a whole bunch of different books. The fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable. The question is, what is that story about? And how did it come up as a story? Is there anything to it? It constituted a dramatic record of self-realization or abstraction. I already mentioned that. The idea of the formulation of the image of God is an abstraction. Thats how were going to handle it, to begin with. I want to saybecause I said I wasnt going to be any more reductionist than necessary that I know the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but its not explicable, and so I dont want to explain it away. I want to just leave it as a fact, and then I want to pull back from that and say, ok, well leave that as a fact and mystery. Were going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out an ideal, and to consider it as an abstraction outside of its instantiation. Thats good enough. Thats an amazing thing, if its true. But I dont want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Its a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors. What does that mean? Many people wrote it, theres many different books, and theyre interwoven togetherespecially in the first five books by people who, I suspect, took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent. They took a little of this, and they took a little of that, and they took a little of this, and they tried not to lose anything, because it seemed valuable. It certainly seemed valuable to the people who collected the stories, because they werent gonna tolerate too much editing. But they also wanted it to make sense, to some degree, so it wasnt completely logically contradictory and completely absurd. Many people wrote it, and many people edited it, and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time. We have very few documents like that, and so just because we have a document like that is sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena, and to try to understand what it is that its trying to communicate. I said its also the worlds first hyperlinked text, which is very much worth thinking about, for quite a long time.
Theres four sources in the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Biblefour stories that we know came together. The first one was called the Priestly. It used the name Elohim, or El Shaddai, for God. I believe el is the root for allah, as well. This is usually translated as God, or the gods, because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible. Its newer than the Jahwist version. The reason Im telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isnt as old as Genesis 2. Genesis 2 contains the Jahwist version. It contains the story of Adam and Eve. Thats older than the very first book in the Bible, but they decided to put the newer version first. I think its because it deals with more fundamental abstractions. Its something like that. It deals with the most basic of abstractionshow the universe was created and then segues into what the human environment is like. That seems to be the logic behind it.
The Jahwist version uses the name YHWH , which, apparently, people didnt say, but we believe was pronounced something like Yahwa. It has a strongly anthropomorphic God, that takes human form. It begins with Genesis 2:4. This is the account of the heavens and the earth, and it contains the story of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and Noah, and the Tower of Babel, and Exodus, and Numbers, along with the Priestly version. It also contains the law in the formjust the formof the Ten Commandments, which is like a truncated form of the law.
Conversations with Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
But I wouldn't advise you to say all that to Z I don't know if the mere fact of coming here and listening to what I have to say will suffice to make her see the truth. It is possible that she needs to find out by her own experience. For it is experience of life which is the touch-stone; so long as one remains in abstractions one does not discover the criterion; but when you try to realise, experience teaches you. It is necessary for the whole being to know the truth. If she only puts aside her idea, this tendency will remain there, intact, ready to reappear, and the final results may be bad. Perhaps it would be better to let her try out her own experience; that of another does not suffice.
You may write to her that you are engaged in sadhana and that for the time being you have given up all other work.
Cratylus, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Another says, "No, not fire in the abstract, but the abstraction of
heat in the fire." Another man professes to laugh at all this, and
ENNEAD 01.04 - Whether Animals May Be Termed Happy., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
15. Let us now imagine two wise men, the first of whom possesses everything that heart can wish for, while the other is in a contrary position. Shall they be said to be equally happy? Yes, if they be equally wise. Even if the one possessed physical beauty, and all the other advantages that do not relate either to wisdom, virtue, contemplation of the good, or perfect life; what would be the use of all that since he who possesses all these advantages is not considered as really being happier than he who lacks them? Such wealth would not even help a flute-player to accomplish his object! We, however, consider the happy man only from the standpoint of the weakness of our mind, considering as serious and frightful what the really1039 happy man considers indifferent. For the man could not be wise, nor consequently happy, so long as he has not succeeded in getting rid of all these vain ideas, so long as he has not entirely transformed himself, so long as he does not within himself contain the confidence that he is sheltered from all evil. Only then will he live without being troubled by any fear. The only thing that should affect him, would be the fear that he is not an expert in wisdom, that he is only partly wise. As to unforeseen fears that might get the better of him before he had had the time to reflect, during a moment of abstraction of attention, the wise man will hasten to turn them away, treating that which within himself becomes agitated as a child that has lost its way through pain. He will tranquilize it either by reason, or even by a threat, though uttered without passion. Thus the mere sight of a worthy person suffices to calm a child. Besides, the wise man will not hold aloof either from friendship nor gratitude. He will treat his own people as he treats himself; giving to his friends as much as to his own person; and he will give himself up to friendship, without ceasing to exercise intelligence therein.
THE WISE MAN REMAINS UNATTACHED.
ENNEAD 01.08 - Of the Nature and Origin of Evils., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
9. How do we get to know vice and virtue? As to virtue, we know it by the very intelligence and by wisdom; for wisdom knows itself. But how can we know vice? Just as we observe that an object is not in itself straight, by applying a rule, so we discern vice by this characteristic, that it does not comport itself with virtue. But do we, or do we not have direct intuition thereof? We do not have the intuition of absolute vice, because it is indeterminate. We know it, therefore, by a kind of abstraction, observing that virtue is entirely lacking. We cognize relative vice by noticing that it lacks some part of virtue. We see a part of virtue, and, by this part, judging what is lacking in order completely to constitute the form (of1156 virtue), we call vice what is lacking to it; defining as the indeterminate (evil) what is deprived of virtue. Similarly with matter. If, for instance, we notice a figure that is ugly because its ("seminal) reason," being unable to dominate matter, has been unable to hide its deformity, we notice ugliness by what is lacking to form.
HOW TO SEE MATTER: BY DIALECTIC abstraction.
But how do we know that which is absolutely formless (matter)? We make abstraction of all kinds of form, and what remains we call matter. We allow ourselves to be penetrated by a kind of shapelessness by the mere fact that we make abstraction of all shape in order to be able to represent matter (by a "bastard reasoning").185 Consequently, intelligence becomes altered, and ceases to be genuine intelligence when it dares in this way to look at what does not belong to its domain.186 It resembles the eye, which withdraws from light to see darkness, and which on that very account does not see. Thus, in not seeing, the eye sees darkness so far as it is naturally capable of seeing it. Thus intelligence which hides light within itself, and which, so to speak, issues from itself, by advancing towards things alien to its nature, without bringing along its own light, places itself in a state contrary to its being to cognize a nature contrary to its own.165 But enough of this.
MATTER IS BOTH WITHOUT QUALITIES AND EVIL.
--- Overview of noun abstraction
The noun abstraction has 6 senses (first 4 from tagged texts)
1. (5) abstraction, abstract ::: (a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance; "he loved her only in the abstract--not in person")
2. (3) abstraction ::: (the act of withdrawing or removing something)
3. (2) abstraction, generalization, generalisation ::: (the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances)
4. (2) abstraction ::: (an abstract painting)
5. abstractedness, abstraction ::: (preoccupation with something to the exclusion of all else)
6. abstraction, abstract entity ::: (a general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun abstraction
6 senses of abstraction
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
=> concept, conception, construct
=> idea, thought
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
abstraction
=> removal, remotion
=> separation
=> change of integrity
=> change
=> action
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
abstraction, generalization, generalisation
=> theorization, theorisation
=> conjecture
=> reasoning, logical thinking, abstract thought
=> 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
abstraction
=> painting, picture
=> graphic art
=> art, fine art
=> creation
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 5
abstractedness, abstraction
=> preoccupation, preoccupancy, absorption, engrossment
=> cognitive state, state of mind
=> psychological state, psychological condition, mental state, mental condition
=> condition, status
=> state
=> attribute
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 6
abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun abstraction
3 of 6 senses of abstraction
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
=> right
=> absolute
=> teacher
=> thing
Sense 5
abstractedness, abstraction
=> reverie, revery
Sense 6
abstraction, abstract entity
=> psychological feature
=> attribute
=> group, grouping
=> relation
=> communication
=> measure, quantity, amount
=> otherworld
=> set
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun abstraction
6 senses of abstraction
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
=> concept, conception, construct
Sense 2
abstraction
=> removal, remotion
Sense 3
abstraction, generalization, generalisation
=> theorization, theorisation
Sense 4
abstraction
=> painting, picture
Sense 5
abstractedness, abstraction
=> preoccupation, preoccupancy, absorption, engrossment
Sense 6
abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun abstraction
6 senses of abstraction
Sense 1
abstraction, abstract
-> concept, conception, construct
=> conceptualization, conceptualisation, conceptuality
=> notion
=> category
=> rule, regulation
=> property, attribute, dimension
=> abstraction, abstract
=> quantity
=> part, section, division
=> whole
=> law, natural law
=> law, law of nature
=> lexicalized concept
=> hypothesis, possibility, theory
=> fact
=> rule, linguistic rule
Sense 2
abstraction
-> removal, remotion
=> abscission, cutting off
=> abstraction
=> extraction
=> autotomy
=> decontamination
=> deletion
=> denudation, stripping, uncovering, baring, husking
=> dermabrasion
=> dislodgment, dislodgement
=> elimination, riddance
=> elimination
=> emptying, voidance, evacuation
=> rinse, rinsing
=> disembowelment, evisceration
=> skimming
=> withdrawal
=> withdrawal
Sense 3
abstraction, generalization, generalisation
-> theorization, theorisation
=> ideology
=> abstraction, generalization, generalisation
Sense 4
abstraction
-> painting, picture
=> abstraction
=> cityscape
=> daub
=> distemper
=> finger-painting
=> icon, ikon
=> landscape
=> miniature, illumination
=> monochrome
=> mural, wall painting
=> nude, nude painting
=> oil painting
=> pentimento
=> sand painting
=> seascape, waterscape
=> semi-abstraction
=> still life
=> tanka
=> trompe l'oeil
=> watercolor, water-color, watercolour, water-colour
Sense 5
abstractedness, abstraction
-> preoccupation, preoccupancy, absorption, engrossment
=> abstractedness, abstraction
=> absentmindedness
Sense 6
abstraction, abstract entity
-> entity
=> physical entity
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> thing
--- Grep of noun abstraction
abstraction
abstractionism
abstractionist
semi-abstraction
Wikipedia - Abstraction (computer science) -- Technique for arranging complexity of computer systems
Wikipedia - Abstractionist Platonism
Wikipedia - Abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Abstraction (linguistics) -- Use of terms for concepts removed from the objects to which they were originally attached
Wikipedia - Abstraction (mathematics)
Wikipedia - Abstraction principle (programming)
Wikipedia - Abstraction (software engineering)
Wikipedia - Abstraction -- Conceptual process where general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples
Wikipedia - Category:Abstraction
Wikipedia - Cross-platform support middleware -- Software abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Data abstraction
Wikipedia - Database abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Full abstraction
Wikipedia - Fundamental theorem of software engineering -- A general principle for managing complexity through abstraction
Wikipedia - Geometric abstraction -- form of abstract art involving geometry
Wikipedia - Hardware abstraction layer
Wikipedia - Hardware abstraction
Wikipedia - High-level programming language -- Programming language with strong abstraction from details of hardware
Wikipedia - Hypostatic abstraction
Wikipedia - In Abstraction -- album by A Hope for Home
Wikipedia - Lambda abstraction
Wikipedia - Lambda calculus -- Formal mathematical logic system centered on function abstractions and applications
Wikipedia - Link layer -- lowest abstraction layer in the Internet Protocol Suite
Wikipedia - Lyrical Abstraction
Wikipedia - Lyrical abstraction
Wikipedia - Mathematical and theoretical biology -- Branch of biology which employs theoretical analysis, mathematical models and abstractions of the living organisms
Wikipedia - Nadir Afonso -- Portuguese geometric abstractionist painter (1920-2013)
Wikipedia - Operating system abstraction layer
Wikipedia - OSI model -- Model of communication of seven abstraction layers
Wikipedia - Parallel programming model -- Abstraction of parallel computer architecture, with which it is convenient to express algorithms and their composition in programs
Wikipedia - Personification -- An anthropomorphic metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person
Wikipedia - Post-painterly abstraction
Wikipedia - Presentation-abstraction-control
Wikipedia - Principle of abstraction
Wikipedia - Selective abstraction
Wikipedia - Superplan -- Programming language with strong abstraction from details of hardware
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13595736-abstraction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21857255.Primordial_An_Abstraction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3179139-the-limits-of-abstraction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32313149-keynes-abstraction-et-exp-rience
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5311717-louise-bourgeois-and-the-nature-of-abstraction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/562896.Women_the_New_York_School_and_Other_True_Abstractions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74413.3x_Abstraction
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8035682-driven-to-abstraction
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - games-abstraction
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abstraction
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abstraction_(mathematics)
Hokuto no Ken Movie -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Adventure Shounen -- Hokuto no Ken Movie Hokuto no Ken Movie -- Following a cataclysmic nuclear war, the world teeters on the brink of complete destruction. Civilization is polarized into a degenerate society where opposing packs of marauding scavengers prey on helpless, homeless nomads. For those who are lucky enough to survive the constant brutality and danger, it is a bleak existence. Life an death blur into abstractions. The only hope left for mankind is to find a hero worthy of becoming the next "Fist of the North Star" - an enlightened warrior - who is capable of leading those with the will to survive out of this barrenness into a new world. But in this savage no-man's land of shifting loyalties and power-hungry demi-gods, heroes are in short supply. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media -- Movie - Mar 8, 1986 -- 17,312 7.20
Hokuto no Ken Movie -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Adventure Shounen -- Hokuto no Ken Movie Hokuto no Ken Movie -- Following a cataclysmic nuclear war, the world teeters on the brink of complete destruction. Civilization is polarized into a degenerate society where opposing packs of marauding scavengers prey on helpless, homeless nomads. For those who are lucky enough to survive the constant brutality and danger, it is a bleak existence. Life an death blur into abstractions. The only hope left for mankind is to find a hero worthy of becoming the next "Fist of the North Star" - an enlightened warrior - who is capable of leading those with the will to survive out of this barrenness into a new world. But in this savage no-man's land of shifting loyalties and power-hungry demi-gods, heroes are in short supply. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- Movie - Mar 8, 1986 -- 17,312 7.20
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction (computer science)
Abstraction-Cration
Abstraction (disambiguation)
Abstraction layer
Abstraction (linguistics)
Abstraction (mathematics)
Abstraction principle
Abstraction principle (computer programming)
Abstraction principle (law)
Database abstraction layer
Entity abstraction pattern
From China to Taiwan: Pioneers of Abstraction
Geometric abstraction
Hardware abstraction
Hydrogen atom abstraction
Hypostatic abstraction
Leaky abstraction
Lyrical abstraction
Message Abstraction Layer
Metalinguistic abstraction
Objective abstraction
Operating system abstraction layer
Physics Abstraction Layer
Post-painterly abstraction
Presentationabstractioncontrol
Principle of abstraction
Reflective abstraction
Service abstraction
Solo 2: Abstractions
Utility abstraction pattern
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