TERMS STARTING WITH
intervention ::: n. --> The act of intervening; interposition.
Any interference that may affect the interests of others; especially, of one or more states with the affairs of another; mediation.
The act by which a third person, to protect his own interest, interposes and becomes a party to a suit pending between other parties.
Interventionist supply-side policies - Policies to increase aggregate supply by government intervention to counteract the. deficiencies of the market.
Intervention price (in the CAP) - The price at which the EU is prepared to buy a foodstuff if the market price were to be below it. .
TERMS ANYWHERE
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface "hardware, standard" (ACPI) An open industry standard developed by {Intel}, {Microsoft}, and {Toshiba} for configuration and {power management}. The key element of the standard is power management with two important improvements. First, it puts the {OS} in control of power management. In the currently existing {APM} model most of the power management tasks are run by the {BIOS}, with limited intervention from the OS. In ACPI, the BIOS is responsible for the dirty details of communicating with hardware equipment but the control is in the OS. The other important feature is bringing power management features now available only in {portable computers} to {desktop computers} and {servers}. Extremely low consumption states, i.e., in which only memory, or not even memory is powered, but from which ordinary interrupts (real time clock, keyboard, modem, etc.) can quickly wake the system, are today available in portables only. The standard should make these available for a wider range of systems. For ACPI to work the operating system, the {motherboard} chipset, and for some functions even the {CPU} has to be designed for it. Microsoft is heavily driving a move toward ACPI, both {Windows NT 5.0} and {Windows 98} will support it. It remains to be seen how much hardware manufacturers will embrace the technology and whether other operating system vendors will support it. {ACPI Information Page (http://teleport.com/~acpi/)}. (1998-03-27)
"Ah! Since India is the cradle of religion and since so many gods preside over her destiny, who among them will accomplish the miracle of resuscitating the city?" A. Choumel (in an article on Pondicherry in 1928) Follows response by the Mother: "Blinded by false appearances, deceived by calumnies, held back by fear and prejudice, he has passed by the side of the god whose intervention he implores and saw him not; he has walked near to the forces which will accomplish the miracle he demands and had no will to recognise them. Thus has he lost the greatest opportunity of his life—a unique opportunity of entering into contact with the mysteries and marvelswhose existence his brain has divined and to which his heart obscurely aspires. In all times the aspirant, before receiving initiation, had to pass through tests. In the schools of antiquity these tests were artificial and by that they lost the greater part of their value. But it is no longer so now. The test hides behind some very ordinary every-day circumstance and wears an innocent air of coincidence and chance which makes it still more difficult and dangerous.It is only to those who can conquer the mind’s
references and prejudices of race and education that India reveals the mystery of her treasures. Others depart disappointed, failing to find what they seek; for they have sought it in the wrong way and would not agree to pay the price of the Divine Discovery."
Ref: CWM Vol. 13, Page: 372-373
Also called creation theology. ::: The belief that humans, life, the Earth, and the Universe were created by the supernatural intervention of a supreme being or deity. This intervention may be seen either as an act of creation from nothing (ex nihilo) or the emergence of order from pre-existing chaos.[4]
Ananda. (T. Kun dga' bo; C. Anan[tuo]; J. Anan[da]; K. Anan[da] 阿難[陀]). In Sanskrit and PAli, literally "Bliss," the name of the Buddha's cousin, longtime attendant, and one of his chief disciples. According to tradition, in his previous life, he was a god in the TUsITA heaven, who was born on the same day and into the same sAKYA clan as the BODHISATTVA and future buddha who was born as prince SIDDHARTHA. Ananda was born as the son of Amṛtodana, the brother of king sUDDHODANA. He was thus the Buddha's cousin and the brother of DEVADATTA. When the Buddha returned to his home town of KAPILAVASTU in the second year after his enlightenment, many of the sAkyan men, such as Ananda and Devadatta, wished to renounce the householder life and become the Buddha's disciples as monks. Not long after his ordination, Ananda became a SROTAAPANNA upon hearing a sermon by PuRnA. The Buddha did not have a personal attendant for the first twenty years after his enlightenment, with various monks occasionally offering various services to him. But after two decades of these ad hoc arrangements, the Buddha finally asked for someone to volunteer to be his personal attendant; all the monks volunteered except Ananda, who said that he did not do so because the Buddha would choose the correct person regardless of who volunteered. The Buddha selected Ananda, who accepted on the following conditions: the Buddha was never to give him any special food or robes that he had received as gifts; the Buddha was not to provide him with a special monk's cell; and the Buddha was not to include him in dining invitations he received from the laity. Ananda made these conditions in order to prevent anyone from claiming that he received special treatment because of serving as the Buddha's attendant. In addition, he asked to be allowed to accept invitations on behalf of the Buddha; he asked to be allowed to bring to the Buddha those who came from great distances to see him; he asked to be able to bring any questions he had to the Buddha; and he asked that the Buddha repeat to him any doctrine that had been taught in his absence. Ananda saw these latter conditions as the true advantages of serving the Buddha. For the next twenty-five years, Ananda served the Buddha with great devotion, bringing him water, sweeping his cell, washing his feet, rubbing his body, sewing his robes, and accompanying him wherever he went. He guarded the Buddha's cell at night, carrying a staff and a torch, in order to make sure that his sleep was not disturbed and to be ready should the Buddha need him. As the Buddha grew older and more infirm, Ananda provided devoted care, despite the fact that the two were exactly the same age. Because Ananda was constantly in the Buddha's presence, he played a key role in many famous events of the early dispensation. For example, it was Ananda who, on behalf of MAHAPRAJAPATI, requested that women be allowed to enter the SAMGHA as nuns, persisting in his request despite the Buddha's initial refusal. He is therefore remembered especially fondly by the order of BHIKsUnĪs, and it is said that he often preached to nuns. In a famous tale reproduced in various sources, the daughter of a woman named MAtangī attempted to seduce Ananda with the help of her mother's magical powers, only to come to realize her wrongdoing with the intervention of the Buddha. Toward the end of his life, the Buddha mentioned to Ananda that a buddha could live for a KALPA or until the end of the kalpa if he were asked to do so. (See CAPALACAITYA.) Ananda, distracted by MARA, failed to request the Buddha to do so, despite the Buddha mentioning this three times. Ananda was chastised for this blunder at the first council (see infra). Ananda figures prominently in the account of the Buddha's last days in the MAHAPARINIBBANASUTTA, weeping at the knowledge that the Buddha was about to die and being consoled by him. Ananda was known for his extraordinary powers of memory; he is said to have heard all 84,000 sermon topics (82,000 taught by the Buddha and 2,000 taught by other disciples) and was able to memorize 15,000 stanzas without omitting a syllable. He therefore played a key role in the recitation of the Buddha's teachings at the first council (SAMGĪTI; see COUNCIL, FIRST) held at RAJAGṚHA shortly after the Buddha's death. However, MAHAKAsYAPA, who convened the council, specified that all five hundred monks in attendance must be ARHATs, and Ananda was not. On the night before the opening of the council, Ananda achieved the enlightenment of an arhat as he was lying down to sleep, as his head fell to the pillow and his feet rose from the ground. He is therefore famous for achieving enlightenment in none of the four traditional postures (ĪRYAPATHA): walking, standing, sitting, or lying down. As an arhat, Ananda was welcomed to the council, where he recounted all the words of the Buddha (except those concerning the VINAYA, or monastic rules, which were recited by UPALI). For this reason, most SuTRAs open with the words, "Thus have I heard" (EVAM MAYA sRUTAM); the "I" is usually Ananda. (For this reason, Ananda is also known in China as Duowen Diyi, "First in Vast Hearing" or "He Who Heard the Most.") After the Buddha's death, the order of monks brought five charges against Ananda: (1) the Buddha had said that after his passing, the monks could disregard the minor precepts, but Ananda failed to ask him which those were; thus, all the precepts had to be followed; (2) Ananda had once stepped on the Buddha's robe when sewing it; (3) Ananda had allowed women to honor the Buddha's naked body after his death and their tears had fallen on his feet; (4) Ananda failed to ask the Buddha to live on for the rest of the kalpa; and (5) Ananda urged the Buddha to admit women to the order. Ananda replied that he saw no fault in any of these deeds but agreed to confess them. According to FAXIAN, when Ananda was 120 years old, he set out from MAGADHA to VAIsALĪ in order to die. Seeking his relics (sARĪRA), AJATAsATRU followed him to the Rohīni River, while a group from VaisAlī awaited him on the other bank. Not wishing to disappoint either group, Ananda levitated to the middle of the river in the meditative posture, preached the dharma, and then meditated on the TEJOKASInA, which prompted his body to burst into flames, with the relics dividing into two parts, one landing on each bank of the river. Ananda has long been one of the most beloved figures in the history of Buddhism, in part because he was not the wisest of the Buddha's disciples but showed unstinting devotion to the Buddha, always seeking to understand him correctly and to bring his teachings to as many people as possible.
antecedent control: a behavioural measure in which the intervention occurs before the behaviour arises. Antecedent procedures include education, attitude change and inducing or preventing behaviours by controlling the triggers which cause them to occur.
Automation - the technique, method, or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means, as by electronic devices, reducing human intervention to a minimum. See /r/Automate.
Autonomous vehicle - a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator. See /r/SelfDrivingCars
Ayuta (Sanskrit) Ayuta [from a not + the verbal root yu to be interrupted, separated] Unimpeded; unseparated; ayuta-siddha is a philosophical term meaning proved to be not separated (by the intervention of space), hence inherent or innate. As an adjective, unbound, unfastened [from the verbal root yu to bind, fasten]. Also, ten thousand, a myriad.
Bast: The Primordial Great Mother of the Egyptians, who "catted", or gave birth, without the intervention of the male. She was therefore one of the original types of the
batch processing "programming" A system that takes a sequence (a "batch") of commands or jobs, executes them and returns the results, all without human intervention. This contrasts with an {interactive} system where the user's commands and the computer's responses are interleaved during a single run. A batch system typically takes its commands from a disk file (or a set of {punched cards} or {magnetic tape} in the {mainframe} days) and returns the results to a file (or prints them). Often there is a queue of jobs which the system processes as resources become available. Since the advent of the {personal computer}, the term "batch" has come to mean automating frequently performed tasks that would otherwise be done interactively by storing those commands in a "{batch file}" or "{script}". Usually this file is read by some kind of {command interpreter} but batch processing is sometimes used with GUI-based applications that define script equivalents for menu selections and other mouse actions. Such a recorded sequence of GUI actions is sometimes called a "{macro}". This may only exist in memory and may not be saved to disk whereas a batch normally implies something stored on disk. Unix {cron} jobs and Windows scheduled tasks are batch processing started at a predefined time by the system whereas mainframe batch jobs were typically initiated by an operator loading them into a queue. (2009-09-14)
batch processing ::: (programming) A system that takes a set (a batch) of commands or jobs, executes them and returns the results, all without human intervention. This contrasts with an interactive system where the user's commands and the computer's responses are interleaved during a single run.A batch system typically takes its commands from a disk file (or a set of punched cards or magnetic tape in the old days) and returns the results to a file (or prints them). Often there is a queue of jobs which the system processes as resources become available.Since the advent of the personal computer, the term batch has come to mean automating frequently performed tasks that would otherwise be done interactively called a macro. This may only exist in memory and may not be saved to disk whereas a batch normally implies something stored on disk. (1998-06-26)
intervention ::: n. --> The act of intervening; interposition.
Any interference that may affect the interests of others; especially, of one or more states with the affairs of another; mediation.
The act by which a third person, to protect his own interest, interposes and becomes a party to a suit pending between other parties.
BrahmA. [alt. MahAbrahmA] (T. Tshangs pa; C. Fantian; J. Bonten; K. Pomch'on 梵天). An Indian divinity who was adopted into the Buddhist pantheon as a protector of the teachings (DHARMAPALA) and king of the BRAHMALOKA (in the narrow sense of that term). A particular form of the god BrahmA, called SAHAMPATI, plays a crucial role in the inception of the Buddhist dispensation or teaching (sASANA). During the seven weeks following his enlightenment, the newly awakened buddha GAUTAMA was unsure as to whether he should teach, wondering whether there would be anyone in this world who would be able to duplicate his experience. BrahmA descended to earth and convinced him that there were persons "with little dust in their eyes" who would be able to understand his teachings. The Buddha then surveyed the world to determine the most suitable persons to hear the DHARMA. Seeing that his former meditation teachers had died, he chose the "group of five" (PANCAVARGIKA) and proceeded to ṚsIPATANA, where he taught his first sermon, the "Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma" (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANASuTRA; P. DHAMMACAKKAPPAVATTANASUTTA). Because of this intervention, BrahmA is considered one of the main dharmapAlas. BUDDHAGHOSA explains, however, that the compassionate Buddha never had any hesitation about teaching the dharma but felt that if he were implored by the god BrahmA, who was revered in the world, it would lend credence to his mission. BrahmA is depicted with four faces and four arms, and his primary attributes are the lotus and the CAKRA. The figure of BrahmA also fused with early Indian BODHISATTVAs such as PADMAPAnI (AVALOKITEsVARA). In Tibet the dharmapAla TSHANGS PA DKAR PO is a fusion of BrahmA and PE HAR RGYAL PO.
bus master "architecture" The device in a computer which is driving the {address bus} and bus control signals at some point in time. In a simple architecture only the (single) {CPU} can be bus master but this means that all communications between ("slave") I/O devices must involve the CPU. More sophisticated architectures allow other capable devices (or multiple CPUs) to take turns at controling the bus. This allows, for example, a {network controller} card to access a {disk controller} directly while the CPU performs other tasks which do not require the bus, e.g. fetching code from its {cache}. Note that any device can drive data onto the {data bus} when the CPU reads from that device, but only the bus master drives the {address bus} and control signals. {Direct Memory Access} is a simple form of bus mastering where the I/O device is set up by the CPU to read from or write to one or more contiguous blocks of memory and then signal to the CPU when it has done so. Full bus mastering (or "First Party DMA", "bus mastering DMA") implies that the I/O device is capable of performing more complex sequences of operations without CPU intervention (e.g. servicing a complete {NFS} request). This will normally mean that the I/O device contains its own processor or {microcontroller}. See also {distributed kernel}. (1996-08-26)
bystander intervention:the act of assisting strangers in an emergency.
consequent control: a behavioural measure in which the intervention follows the behaviour to be changed. Consequent procedures can affect behaviours by using pleasant or unpleasant consequences (positive or negative reinforcement or punishment) to make their performance more or less likely or through the use of feedback.
cosmic mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” *The Life Divine
"If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine
"There is one cosmic Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the understanding and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
"[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one"s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one"s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga
"The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga*
direct-acting ::: a. --> Acting directly, as one part upon another, without the intervention of other working parts.
Direct Memory Access "architecture" (DMA) A facility of some architectures which allows a peripheral to read and write memory without intervention by the CPU. DMA is a limited form of {bus master}ing. (1996-08-23)
Direct Memory Access ::: (architecture) (DMA) A facility of some architectures which allows a peripheral to read and write memory without intervention by the CPU. DMA is a limited form of bus mastering. (1996-08-23)
Dirty or managed float - A freely floating (or flexible) exchange rates that involves governments intervening to stabilize the value of their currencies. To be compared with a 'clean' float, where there is no government intervention in the foreign exchange market.
Does the intervention of the Grace come through a call?When one calls? I think so. Anyway, not exclusively and solely. But certainly, yes, if one has faith in the Grace and an aspiration and if one does what a little child would when it runs to its mother and says: "Mamma, give me this", if one calls with that simplicity, if one turns to the Grace and says "Give me this", I believe it listens. Unless one asks for something that is not good for one, then it does not listen. If one asks from it something that does harm or is not favourable, it does not listen.
Ref: CWM Vol.05, Page: 366
eclipse ::: n. --> An interception or obscuration of the light of the sun, moon, or other luminous body, by the intervention of some other body, either between it and the eye, or between the luminous body and that illuminated by it. A lunar eclipse is caused by the moon passing through the earth&
embedded system ::: (computer) Hardware and software which forms a component of some larger system and which is expected to function without human intervention.A typical embedded system consists of a single-board microcomputer with software in ROM, which starts running some special purpose application program as soon as it is turned on and will not stop until it is turned off (if ever).An embedded system may include some kind of operating system but often it will be simple enough to be written as a single program. It will not usually have any by the overall system of which it is a part. Often it must provide real-time response.Usenet newsgroup: comp.arch.embedded. (1995-04-12)
embedded system "computer" Hardware and software which forms a component of some larger system and which is expected to function without human intervention. A typical embedded system consists of a single-board {microcomputer} with software in {ROM}, which starts running some special purpose {application program} as soon as it is turned on and will not stop until it is turned off (if ever). An embedded system may include some kind of {operating system} but often it will be simple enough to be written as a single program. It will not usually have any of the normal {peripherals} such as a keyboard, monitor, serial connections, mass storage, etc. or any kind of user interface software unless these are required by the overall system of which it is a part. Often it must provide {real-time} response. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.arch.embedded}. (1995-04-12)
failover ::: (reliability) Automatically switching to a redundant or standby server, system, or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the Failover happens without human intervention. This feature is usually built-in to expensive systems which must be available continuously.(2001-03-19)
first-hand ::: a. --> Obtained directly from the first or original source; hence, without the intervention of an agent.
Fixed exchange rate - An exchange rate that is maintained within a small range around its publicly stated par value by the intervention of a country's central bank in foreign market operations.
Flexible exchange rate - An exchange rate that is left free to be determined by the forces of demand and supply on the free market, with no intervention by the monetary authorities.
Freely floating exchange rate - Where the exchange rate is determined entirely by the forces of demand and supply in the foreign exchange market with no government intervention whatsoever.
Free-market economy - An economy where all economic decisions are taken by individual households and firms and with no government intervention.
Free trade - The absence of any form of government intervention in international trade, which implies that imports and exports must not be subject to special taxes or restrictions levied merely because of their status as "imports" or "exports.
Government intervention - May be able to rectify various failings of the market. Government intervention in the market can be used to achieve various economic objectives which may not be best achieved by the market. Governments, however, are not perfect and their actions may bring adverse as well as beneficial consequences.
Harmony, Pre-Established: The perfect functioning of mind and body, as ordained by God in the beginning. The dualism of Descartes (1596-1650) had precluded interaction between mind or soul and body by its absolute difference and opposition between res cogitans and res extensa. How does it happen, then, that the mind perceives the impressions of the body, and the body is ready to follow the mind's will? The Cartesians, in order to correct this difficulty, introduced the doctrine of "occasionalism", whereby when anything happens to either mind or body, God interferes to make the corresponding change in the other. Leibniz (1646-1716) countered by suggesting that the relation between mind and body is one of harmony, established by God before their creation. Earlier than mind or body, God had perfect knowledge of all possible minds and bodies. In an infinite number of creations all possible combinations are possible, including those minds whose sequence of ideas perfectly fits the motions of some bodies. In the latter, there is a perfect and pre-established harmony. A parallelism between mind and body exists, such that each represents the proper expression of the other. Leibniz compares their relation to that of two clocks which have been synchronized once for all and which therefore operate similarly without the need of either interaction or intervention. Expressed by Leibniz' follower, C. Wolff (1679-1754) as "that by which the intercourse of soul and bodv is explained by a series of perceptions and desires in the soul, and a series of motions in the body, which are harmonic or accordant through the nature of soul and body." -- J.K.F.
I know by wWch the taking up of sadbaoa by the Dmne becomes a sensible fact before the preparation of the nature is done. In other methods the Divine action may be felt from time to time, but it remains mostly behind the veil till all is ready. In some the ditioe action Is not recognised ; all must be done by (apioya. In most there is a mixing of the two ::: the iapas>3 finally calling the direct help and intervention. The idea and experience of the Divine doing all belong to the Yoga based on surrender. But whatever way is followed, the one thing to be done is to be faithful and go on to the end.
immediacy ::: n. --> The relation of freedom from the interventionof a medium; immediateness.
immediate ::: a. --> Not separated in respect to place by anything intervening; proximate; close; as, immediate contact.
Not deferred by an interval of time; present; instant.
Acting with nothing interposed or between, or without the intervention of another object as a cause, means, or agency; acting, perceived, or produced, directly; as, an immediate cause.
immediately ::: adv. --> In an immediate manner; without intervention of any other person or thing; proximately; directly; -- opposed to mediately; as, immediately contiguous.
Without interval of time; without delay; promptly; instantly; at once.
As soon as. Cf. Directly, 8, Note.
In aesthetics: The general doctrine that the proper study of art is nature. In this broad sense, artistic naturalism is simply the thesis that the artist's sole concern and function should be to observe closely and report clearly the character and behavior of his physical environment. Similarly to philosophical naturalism, aesthetic naturalism derives much of its importance from its denials and from the manner in which it consequently restricts and directs art. The artist should not seek any "hidden" reality or essence; he should not attempt to correct or complete nature by either idealizing or generalizing; he should not impose value judgments upon nature; and he should not concern himself with the selection of "beautiful" subjects that will yield "aesthetic pleasure". He is simply to dissect and describe what he finds around him. Here, it is important to notice explicitly a distinction between naturalism and romanticism (q.v.): romanticism emphasizes the felt quality of things, and the romanticist is primarily interested in the experiences that nature will yield, naturalism emphasizes the objective character of things, and is interested in nature as an independent entity. Thus, romanticism stresses the intervention of the artist upon nature, while naturalism seeks to reduce this to a minimum.
Incomes policy - Any direct intervention by the government to influence wage and price formation.
in doing so, but for the timely intervention of
informed consent: an ethical requirement that participants or clients should have sufficient information about an experiment or therapeutic intervention to enable them to make an informed judgement about whether or not to participate.
intercedence ::: n. --> The act of interceding; intercession; intervention.
intercoming ::: n. --> The act of coming between; intervention; interference.
interjacency ::: n. --> The state of being between; a coming or lying between or among; intervention; also, that which lies between.
intermediacy ::: n. --> Interposition; intervention.
intermediately ::: adv. --> In an intermediate manner; by way of intervention.
intermediation ::: n. --> The act of coming between; intervention; interposition.
interposal ::: n. --> The act of interposing; interposition; intervention.
interruption ::: n. --> The act of interrupting, or breaking in upon.
The state of being interrupted; a breach or break, caused by the abrupt intervention of something foreign; intervention; interposition.
Obstruction caused by breaking in upon course, current, progress, or motion; stop; hindrance; as, the author has met with many interruptions in the execution of his work; the speaker or the argument proceeds without interruption.
intervene ::: to occur or come between two things as in action. intervening, intervention, interventions.
interveniency ::: n. --> Intervention; interposition.
Interventionist supply-side policies - Policies to increase aggregate supply by government intervention to counteract the. deficiencies of the market.
Intervention price (in the CAP) - The price at which the EU is prepared to buy a foodstuff if the market price were to be below it. .
jiriki. (C. zili; K. charyok 自力). In Japanese, "self power." The term jiriki came to be used frequently in the pure land schools by the followers of HoNEN and SHINRAN and their JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu traditions. Jiriki, or "self power," is often contrasted with the term TARIKI, or "other power." While tariki refers to the practitioner's reliance on the power or grace of the buddha AMITĀBHA, jiriki is often used pejoratively to refer to practices requiring personal effort, such as keeping the precepts (sĪLA) and cultivating the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ). Reliance on jiriki was often condemned as a difficult path to enlightenment, especially as compared to practices based on tariki, such as reciting Amitābha's name (J. nenbutsu; see C. NIANFO). Exegetes also attempted to underscore the futility of jiriki practices by suggesting that the world was currently in the mappo (C. MOFA), or dharma-ending age, when personal power alone was no longer sufficient to bring one to enlightenment, requiring instead the intervention of an external force. The jiriki-tariki dichotomy was often used polemically by Jodoshu and Jodo Shinshu exegetes to condemn the practices of rival Japanese traditions, such as the TENDAISHu and ZENSHu, which they claimed were ineffective in the current degenerate age of the dharma.
Keynesian - A Keynesians economist holds the view, derived from the work of John Maynard Keynes, that active use of monetary and fiscal policy can be effective in stabilising the economy. Often the term encompasses economists who advocate active policy intervention in general.
Laissez-faire - Literally, "let do"; a policy advocating the minimisation of government intervention in a market economy. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations represents this doctrine.
Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, how- ever miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers.
Managed float - In the context of flexible exchange rates, intervention in the form of buying and selling currency to affect the exchange rate.
mediation ::: a. --> The act of mediating; action or relation of anything interposed; action as a necessary condition, means, or instrument; interposition; intervention.
Hence, specifically, agency between parties at variance, with a view to reconcile them; entreaty for another; intercession.
Mixed market economy - A market economy where there is some government intervention.
modem "hardware, communications" (Modulator/demodulator) An electronic device for converting between serial data (typically {EIA-232}) from a computer and an audio signal suitable for transmission over a telephone line connected to another modem. In one scheme the audio signal is composed of silence (no data) or one of two frequencies representing zero and one. Modems are distinguished primarily by the maximum data rate they support. Data rates can range from 75 bits per second up to 56000 and beyond. Data from the user (i.e. flowing from the local terminal or computer via the modem to the telephone line) is sometimes at a lower rate than the other direction, on the assumption that the user cannot type more than a few characters per second. Various data {compression} and error correction {algorithms} are required to support the highest speeds. Other optional features are {auto-dial} (auto-call) and {auto-answer} which allow the computer to initiate and accept calls without human intervention. Most modern modems support a number of different {protocols}, and two modems, when first connected, will automatically negotiate to find a common protocol (this process may be audible through the modem or computer's loudspeakers). Some modem protocols allow the two modems to renegotiate ("retrain") if the initial choice of data rate is too high and gives too many transmission errors. A modem may either be internal (connected to the computer's {bus}) or external ("stand-alone", connected to one of the computer's {serial ports}). The actual speed of transmission in characters per second depends not just the modem-to-modem data rate, but also on the speed with which the processor can transfer data to and from the modem, the kind of compression used and whether the data is compressed by the processor or the modem, the amount of noise on the telephone line (which causes retransmissions), the serial character format (typically {8N1}: one {start bit}, eight data bits, no {parity}, one {stop bit}). See also {acoustic coupler}, {adaptive answering}, {baud barf}, {Bulletin Board System}, {Caller ID}, {SoftModem}, {U.S. Robotics}, {UUCP}, {whalesong}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.dcom.modems}. (2002-05-04)
Natural Selection: This is the corner stone of the evolutionary hypothesis of Charles Darwin. He found great variation in and among types as a result of his extensive biological investigations and accounted for the modifications, not bvysome act of special creation or supernatural intervention, but by the descent, generation after generation, of modified species selected to survive and reproduce the more useful and the more successfully adapted to the environmental struggle for existence. He elaborated a corollary to this general theory in his idea of sexual selection. See Evolutionism, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer. -- L.E.D.
“Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes,—towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” The Life Divine
nonintervention ::: n. --> The state or habit of not intervening or interfering; as, the nonintervention of one state in the affairs of another.
occasionalism ::: n. --> The system of occasional causes; -- a name given to certain theories of the Cartesian school of philosophers, as to the intervention of the First Cause, by which they account for the apparent reciprocal action of the soul and the body.
occultation ::: n. --> The hiding of a heavenly body from sight by the intervention of some other of the heavenly bodies; -- applied especially to eclipses of stars and planets by the moon, and to the eclipses of satellites of planets by their primaries.
Fig.: The state of being occult.
occulted ::: a. --> Hidden; secret.
Concealed by the intervention of some other heavenly body, as a star by the moon.
of later scribes, too many direct interventions of
Operation Headstart: an enrichment intervention programme used in the US in the 1960s for preschool children, aimed at changing the effects of social disadvantage.
Oracle A divine saying, or the place or means by which a divine message is communicated. The soul, according to Plato, has a certain innate prophetic power. The person in whom this power is fully manifest needs no means of communication; in some it may be manifest temporarily and under certain conditions. In the Greek Heroic ages, deities spoke or appeared directly to man, as we see in Homer. Later, indirect means of communication were used, which may be classed under the general name of oracular. In some cases the intervention of a seer was employed, as in the Sibyllae of Rome and the Pythian seeress of Delphi. Sometimes the “spirits” of the dead were consulted, as in the case of Saul and the wise woman of Endor, and Aeneas and Anchises. The earth and the chthonic deities played an important part: at Delphi, though Apollo was consulted, yet the priestess was entranced, as alleged, through the influence of vapors from the earth; sometimes descent into subterranean caves was necessary, and the inquirer might have to undergo experiences analogous to those of one who dies, as in initiation. Again, it was often customary for the inquirer to sleep in a sacred place to obtain in a dream a revelation from the presiding deity. Or the message might be conveyed by some sign requiring the skill of a diviner for its interpretation, but this comes under the head of divination and omens. The whole purpose was to supplement the intelligence of the incarnate man by appealing to truly spiritual intelligences.
outcome study: a technique for exploring how successful a therapeuticintervention has been. For instance, an experimental group who has been given a drug may be compared to a control group that received a placebo.
paNcamārga. (T. lam lnga; C. wuwei; J. goi; K. owi 五位). In Sanskrit, "five paths," the most common description of the path to enlightenment in Sanskrit Buddhism: (1) the path of accumulation (SAMBHĀRAMĀRGA), (2) the path of preparation (PRAYOGAMĀRGA), (3) the path of vision (DARsANAMĀRGA), (4) the path of cultivation (BHĀVANĀMĀRGA), and (5) the adept path, lit., "the path where there is nothing more to learn" (AsAIKsAMĀRGA). These five paths are progressive, moving the practitioner sequentially from ordinary existence towards enlightenment and complete liberation from suffering. This system is elaborated especially in SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA materials, as well as in the YOGĀCĀRA school of the MAHĀYĀNA. Depending on the source in which it is discussed, the paNcamārga can therefore be deployed to describe the spiritual development culminating in the rank of ARHAT or culminating in the rank of buddha. The general features of each of the five stages are as follows. ¶ The first is the "path of accumulation" or "equipment" (saMbhāramārga), wherein the practitioner develops a small degree of three prerequisite qualities for spiritual advancement: morality (sĪLA) by way of the basic precepts, merit (PUnYA) by way of veneration, and concentration (SAMĀDHI). The path of accumulation marks the beginning of the religious life. ¶ In the second "path of preparation" (prayogamārga), the practitioner continues to cultivate those qualities developed in the first path, but also undertakes a more stringent cultivation of concentration (samādhi) through the practice of calmness (sAMATHA); he also begins the cultivation of wisdom (PRAJNĀ) through the practice of insight (VIPAsYANĀ). ¶ With the third path, the "path of vision" (darsanamārga), the practitioner comes to a direct perception of the true nature of reality as it is. This reality may be described in terms of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (catvāry āryasatyāni) and/or emptiness (suNYATĀ). In the Yogācāra school, this path is understood as the realization that subject and object derive from the same source and a subsequent perception of phenomenal objects without the intervention of conventional labels. The darsanamārga is of particular importance because it typically marks the end of the mundane path of training and the beginning of the supramundane path of sanctity; thus, it is upon entering the path of vision that one becomes a noble person (ĀRYA). In abhidharma models, the path of vision corresponds to the stage of stream-entry (SROTAĀPANNA); in later Mahāyāna models, attainment of this path marks the first stage (BHuMI) of the bodhisattva path. ¶ The fourth path, the "path of cultivation" or "development" (bhāvanāmārga), involves the reinforcement and deepening of the insights developed in the path of vision. This cultivation is accomplished by advanced stages of meditation, through which one eliminates the most subtle and deep-rooted afflictions (KLEsA). The various schools delineate the meditative practices involved in this path in a variety of ways. The ABHIDHARMASAMUCCAYA, for example, schematizes this path both in terms of the nature or object of the meditation and in terms of the type of affliction that is abandoned during practice. ¶ Finally, the fifth stage, the adept path, lit., the "path where there is nothing more to learn" or the "path where no further training is necessary" (asaiksamārga), is synonymous with the soteriological goal, whether that is the state of an arhat or a buddha. With the consummation of the path of cultivation, the adept achieves the "adamantine-like concentration" (VAJROPAMASAMĀDHI), which leads to the permanent destruction of even the subtlest and most persistent of the ten fetters (SAMYOJANA), resulting in the "knowledge of cessation" (KsAYAJNĀNA) and in some presentations an accompanying "knowledge of nonproduction" (ANUTPĀDAJNĀNA), viz., the knowledges that the fetters were destroyed and could never again recur. With the attainment of this path, the practitioner has nothing more he needs to learn and is freed from the possibility of any further rebirth due to the causal force of KARMAN. This final path is also sometimes referred to as the NIstHĀMĀRGA, or "path of completion." All those proceeding to a state of liberation (VIMOKsA), whether as an arhat or as a buddha, are said to traverse these five paths. See also ĀNANTARYAMĀRGA; VIMOKsAMĀRGA.
Parthenogenesis [from Greek parthenos a virgin + genesis birth] A kind of reproduction, neither sexual nor asexual, where offspring is produced from a female ovum or gamete with no fertilization either by the individual itself or by another individual. It occurs even at present in certain primitive animals as a stage in a process of alternation of generation. An imperfect female individual is hatched from an egg laid by a perfect female after impregnation, and continues to reproduce its kind for several generations without further fertilization. Males may also be reproduced in the same way, thus affording the means for renewed sexual reproduction. An analogous process is known in botany, where a perfect embryo is produced without the intervention of pollen. As is the case with other methods of reproduction, processes which presently are restricted to organisms lower then man, were in earlier cycles normal for those beings which then formed the human life-wave.
parthenogenesis ::: n. --> The production of new individuals from virgin females by means of ova which have the power of developing without the intervention of the male element; the production, without fertilization, of cells capable of germination. It is one of the phenomena of alternate generation. Cf. Heterogamy, and Metagenesis.
The production of seed without fertilization, believed to occur through the nonsexual formation of an embryo extraneous to the embrionic vesicle.
Paternalism - Intervention in the free choices of individuals by others (including governments) to protect them against their own ignorance or folly.
personal ::: a. --> Pertaining to human beings as distinct from things.
Of or pertaining to a particular person; relating to, or affecting, an individual, or each of many individuals; peculiar or proper to private concerns; not public or general; as, personal comfort; personal desire.
Pertaining to the external or bodily appearance; corporeal; as, personal charms.
Done in person; without the intervention of another.
phacker "communications, security" A telephone system {cracker}. A phacker may attempt to gain unauthorised access to a phone system in order to make free or untraceable calls or he may disrupt, alter or illegally tap phone systems via computer. The disruptions may include causing a phone line to be engaged so no calls go in or out, redirecting outgoing or incoming calls, as well as listening to actual calls made. Phackers are frequently confidence tricksters or phone freaks (nuisance callers who can only relate to other people by phone). Phackers are sometimes employed by illegal enterprises to conduct business using untraceable calls, or to disrupt, or follow legal authorities' investigations. Phackers interventions may be lethal to the person being phacked. A phacker may be a phone company employee, or usually, ex-employee who specialises in illegal phone system disruption, alteration or tapping via physically altering installations. A phacker is generally considered to be a socially and intellectually retarded cracker. See {Captain Crunch}. (1998-08-09)
phacker ::: (communications, security) A telephone system cracker. A phacker may attempt to gain unauthorised access to a phone system in order to make free or untraceable calls or he may disrupt, alter or illegally tap phone systems via computer.The disruptions may include causing a phone line to be engaged so no calls go in or out, redirecting outgoing or incoming calls, as well as listening to actual calls made.Phackers are frequently confidence tricksters or phone freaks (nuisance callers who can only relate to other people by phone). Phackers are sometimes employed disrupt, or follow legal authorities' investigations. Phackers interventions may be lethal to the person being phacked.A phacker may be a phone company employee, or usually, ex-employee who specialises in illegal phone system disruption, alteration or tapping via physically altering installations. A phacker is generally considered to be a socially and intellectually retarded cracker.See Captain Crunch. (1998-08-09)
photomechanical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or designating, any photographic process in which a printing surface is obtained without the intervention of hand engraving.
Placebo Effect ::: The phenomenon in research where the subject’s beliefs about the outcome can significantly effect the outcome without any other intervention.
plebiscitum ::: n. --> A law enacted by the common people, under the superintendence of a tribune or some subordinate plebeian magistrate, without the intervention of the senate.
plotter "hardware" A device that uses one or more pens that can be raised, lowered and moved over the printing media to draw graphics or text. The heart of the plotter is the printer head assembly, consisting of a horizontal bar and, attached to it, the head assembly holding the pen in use. The pen can be positioned horizontally by moving the pen assembly along the bar. Vertical positioning is achieved by either moving the bar (stationary page plotter) or the paper (rolling page plotter). Combinations of horizontal and vertical movement are used to draw arbitrary lines and curves in a single action, in contrast to {printers} which usually scan horizontally across the page. Colour plots can be made by using more than one pen. Older plotters required a separate pen for each colour and the pens had to be changed by hand. Modern colour plotters usually use only four pens (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, see {CMYK}) and need no human intervention to change them. Monochromatic plotters have been largely phased out by {laser printers} except when large paper size is needed, e.g. in {CAD}. (1996-01-10)
plotter ::: (hardware) A device that uses one or more pens that can be raised, lowered and moved over the printing media to draw graphics or text.The heart of the plotter is the printer head assembly, consisting of a horizontal bar and, attached to it, the head assembly holding the pen in use. vertical movement are used to draw arbitrary lines and curves in a single action, in contrast to printers which usually scan horizontally across the page.Colour plots can be made by using more than one pen. Older plotters required a separate pen for each colour and the pens had to be changed by hand. Modern colour plotters usually use only four pens (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, see CMYK) and need no human intervention to change them.Monochromatic plotters have been largely phased out by laser printers except when large paper size is needed, e.g. in CAD. (1996-01-10)
possession (by hostile forces) ::: an intervention from the non-human worlds in which the hostile forces act on humans.
possibly ::: adv. --> In a possible manner; by possible means; especially, by extreme, remote, or improbable intervention, change, or exercise of power; by a chance; perhaps; as, possibly he may recover.
Po ta la. The most famous building in Tibet and one of the great achievements of Tibetan architecture. Located in the Tibetan capital of LHA SA, it served as the winter residence of the DALAI LAMAs and seat of the Tibetan government from the seventeenth century until the fourteenth Dalai Lama's flight into exile in 1959. It takes its name from Mount POTALAKA, the abode of AVALOKITEsVARA, the bodhisattva of compassion, of whom the three Tibetan dharma kings (chos rgyal) and the Dalai Lamas are said to be human incarnations. The full name of the Potala is "Palace of Potala Peak" (Rtse po ta la'i pho brang), and it is commonly referred to by Tibetans simply as the Red Palace (Pho brang dmar po), because the edifice is located on Mar po ri (Red Hill) on the northwestern edge of Lha sa and because of the red palace at the summit of the white structure. In the early seventh century, the Tibetan king SRONG BTSAN SGAM PO is said to have meditated in a cave located on the hill; the cave is preserved within the present structure. The earliest structure to have been constructed there was an elevenstoried palace that he had built in 637 when he moved his capital to Lha sa. In 1645, three years after his installation as temporal ruler of Tibet, the fifth Dalai Lama NGAG DBANG BLO BZANG RGYA MTSHO began renovations of what remained of this original structure, with the new structure serving as his own residence, as well as the site of his government (known as the DGA' LDAN PHO BRANG), which he moved from the DGE LUGS PA monastery of 'BRAS SPUNGS, located some five miles outside the city. The exterior of the White Palace (Pho brang dkar po), which includes the apartments of the Dalai Lama, was completed in 1648 and the Dalai Lama took up residence in 1649. The portion of the Po ta la known as the Red Palace was added by the regent SANGS RGYAS RGYA MTSHO in honor of the fifth Dalai Lama after his death in 1682. Fearing that the project would cease if news of his death became known, Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho was able successfully to conceal the Dalai Lama's death for some twelve years (making use of a double who physically resembled the Dalai Lama to meet foreign dignitaries) until construction could be completed in 1694. The current structure is thirteen stories (approximately 384 feet) tall and is said to have over a thousand rooms, including the private apartments of the Dalai Lama, reception and assembly halls, temples, chapels containing the stupas of the fifth and seventh through thirteenth Dalai Lamas, the Rnam rgyal monastery that performed state rituals, and government offices. From the time of the eighth Dalai Lama, the Po ta la served as the winter residence for the Dalai Lamas, who moved each summer to the smaller NOR BU GLING KHA. The first Europeans to see the Po ta la were likely the Jesuit missionaries Albert Dorville and Johannes Grueber, who visited Lha sa in 1661 and made sketches of the palace, which was still under construction at the time. During the Tibetan uprising against the People's Liberation Army in March 1959, the Po ta la was shelled by Chinese artillery. It is said to have survived the Chinese Cultural Revolution through the intervention of the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai, although many of its texts and works of art were looted or destroyed. In old Lha sa, the Po ta la stood outside the central city, with the small village of Zhol located at its foot. This was the site of a prison, a printing house, and residences of some of the lovers of the sixth Dalai Lama. In modern Lha sa, the Po ta la is now encompassed by the city, and much of Zhol has been destroyed. The Po ta la still forms the northern boundary of the large circumambulation route around Lha sa, called the gling bskor (ling khor). Since the Chinese opened Tibet to foreign access in the 1980s, the Po ta la has been visited by millions of Tibetan pilgrims and foreign tourists. The stress of tourist traffic has required frequent restoration projects. In 1994, the Po ta la was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. See also PUTUOSHAN.
presence ::: n. --> The state of being present, or of being within sight or call, or at hand; -- opposed to absence.
The place in which one is present; the part of space within one&
Private Automatic Branch eXchange "communications" (PABX) A telephone exchange operated within an organisation, used for switching calls between internal lines and between internal and {PSTN} lines. In contrast to a {PMBX}, a PABX can route calls without manual intervention, based entirely on the number dialed. Not all PABXs can route external calls to internal numbers automatically however. (1998-08-07)
Private Automatic Branch eXchange ::: (communications) (PABX) A telephone exchange operated within an organisation, used for switching calls between internal lines and between manual intervention, based entirely on the number dialed. Not all PABXs can route external calls to internal numbers automatically however. (1998-08-07)
proxy server "networking" A {server} process that intercepts requests from a client, passes them to an {origin server} and returns the response to the client while performing various other operations in the process. An {HTTP proxy server} is a common example. A proxy may be used for purposes of {security}, performance ({caching}) or anonymity. It may be purely software or may run on its own hardware, either a standard {PC} or server machine or a custom hardware appliance. A software proxy may be on the same computer as the client or the origin server, separate hardware may be anywhere on the network in between. The proxy may filter requests, rejecting some if the request or response matches certain conditions (e.g. an {antivirus} proxy). It may cache requests and responses to reduce load on the origin server or data volume on the network or to provide quicker response to the client for common requests. The proxy may modify the request or response, e.g. to convert between different protocols or interfaces. Proxy servers are often used in large companies as part of a {firewall} so that users within the company need have no direct connection to the Internet (and can use a {private IP address} range) but can still access the {web}, {instant messenger}, etc via the proxy. Usually this requires each client to be configured to use the proxy. The term "proxy gateway" may more imply transparency (less intervention) in the request-response process, though is often used as a synonym for proxy server. (2008-07-01)
pulsometer ::: n. --> A device, with valves, for raising water by steam, partly by atmospheric pressure, and partly by the direct action of the steam on the water, without the intervention of a piston; -- also called vacuum pump.
A pulsimeter.
reflex ::: a. --> Directed back; attended by reflection; retroactive; introspective.
Produced in reaction, in resistance, or in return.
Of, pertaining to, or produced by, stimulus or excitation without the necessary intervention of consciousness. ::: n.
relief ::: n. --> The act of relieving, or the state of being relieved; the removal, or partial removal, of any evil, or of anything oppressive or burdensome, by which some ease is obtained; succor; alleviation; comfort; ease; redress.
Release from a post, or from the performance of duty, by the intervention of others, by discharge, or by relay; as, a relief of a sentry.
That which removes or lessens evil, pain, discomfort,
Resistance ::: In psychoanalysis, the client&
saMghāvasesa. [alt. saMghātisesa] (P. sanghādisesa; T. dge 'dun lhag ma; C. sengcanzui/sengcanfa; J. sozanzai/sozanho; K. sŭngjanjoe/sŭngjanpop 僧殘罪/僧殘法). In Sanskrit, "probationary offense"; a category of offenses in the roster of monastic rules (PRĀTIMOKsA) that require penance and/or probation. The saMghāvasesa offenses are the second most serious category of offense in the VINAYA, second only to the "defeats" (PĀRĀJIKA), which render a monk or nun "not in communion" (ASAMVĀSA) with the community. A saMghāvasesa infraction requires either an open confession of the offense before a gathering of monks or else expulsion from the order (SAMGHA) if the offender refuses to confess. According to one paranomastic gloss, because the remedy for these offenses requires the intervention of the saMgha at both the beginning (ādi) and the end (sesa) of the expiation process, these offenses are known collectively as saMghādisesa. The probationary offender receives two different kinds of punishments: penance (MĀNATVA) and temporary probation (PARIVĀSA). The mānatva penance is imposed on a monk who commits a saMghāvasesa offense when that monk immediately confesses the infraction to another monk. In the Pāli vinaya, the penance imposed in this circumstance is called "penance for unconcealed offenses" (apaticchannamānatta), which entails the loss of the usual privileges of monkhood for a set period of six nights. If a monk instead conceals a saMghāvasesa offense for a period of time before confessing it, he must undergo a "probationary penance" called either parivāsa or, in Pāli, "penance for concealed offenses" (paticchannamānatta). This probationary penance likewise entails the loss of privileges, but in this case that probation must last for as long as the offense was concealed. After the parivāsa penance is completed, the monk must then undergo mānatta penance for six nights. These penances are similar in some vinaya traditions to those meted out to "pārājika penitents" (sIKsĀDATTAKA). During his probationary period, the offender is stripped of his seniority and expected to observe certain social constraints. For example, the VINAYAPItAKA states that such offenders may not leave the monastery grounds without being accompanied by at least four monks (BHIKsU) who are not themselves on probation. Also, every day of his probation, the offending monk must inform the other monks of the offense for which he is being punished. The exact number of precepts that fall under the category of saMghāvasesa varies somewhat among the different vinaya traditions; a typical list of thirteen rules for monks includes (1) willingly emitting semen, (2) engaging in lustful physical contact with a woman, (3) using sexually inappropriate language toward a woman, (4) praising sexual intercourse as a religious act, (5) acting as the liaison in the arrangement of a marriage, (6) building a personal hut that is larger than the prescribed dimensions, (7) building a monastery (VIHĀRA) for the community that does not meet the prescribed specifications, (8) falsely and maliciously accusing another monk of an infraction, (9) taking up an issue as a ploy to falsely accuse another monk of an infraction, (10) taking any action that may result in a schism within the community (SAMGHABHEDA), (11) siding with or following a monk who has created a schism in the order, (12) refusing to acknowledge and to heed the admonishments of training given by other monks, and finally (13) corrupting families. Nuns are typically subject to seventeen rules, including a few additional restrictions enumerated in the bhiksunīprātimoksa. After completing the parivāsa penance and his six nights of mānatva, the monk approaches the saMgha, which in this case means a quorum of monks consisting of at least twenty members, and requests to be "called back into community" (S. ABHYĀYANA, P. abbhāna). If the saMgha agrees, the monk is declared free of the saMghāvasesa offense and is restored to his former status.
sāsanavisodhana. In Pāli, "purification of the Buddha's teaching"; referring specifically to the expulsion of malefactors and heretics from the congregation of Buddhist monks and nuns (P. sangha; S. SAMGHA). It is typically, but not necessarily followed by a communal recitation (SAMGĪTI) of the Buddhist canon (P. tipitaka; S. TRIPItAKA) by the newly purified and reunited sangha. The monastic code (VINAYA) severely limits the ability of the sangha as a body or its leaders to force the secession of false monks, monks guilty of PĀRĀJIKA offenses, schismatics, or heretics. For this reason this authority has been ceded by historical precedent and tradition (but not by vinaya law) to the state, embodied ideally in the person of the pious Buddhist king. In the Pāli tradition, the ultimate paradigm for royal interventionism in sangha affairs is King Dhammāsoka (see AsOKA), who is portrayed in the Pāli chronicles of Sri Lanka and the Pāli commentaries as having purged the sangha of malefactors at the behest of the sangha and under the guidance of the elder MOGGALIPUTTATISSA. After the sangha was purified, Moggaliputtatissa convened the third Buddhist council (see COUNCIL, THIRD) to rehearse and reaffirm the Buddha's true teachings. Cf. SIKKHĀPACCAKKHĀNA; sIKsĀDATTAKA.
self-management ::: The process by which computer systems manage their own operation without human intervention.
Sgrol ma lha khang. (Drolma Lhakhang). In Tibetan, "Tārā Temple," a temple in the central Tibetan region of Snye thang (Nyetang) where the Bengali scholar ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNĀNA lived for much of his time in Tibet, where he made his principal seat, and later died. The primary image is a statue of TĀRĀ (T. Sgrol ma), the female bodhisattva of compassion who served as Atisa's personal protector, after which the temple takes its name. Constructed in the mid-eleventh century, it was spared major damage during the Chinese Cultural Revolution due to the intervention of officials from the Indian state of Bengal, which was ruled at the time by the Communist Left Front. Consequently, the temple still houses Atisa's relics and original artwork of great value and beauty.
shade ::: n. --> Comparative obscurity owing to interception or interruption of the rays of light; partial darkness caused by the intervention of something between the space contemplated and the source of light.
Darkness; obscurity; -- often in the plural.
An obscure place; a spot not exposed to light; hence, a secluded retreat.
That which intercepts, or shelters from, light or the direct rays of the sun; hence, also, that which protects from heat or currents
sign ::: n. 1. An act or gesture used to convey an idea, a desire, information, or a command. 2. Any object, action, event, pattern, etc., that conveys a meaning. 3. A mark used to mean something; a symbol that sets something apart from others of its kind. 4. Something that indicates or acts as a token of a fact, condition, etc., that is not immediately or outwardly observable. 5. A signal. 6. A conventional figure or device that stands for a word, phrase, or operation; a symbol, as in mathematics or in musical notation. 7. A displayed structure such as a banner bearing lettering or symbols. 8. An act or significant event that is experienced as indication of divine intervention. 9. A portent of things to come. Sign, sign"s, signs, signless, sign-burdened, flame-signs. v. 10. To affix one"s signature to. 11. To indicate by or as if by a sign; betoken. signs, signed, signing.
Social efficiency - Production and consumption at the point where marginal social benefit equals marginal social cost (MSB = MSC). An equitable and desirable outcome for society. Markets generally fail to achieve social efficiency. There are various types of market failure. Market failures provide one of the major justifications for government intervention in the economy.
solder ::: n. --> A metal or metallic alloy used when melted for uniting adjacent metallic edges or surfaces; a metallic cement.
anything which unites or cements.
To unite (metallic surfaces or edges) by the intervention of a more fusible metal or metallic alloy applied when melted; to join by means of metallic cement.
To mend; to patch up.
spontaneous remission: in psychotherapy, improvement in an individual's condition without professional intervention, often serves as a baseline criterion to compare the effectiveness of therapies.
star-chamber ::: n. --> An ancient high court exercising jurisdiction in certain cases, mainly criminal, which sat without the intervention of a jury. It consisted of the king&
Tārā. (T. Sgrol ma; C. Duoluo; J. Tara; K. Tara 多羅). In Sanskrit, lit. "Savioress"; a female bodhisattva who has the miraculous power to be able to deliver her devotees from all forms of physical danger. Tārā is said to have arisen from either a ray of blue light from the eye of the buddha AMITĀBHA, or from a tear from the eye of the BODHISATTVA AVALOKITEsVARA as he surveyed the suffering universe. The tear fell into a valley and formed a lake, out of which grew the lotus from which Tārā appeared. She is thus said to be the physical manifestation of the compassion of Avalokitesvara, who is himself the quintessence of the compassion of the buddhas. Because buddhas are produced from wisdom and compassion, Tārā, like the goddess PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ ("Perfection of Wisdom"), is hailed as "the mother of all buddhas," despite the fact that she is most commonly represented as a beautiful sixteen-year-old maiden. She is often depicted together with BHṚKUTĪ (one of her forms) as one of two female bodhisattvas flanking Avalokitesvara. Tārā is the subject of much devotion in her own right, serving as the subject of many stories, prayers, and tantric SĀDHANAs. She can appear in peaceful or wrathful forms, depending on the circumstances, her powers extending beyond the subjugation of these worldly frights, into the heavens and into the hells. She has two major peaceful forms, however. The first is SITATĀRĀ, or White Tārā. Her right hand is in VARADAMUDRĀ, her left is at her chest in VITARKAMUDRĀ and holds a lotus and she sits in DHYĀNĀSANA. The other is sYĀMATĀRĀ, or Green Tārā. Her right hand is in varadamudrā, her left is at her chest in vitarkamudrā and holds an utpala, and she sits in LALITĀSANA. Her wrathful forms include KURUKULLĀ, a dancing naked YOGINĪ, red in color, who brandishes a bow and arrow in her four arms. In tantric MAndALAs, she appears as the consort of AMOGHASIDDHI, the buddha of the northern quarter; together they are lord and lady of the KARMAKULA. But she is herself also the sole deity in many tantric SĀDHANAs, in which the meditator, whether male or female, visualizes himself or herself in Tārā's feminine form. Tārā is best-known for her salvific powers, appearing the instant her devotee recites her MANTRA, oM tāre tuttāre ture svāhā. She is especially renowned as Astabhayatrānatārā, "Tārā Who Protects from the Eight Fears," because of her ability to deliver those who call upon her when facing the eight great fears (mahābhaya) of lions, elephants, fire, snakes, thieves, water, imprisonment, and demons. Many tales are told recounting her miraculous interventions. Apart from the recitation of her mantra, a particular prayer is the most common medium of invoking Tārā in Tibet. It is a prayer to twenty-one Tārās, derived from an Indian TANTRA devoted to Tārā, the Sarvatathāgatamātṛtārāvisvakarmabhavatantra ("Source of All Rites to Tārā, the Mother of All the Tathāgatas"). According to some commentarial traditions on the prayer, each of the verses refers to a different form of Tārā, totaling twenty-one. According to others, the forms of Tārā are iconographically almost indistinguishable. Tārā entered the Buddhist pantheon relatively late, around the sixth century, in northern India and Nepal, and her worship in Java is attested in inscriptions dating to the end of the eighth century. Like Avalokitesvara, she has played a crucial role in Tibet's history, in both divine and human forms. One version of the creation myth that has the Tibetan race originating from a dalliance between a monkey and an ogress says the monkey was a form of Avalokitesvara and the ogress a form of Tārā. Worship of Tārā in Tibet began in earnest with the second propagation and the arrival of ATIsA DĪPAMKARAsRĪJNĀNA in the eleventh century; she appears repeatedly in accounts of his life and in his teachings. He had visions of the goddess at crucial points in his life, and she advised him to make his fateful journey to Tibet, despite the fact that his life span would be shortened as a result. His sādhanas for the propitiation of Sitatārā and syāmatārā played a key role in promoting the worship of Tārā in Tibet. He further was responsible for the translation of several important Indic texts relating to the goddess, including three by Vāgīsvarakīrti that make up the 'chi blu, or "cheating death" cycle, the foundation of all lineages of the worship of Sitatārā in Tibet. The famous Tārā chapel at Atisa's temple at SNYE THANG contains nearly identical statues of the twenty-one Tārās. The translator Darmadra brought to Tibet the important ANUYOGA tantra devoted to the worship of Tārā, entitled Bcom ldan 'das ma sgrol ma yang dag par rdzogs pa'i sangs rgyas bstod pa gsungs pa. Tārā is said to have taken human form earlier in Tibetan history as the Chinese princess WENCHENG and Nepalese princess Bhṛkutī, who married King SRONG BTSAN SGAM PO, bringing with them buddha images that would become the most revered in Tibet. Which Tārā they were remains unsettled; however, some sources identify Wencheng with syāmatārā and Bhṛkutī with the goddess of the same name, herself said to be a form of Tārā. Others argue that the Nepalese princess was Sitatārā, and Wencheng was syāmatārā. These identifications, however, like that of Srong btsan sgam po with Avalokitesvara, date only to the fourteenth century, when the cult of Tārā in Tibet was flourishing. In the next generation, Tārā appeared as the wife of King KHRI SRONG LDE BTSAN and the consort of PADMASAMBHAVA, YE SHES MTSHO RGYAL, who in addition to becoming a great tantric master herself, served as scribe when Padmasambhava dictated the treasure texts (GTER MA). Later, Tārā is said to have appeared as the great practitioner of the GCOD tradition, MA GCIG LAP SGRON (1055-1149). Indeed, when Tārā first vowed eons ago to achieve buddhahood in order to free all beings from SAMSĀRA, she swore she would always appear in female form.
"The Divine Grace is there ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the Law of Ignorance into the Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers.” Letters on Yoga
“The Divine Grace is there ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the Law of Ignorance into the Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers.” Letters on Yoga
therapy: any process that aids understanding and recovery from psychologicaldifficulties. A wide variety of therapies can be divided into psychotherapies(involving discussion or action) and somatic therapies (medical or biological intervention).
There is also the intervention of the psychic ; if the psychic being is sufficiently awake and active to intervene each time you are going to speak at random and say “No”, then the change becomes more easy.
Theurgy: (Gr. theos, god, ergon, work) The work of some divine, supernatural agency in the affairs of men, generally by direct intervention. -- V.F.
Theurgy: The literal meaning of this Greek term is divine work, and it is generally applied to denote the work of a divine or other supernatural agency in the affairs of man, generally by direct intervention. In occult terminology, it means communication with supernatural beings and the practice of magic rites aimed at bringing Gods and spirits down to the Earth.
theurgy ::: Theurgy Kabbalah and Hermetic Magick are both theurgic practices. Theologically speaking, theurgy is divine intervention in human affairs, or the performance of miracles, for example, the harnessing of spiritual forces through ritual to cause transcendent spiritual change.
tmesis ::: n. --> The separation of the parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words; as, in what place soever, for whatsoever place.
To arrive at full possession of the powers of the dream-state, it is necessary first to exclude the attack of the sights, sounds etc. of the outer world upon the physical organs. It is quite possible indeed to be aware in the dream-trance of the outer physical world through the subtle senses which belong to the subtle body ; one may be aware of them just so far as one chooses and on a much wider scale than In the waking condition ; for the subtle senses have a far more powerful range than the gross physical organs, a range which may be made practically unlimited. But this awareness of the phj-sical world through the subtle senses is something quite different from our normal awareness of it through the physical organs ; the latter is incompatible with the settled state of trance, for the pressure of the physical senses breaks the Samadhi and calls back the mind to live in their normal field where alone they have power. But the subtle senses have power both upon their own planes and upon the physical world, though this is to them more remote than their own world of being. In Yoga various devices are used to seal up the doors of the physical sense, some of them physical devices ; but the one all-sufficient means is a force of concentration by which the mind is drawn inward to depths where the call of physical things can no longer easily attain to it. A second necessity is to get rid of the intervention of physical sleep. The ordinary habit of the mind when it goes in away from contact with physical things is to fall into the torpor of sleep or its dreams, and therefore when called in for the purposes of Samadhi, it gives or lends to give, at the first chance, by sheer force of habit, not the response demanded, but its usual response of ph)sical slumber. This habit of the mind has to be got rid of ; the mind has to Icam to be awake in the dream-stale, in possession of itself, not with the outgoing, but with an ingathered wakefulness in which, though immersed in itself, it exercises all its powers.
Two things render that culmination more facile than it would otherwise be. Overmind in the descent towards material creation has originated modifications of itself,—Intuition especially with its penetrative lightning flashes of truth lighting up local points and stretches of country in our consciousness,—which can bring the concealed truth of things nearer to our comprehension, and, by opening ourselves more widely first in the inner being and then as a result in the outer surface self also to the messages of these higher ranges of consciousness, by growing into them, we can become ourselves also intuitive and overmental beings, not limited by the intellect and sense, but capable of a more universal comprehension and a direct touch of truth in its very self and body. In fact flashes of enlightenment from these higher ranges already come to us, but this intervention is mostly fragmentary, casual or partial; we have still to begin to enlarge ourselves into their likeness and organise in us the greater Truth activities of which we are potentially capable. But, secondly, Overmind, Intuition, even Supermind not only must be, as we have seen, principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive emergence in the cosmic activity of Mind, Life and Matter. It is true that their action is concealed and, even when they emerge, it is modified by the medium, material, vital, mental in which they work and not easily recognisable. Supermind cannot manifest itself as the Creator Power in the universe from the beginning, for if it did, the Ignorance and Inconscience would be impossible or else the slow evolution necessary would change into a rapid transformation scene. Yet at every step of the material energy we can see the stamp of inevitability given by a supramental creator, in all the development of life and mind the play of the lines of possibility and their combination which is the stamp of Overmind intervention. As Life and Mind have been released in Matter, so too must in their time these greater powers of the concealed Godhead emerge from the involution and their supreme Light descend into us from above. …
up to the ankles, Hemah had to disgorge him at the timely intervention of the Lord. Moses then
Wage and price controls - Direct government intervention into wage and price formation with legal power to enforce the government's decisions on wages and prices.
With these principles of matter and form, and the parallel distinction between potential and actual existence, Aristotle claims to have solved the difficulties that earlier thinkers had found in the fact of change. The changes in nature are to be interpreted not as the passage from non-being to being, which would make them unintelligible, but as the process by which what is merely potential being passes over, through form, into actual being, or entelechy. The philosophy of nature which results from these basic concepts views nature as a dynamic realm in which change is real, spontaneous, continuous, and in the main directed. Matter, though indeed capable of form, possesses a residual inertia which on occasion produces accidental effects; so that alongside the teological causation of the forms Aristotle recognizes what he calls "necessity" in nature; but the products of the latter, since they are aberrations from form, cannot be made the object of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the system of nature as developed by Aristotle is a graded series of existences, in which the simpler beings, though in themselves formed matter, function also as matter for higher forms. At the base of the series is prime matter, which as wholly unformed is mere potentiality, not actual being. The simplest formed matter is the so-called primary bodies -- earth, water, air and fire. From these as matter arise by the intervention of successively more complex forms the composite inorganic bodies, organic tissues, and the world of organisms, characterized by varying degrees of complexity in structure and function. In this realization of form in matter Aristotle distinguishes three sorts of change: qualitative change, or alteration; quantitative change, or growth and diminution; and change, of place, or locomotion, the last being primary, since it is presupposed in all the others. But Aristotle is far from suggesting a mechanical explanation of change, for not even locomotion can be explained by impact alone. The motion of the primary bodies is due to the fact that each has its natural place to which it moves when not opposed; earth to the center, then water, air, and fire to successive spheres about the center. The ceaseless motion of these primary bodies results from their ceaseless transformation into one another through the interaction of the forms of hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus qualitative differences of form underlie even the most elemental changes in the world of nature.
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1:Let us unite our will in a great aspiration; let us pray for an intervention of the Grace. A miracle can always happen. Faith has a sovereign power. ~ The Mother, On Education, [T5], #KEYS
2:But you should have all the more confidence in your heavenly Mother! Look, with Me, at the times in which you are living and you will see the signs of my extraordinary intervention." ~ Our Lady to Father Stefano Gobbi , #KEYS
3:While a tardy Evolution's coils wind on
And Nature hews her way through adamant
A divine intervention thrones above. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#KEYS
4:What exactly should I do to accelerate the sadhana?
Wait quietly for the exact indication; all mental intervention and decisions are arbitrary. The clear indication comes in the silence of the mind.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
5:And from this point of view no formulation is better than any other; the best of all is the one that helps each one to remember, that is, the way in which the intervention of the Grace has crystallised in the thought.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#KEYS
6:Attacks from adverse forces are inevitable: you have to take them as tests on your way and go courageously through the ordeal. The struggle may be hard, but when you come out of it, you have gained something, you have advanced a step. There is even a necessity for the existence of the hostile forces. They make your determination stronger, your aspiration clearer.
"It is true, however, that they exist because you gave them reason to exist. So long as there is something in you which answers to them, their intervention is perfectly legitimate. If nothing in you responded, if they had no hold upon any part of your nature, they would retire and leave you.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, (5 May 1929),#KEYS
7:Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the "superman" Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche's Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to "create a god for yourself out of your seven devils." Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~ Carl Jung, "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942), CW 13, § 163., #KEYS
8: If everything depends on the Divine intervention, then man is only a puppet and there is no use of sadhana, and there are no conditions, no law of things - therefore no universe, but only the Divine rolling things about at his pleasure. No doubt in the last resort all can be said to be the Divine cosmic working, but it is through persons, through forces that it works - under the conditions of Nature. Special intervention there can be and is, but all cannot be special intervention.
The Divine Grace and Power can do everything, but with the full assent of the sadhak. To learn to give that full assent is the whole meaning of the sadhana. It may take time either because of ideas in the mind, desires in the vital or inertia in the physical consciousness, but these things have to be and can be removed with the aid or by calling in the action of the Divine Force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga II, 1.4.01,#KEYS
9:I have spoken of Sri Aurobindo's life as a series of radical turns that changed the movement, the mode of life, almost radically every time the turn came. The turn meant a break with the past and a moving into the future. We have a word for this phenomenon of radical and unforeseen change. You know the word, it is intervention. Intervention means, as the Mother has explained to us more than once, the entry of a higher, a greater force from another world into the already existent world. Into the familiar established mode of existence that runs on the routine of some definite rules and regulations, the Law of the present, there drops all on a sudden another mode of being and consciousness and force, a Higher Law which obliterates or changes out of recognition the familiar mode of living; it is thus that one rises from level to level, moves out into wider ranges of being, otherwise one stands still, remains for ever what he is, stagnant, like an unchanging clod or at the most a repetitive animal. The higher the destiny, the higher also the source of intervention, that is to say, more radical - more destructive yet more creative - destructive of the past, creative of the future.
I have spoken of the passing away of Sri Aurobindo as a phenomenon of intervention, a great decisive event in view of the work to be done. Even so we may say that his birth too was an act of intervention, a deliberate divine intervention. The world needed it, the time was ripe and the intervention happened and that was his birth as an embodied human being - to which we offer our salutation and obeisance today. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta,#KEYS
10:the aim of our yoga :::
The aim set before our Yoga is nothing less than to hasten this supreme object of our existence here. Its process leaves behind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth through the evolution of Nature. For the natural evolution is at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pressure of the environment, partly by a groping education and an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes, - though veiling a secret divine intervention and guidance. In Yoga we replace this confused crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us. In a certain sense it may be an error to speak of a goal anywhere in a progression which may well be infinite. Still we can conceive of an immediate goal, an ulterior objective beyond our present achievement towards which the soul in man can aspire. There lies before him the possibility of a new birth; there can be an ascent into a higher and wider plane of being and its descent to transform his members. An enlarged and illumined consciousness is possible that shall make of him a liberated spirit and a perfected force - and, if spread beyond the individual, it might even constitute a divine humanity or else a new, a supramental and therefore a superhuman race. It is this new birth that we make our aim: a growth into a divine consciousness is the whole meaning of our Yoga, an integral conversion to divinity not only of the soul but of all the parts of our nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, 89-90,#KEYS
11:The perfect supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule.It is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit's impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego.
If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, 206,#KEYS
12:Intuition And The Value Of Concentration :::
Mother, how can the faculty of intuition be developed?
... There are different kinds of intuition, and we carry these capacities within us. They are always active to some extent but we don't notice them because we don't pay enough attention to what is going on in us. Behind the emotions, deep within the being, in a consciousness seated somewhere near the level of the solar plexus, there is a sort of prescience, a kind of capacity for foresight, but not in the form of ideas: rather in the form of feelings, almost a perception of sensations. For instance, when one is going to decide to do something, there is sometimes a kind of uneasiness or inner refusal, and usually, if one listens to this deeper indication, one realises that it was justified. In other cases there is something that urges, indicates, insists - I am not speaking of impulses, you understand, of all the movements which come from the vital and much lower still - indications which are behind the feelings, which come from the affective part of the being; there too one can receive a fairly sure indication of the thing to be done. These are forms of intuition or of a higher instinct which can be cultivated by observation and also by studying the results. Naturally, it must be done very sincerely, objectively, without prejudice. If one wants to see things in a particular way and at the same time practise this observation, it is all useless. One must do it as if one were looking at what is happening from outside oneself, in someone else. It is one form of intuition and perhaps the first one that usually manifests. There is also another form but that one is much more difficult to observe because for those who are accustomed to think, to act by reason - not by impulse but by reason - to reflect before doing anything, there is an extremely swift process from cause to effect in the half-conscious thought which prevents you from seeing the line, the whole line of reasoning and so you don't think that it is a chain of reasoning, and that is quite deceptive. You have the impression of an intuition but it is not an intuition, it is an extremely rapid subconscious reasoning, which takes up a problem and goes straight to the conclusions. This must not be mistaken for intuition. In the ordinary functioning of the brain, intuition is something which suddenly falls like a drop of light. If one has the faculty, the beginning of a faculty of mental vision, it gives the impression of something coming from outside or above, like a little impact of a drop of light in the brain, absolutely independent of all reasoning. This is perceived more easily when one is able to silence one's mind, hold it still and attentive, arresting its usual functioning, as if the mind were changed into a kind of mirror turned towards a higher faculty in a sustained and silent attention. That too one can learn to do. One must learn to do it, it is a necessary discipline.
When you have a question to solve, whatever it may be, usually you concentrate your attention here (pointing between the eyebrows), at the centre just above the eyes, the centre of the conscious will. But then if you do that, you cannot be in contact with intuition. You can be in contact with the source of the will, of effort, even of a certain kind of knowledge, but in the outer, almost material field; whereas, if you want to contact the intuition, you must keep this (Mother indicates the forehead) completely immobile. Active thought must be stopped as far as possible and the entire mental faculty must form - at the top of the head and a little further above if possible - a kind of mirror, very quiet, very still, turned upwards, in silent, very concentrated attention. If you succeed, you can - perhaps not immediately - but you can have the perception of the drops of light falling upon the mirror from a still unknown region and expressing themselves as a conscious thought which has no connection with all the rest of your thought since you have been able to keep it silent. That is the real beginning of the intellectual intuition.
It is a discipline to be followed. For a long time one may try and not succeed, but as soon as one succeeds in making a mirror, still and attentive, one always obtains a result, not necessarily with a precise form of thought but always with the sensations of a light coming from above. And then, if one can receive this light coming from above without entering immediately into a whirl of activity, receive it in calm and silence and let it penetrate deep into the being, then after a while it expresses itself either as a luminous thought or as a very precise indication here (Mother indicates the heart), in this other centre.
Naturally, first these two faculties must be developed; then, as soon as there is any result, one must observe the result, as I said, and see the connection with what is happening, the consequences: see, observe very attentively what has come in, what may have caused a distortion, what one has added by way of more or less conscious reasoning or the intervention of a lower will, also more or less conscious; and it is by a very deep study - indeed, almost of every moment, in any case daily and very frequent - that one succeeds in developing one's intuition. It takes a long time. It takes a long time and there are ambushes: one can deceive oneself, take for intuitions subconscious wills which try to manifest, indications given by impulses one has refused to receive openly, indeed all sorts of difficulties. One must be prepared for that. But if one persists, one is sure to succeed.
And there comes a time when one feels a kind of inner guidance, something which is leading one very perceptibly in all that one does. But then, for the guidance to have its maximum power, one must naturally add to it a conscious surrender: one must be sincerely determined to follow the indication given by the higher force. If one does that, then... one saves years of study, one can seize the result extremely rapidly. If one also does that, the result comes very rapidly. But for that, it must be done with sincerity and... a kind of inner spontaneity. If one wants to try without this surrender, one may succeed - as one can also succeed in developing one's personal will and making it into a very considerable power - but that takes a very long time and one meets many obstacles and the result is very precarious; one must be very persistent, obstinate, persevering, and one is sure to succeed, but only after a great labour.
Make your surrender with a sincere, complete self-giving, and you will go ahead at full speed, you will go much faster - but you must not do this calculatingly, for that spoils everything! (Silence) Moreover, whatever you may want to do in life, one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the basis of everything, the capacity of concentrating the attention. If you are able to gather together the rays of attention and consciousness on one point and can maintain this concentration with a persistent will, nothing can resist it - whatever it may be, from the most material physical development to the highest spiritual one. But this discipline must be followed in a constant and, it may be said, imperturbable way; not that you should always be concentrated on the same thing - that's not what I mean, I mean learning to concentrate.
And materially, for studies, sports, all physical or mental development, it is absolutely indispensable. And the value of an individual is proportionate to the value of his attention.
And from the spiritual point of view it is still more important.
There is no spiritual obstacle which can resist a penetrating power of concentration. For instance, the discovery of the psychic being, union with the inner Divine, opening to the higher spheres, all can be obtained by an intense and obstinate power of concentration - but one must learn how to do it. There is nothing in the human or even in the superhuman field, to which the power of concentration is not the key. You can be the best athlete, you can be the best student, you can be an artistic, literary or scientific genius, you can be the greatest saint with that faculty. And everyone has in himself a tiny little beginning of it - it is given to everybody, but people do not cultivate it.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#KEYS
13:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Intervention only works when the people concerned seem to be keen for peace. ~ nelson-mandela, @wisdomtrove 2:If ever there was a time this country needed the intervention of God, it is now. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 3:Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 4:That meddling in other people's affairs... formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 5:Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 6:True understanding is possible only when we are fully conscious of our thought, not as an operative observer on this thought, but completely and without the intervention of a choice. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 7:The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind - the lower animals. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 8:The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 9:Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 10:It can have its effect only through the intervention of God, inasmuch as in the ideas of God a monad rightly demands that God, in regulating the rest from the beginning of things, should have regard to itself. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 11:The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 12:In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 13:If ever there was a time this country needed the intervention of God, it is now. We can and should pray for America as a whole, but remember that when God sets out to change a nation, He begins by changing people. It starts with individuals. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 14:Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 15:Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society - and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 16:If the positive innovations connect exponentially before the massive breakdowns reinforce one another, the system can re-pattern itself to a higher order of consciousness and freedom without the predicted economic, environmental, and social collapse... If the system could go either way, a slight intervention to assist the convergence of the positive can tip the scales of evolution in favor of the enhancement of life on Earth. ~ barbara-marx-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 17:In proportion as the people are accustomed to manage their affairs by their own active intervention, instead of leaving them to the government, their desires will turn to repelling tyranny, rather than to tyrannizing: while in proportion as all ready initiative and direction resides in the government, and individuals habitually feel and act as under its perpetual tutelage, popular institutions develop in them not the desire of freedom, but an unmeasured appetite for place and power. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 18:The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:A little Devine intervention ~ Ronie Kendig, #NFDB
2:I think I’m in need of an intervention. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
3:War, 46. 267. Bunyan, Intervention, 277, ~ Stephen Kotkin, #NFDB
4:I am a big believer in early intervention. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
5:Art is manipulation without intervention. ~ Louise Bourgeois, #NFDB
6:Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable. ~ Erwin Chargaff, #NFDB
7:The Gospels: God's perfection consists in non-intervention. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
8:An alcoholic at a small gathering is called an intervention. ~ Amy Sedaris, #NFDB
9:Hell no. You're what saved you, kid. Not divine intervention. ~ Laura Wiess, #NFDB
10:I'm super-obsessed with 'Intervention.' I wrote a song about it. ~ Margaret Cho, #NFDB
11:Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it?” (205) ~ Jeanette Winterson,#NFDB
12:prone to infection, and surgical intervention was extremely ~ Lindsey Fitzharris, #NFDB
13:What appears to be an interruption is often an intervention. ~ Rich Wilkerson Jr, #NFDB
14:Every therapeutic intervention is an act of social transformation. ~ Harville Hendrix, #NFDB
15:Nothing fucks up a religion like an intervention from a real God. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
16:It is the line soldier who ultimately pays for any foreign intervention, ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
17:[TARP] The strategy was a breakthrough intervention in the free market. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
18:Nor let a god come in, unless the difficulty be worthy of such an intervention. ~ Horace, #NFDB
19:oh, why did her mouth run so often without the intervention of her brain? ~ Vivienne Lorret, #NFDB
20:The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention. ~ Thomas R Insel, #NFDB
21:Each time it happens we’re tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
22:Talk about divine intervention. I can't even tell you how blessed I feel. ~ Khandi Alexander, #NFDB
23:If deep change depended solely on outside intervention it would never happen. ~ Marshall Ganz, #NFDB
24:Intervention only works when the people concerned seem to be keen for peace. ~ Nelson Mandela, #NFDB
25:Sickness may be the solemn occasion of God's intervention in a person's life. ~ Paul Tournier, #NFDB
26:If ever there was a time this country needed the intervention of God, it is now. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
27:The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor. ~ Bill O Brien, #NFDB
28:He probably couldn’t turn off his sexiness without medical intervention.’ (Abbie) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
29:the idea is to see how far one can go without supposing supernatural intervention. ~ Steven Weinberg, #NFDB
30:Judicial intervention unjustly removes contentious matters from democratic deliberation. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
31:Ignorant intervention is absolutely a contributing factor to cycles of oppression. This ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
32:Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
33:The whole basis for the US intervention in Colombia is outrageously racist and arrogant. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
34:Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
35:My level of intervention in the press, trying to control stories, is zero. Subzero. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu, #NFDB
36:Sometimes the divine intervention of God means breaking allegiance with what you love. ~ Priscilla Shirer, #NFDB
37:Technology works best when it facilitates human hope, activism, engagement & intervention. ~ Mal Fletcher, #NFDB
38:Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
39:A short-term efficacious intervention may have few discernible, sustainable long-term benefits. ~ Dambisa Moyo, #NFDB
40:Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
41:I believe the only time when we can call for intervention is when there is an ongoing genocide. ~ Bianca Jagger, #NFDB
42:they are simple psychological phenomena, isolated, without intervention of the idea of personality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
43:Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
44:Believing that others will react as we would is the single most dangerous myth of intervention. ~ Gavin de Becker, #NFDB
45:The parent-child connection is the most powerful mental health intervention known to mankind. ~ Bessel van der Kolk, #NFDB
46:Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
47:Without the intervention of the civil authority what would our percepts become?- Platonic laws. ~ Philipp Melanchthon, #NFDB
48:On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
49:I do not know if there is anything divine. I do know it will take divine intervention to save mankind. ~ Zachary Koukol, #NFDB
50:In a cult intervention information is presented about the group that the member is most often not aware of. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
51:On the issue of drugs, we wir classical liberals, vehemently opposed tae state intervention in any form. ~ Irvine Welsh, #NFDB
52:What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
53:But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
54:every government intervention in the marketplace tends to reduce wealth and the overall standard of living. ~ David Boaz, #NFDB
55:Lament challenges the church to acknowledge real suffering and plead with God for his intervention. The ~ Soong Chan Rah, #NFDB
56:two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
57:If the world is the product of nothing but natural forces and natural law, divine intervention is impossible. ~ Lucretius, #NFDB
58:Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not. ~ Janet Yellen, #NFDB
59:I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty - that's positive. ~ Assata Shakur, #NFDB
60:My motto is "Unite now, today if you can; fight if you must. But in every case avoid British intervention." ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
61:To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems. ~ Rafael Sabatini, #NFDB
62:Aside from an intervention, which I don't think is on anybody's mind, Iraq is going to have defend for itself. ~ Doug Collins, #NFDB
63:It does not seem possible to explain these facts by a purely physical mechanism without any intervention of mind. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
64:The blinding ability of sin is so powerful and persuasive that you and I literally need daily intervention. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
65:Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
66:We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
67:Most often the earlier a cult member is approached through an intervention the more likely they are to be responsive. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
68:The best motivating factor of all, however, is divine intervention, or what I like to call The Magic of Grace. ~ Cheryl Richardson, #NFDB
69:an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
70:We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities. ~ Ruhollah Khomeini, #NFDB
71:I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
72:For "The Intervention" I came up with a back-story and Clea [Duvall] was like, "No." And I was like, "I don't care." ~ Melanie Lynskey, #NFDB
73:I find the growing intervention by the football authorities in strictly footballing matters a rather worrying trend. ~ Kenny Cunningham, #NFDB
74:In 1979, we thought it would be easier to take power. The intervention of the United States has changed the circumstances. ~ Mario Lopez, #NFDB
75:Nationalization of private debts undermines prudential lender behavior and is a government intervention in the market. ~ Joseph Stiglitz, #NFDB
76:Smoking dope and smoking coke, you are rendered defenseless. The only way out of that hopeless state is intervention. ~ Robert Downey Jr, #NFDB
77:That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention. ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
78:according to some accounts Smith’s life was saved only at the intervention of Wahunsunacock’s young daughter Pocahontas. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
79:State intervention to try and control incidents of widow immolation begins during the time of the Sultans and the Mughals. ~ Romila Thapar, #NFDB
80:We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men. ~ Paul Goodman, #NFDB
81:Its often difficult for conservatives to separate overall government intervention from a question as simple as the census. ~ Patrick McHenry, #NFDB
82:Thanksgiving is the day you don't know if you're invited for dinner or an intervention either way is going to be an ambush. ~ Felipe Esparza, #NFDB
83:That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.” So ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
84:We do have evidence the [Donald] Trump campaign was working to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue. ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
85:Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
86:We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang. ~ Daniel Morgan, #NFDB
87:Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad. ~ Remy de Gourmont, #NFDB
88:it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good. ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
89:The journey from first breath to death has nothing to do with miracles, how much you pray, coincidences, or divine intervention. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
90:My view of foreign policy is that we need to be careful and circumspect about United States intervention in any foreign nation. ~ Michele Bachmann, #NFDB
91:improving on the natural course if evolution—which, attendees argued, could be so cruel as to justify some sort of intervention. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
92:All the fear that Markandeya experienced now disappears, thanks to the intervention of the child, who is undoubtedly Vishnu. Then ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
93:Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth. ~ Ian Bremmer, #NFDB
94:If you take a wrong direction in life, you shouldn’t expect God, through divine intervention, to change it and suddenly make it better. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
95:It's not a thrilling tale of adventure or the kind of fairy-tale romance portrayed in movies, but it felt like divine intervention. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
96:It was truly revealing. The strength of the intervention, the intensity of colors and the happiness of this work, has never left me. ~ Bram van Velde, #NFDB
97:Quantum machine learning promises to discover the optimal network topologies and hyperparameters automatically without human intervention. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
98:To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
99:If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism. ~ Stanley Hauerwas, #NFDB
100:I went running and I ran into her again thanks to fate or coincidence or divine intervention or maybe you had something to do with it. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
101:Southerners who had insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights. ~ Andrew Delbanco, #NFDB
102:Today, with humility and openness I ask for spiritual intervention in my earthly affairs. I ask for help, and, in the asking, it appears. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
103:For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
104:no organised being could ever have been called into existence by other agency than by the direct intervention of a reflective mind. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
105:People would rather believe in fairy godmothers and divine intervention than to think that you took charge of your own destiny. ~ Margaret Peterson Haddix, #NFDB
106:The journey from first breath to death has nothing to do with miracles, how much you pray, coincidences, or divine intervention. Sometimes ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
107:I don't know whether our watching the play in these times was a coincidence or divine intervention but time and again, we were introspecting. ~ Sushma Swaraj, #NFDB
108:What I object to the current government intervention in so-called 'solving the crisis', they haven't solved anything. They've just postponed it. ~ Marc Faber, #NFDB
109:L’intervention des deux hommes avait peut-être été superflue, mais tout le monde savait que les dieux aidaient ceux qui se prenaient en main. Il ~ Dave Duncan, #NFDB
110:That meddling in other people's affairs...formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
111:What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
112:Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
113:A 1940 Gallup poll showed 83 percent of the public was against intervention. A good pretext was needed to gain support from an intransigent public. ~ Jim Marrs, #NFDB
114:Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are not prepared to gain new information for development. Learning is the intervention! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
115:Peoples of the Americas are rising once again, saying no to imperialism, saying no to fascism, saying no to intervention - and saying no to death. ~ Hugo Chavez, #NFDB
116:The anxiety has always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so tortuous he might have welcomed the law's intervention. ~ Patricia Highsmith, #NFDB
117:France believes in armed intervention by America only when the intervention is in France to rescue France from occupation by other powers. ~ William F Buckley Jr, #NFDB
118:If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
119:I reckon that there won't be an intervention in the near future, because Georgia's military adventure revealed the weakness of the Russian army. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
120:No one intervened—hardly surprising, thought Rosner, for intervention would have been intolerant—and no one thought to comfort him as he lay dying. ~ Daniel Silva, #NFDB
121:When we find out an Idea, by whose Intervention we discover the Connexion of two others, this is a Revelation from God to us, by the voice of Reason. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
122:Investments in immunization yield a rate of return on a par with educating our children - and higher than nearly any other development intervention. ~ Seth Berkley, #NFDB
123:Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
124:I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we can say this is the template, this is the checklist, that must be met [for intervention]. ~ Peter MacKay, #NFDB
125:no matter the intervention, developing readers must spend substantial instructional time actually reading if they are to attain reading competence. ~ Donalyn Miller, #NFDB
126:The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
127:If Only--but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can't rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good. ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
128:Suffering offers a general message of warning to all humanity that something is wrong with this planet, and that we need radical outside intervention ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
129:But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy. ~ Amity Shlaes, #NFDB
130:It was also Lena who invited Amma, knowing full well nothing short of divine intervention could get Amma to set foot through the door of Ravenwood Manor. ~ Kami Garcia, #NFDB
131:The body moves naturally, automatically, without any personal intervention or awareness. If we think too much, our actions become slow and hesitant. ~ Taisen Deshimaru, #NFDB
132:Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
133:I don't believe in revenge. It's unnecessary. I prefer using a very discreet psychological intervention topped of with a short burst of extreme violence! ~ Jos N Harris, #NFDB
134:Whatever that thought was that just popped into your head. That's your answer. That's divine intervention, beta. The rest is all courage and choice. ~ Sonali Dev, #NFDB
135:What was wrong with people these days? Couldn’t a guy have a few beers to drown a personal problem without getting caught up in a makeshift intervention? ~ Graham Parke, #NFDB
136:Of course, there were huge disagreements in the arguments of military intervention, .. There is no point at the moment on focusing on those disagreements. ~ Chris Patten, #NFDB
137:Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis. ~ Jurgen Habermas, #NFDB
138:The closure of the stock market and the intervention of the authorities to supply liquidity almost certainly averted a catastrophic fire-sale of assets. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
139:It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry. ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
140:While a tardy Evolution’s coils wind on
And Nature hews her way through adamant
A divine intervention thrones above. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Secret Knowledge,#NFDB
141:When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
142:I have said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a great man is that his active intervention makes what seemed highly improbable in fact happen. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB
143:What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.
What good is it otherwise? ~ William Carlos Williams,#NFDB
144:I closed my eyes and prayed for divine intervention.
I waited a beat and nothing happened.
Guess God was busy with war and famine and the like. ~ Kristen Ashley,#NFDB
145:It was a stunning result. Years later, long after these children had left home, this short intervention at age 11 was still dramatically affecting their biology. ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
146:Most of us discover early on that it's safer to hide behind prayers that can't be measured, petitions so nebulous they don't require intervention from God. ~ Margaret Feinberg, #NFDB
147:We've been blessed with four beautiful children. Michael, he doesn't have much of a problem anymore. He is high functional, probably because of early intervention. ~ Dan Marino, #NFDB
148:And that was our beginning. It's not a thrilling tale of adventure or the kind of fairy-tale romance portrayed in movies, but it felt like divine intervention. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
149:If someone had asked who could stage the best intervention with a crazy woman who had formerly been an undead monster, Sydney Sage would have been my last guess. ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
150:When kids are really little, they all look the same. No speech, no social relatedness, cannot emphasize enough the importance of early educational intervention. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
151:This is not about abortion or the antics. This is about pro choice versus anti-choice and government intervention in a woman's personal decisions about her life. ~ Kathleen Turner, #NFDB
152:If you accept that security is a process, and if you can eliminate the human interaction or intervention in that process by automating more, that is a good thing. ~ John W Thompson, #NFDB
153:The acting thing is so beyond my control. Acting isn't mine. You're like a tiny piece in this big, corporate mechanism that needs chemistry and divine intervention. ~ Sandra Bullock, #NFDB
154:There are the countries of the north of Europe taking decisions and the countries of the south of Europe that are living under intervention. This division exists. ~ Jose Maria Aznar, #NFDB
155:International intervention in the country is like asking security guards to patrol a bank in mid-robbery. The guards may end up robbing or running the bank, whether ~ Adam Hochschild, #NFDB
156:Let us unite our will in a great aspiration; let us pray for an intervention of the Grace. A miracle can always happen. Faith has a sovereign power. ~ The Mother, On Education, [T5], #NFDB
157:Today...the bluebirds, old and young, have revisited their box, as if they would fain repeat the summer without intervention of winter, if Nature would let them. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
158:Government intervention is not solving the problems, and in fact the governments around the world that are intervening the most in their economies are struggling more. ~ Oliver DeMille, #NFDB
159:The Pentagon also wants a system capable of launching speed-of-light strikes and counterstrikes using preprogrammed scenarios so that human intervention won’t be necessary. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
160:If you had issues with him, I could have spoken to HR. Arranged an intervention. Breaking his neck without going through your line manager, that shit stays on your record. ~ Mick Herron, #NFDB
161:If you have a 2 or 3 year old who is not talking, you must start an early intervention program. The worst thing you can do with an autistic 3 year old is to do nothing. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
162:Sometimes I wonder if you should be on medication," Charlie said. "It can't be healthy to have you thinking all by yourself without some kind of pharmaceutical intervention. ~ T J Klune, #NFDB
163:We do not support the man. We do not support the individual. We support the idea of independent revolution in the Western Hemisphere, free from American intervention ~ Lee Harvey Oswald, #NFDB
164:Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
165:The Libertarian position on the freedom of speech is a strong support of freedom of speech, and we oppose government intervention in controlling what is or is not moral. ~ Michael Badnarik, #NFDB
166:The diversity of our cultures is Europe's greatest asset. We have to preserve this asset. And any political intervention that reduces this diversity is a loss to Europe. ~ Jaroslaw Kaczynski, #NFDB
167:There were too many problems with wizards and fairies and odd things popping up in the corners of the potato field for anyone to want to invite more supernatural intervention. ~ T Kingfisher, #NFDB
168:When families observe a later, deeper stage of cult involvement they may find it necessary to consider the involvement of a professional such as myself in an intervention effort. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
169:You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications. ~ Henry A Kissinger, #NFDB
170:Newborn screening is a public health intervention that involves a simple blood test used to identify many life-threatening genetic illnesses before any symptoms begin. ~ Lucille Roybal Allard, #NFDB
171:[W]hen "the rule of law" becomes absolutized and everything is done by the book or the computer, people call out in desperation for the intervention of a reasonable human being. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
172:When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
173:The Lourie Center...is a national pioneer in developing and applying early intervention techniques to diagnose and treat emotional and developmental problems in young children. ~ Connie Morella, #NFDB
174:What people see you do may not be remembered; what they hear you say may be forgotten; but how they feel your intervention in their times of need will forever be remembered. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
175:Without intervention today, the cost of care for adults with autism will be significantly greater and the burden will no longer lie with the parents, but on our entire society. ~ Jenny McCarthy, #NFDB
176:Even from a young age, kids will do what they see their parents doing, and without some form of intervention they’ll likely continue those patterns throughout their lives. ~ Candace Cameron Bure, #NFDB
177:Every moment—every blink—is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
178:We tried war, we tried aggression, we tried intervention. None of it works. Why don't we try peace, as a science of human relations, not as some vague notion - as everyday work. ~ Dennis Kucinich, #NFDB
179:The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
180:The role of Iran has been very destructive. As an Iranian, I apologize to the civilian people of Syria who have been killed as a result of the useless intervention of Iran in Syria. ~ Shirin Ebadi, #NFDB
181:Things have to be made to happen in a way you want them to happen. Without management, without the intervention of organized willpower the desired result simply cannot be obtained. ~ Robert Heller, #NFDB
182:I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms. ~ Boris Yeltsin, #NFDB
183:Every moment — every blink — is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
184:I’m glad nothing requires my intervention, because I’m trying hard to maintain my composure. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a woman naked and I don’t think I’ll ever be the same. ~ Sara Gruen, #NFDB
185:[...] in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment [...]. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
186:intervention is, he thought. That moment when everybody else is on one side and you’re on the other. That’s how you know it’s time to change. Because you’re fresh out of support. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde, #NFDB
187:My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations. ~ Peter Atkins, #NFDB
188:This legislation confronts the human truth that the need for clean water knows no borders, and proper management and intervention can be a currency for peace and international cooperation. ~ Bill Frist, #NFDB
189:When that truth of alien intervention in our planet's affairs and our ongoing contact with an alien culture is finally revealed, it won't be frightening even though it will be a shock. ~ Philip J Corso, #NFDB
190:This entire process of stellar evolution is by natural process alone. We do not have to invoke Divine intervention at any stage in the history of the life-cycle of the stars that we observe. ~ Hugh Ross, #NFDB
191:Sometimes, at a certain point, the painting seems to have painted itself without my help - what I have called the 'eureka' moment when a sudden daring intervention has worked a miracle. ~ Joseph Plaskett, #NFDB
192:The highest truth needs no communicating, for it is by its very nature self-propelling. It radiates its influence silently as the rose its fragrance without the intervention of a medium. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
193:True understanding is possible only when we are fully conscious of our thought, not as an operative observer on this thought, but completely and without the intervention of a choice. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
194:Very blue blood. Bunny stepped back, narrowing her gaze. Was she nuts, or did each frame sit two inches from the next? Exactly. Wow. This guy needed a cosmic energy intervention and fast. ~ Kathleen Long, #NFDB
195:What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? —William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
196:observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
197:With personal intervention on behalf of the principle of openness, which exposes crime as well as error to public view, Niels Bohr played a decisive part in the rescue of the Danish Jews. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
198:Dreams, stories, art- they were, and are, instruments of divine intervention that molded you into a woman who dwells in possibility: who now feels herself serene with comfort and strength. ~ Marjorie M Liu, #NFDB
199:The body moves naturally, automatically, unconsciously, without any personal intervention or awareness. But if we begin to use our faculty of reasoning, our actions become slow and hesitant. ~ Jaimal Yogis, #NFDB
200:Concerted voices of heartfelt petitions in Arabic all pleading for divine intervention are abruptly silenced as the drone ensures fatalities by injecting a final stab in each of their skulls. ~ C J Anderson, #NFDB
201:He believed that surgical intervention into the brain to treat psychological disorders did not require the extensive surgical training that neurosurgeons spent years acquiring. Though ~ Kate Clifford Larson, #NFDB
202:One moral of this little story might be that once you’ve burned a bridge with lies, it may be that nothing short of divine intervention can rebuild the relationship and create a positive result. ~ Tom Morris, #NFDB
203:The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind - the lower animals. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
204:The thing about computers—it's like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
205:As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
206:Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is. ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB
207:Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
208:The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
209:While the richest people on earth pray to get richer, the rest of the world begs for intervention with their faces pressed to the window, watching us drink our coffee, unruffled by their suffering. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
210:FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements. ~ Henry Giroux, #NFDB
211:All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
212:But sometimes a little intervention from Fate didn’t hurt either. Now if only Fate would keep Oliver from Nathan. The last thing she wanted was to watch the love of her life be hanged for murder. ~ Sabrina Jeffries, #NFDB
213:My first intervention is to say, when your baby is born, just don't jump on your kid at night," Cohen says, "Give your baby a chance to self-soothe, don't automatically respond, even from birth. ~ Pamela Druckerman, #NFDB
214:I'm so thankful a significant majority of Americans are saying no to military intervention. We've got to find a solution that will in the end be one that makes Syria a better country, a better people. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
215:It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
216:philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness— ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
217:A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged 'need' or relieve some alleged distress. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
218:...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
219:The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
220:Can any serious scholar observe the Hoover administration’s massive economic intervention and, with a straight face, pronounce the inevitably deleterious effects as the fault of free markets? Franklin ~ Lawrence W Reed, #NFDB
221:Haiti, which has been the main target of US intervention throughout the 20th century, is the poorest. And Guatemala, which is maybe the third major target of US intervention, probably ranks third poorest. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
222:Cynically but accurately put, Americans oppose public intervention or regulation if it helps others, but favor it if it helps them - take social security, disaster relief, public works projects, for example. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
223:If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences. ~ Fareed Zakaria, #NFDB
224:The United States only knows one form of intervention and that is the military one. Everything depends on drawn weapons. We should, however, develop a wider scope of action. And we should learn to be patient. ~ Ahmed Rashid, #NFDB
225:I feel Man would be wise to work at correcting his own mistakes instead of waiting for intervention from on high, and should replace faith in an unknowable divine plan with a well-thought-out scheme of his own. ~ Mark Hodder, #NFDB
226:The fact is that there was a long war in which Serbia and its capital Belgrade were bombarded and attacked with missiles. It was a military intervention of the West and NATO against the then rump Yugoslavia. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
227:Indeed, Isaac Newton himself, who introduced the concept of immutable laws which guided the planets and stars without divine intervention, believed that the elegance of these laws pointed to the existence of God. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
228:[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
229:Power thrives on coercive obstructions to market competition. Ideologies that seek increased governmental intervention into the economy have been only helping the powerful secure better control throughout the world. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
230:Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
231:Our intervention to destabilize the Assad regime has really made the chaos worse in Syria. And if you were to get rid of Assad today, I would actually worry about the 2 million Christians that are protected by Assad. ~ Rand Paul, #NFDB
232:Countrywide was an early adopter of information technology to process applications. By the mid-1990s, fully 70 percent of loans passing through its automated underwriting system required no human intervention. ~ Barry Eichengreen, #NFDB
233:The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
234:It's a very serious matter. And what should we do about it? We should reinforce NATO. We need to be prepared to take solid actions to make it clear that we will not tolerate any intervention, and Russian intervention. ~ John Kasich, #NFDB
235:Because I do not accept the hand of God; I do not believe in divine intervention or predestination. I cannot believe that our paths are pre-chosen and that our lives have no will. That there is no such thing as choice. ~ Carrie Ryan, #NFDB
236:He recalls sympathetically the words of The Observer after Britain’s disastrous military intervention over the Suez Canal in 1956: ‘We had not realized that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness. ~ Owen Jones, #NFDB
237:I have long been a supporter of the Head Start program because each and every year I witness the dramatic positive impact that early intervention services have on children's lives in my congressional district. ~ Lucille Roybal Allard, #NFDB
238:The general point that a political theory is, among other things, a partisan intervention, is well taken. So question about the actual political implication of a theory cannot be excluded as, in principle, irrelevant. ~ Raymond Geuss, #NFDB
239:There was great anxiety about Russian intervention in the recent German elections, perhaps contributing to the frightening surge of support for the right-wing nationalist, if not neo-fascist, "Alternative for Germany". ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
240:When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
241:Excellent outcomes with much lower intervention rates are achieved at home births. This may be because the overuse of interventions in hospital births introduces risks or the home environment promotes problem-free labors. ~ Henci Goer, #NFDB
242:He did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment—I speak optimistically. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
243:Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields. ~ Gunnar Myrdal, #NFDB
244:And ASW was never one to stand idly by and say nothing when he believed that his intervention would help. His favorite saying was If you live without making a difference, what difference does it make that you have lived. ~ Felix Francis, #NFDB
245:However, for Keynes it had become self-evident that the best defense against political extremism and economic collapse was an increased role for the state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention. ~ Tony Judt, #NFDB
246:Only then, as a result of his light-creating and space-creating intervention, was there heaven above and earth below, back and front, left and right-in other words, only then was space organized with reference to an ego. ~ Erich Neumann, #NFDB
247:We are to make a plan for the day, pray over that plan, and then proceed with that plan. When we are willing to regard the unexpected as God's intervention, we can flex with the new plan, recognizing it as God's plan. ~ Elizabeth George, #NFDB
248:It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
249:Maybe it was fate that I sat next to her that day, or serendipity, divine intervention, who knows? However you look at, I got seated next to the first girl to ever really steal my heart. I was in love from that moment on. ~ Renee Carlino, #NFDB
250:We need to stop Sharon. His lethal policies are drawing blood on both sides. That's why we need a serious intervention -- international troops. And we need to end the occupation if there is to be security for both people. ~ Hanan Ashrawi, #NFDB
251:Despite the potential of diet and disease prevention, most of the attention given to heart disease has been on mechanical and chemical intervention for those people who have advanced disease. Diet has been pushed aside. ~ T Colin Campbell, #NFDB
252:Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
253:The belief that every human soul was the child of God, and capable of direct inspiration from the Father of all, without mediator or priestly intervention, or sacramental instrumentality, was fatal to all privilege and rank. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
254:Lamb said, ‘If you had issues with him, I could have spoken to HR. Arranged an intervention.’ He tapped Moody’s shoulder with his foot. ‘Breaking his neck without going through your line manager, that shit stays on your record. ~ Mick Herron, #NFDB
255:We can be angels to each other. We are angels to each other, all the time. And we should be. No divine intervention required. Just a sense of staying together and looking out for each other. You know. Safety in numbers. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde, #NFDB
256:Famine, plague, death and war... that's a pretty good description of 1917-18. The war was meant to end quickly, but by 1917 it seemed to be set until the end of time. No wonder everyone dreamed of an apocalyptic intervention. ~ Philip Jenkins, #NFDB
257:I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse. ~ John Stossel, #NFDB
258:The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
259:Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making. ~ Ted Cruz, #NFDB
260:So, divine intervention or fluid dynamics? The hand of God or an event so windy it makes dog farts pedestrian? Either way, one thing is for certain: if you're watching the 3D version of the film, make sure you take your scuba gear. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
261:Given the well-documented resistance of PTS to treatment, Seppälä was surprised by the results: a month after completing the intervention, veterans who took part in the weeklong yoga program showed reductions on all measures of PTS. ~ Amy Cuddy, #NFDB
262:What exactly should I do to accelerate the sadhana?
Wait quietly for the exact indication; all mental intervention and decisions are arbitrary. The clear indication comes in the silence of the mind.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB
263:By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level. ~ John Hodgman, #NFDB
264:Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have been different from what it is. ~ Paul Bowles, #NFDB
265:I'm so thankful a significant majority of Americans are saying no to military intervention. We've got to find a solution that will in the end be one that makes Syria a better country, a better people. We can be human only together. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
266:We are too solicitous for government intervention, on the theory, first, that the people themselves are helpless, and second, that the Government has superior capacity for action. Often times both of these conclusions are wrong. ~ Calvin Coolidge, #NFDB
267:After the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Congressman Frank changed his tune completely. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
268:Capitalism would self-destruct in no time. So the business classes have always demanded strong, straight intervention to protect the society from the destructive effects of market forces because they don't want everything destroyed. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
269:In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
270:The Andes region is not stable. So we can expect to see more US intervention. It could be under any kind of pretext. We can no longer use the Russians as an excuse, as we did in Central America in the 1980's, so drugs will have to do. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
271:In the dead world of the Western mind all that is seen are shades of gray. There's a cloud over every experience. There's no possibility of divine incarnation, divine intervention, let alone that one's self in every moment is divine. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
272:What happened in the following years? Well, I think that among the educated classes it stayed the same. You talk about humanitarian intervention, it's like Vietnam was a humanitarian intervention. Among the public, it's quite different. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
273:Early intervention programs enrich adverse family environments. The largest effects of the early intervention programs are on noncognitive traits. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean perseverance, motivation, self-esteem, and hard work. ~ James Heckman, #NFDB
274:The problem for Rome, then, is how and when the intervention should be done with a sense of the possibility of going too far in limiting the freedom of theologians. This is not an easy time - neither for Rome nor for the theologians. ~ Godfried Danneels, #NFDB
275:God is part of the universe, master architect but not master magician. In this conception, miracles do not represent, as they traditionally have, “the intervention of God in the natural order” or “the suspension of the natural order.”10 ~ Terryl L Givens, #NFDB
276:After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious.... Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late. ~ Antonio Gramsci, #NFDB
277:A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
278:If ever there was a time this country needed the intervention of God, it is now. We can and should pray for America as a whole, but remember that when God sets out to change a nation, He begins by changing people. It starts with individuals. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
279:I scowled at him. “Not every good thing that happens is divine intervention, Michael.” “True,” Michael said, “but I prefer to give Him the credit unless I have a good reason to believe otherwise. It seems more polite than the other way around. ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
280:Iraq now says that it will, after all, destroy its missiles. President Bush said, 'Please, I used to pull the same trick. There'd be an intervention, I'd make a big show of pouring out the liquor and then there was a case under the floorboards.' ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
281:Should I really tell her how that made me feel? How I thought for sure Les had something to do with it or that it was divine intervention or a freaking miracle? Because I honestly feel like it was too perfect to be chalked up to coincidence. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
282:Amongst the deported are many Catholics. Would it not be possible that Your Holiness make another attempt to intercede for these unhappy innocents? Your intervention represents the last hope of so many and the fervent entreaty of all decent men. ~ Gitta Sereny, #NFDB
283:At last, the officials sought an intervention from the highest power in the land, who sent them back with a sign. An actual sign, which was erected in the village square for all to see. It read: THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE BY ORDER OF THE KING ~ Casey Gerald, #NFDB
284:...you can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn't the intervention of a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
285:Having to go through an intervention and family counseling is a wonderful experience. I would almost recommend it to anybody. It opens a lot of communication, and it opens old sores, but once it is opened and hashed out, the rewards are far greater. ~ Susan Ford, #NFDB
286:Intervention for the prevention and control of osteoporosis should comprise a combination of legislative action, educational measures, health service activities, media coverage, and individual counselling to initiate changes in behaviour. ~ Gro Harlem Brundtland, #NFDB
287:It is imperative, too, that every strategy takes into account an analysis and understanding of the global financial and economic environment marked by slower growth, increased competition, altered consumer behavior, and more government intervention. ~ Ram Charan, #NFDB
288:The real problem is not in losing the weight but in keeping it off for any meaningful length of time. Numerous sources show that almost every lifestyle intervention works for the first three to six months. But then the weight comes rolling back. ~ Robert H Lustig, #NFDB
289:State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. ~ Benito Mussolini, #NFDB
290:And from this point of view no formulation is better than any other; the best of all is the one that helps each one to remember, that is, the way in which the intervention of the Grace has crystallised in the thought.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#NFDB
291:The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on. ~ Winona LaDuke, #NFDB
292:I'm in my truck talking to Jesus. And you can see a World Series ring on my right pinkie finger. But when I take my sunglasses off a second later, it's gone. It's the whole divine intervention thing. You know Jesus had something to do with them winning. ~ Denis Leary, #NFDB
293:Mr. Lipwig, this morning you had no experience at all of being dead, and yet but for my intervention you would nevertheless have turned out to be extremely good at it,” said Lord Vetinari sharply. “It just goes to show: you never know until you try. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
294:The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great. ~ Amity Shlaes, #NFDB
295:A rather small statue of Ernesto Cardenal shall stand in a Nicaraguan square in the year 2018. But all statues tumble eventually, by divine intervention or the power of dynamite, like the statue of Heine. So let us not place too much trust in statues. ~ Roberto Bola o, #NFDB
296:The Compromise of 1850 provided that the prohibition of slavery should be left up to the individual States, thus thwarting the Canaanites in their attempts to make this problem an excuse for federal intervention and a cause of war between the States. ~ Eustace Mullins, #NFDB
297:As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. ~ Chelsea Manning, #NFDB
298:No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
299:The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
300:We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation. ~ Andrew Weil, #NFDB
301:Have you ever heard of the law of unintended consequences?” He shook his head. “It basically says that any intervention in a complex system may or may not have the intended result, but will inevitably create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. ~ Michael R Hicks, #NFDB
302:Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
303:People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose. ~ Gunnar Myrdal, #NFDB
304:The elevator turned out to be slower than the damned train at Disney World. And it played “The Girl from Ipanema” in Muzak. I looked at Paris and saw that he was mouthing the lyrics. That was it. I’d have to plan an intervention for him once we got home. ~ Leslie Langtry, #NFDB
305:(Economist Robert Higgs wrote a book about this phenomenon titled Crisis and Leviathan, in which he argues that government intervention inevitably creates future problems, which results in the government’s intervening even more in an attempt to correct them.) ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
306:However, today due to civil litigation funded by cults this option for families has been eliminated. Instead, the only form of cult intervention now practiced is voluntary-with the exception of minor children under the direct supervision of a custodial parent. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
307:Through what I have witnessed and documented, with proper interventions you can break those cycles. When I made the first film on this subject, 'Paper Tigers,' kids were going off the cliff. But then there was intervention, and they won't go off the cliff. ~ James Redford, #NFDB
308:Until our global institutions take a stand against the teaching and preaching of hate, all their efforts of diplomacy and military intervention will fail. Ultimately the responsibility is ours. Tomorrow’s world is born in what we teach our children today. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
309:Part of what makes the concept of miracles and God’s intervention such a hot topic for so many people is that everyone wonders how a God who is presumably running the entire universe will not heal someone of cancer but will find someone else a parking space. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
310:We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system. ~ Caitlin Doughty, #NFDB
311:If you believe in divine intervention, it's because you think that mankind is the best creation of all beings. But for those who do not think so, mankind is nothing but guinea pigs which will someday be divided into two categories, finished goods or the rejects. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
312:Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment. ~ Thomas Szasz, #NFDB
313:Older people are not going to evaporate from the face of the Earth for two years. They're going to have medical need and they're going to have to be attended to. And the earlier intervention for it, the less the cost will be and the better the quality of life. ~ Nancy Pelosi, #NFDB
314:...they'd been some of the most fully live creatures I'd ever seen --- eyes gleaming with intelligence, bodies rippling with muscle, radiating with heat --- and now, thanks to the intervention of a few pieces of metal, they were nothing but heaps of cold meat. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
315:I think that some "interventionist theisms" are compatible with evolutionary theory. (By "intervention," I don't mean that God violates laws of nature; I mean that God affects what happens in nature in ways that are additional to the ones that deism recognizes.) ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
316:Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power.' A strong central government led by an effective executive was needed, as Washington had warned. ~ John P Avlon, #NFDB
317:In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat. ~ Laura Mullen, #NFDB
318:Bill Shorten should - either knows that or at least he should know it and for him to change the conversation by proposing - by suggesting a proposal significantly more adventurous than where the conversation has been up until now was a very unhelpful intervention. ~ George Brandis, #NFDB
319:(D) Write a political treatise—not to exceed 250,000 words or 500 sides, whichever is less—detailing your solution to stabilising relations in the region. Military force above brigade level is not permitted, nor is divine intervention. You may include diagrams. ~ Jonathan L Howard, #NFDB
320:It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already. That's right--you heard me: dead again already. I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that? ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
321:Violence against women and lack of intervention and man's inhumanity to man and this kind of atrocities are going on. These are big issues of our times, we must speak about them, we must learn how to better understand how these things happen so we can address them. ~ Angelina Jolie, #NFDB
322:I say it must have been great to grow up when men were men. He says men have always been what the are now, namely incapable of coping with life without the intervention of God the Almighty. Then in the oven behind him my pizza starts smoking and he says case in point. ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
323:Military intervention to maintain the global status quo will become a constant feature of international relations, whether this is justified in terms of fighting drugs, fighting terrorism, containing 'rogue states', opposing 'Islamic fundamentalism', or containing China. ~ Walden Bello, #NFDB
324:The British consul in Mashed later wrote in his memoirs that what had turned “Russia from hot-war ally to cold-war rival” was the “vigorous American intervention to capture the Persian market, especially the efforts of Socony-Vacuum to secure oil prospecting rights. ~ Ervand Abrahamian, #NFDB
325:As we have seen in the data, resentment against the West comes from what Muslims perceive as the West's hatred and denigration of Islam; the Western belief that Arabs and Muslims are inferior,; and their fear of Western intervention, domination, or occupation. (p. 141) ~ John L Esposito, #NFDB
326:For the time being, it need only be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors. ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
327:This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
328:As we know from Richard Glazar’s story, 24,000 Bulgarians – those who had been in Salonika – did die in Treblinka in the spring of 1943; but there can be little doubt that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia were saved by the intervention of the future Pope and the courage of a king. ~ Gitta Sereny, #NFDB
329:The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
330:And when the man who commanded a nuclear arsenal and the greatest military in history was frightened, it meant that something other than human intervention was required. That, unfortunately, was part of Zach’s job every day now. That was where Nathaniel Cade came in ~ Christopher Farnsworth, #NFDB
331:In no way have we contemplated the intervention of the army in tasks that belong to police at the different levels of government. What is contemplated .. is support from the army in these tasks but not in direct actions that correspond to municipal, state and federal police. ~ Ruben Aguilar, #NFDB
332:Approaching systemic problems via individual cases is inefficient and involves people – hence uncontrollable effects at the level of intervention. High-level action is vastly more effective. Like modifying the mosquito genome rather than treating individual cases of malaria. ~ Graeme Simsion, #NFDB
333:I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
334:While police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes. ~ Sarah Schulman, #NFDB
335:Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a condition, an irrational state requiring professional, or divine, intervention. ~ Shirley Hazzard, #NFDB
336:It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already.
That's right--you heard me: dead again already.
I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that? ~ Jim Butcher,#NFDB
337:It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate. ~ Mark Zandi, #NFDB
338:Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
339:I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball? ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
340:Living with bipolar, schizophrenia or any other mental condition takes a recognition that one has a chronic condition that needs managing. The management can be through pharmaceutical intervention, talk therapy, mindfulness programmes, diet and exercise changes, all kinds of things. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
341:Through "deprogramming" or cult intervention the only issues that are addressed focus upon the specific group and group involvement. The subject of such an intervention subsequently may leave the group and go on with their life reassuming their own basic individual values and beliefs. ~ Rick Ross, #NFDB
342:The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it. ~ Mark Zandi, #NFDB
343:Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
344:Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
345:Allow me to say how manly and humanly great of you I think this is. Your courageous and firm intervention have met with nothing but recognition throughout the entire world. I congratulate you for all you have given anew to the German nation by crushing the intended second revolution. ~ Franz von Papen, #NFDB
346:We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's? ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
347:All such questions as, for instance,of the cause of failure of crops, of the adherence of certain tribes to their ancient belief, etc.--questions which, but for the convenient intervention of the official machine are not, and cannot be solved for ages--received full, unhesitating solution. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
348:Tenacious prayer is a lifestyle that produces results. Prayer is more than getting on our knees or clasping our hands while closing our eyes. Prayer is an attitude of operating in conjunction with God. Prayer involves exercising our authority for heavenly intervention in our earthly affairs. ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
349:...you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you're succeeding. People do not get scared when you are failing. It calms them. That's why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves "worrying about" Amanda Bynes. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
350:Your--ah--intervention, shall we say, has simplified things in the palace enormously. We no longer have to worry about Salmissra's whims and peculiar appetites. We rule by committee, and we hardly ever find it necessary to poison each other anymore. No one's tried to poison me for months. ~ David Eddings, #NFDB
351:The federal minimum wage is complemented by state laws that sometimes exceed the federal requirements. Federal and state minimum wage laws represent deliberate governmental intervention in the labor market to produce a pattern of results other than that produced in a free labor market. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
352:Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
353:A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
354:Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
355:I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character. ~ William E Gladstone, #NFDB
356:Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat. ~ Deborah Blum, #NFDB
357:His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: ‘A maternal hand guided the bullet.’ One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
358:With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. ~ Elizabeth Bowen, #NFDB
359:Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for 'independent creation,' as it is often termed, or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science. ~ Charles Lyell, #NFDB
360:Indeed we rarely look at religion’s benefits in limiting the intervention bias and its iatrogenics: in a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and allows you to do nothing (hence gives nature a chance to do its work) will be beneficial. So ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
361:Sweet Jesus! Sweet, sweet Jesus!” Mom called to the Savior, caught up in the divine intervention that was Hank and me.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Stop cal ing Jesus, Mom. Hank’s gonna think you’re weird,” I snapped.
“She is weird,” Dad said.
“I’m not weird,” Mom returned. ~ Kristen Ashley,#NFDB
362:But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.... The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
363:The affirmation of an intervention amidst all our doubt and uncertainty concerning its source thus represents the Christian idea that we have been marked by a life-giving event that invites us to passionately respond with our entire being. It is out of this that a deep and sustained questioning arises. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
364:There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
365:Those who suffer by exposure to external costs do so involuntarily, while those who enjoy external benefits do so at no cost. Friedman thought that overcoming neighborhood effects “widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention” was one of the key roles of government. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
366:In other words, government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad, ~ Tim Wise, #NFDB
367:The beneficial effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects are gradual and indirect and lay out of sight ... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention. ~ A V Dicey, #NFDB
368:Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev. ~ Russell Baker, #NFDB
369:Have we reached the point where my intervention will not get me shouted at for being a meddling tomcat who doesn't respect the boundaries of others?" Tybalt stepped out of the shadows behind the Candela, tightening his hand around her throat. "I ask to be polite, you realize. There's no way I'm walking away. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
370:Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
371:Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer. ~ William Styron, #NFDB
372:Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse — there is more than one reading. The story won’t stop, can’t stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
Love is an intervention. ~ Jeanette Winterson,#NFDB
373:I started Eastwood Ranch Foundation a few years ago after I developed, co-starred, and produced a show for Nat Geo Wild called Animal Intervention. I always loved animals but when I got to travel the U.S. and see what was really going on in our country, I decided to take action and be a real advocate for them. ~ Alison Eastwood, #NFDB
374:The next time life tosses you a multiples choice test, Meaghan, remember…
1) The more time you give it, the more choices you’ll have.
2) There’ll always be more than one right answer. And,
3) Waiting for divine intervention is almost never a good idea.
Poised for greatness,
The Universe ~ Mike Dooley,#NFDB
375:Life is a journey. It is not about where you are going or where you end up, it is about what takes you there. You can plan the path you take, but life has a way of throwing obstacles into your path that make you change course. It is not “divine intervention” or “destiny”; it is the reality of being a human being. ~ Courtney Lynn, #NFDB
376:I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market. ~ John Stossel, #NFDB
377:I may say that here, as in most cases where the operations of nature interfere with the designs of man, it is not by a direct intervention on our part that we may remedy the difficulties, but rather by a precise knowledge of their causes, which may enable us, if not to check, at least to avoid the evil consequences. ~ Louis Agassiz, #NFDB
378:Yes, an old-fashioned feminist “consciousness-raising” still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
379:It happened in all walks of life: business, real estate, health care, the school yard, you name it. Any where that bad things happened, people would not get involved in order to save their own skin. It wasn't that people weren't civic-minded. It was just that the price for intervention would be punishment, not praise. ~ Bill Browder, #NFDB
380:by means of evolution by natural selection, which showed how living things can become well adapted to their environments over the course of time under a very wide range of circumstances, so long as the environment is not changing too quickly. Complexity could develop from simplicity without direct Divine intervention. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
381:Jesus Christ.” I look up to the heavens, seeking divine intervention. “This is torture.”
“This? No. This is a conversation between…friends.”
“We aren’t friends.”
“You’re right.” He shakes his head. “We’re so much more, snookums. Our connection…it’s deeper than words.”
“I loathe you.”
“You love me. ~ Julie Johnson,#NFDB
382:Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
383:There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. ~ Norman Mailer, #NFDB
384:The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment. ~ Henry Louis Gates, #NFDB
385:…when a voice is heard in a dream it is a most meaningful occurrence. Dr. Jung identified the appearance of a voice identified the appearance of a voice in dreams with an intervention of the Self. It stands for knowledge that has its roots in the collective knowledge of the psyche. What the voice says cannot be disputed. ~ Jolande Jacobi, #NFDB
386:Classic economic theories recognize public goods aspects of one kind or another - the need for economic intervention in, obviously, the supply of infrastructure and of education. We're not supplying that infrastructure at an appropriate rate today. I don't doubt it isn't just money; it's organization and goals and so forth. ~ Kenneth Arrow, #NFDB
387:I think we would be shocked if we knew how many homes of parents who love to sing of God’s grace on Sunday completely forget that grace as they parent their children the rest of the week. But without the intervention of God’s grace, your children will not be who they are supposed to be or do what they are supposed to do. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
388:If you understand it from an ecological or sustainability perspective, agriculture is the primary way we meet most of our needs, and it's the greatest form of human intervention on our environment. It has intimately shaped our culture as powerfully as industrial modernity, but for ten thousand years rather than two hundred. ~ David Holmgren, #NFDB
389:Pluribus Unum. In my view that does not refer only to states, but also to our varied people. Whatever brought these strangers together in this place—chance, fate, or divine intervention—their lives will be forever transformed, forever bound together even if only by the slenderest of threads, because they shared stories. ~ Jennifer Chiaverini, #NFDB
390:China has been a textbook case of how the government did just enough intervention to increase penetration, but the reality is that it isn't going to work for all countries in the same way. Culture always plays a role and you can't necessarily take what worked in one market and automatically make it work somewhere else. ~ Michael Clarke Duncan, #NFDB
391:With a doctor’s expert care you should be better in a week, but without access to the marvels of modern medicine your recovery will require at least seven days.” With or without a physician, with or without medical intervention, the natural medicine that we produce—our healer within—is working to heal us and sustain our health. ~ Roger Jahnke, #NFDB
392:In the West everybody recognizes the need for a private sector, pretty much, even the one Socialist group understands this now, and so there tends to be debate about how much public sector intervention you think is needed for a variety of reasons, and there are very important differences on party lines that should be fought out. ~ Barney Frank, #NFDB
393:it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
394:Maybe it was always that way and everyone has always been forever waking in a flustered confusion deep at night trying to believe that the awful sound they think woke them was nothing, or was the nervous bark of a dog, not the sound of violence or of a child weeping in the kind of desolation or terror that demands intervention ~ China Mi ville, #NFDB
395:There is reason to believe that, to some extent at least, the physical universe is actually ‘constructed’ by the intervention of the physicist, which is the reason John Wheeler refers to it as ‘the participatory universe’, and why Heisenberg states that physics deals, not with Nature as such, but with ‘our relations to Nature’. ~ Wolfgang Smith, #NFDB
396:What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth. ~ Slavoj Zizek, #NFDB
397:Every word of etatistic thought is contradicted by the doctrines of sociology and economics; this is why etatists endeavour to prove that these sciences do not exist. In their opinion, social affairs are shaped by the State. To the law, all things are possible; and there is no sphere in which State intervention is not omnipotent. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
398:In a perfect world, pregnancy would be an intimate experience shared by a woman and her partner alone, but for various reasons that is not possible. Pregnancy is an experience that invites public intervention and forces the female body into the public discourse. In many ways, pregnancy is the least private experience of a woman’s life. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
399:A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming the modern monetary ideal. The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from State influence that such a system guarantees. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
400:Quite frankly, I have to admit that with regard to the enormous financial assets and funds of Russian leaders in Western banks and on stock markets, the chances for the West to exert influence on Russia are quite low. I doubt that Western leaders are willing to exert pressure. I would not exclude an intervention in case of a crisis. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
401:For example, the bulk of federal Medicare insurance for the elderly is spent keeping people alive in their last six months, trying to prevent what cannot be prevented. That many recipients of this intervention do not judge the quality of their life in those last months to be satisfactory is a dilemma for which we have no solution. ~ Richard E Cytowic, #NFDB
402:I’ll tell you what that was, Journal. That was divine intervention. Angel Alvarez was a solid buck fifty of Valtrex-and-crystal-meth-fueled trailer-park scrapper. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I would have been liquefied on impact had I not been blessed with a guardian angel who wasn’t above tripping a bitch, not even a bitch named Angel. ~ B B Easton, #NFDB
403:Looking more deeply at the emergence of ISIS or the chaos that exists in Syria, Yemen and Libya would clearly raise crucial doubts about reliance on military intervention and drone warfare as adequate counterterrorist responses and would call attention to the detrimental effects of US "special relationships" with Israel and Saudi Arabia. ~ Richard A Falk, #NFDB
404:Here’s a simple intervention to show what a little change in your negative narrative can do. First-year college students who receive worse grades than they anticipate are highly likely to drop out. Some conclude they’re just not college material, while others, who have a positive narrative, will absorb the news and decide to work harder. ~ Richard O Connor, #NFDB
405:On humanitarian intervention in general, I guess my view is not unlike the view that was attributed to Gandhi, accurately or not, when he was supposedly asked what he thought about western civilization. He is supposed to have said that he thought it would be a good idea. Similarly, humanitarian intervention would be a good idea, in principle. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
406:The Russians wanted Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Their entire intervention in the American president election - from the news bots, to allies like Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn to the meeting with Don Jr. - was about hoping to elect a president who would ease the sanctions that pinch the oligarchy that enables Vladimir Putin. ~ Mark Felt, #NFDB
407:Putin, it seemed, didn’t see how intervention in Libya could produce a good outcome for Russia; instead, he viewed Russia’s abstention as Medvedev caving in to American influence. In the name of advancing the Reset, Medvedev had just violated a central principle of Russian (and Soviet) foreign policy: resisting American military interventions ~ Michael McFaul, #NFDB
408:Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
409:Let every nation, right now, do what is best for all citizens of the world: eliminate every form of intervention that would prevent or otherwise hobble mutually beneficial trade between any two parties anywhere in the world. No bureaucracy can help us toward that goal; it must come from a growing realization of the merit of freedom itself. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell, #NFDB
410:Stress-relieving impulses like these had driven most of his actions during the previous year. His intervention on behalf of his patients was a compulsion that had little to do with the patients themselves; often, in fact, he failed to notice the patients at all, only their outcomes. Each spasm of control offered a period of relief and afterglow. ~ Charles Graeber, #NFDB
411:The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made. ~ Evgeny Morozov, #NFDB
412:the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention followed the arrival of apparently innocent traders and missionaries in China, India, and many other countries, the threat foreseen by Ieyasu was real.) ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
413:Part of what the [British] dossier says is this, quote, "The operation", meaning the effort to influence our election, "that has been conducted with the full knowledge and support of [Donald] Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return, in return, the Trump team has agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue." ~ Rachel Maddow, #NFDB
414:That’s why, white America, we had no objection to (and indeed supported mightily) the “big government” intervention known as the Homestead Act, passed in 1862, which gave over 200 million acres of essentially “free” land to white families: land that had been confiscated from indigenous people or from Mexico and was then made available to white settlement. ~ Tim Wise, #NFDB
415:I mean, you can agree or disagree with Iraq or Afghanistan, but by the way, now the great campaigning cause out there is the absence of intervention in Syria. And then in Libya, it's partial intervention. And that doesn't really explain why some countries that have literally nothing to do with the interventions in the Middle East end up getting targeted. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
416:The political power had intervened, and such was its necessary effect. The Western farmers, who willingly took what appeared to be the advantage of it, in so doing had surrendered their power of choice for an indefinite future period. The intervention of the political power had created a monopoly. And even its supposed beneficiaries found it odious. ~ Isabel Paterson, #NFDB
417:We are a great capitalist society, that works most of the time. We do need to take better care of our people and fix the access, cost, and quality of healthcare. But we need to act intelligently. We needed the intervention of government to keep the economy from falling into an abyss, but we must now encourage the creation of business - not burden it. ~ James A Champy, #NFDB
418:Mill sets out several related arguments for protecting freedom of speech, not just from oppressive government intervention, but also from social pressures. Underlying them all are the assumptions that (a) truth is valuable, and (b) no matter how certain someone is that they know the truth, their judgement is still fallible: they might still be wrong. ~ Nigel Warburton, #NFDB
419:Nothing is so unpredictable as a throw of the dice, and yet every man who plays often will at some time or other make a Venus-cast: now and then he indeed will make it twice and even thrice in succession. Are we going to be so feebleminded then as to aver that such a thing happened by the personal intervention of Venus rather than by pure luck? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
420:The pack includes analysis and summary forms as well as very explicit links between assessment and individualised intervention...these materials are often lacking in published therapy programmes and are especially helpful...the pack provides very clear guidelines...overall it will be a very significant addition to speech and language therapy practice. ~ Linda Armstrong, #NFDB
421:Thomas Moore estimates that their aggregate value in 1972 was between $2 and $3 billion6—a value that corresponds solely to a government-granted monopoly position. It constitutes wealth for the people who own the certificates, but for the society as a whole it is a measure of the loss from government intervention, not a measure of productive capacity. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
422:One key area of U.S.-Russian tension was Ukraine. According to Steele’s sources, the Trump team agreed to sideline Russia’s intervention in Ukraine during the campaign. Instead, and in order to “deflect attention,” Trump would raise U.S.-NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. This would help Putin, “who needed to cauterize the subject. ~ Luke Harding, #NFDB
423:Two areas have been particularly infected with absence of awareness of iatrogenics: socioeconomic life and (as we just saw in the story of Semmelweis) the human body, matters in which we have historically combined a low degree of competence with a high rate of intervention and a disrespect for spontaneous operation and healing—let alone growth and improvement. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
424:All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other. ~ Tariq Ali, #NFDB
425:Paradoxically, the timid rumors circulating in Washington in favor of arming Ukraine are creating an incentive for Moscow to escalate the war now, to attain the desired territorial gains before it becomes too costly. Once Ukrainian forces possess, for instance, anti-armor weapons, Russia’s advantages decrease and the costs of its intervention increase dramatically. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
426:Taura would have been dead of old age at twenty-standard without the medical intervention that the Dendarii medics and later the Duronas had supplied her. Roic had met her twice, desperately memorably, the first time when she'd attended m'lord's wedding, the second when m'lord and Roic had traveled to Escobar to attend her last days in the Durona hospice. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
427:As so often during the US military intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, there was excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis in both countries. ~ Patrick Cockburn, #NFDB
428:I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part. ~ Ira Glass, #NFDB
429:I see nothing wrong ethically with the idea of correcting single gene defects through genetic engineering. But I am concerned about any other kind of intervention, for anything else would be an experiment, which would impose our will on future generations and take unreasonable chances with their welfare ... Thus such intervention is beyond the scope of consideration. ~ Ian Wilmut, #NFDB
430:The ultimate goal of parents, educators, and professionals who interact with children with autism is to unlock their potential to become self-reliant, fully-integrated, contributing members of society. We have the power to unlock this potential by implementing an effectively structured intervention—that which takes the development of the whole child into account. ~ Karina Poirier, #NFDB
431:I always say the Syrian problem as isolated case, as Syrian case, is not very complicated. What makes it complicated is the interference from the outside, especially the Western interference because it's against the will of the Syrian government, while the intervention of the Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah is because of the invitation of the Syrian government. ~ Bashar al Assad, #NFDB
432:Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
433:...it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love, but to engage in the practice of love. For love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love we are doing the work of ending domination. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
434:So this is my aim for watercooler conversations: improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. In at least some cases, an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
435:You are free to choose the concept you will accept of yourself. Therefore, you possess the power of intervention, the power which enables you to alter the course of your future. The process of rising from your present concept to a higher concept of yourself is the means of all true progress. The higher concept is waiting for you to incarnate it in the world of experience. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
436:V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion. ~ Charles Frazier, #NFDB
437:If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is severed from the Godhead. If anyone should assert that He passed through the Virgin as through a channel, and was not at once divinely and humanly formed in her (divinely, because without the intervention of a man; humanly, because in accordance with the laws of gestation), he is in like manner godless. ~ Gregory of Nazianzus, #NFDB
438:In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. Cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
439:The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role impressed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
440:In the modern world, tariffs and similar restrictions on trade have been one source of friction among nations. But a far more troublesome source has been the far-reaching intervention of the state into the economy in such collectivist states as Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain, and especially the communist countries, from Russia and its satellites to China. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
441:En quelque sorte, on avait l’air de traiter cette affaire en dehors de moi. Tout se déroulait sans mon intervention. Mon sort se réglait sans qu’on prenne mon avis. De temps en temps, j’avais envie d’interrompre tout le monde et de dire : «Mais tout de même, qui est l’accusé ? C’est important d’être l’accusé. Et j’ai quelque chose à dire.» Mais réflexion faite, je n’avais rien à dire. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
442:En quelque sorte, on avait l’air de traiter cette affaire en de hors de moi. Tout se déroulait sans mon intervention. Mon sort se réglait sans qu’on prenne mon avis. De temps en temps, j’avais envie d’interrompre tout le monde et de dire : «Mais tout de même, qui est l’accusé ? C’est important d’être l’accusé. Et j’ai quelque chose à dire.» Mais réflexion faite, je n’avais rien à dire. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
443:There is also no doubt that major market-oriented reforms and overhauls are required immediately to address unsustainable federal health-care entitlements and avoid the devastating economic and societal consequences awaiting younger people and future generations from decades of extravagance, political manipulation, and rampant bureaucratic intervention in the private health-care system. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
444:..where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
445:People constantly requesting government intervention are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
446:The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction. The Korean government did not vanquish the market as the communist states did. However, it did not have blind faith in the free market either. While it took markets seriously, the Korean strategy recognized that they often need to be corrected through policy intervention. ~ Ha Joon Chang, #NFDB
447:One absolutely crucial change is that feminist film theory is today an academic subject to be studied and taught. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a political intervention, primarily influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement and, in my specific case, a Women's Liberation study group, in which we read Freud and realised the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist project. ~ Laura Mulvey, #NFDB
448:Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, took this approach furthest, becoming pals with Mr Putin and, soon after leaving office, joining the board of a pipeline company carrying Russian gas to Germany. Even now, Mr Schröder preaches empathy for Mr Putin, arguing that his actions in the Crimea are no different to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, in which Germany took part under Mr Schröder. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
449:they equally entertained a deep-rooted contempt for that portion of mankind who thought that property could be managed and protected without the intervention of lawyers. The outside world to them was a world of pretty, laughing, ignorant children; and lawyers were the parents, guardians, pastors, and masters by whom the children should be protected from the evils incident to their childishness ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
450:If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
451:Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued. ~ Doug Casey, #NFDB
452:South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita in the 1950s. One received far more aid, advice and political intervention than the other. It is now by far the poorer of the two. In general, Asian economies grew their way out of poverty in the late twentieth century, while African economies failed to be aided out of poverty. Trade, not aid, proved the best way to achieve an increase in prosperity. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
453:...Started by missionaries in 1841, Punahou Academy had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites...It hadn't been easy to get me in, my grandparents told her (my mother); there was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps' boss, who was an alumnus (my first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race). ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
454:His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A maternal hand guided the bullet.' One cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
455:Let's be frank: if there are hardened terrorists [Australian] who are fighting overseas, we don't want to see those people come back to our shores. But if we could stop youngsters, teenagers from falling into the snares of ISIL or Jabhat al-Nusra or other terrorist organisations through parental intervention and other strategies then, we hope to be able to rescue them before they commit these crimes. ~ George Brandis, #NFDB
456:Deaner ran down to the barrier separating the crowd from the pitch, and eventually persuaded the stewards that he had a part to play in the unfolding drama. (Anyone who has ever attempted to talk to a steward at a Premiership football ground will recognize that, whatever else during the afternoon required divine intervention, Deaner’s success in getting on to the White Hart Lane turf really was a miracle.) ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
457:The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee. ~ John Medina, #NFDB
458:No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
459:My mom, for most of her life, was a Holocaust denier. And it was terrible for the entire family to have to deal with until, finally, a couple years ago, we had an intervention. And we had a rabbi come into the home, had him walk her through the history of the Jewish people, and then he made her watch "Schindler's List." And after that, my mom did a complete 180. Now she can't believe it only happened once. ~ Anthony Jeselnik, #NFDB
460:I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate. ~ Vaclav Havel, #NFDB
461:Integration is not the same as blending. Integration requires that we maintain elements of our differentiated selves while also promoting our linkage. Becoming a part of a "we: does not mean losing a "me." Integration as a focus of intervention among a range of domains of integration becomes the fundamental basis for how we apply interpersonal neurobiology principles to the nurturing of healthy relationships. ~ Daniel J Siegel, #NFDB
462:Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor. The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell, #NFDB
463:Yes, Satan rebelled. Yes, Adam and Eve freely chose sin, and with it death and suffering. And yes, the all-powerful, happy God could have intervened to prevent those choices. If that intervention would have brought him more glory and us more good, no doubt he would have done it. But God, in his wisdom, determined that not even rebellion and sin could thwart his plan to further his happiness and that of his people. ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
464:The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
465:American press, like the press in many countries, acts like a cheerleader to our government rather than a critical observer. This is especially true, when it comes to foreign interventions. That means that when government leaders conclude that intervention in a foreign country is justified, the press rarely criticizes it. In fact, the press has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for many of our foreign interventions. ~ Stephen Kinzer, #NFDB
466:I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It’s not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical cultural series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh. ~ Flannery O Connor, #NFDB
467:If you look across a host of measures at adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty. ~ Steve Sailer, #NFDB
468:If you look in the Muslim World right now, the Shia, the Sunni Muslims are standing at the brink of a pit of fire started by Western intervention and influence in pitting them against each other by exploiting their divisions. So the stage is set for war in that area of the world that would destroy that area as completely as what they are calling the failed state Libya making Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq failed states. ~ Louis Farrakhan, #NFDB
469:They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him. The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
470:Alas, it has been hard for me to fit these ideas about fragility and antifragility within the current U.S. political discourse—that beastly two-fossil system. Most of the time, the Democratic side of the U.S. spectrum favors hyper-intervention, unconditional regulation, and large government, while the Republican side loves large corporations, unconditional deregulation, and militarism—both are the same to me here. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
471:QUAKER: Since God maintains direct accessibility with every human life and offers instant and uncomplicated guidance, the intervention of priests and ministers is unnecessary. The intercession of saints is not required. Musical chanting and pretentious prayers fulfill no need. God is not attracted by incense or ostentation or robes or colorful garments or hierarchies. CATHOLIC: You pretty well abolish my church. QUAKER ~ James A Michener, #NFDB
472:International law tends to take a back seat when a major power asserts a right to protect vital security interests. Indeed, when a great power needs a threat to justify its intervention in another state, it invariably finds one. There is thus a long political history of world powers quoting international law to others but ignoring it when it comes in their way. The Ukraine case illustrates the international law of convenience. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
473:One can, then, conceive the production, by purely mineral means, of all natural hydrocarbons. The intervention of heat, of water, and of alkaline metals - lastly, the tendency of hydrocarbons to unite together to form the more condensed material - suffice to account for the formation of these curious compounds. Moreover, this formation will be continuous because the reactions which started it are renewed incessantly. ~ Marcellin Berthelot, #NFDB
474:No one "discovers" the future. The future is not a discovery. The future is not a destiny. The future is a decision, an intervention. Do nothing and we drift fatalistically into a future not driven by technology alone, but by other people's need, greed, and creed. The future is not some dim and distant region out there in time. The future is a reality that is coming to pass with each passing day, with each passing decision. ~ Leonard Sweet, #NFDB
475:The Soviet Union, true to the Leninist principles of respect for the rights and national independence of all peoples great or small, has always been and is guided in its relations with other countries by the principles of mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-intervention in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefits, peaceful coexistence and economic cooperation. ~ Kliment Voroshilov, #NFDB
476:It is the principal paradox of this period that the only sphere of our economic system in which government intervention is urgently necessary is also the only point at which action of the State is now effectively inhibited. It is in the region of wages and prices that we really require the continual economic leadership of government, but in our prevailing trade structure any such suggestion has come to be regarded as impious. ~ Oswald Mosley, #NFDB
477:If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
478:There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
479:If the positive innovations connect exponentially before the massive breakdowns reinforce one another, the system can re-pattern itself to a higher order of consciousness and freedom without the predicted economic, environmental, and social collapse...If the system could go either way, a slight intervention to assist the convergence of the positive can tip the scales of evolution in favor of the enhancement of life on Earth. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, #NFDB
480:We need, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the first time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the endless shifts and wiles required to catch it, the intervention, during our afternoons with the rod, of the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing, without our quite knowing what we intend to do with them, the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
481:Its a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know dont care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science-that it has made it possible for people not to be religious. ~ Steven Weinberg, #NFDB
482:Intervention in Syria is not an option. President Obama has already helped foment this civil war and supported the al-Qaeda jihadists. This is an explosive region, and more US intervention means more people will die. We should be choosing peace - not a new conflict. More so than anyone else, my supporters know that America cannot afford another unlawful, immoral war in the Middle East. Stand with me and tell President Obama to stay out of Syria. ~ Ron Paul, #NFDB
483:It was divine intervention—the act of starting to turn on the lights to alleviate my discomfort made me think of my favorite quote about darkness and compassion from Pema Chödrön, who writes: “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
484:we think that we have spiritual life in ourselves—that we are worthy of God’s acceptance, or that we can be good enough to earn God’s approval if we just try a little harder, or that God knows we are doing our best and will accept our good intentions—we reject God’s testimony about the indispensability of Jesus and call Him a liar. The testimony is that we are hopelessly wicked, spiritually dead, and without hope apart from God’s intervention. ~ J D Greear, #NFDB
485:Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable, and if the jump saves much time and effort. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high, and there is no time to collect more information. These are the circumstances in which intuitive errors are probable, which may be prevented by a deliberate intervention of System 2. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
486:It will even bring into question our system of representative democracy. The tech is there for people’s identity to be proven and for them to vote instantly on just about any issue that comes up – gay marriage, abortion law, planning permission, military intervention. Liquid democracy – where people actually vote on decisions as they get made – is surely a far truer democracy. Why then do you need a congressman or parliamentary representative? ~ Dominic Frisby, #NFDB
487:The Second World War ended with a radicalization of the population in the United States and everywhere else, and called for all kinds of things like popular takeovers, government intervention, and worker takeovers of factories. Business propagated a tremendous propaganda offensive. The scale surprised me when I read the scholarship - it's enormous, and it's been very effective. There were two major targets: one is unions, the other is democracy. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
488:If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
489:The National Association of Attorneys General's proposal to make the chief law enforcement officers of the states more accountable, if not certainly more professional, ought to be titled: "The Pam Bondi Party's Over Intervention Act." When an elected attorney general spends more time in airline VIP lounges awaiting to go wheels up to some exotic lobbyist campaign contribution holiday than she does in court, it is probably time to reign in the rumaki. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
490:People did stupid, sometimes unkind things. People did things that were a little bad, things that they were ashamed of. People cheated a little on their taxes, got a little greedy, sometimes they pilfered something that wasn’t properly theirs, they quarreled, they abused each other (but never to the point that it would call for a Herald’s intervention) and were basically just . . . people. A little good, a little bad, mostly just getting by. Not ~ Mercedes Lackey, #NFDB
491:This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past—to rewrite history. There is no cause for writers to join their ranks. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
492:Discord among the ex-Soviet nationalities was fuelling an ugly brand of Russian nationalism. Voices in Moscow called for the re-conquest of Russia’s ‘near abroad’. For after Abkhazia, there waited several further targets for Russian intervention, including Tatarstan and Chechenia, and other non-Russian lands within the Russian Federation. Sooner or later, Russia would be forced to choose between its new-style democracy and its old-style imperialism. ~ Norman Davies, #NFDB
493:With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
494:What's the purpose of NATO? Well actually we have an official answer. It isn't publicized much, but a couple of years ago, the secretary-general of NATO made a formal statement explaining the purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world is to control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes. That means it's a global system and of course he didn't say it, it's an intervention force under US command, as we've seen in case after case. So that's NATO. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
495:When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
496:We can “forget” about ourselves because Christ never forgets us. We can afford to be less important to ourselves because we are vastly important to God. We can willingly be crucified with Christ because we are raised to walk in resurrection life. Biblical self-denial will never fail to be for us rather than against us, whether here or in eternity. When Peter chose to deny Christ rather than himself, he really chose human limitations over divine intervention. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
497:To salvage a society, it is necessary to aid, abet, raise and increase that state of mind. If you were to set up a perfect government out here which required the intervention of nobody, you would have destroyed the society. But by raising the individual ability of the persons in the society within the framework that they are able to view, raise their ability within the framework they are able to view, you would have achieved a marked advance for that society. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
498:Do not be discouraged by the fact that many of your prayers are yet unanswered. Time is a trainer, teaching you to wait upon Me, to trust Me in the dark. The more extreme your circumstances, the more likely you are to see My Power and Glory at work in the situation. Instead of letting difficulties draw you into worrying, try to view them as setting the scene for My glorious intervention. Keep your eyes and your mind wide open to all that I am doing in your life. ~ Sarah Young, #NFDB
499:There's a lot of expectation in the Middle East that post-Obama there will be a sort of tougher U.S. line on Assad, there will be more intervention and so forth. But I don't know if that's going to be fulfilled. If there is more intervention, then I think it's going to go the same way as these other interventions that we've seen in Iraq, we've seen, to a degree, in Syria, we've seen in Libya, you know, that they do really badly. They make bad situations worse. ~ Patrick Cockburn, #NFDB
500:People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing. It calms them. That’s why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves “worrying about” Amanda Bynes. But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing or, worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they want to stop you. You can’t let them. ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
501:A runaway calendar will keep you from simplifying your life. It holds you hostage to tangible things—meetings, appointments, and projects—without giving proper priority to the intangibles: who you are becoming, your relationships with family and friends, your connectedness to God. Without conscious intervention, this pattern of chronically overscheduling ensures that the priorities you care about most will take a backseat to the urgent priorities of others every time. ~ Bill Hybels, #NFDB
502:Donald Trump, like most Americans, like most Republicans, believe in protecting America's core national interests. He believes as do I, as do most Americans, that we aren't yet doing enough to take the fight to the Islamic State.That the intervention in Libya was ill-considered and slapdash at the time. And we're living with the consequences of it now. That we have to get tougher when it comes to our intelligence and law enforcement practices to stop Islamic terrorism. ~ Tom Cotton, #NFDB
503:The idea of self-determination was gradually given credibility by international law, and it lent strong emancipatory support to movements of liberation struggling against a West-centric world order. Latin American countries used international law creatively, both to limit the protection of foreign investment by establishing the primacy of national sovereignty in relation to natural resources, and by building support for the norm on non-intervention in internal affairs. ~ Richard A Falk, #NFDB
504:In sum, economists (and those who listened to them) became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation improves the risk-return trade-off, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot about the other models. There was too much Fama, too little Shiller. The economics of the profession may have been fine, but evidently there was trouble with its psychology and sociology. ~ Dani Rodrik, #NFDB
505:We destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. ~ Walter Ciszek, #NFDB
506:A runaway calendar will keep you from simplifying your life. It holds you hostage to tangible things—meetings, appointments, and projects—without giving proper priority to the intangibles: who you are becoming, your relationships with family and friends, your connectedness to God. Without conscious intervention, this pattern of chronically overscheduling ensures that the priorities you care about most will take a backseat to the urgent priorities of others every time. GRABBING ~ Bill Hybels, #NFDB
507:Englishmen Francis Galton to describe the "science" of bettering human stock and the elimination of unwanted characteristics... and individuals. Galton proposed societal intervention for the furtherance of "racial quality," maintaining that "Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations" and that "except by sterilization I cannot yet see any way of checking the produce of the unfit who are allowed their liberty and are below the reach of moral control. ~ Francis Galton, #NFDB
508:To paraphrase Feenberg commenting on Heidegger, we could say that the form taken by technologies stems not only from experts' intervention but also from that of the concerned groups that have been allowed to contribute to their shaping. And just as there are good and bad sculptors who are more or less skilled in seeing what is inessential in the stone they are sculpting, so too there are good and bad ways of identifying and involving (or not involving) concerned groups. To ~ Andrew Feenberg, #NFDB
509:But blaming Islam is a simple answer, easier and less controversial than re-examining the core political issues and grievances that resonate in much of the Muslim world: the failures of many Muslim governments and societies, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy representing intervention and dominance, Western support for authoritarian regimes, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or support for Israel's military battles with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (p. 136-137) ~ John L Esposito, #NFDB
510:Analysis tries to uncover the complexes and expose them to the conscious reflection of the ego. This intervention can alter them somewhat. In analysis a person learns how the complexes function, what triggers their constellation, and what can prevent their endless repetition. Without such intervention on the part of the ego, a complex will behave like an animated foreign body or an infection. In the grip of a complex, a person can feel quite helpless and emotionally out of control. ~ Murray Stein, #NFDB
511:Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy. ~ Tariq Ali, #NFDB
512:We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity. ~ Conrad Black, #NFDB
513:In proportion as the people are accustomed to manage their affairs by their own active intervention, instead of leaving them to the government, their desires will turn to repelling tyranny, rather than to tyrannizing: while in proportion as all ready initiative and direction resides in the government, and individuals habitually feel and act as under its perpetual tutelage, popular institutions develop in them not the desire of freedom, but an unmeasured appetite for place and power. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
514:In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (isis). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
515:Sometimes people say to me, 'Well, what was the difference between Kosovo, which was a successful intervention, and Iraq and Afghanistan that have been so difficult?' And the answer is perfectly simple. In Kosovo, you have, after the removal of the loss of its regime, you had a process of political and economic reconstruction that took its part without the intervention of terrorism. If you had the intervention of terrorism, by the way, it would have been extremely difficult there - but we didn't. ~ Tony Blair, #NFDB
516:In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design. This ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
517:The timing & characteristics of state intervention affect not only organizational tactics and strategies, but the content and definition of interest itself... Some scholars have directly stressed that state interventions create corporatist forms... the formation, let alone the political capabilities, of such purely socioeconomic phenomena as interest groups and classes depends in significant measure on the structures and activities of the very states the social actors, in turn, seek to influence. ~ Theda Skocpol, #NFDB
518:We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. This is not media consolidation in the traditional sense, where a few huge conglomerates used economies of scale to dominate journalism by dominating the local and national agendas. This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous - and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening. ~ Dan Gillmor, #NFDB
519:Common explanation for Pakistan’s relatively uninspiring economic performance is that the country’s riches are regularly plundered by corrupt politicians and civil servants, making it seem poorer than it is. Every military intervention in Pakistan’s politics has been predicated on the assumption that an honest general can help recover the billions of dollars siphoned from the economy and stashed in bank accounts abroad, though no large-scale repatriation of stolen Pakistani wealth has so far occurred. ~ Husain Haqqani, #NFDB
520:America remains today substantially what it has always been, namely a Christian country. That observation can sound aggressively partisan or intolerant, since some extremists believe that Americans are a Christian people who require a Christian government, with all that implies about religious exercises in schools and public displays. I make no such assertion, since I believe that religion flourishes best when it is kept farthest away from any form of government intervention, even the best-intentioned. ~ Philip Jenkins, #NFDB
521:If state rights and laissez faire meant an end to force bills, removal of Federal troops from Southern state capitals, and abandonment of intervention in local politics and race discriminations, the South was for them strong. On the other hand the South had no patience with state rights and laissez faire if they implied abandonment of Federal subsidies, loans of credit, and internal improvements. Of these the South believed she had not had anything like her just share and she meant to have a lot more. ~ C Vann Woodward, #NFDB
522:White supremacy remained central to Jacksonian Democracy throughout the second party system, no less pervasively than economic development was to Whiggery. Virtually every aspect of the Democratic political outlook supported white supremacy and slavery in particular one way or another: Indian Removal, local autonomy and state sovereignty, respect for property rights, distrust of government economic intervention, criticism of early industrial capitalism, and (as will become evident) Texas annexation. ~ Daniel Walker Howe, #NFDB
523:The Russian government has promised to help build infrastructure in North Korea and increased shipments of coal, oil, and timber to the country. A new RussiaNorth Korea business council is promoting Russian investment. Both sides have proclaimed 2015 as Russia-North Korea Friendship Year. Undergirding the emerging MoscowPyongyang axis is shared hostility toward Washington. Putin needs friends following the annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. “Russia in its isolation has clearly been using ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
524:Love was everyone's to experience if they opened their hearts, but true love was a rare and sterling thing, damn if it wasn't, a sterling thing that required the intervention of destiny: two hearts fated to be as one, finding each other among the billions of the world. True love, by God, was the Excalibur of emotions, and if you recognized it when you saw it, if you drew that noble, shining blade from the stone, your life would be a grand adventure even if you lived it entirely in one small town. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
525:Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference. ~ Stephen Kinzer, #NFDB
526:With considerable security, therefore, we can draw the conclusion that even with a hundred billion trillion stars in the observable universe, the probability of finding, without divine intervention, a single planet capable of supporting physical life is much less than one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. The odds actually are higher that the reader will be killed by a sudden reversal in the second law of thermodynamics.{387} HABITABLE ~ Hugh Ross, #NFDB
527:Which is why you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing. It calms them. That’s why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves “worrying about” Amanda Bynes. But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing or, worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they want to stop you. You can’t let them. WE ~ Mindy Kaling, #NFDB
528:A woman living in a Kansas City suburb may think Tunisia is another planet, and her life has no connection to it, but if she were married to an air force navigator who flies out of the nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, she might be surprised to learn that one obscure Tunisian’s actions led to protests, that led to riots, that led to the toppling of a dictator, that led to protests in Libya, that led to a civil war, that led to the 2012 NATO intervention, that led to her husband dodging antiaircraft fire over Tripoli. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
529:Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea that God occasionally intervenes in nature - for example, by once or twice causing a beneficial mutation to occur. Biologists have not detected any such interventions despite the data and theory they have assembled about mutation. However, I think it is a mistake to expect biological experiments to be able to detect such one-off acts of divine intervention, especially if those acts occurred in the distant past. Science isn't in that line of work. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
530:I oppose U.S. military intervention in Iraq. I believe that we should not send troops or engage in air strikes-our nation's military involvement needs to be over. The United States has already spent billions of dollars in Iraq while our nation has endured a crumbling infrastructure, cuts to our social programs, a lack of investment in job training and creation, and sadly, a failure to take care of our veterans. Let's focus our resources at home. Over 4000 men and women have sacrificed their lives for Iraq. That is enough. ~ Janice Hahn, #NFDB
531:These studies compare women who choose hospital birth with those who try to deliver at home (regardless of whether they have their babies there or end up transferring to hospital for pain relief or medical intervention). It turns out that simply by choosing home birth, women are less likely to require drugs to induce or speed up labor or relieve pain; less likely to be cut open or to tear; and less likely to need a C-section or instrumental delivery. Their babies are born in better shape and are more likely to breastfeed. ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
532:As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God. ~ Victor J Stenger, #NFDB
533:I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer, #NFDB
534:All that the State need do, and can do, in order to preserve the monetary system undisturbed, is to refrain from such intervention. That is the essence of the monetary theory of the classical economists and their immediate successors, the Currency School. It is possible to refine and amplify this doctrine with the aid of the modern subjective theory; but it is impossible to overthrow it, and impossible to put anything else in its place. Those who are able to forget it only show that they are unable to think as economists. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
535:[Speed] ostensibly perverts the illusory order of normal perception, the order of arrival of information. What could have seemed simultaneous is diversified and decomposes. With speed, the world keeps on coming at us, to the detriment of the object, which is itself now assimilated to the sending of information. It is this intervention that destroys the world as we know it, technique now reproducing permanently the violence of the accident; the mystery of speed remains a secret of light and heat from which even sound is missing. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
536:When you go into a country like Libya where a large chunk of the population wants the old regime back you could end up with a protracted civil war. That we're now in a stalemate was both entirely predictable, and predicted. That we're now relying on drones is disturbing. How vital can a cause be if we're not willing to risk American lives to defend it, and instead use robots and remote control operators? It gets me back to the larger feeling about the intervention - there's just not a compelling reason for us to be involved. ~ Michael Hastings, #NFDB
537:Market bashers ... might understand the claim that in some particular field, markets required no intervention--though they'd be skeptical--but the notion that, on general principle, complex systems ran themselves just fine without benign intervention seemed like it could only be the product of a quasi-religious faith. ... Of course, this gets things almost precisely backwards. It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct. ~ Julian Sanchez, #NFDB
538:He laughingly expressed his surprise at having provoked such anger. Perhaps he said this in the hope of minimising in my eyes the importance of his indiscreet intervention, perhaps because he was of a cowardly nature and lived gaily and idly in an atmosphere of falsehood, as jellyfish float upon the surface of the sea, perhaps because, even if he had been a man of a different kind, other people can never see things from our point of view and therefore do not realise the magnitude of the injury that words uttered at random can do us. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
539:It is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to doing so, including people and institutions who seek to pathologize or criminalize such important acts of self-definition. I know that for some feels less brave than necessary, but we all have to defend those necessities that allow us to live and breathe in the way that feels right to us. Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs – it is also not always what a trans person needs. ~ Judith Butler, #NFDB
540:Not that I ever felt the necessity of proving that all human beings suffer the same way, feel joy the same way, but it happened on my way - when I get close to these people, just by the simple intervention of translation I can actually reach them and ask them something, and their reaction is as I expected. I see that the relationship goes so smoothly, and I realize that cultural languages and specificities are nothing but simple obstacles that you can easily overcome. It's obvious that human beings are the same wherever they are. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
541:... an essential feature of a decent society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of outcome - not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state... These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the core of classical liberalism, of Enlightenment thinking... Like Aristotle, [Adam] Smith understood that the common good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
542:Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
543:In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists. The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers. ~ Bernard Lewis, #NFDB
544: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
545:Through luminous and erudite readings of the texts, Hasana Sharp shows us how profound and radical is Spinoza's conception of nature and his claim that humans always remain part of nature, acting solely according to the same rules. She demonstrates the political consequences of adopting this perspective through a provocative intervention in contemporary feminist theory, while along the way opening promising avenues for future work in a variety of other fields, such as animal studies and ecology. This is a challenging and important book. ~ Michael Hardt, #NFDB
546:Liv sits in the silent cubicle for as long as she can without someone staging an intervention, listening as several women come in, sometimes in pairs, chattering as they check hair and makeup. She checks for nonexistent e-mail and plays Scrabble on her phone. Finally, after scoring “flux,” she gets up, flushes, and washes her hands, staring at her reflection with a kind of perverse satisfaction. Her makeup has smudged beneath one eye. She fixes this in the mirror, wondering why she bothers, given that she is about to sit next to Roger again. ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
547:The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
548:[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
549:Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few very far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government. ~ Charles Lindbergh, #NFDB
550:The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
551:We are now a part of Earth’s geological record.4 No matter what we do, no matter where we go from here, we have left our mark. One of those indelible signatures will be the sudden disappearance of certain fossils. Barring some determined intervention, CO2 will remain at elevated levels for about one hundred thousand years. In addition to the direct climate effect of its infrared absorption, it dissolves in ocean water and creates carbonic acid, which corrodes shells and reefs. This acidification of Earth’s oceans seems, by now, inevitable.5 ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
552:Whether or not Islam ever becomes dominant in Western Europe or elsewhere in the former lands of Christendom, the wars will not end. Militant Islam will not go away with the death of bin Laden, or Arafat, or Saddam Hussein, or anyone else. It will clash increasingly with the weary secular powers that it blames for all the ills of the umma. No one can predict the features of the world that will emerge from these conflicts, except that it will be new, and that it will be difficult-unless there is some wondrous intervention from the Merciful One. ~ Robert Spencer, #NFDB
553:To assure someone that if enough nuns sing enough Masses then her dead child will go to heaven is trickery as low as passing a false coin as good. To buy a pardon from the pope, to force the pope to annul a marriage, to make him set aside kinship laws, to watch as he fleeces his cardinals, who charge the bishops, who rent to the priests, who seek their tithes from the poor – all these abuses would have to fall away if we agreed that a soul can come to God without any intervention. The crucifixion is the work of God. The church is the work of man. ~ Philippa Gregory, #NFDB
554:Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself. The message about the nature of framing is stark: framing should not be viewed as an intervention that masks or distorts an underlying preference. At least in this instance—and also in the problems of the Asian disease and of surgery versus radiation for lung cancer—there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame. Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
555:It is claimed by various religious bodies that they protect "the institution of the family". They do nothing of the sort. The family has existed since animals bred and mated and went apart to protect and rear their young. But priestly intervention has degraded this clean and simple relationship by damning unborn children with the idea that they were "conceived in sin", making illegitimacy mysteriously shameful, and keeping all the fundamental facts and possibilities of family life from young people until it is too late for them to benefit by their knowledge. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
556:With a grunt, the gunman ripped off the goggles and fumbled for the hilt of a wicked-looking combat knife, swearing under his breath. Marc remembered the moment on the tower block roof in London, but this time there would be no mystery shot, no intervention from out of the darkness.
He felt no doubt as he brought up the Glock and fired twice, putting both rounds through the other man’s sternum at close range. In the close confines of the corridor, the sound of the gun’s discharge was sharp and high, like firecrackers. The gunman went down and was still. ~ James Swallow,#NFDB
557:But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
558:Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations. It is life based on freedom of the individual, without the intervention of the gendarme. For this reason we are the enemies of capitalism which depends on the protection of the gendarme to oblige workers to allow themselves to be exploited--or even to remain idle and go hungry when it is not in the interest of the bosses to exploit them. We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coercive violent organization of society. ~ Errico Malatesta, #NFDB
559:How then can the US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance and intervention, often violently through direct military means or through proxies. ~ Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, #NFDB
560:Those are God-like qualities. Not in power, but in choice. If He had created us in such a way that we could only do good, if we were incapable of acting badly, selfishly, causing pain or harm, then the notion of free will would be meaningless, would it not? Not only that, true free will precludes God’s intervention in our lives. There is no real free will if God intercedes to protect us or save us from the consequences of our own or other people’s actions and choices. We have to face those consequences ourselves. That is the price we pay for free will.” Father ~ Richard Paul Russo, #NFDB
561:Human rights and international criminal law both illustrate the contradictory potential of international law. On one level, the imposition of human rights norms is a restraint on interventionary diplomacy, especially if coupled with respect for the legal norm of self-determination. But on another level, the protection of human rights creates a pretext for intervention as given approval by the UN Security Council in the form of the R2P (responsibility to protect) norm, as used in the 2011 Libyan intervention. The same applies with international criminal accountability. ~ Richard A Falk, #NFDB
562:Congo, during the first six months of its existence, would have to deal with a serious military mutiny, the massive exodus of those Belgians who had remained behind, an invasion by the Belgian army, a military intervention by the United Nations, logistical support from the Soviet Union, an extremely heated stretch of the Cold War, an unparalleled constitutional crisis, two secessions that covered a third of its territory, and, to top it all off, the imprisonment, escape, arrest, torture, and murder of its prime minister: no, absolutely no one had seen that coming. ~ David Van Reybrouck, #NFDB
563:The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living world; and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed from the inorganic to the organic from blind force to conscious intellect and will. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
564:Miss Penelope THINKS I need beauty sleep?! Sorry, Brianna, but Miss Penelope CAN’T think. She doesn’t have a BRAIN! She’s a hand puppet!” I shot back. “She does TOO have a brain!” Brianna shouted. “She says she can go to puppet school to get smarter, but YOU need to go on that TV show Ugly Face Intervention!” I was like, Oh. No. She. DIDN’T !!! I could NOT believe Miss Penelope was talking TRASH about me like that. SHE was going to need an intervention!! After I took a pen and drew her a mustache. THEN we’d see whose FACE was the most messed up, MINE or HERS! Anyway, ~ Rachel Ren e Russell, #NFDB
565:Continuous wars - which we have now had since 2001 - starting with Afghanistan, continuing on to Iraq. And even since Iraq, it's been more or less continuous. The appalling war in Libya, which has wrecked that country and wrecked that part of the world, and which isn't over by any means. The indirect Western intervention in Syria, which has created new monsters. These are policies, which if carried out by any individual government, would be considered extremist. Now, they're being carried out collectively by the United States, backed by some of the countries of the European Union. ~ Tariq Ali, #NFDB
566:At the beginning of his administration, Reagan tried set the basis for American military intervention in El Salvador - which is about what Kennedy did when he came into office in regard to Vietnam. Well, when Kennedy tried it in Vietnam, it just worked like a dream. Virtually nobody opposed American bombing of South Vietnam in 1962. It was not an issue. But when Reagan began to talk of involving American forces in El Salvador there was a huge popular uproar. And he had to choose a much more indirect way of supporting the collection of gangsters in power there. He had to back off. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
567:In the universe there is an un-measurable, indescribable force which sorcerers call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link. Sorcerers, or warriors, were concerned with discussing, understanding, and employing that connecting link...Sorcerers, therefore, divide their instruction into two categories; one is for everyday-life state of awareness, the other is for the states of heightened awareness, in which sorcerers obtained knowledge directly from intent, without the distracting intervention of spoken language. ~ Carlos Castaneda, #NFDB
568:To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk. ~ Rafael Sabatini, #NFDB
569:To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can they say of any system tried that it proved other than a failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ab actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk. ~ Rafael Sabatini, #NFDB
570:The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, ... says "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district! ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
571:Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
572:There was much talk in the American press in the early eighties about the political cautiousness of a new generation of college students concerned mostly with their own careers. But when, at the Harvard commencement of June 1983, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes criticized American intervention in Latin America, and said, “Because we are your true friends, we will not permit you to conduct yourselves in Latin American affairs as the Soviet Union conducts itself in Central European and Central Asian affairs,” he was interrupted twenty times by applause and received a standing ovation when finished. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
573:I often speak and apply Scripture when I vocalize my most serious prayer requests. I also might use Scripture over matters that require long periods of time, such as the salvation of a resistant sibling. I often interject Scripture into requests for miraculous intervention, as well. Each of these represents a time when we’re most tempted to dwindle in faith, energy, and longevity in prayer. But by using Scripture, I transfer the burden to God’s Word rather than my ability to pray correctly or adequately. Because it is from God’s divine mouth, His Word has energy all its own. I let it do the work. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
574:At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence’s life seemed to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him—certainly the easiest—was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off to college. He matriculated at Iowa State College, which among other things was the site of a Naval ROTC installation in which he was forcibly enrolled. The ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
575:Nehru sought the United Nations’ (UN’s) intervention. After protracted negotiations, the UN succeeded in arranging a ceasefire, which came into effect on December 31, 1948. The ceasefire required Pakistan to withdraw its regular and irregular forces while it permitted India to maintain a minimum force for defensive purposes. Once these conditions were met, Kashmir’s future was to be decided by plebiscite. Pakistan never withdrew, and the plebiscite never took place. The terms of the ceasefire left about three-fifths of Kashmir under Indian control, with the balance of the state going to Pakistan. ~ C Christine Fair, #NFDB
576:that is to say, their non-intervention is the result of selfishness, and not of love. Accordingly, this seems to me to be one principal reason why the good are chastised along with the wicked, when God is pleased to visit with temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap, that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might lay hold of life eternal. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
577:Due to some incident, real or manufactured, Russians in a Baltic capital begin demonstrating, police use tear gas, and somewhere violence breaks out and Russians are killed. The Russian government demands the right to protect its citizens, the Baltic country rejects the demand. Violence mounts, and the Russians demand that NATO stop the fighting. The Baltic state insists it is an internal matter, claims that Russian intelligence caused the violence, and demands that Russian intelligence stop its intervention. A series of explosions kill a large number of Russians, and Russia occupies the country. For ~ George Friedman, #NFDB
578:The doctrine that bears Monroe’s name—that the United States opposes all European intervention in the Western Hemisphere—owes much to the work of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, who was instrumental in the formulation of the policy. But it was also at least partly of Jeffersonian inspiration. In Jefferson’s case, it was fitting that a man who had spent his life in pursuit of control would extend it as far as he could in the service of his nation, leaving a kind of last declaration of independence. This time it was a matter of policy, not of revolution. It was a declaration all the same. I ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
579:It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology. Genes were not abstractions anymore. They could be liberated from the genomes of organisms where they had been trapped for millennia, shuttled between species, amplified, purified, extended, shortened, altered, remixed, mutated, mixed, matched, cut, pasted, edited; they were infinitely malleable to human intervention. Genes were no longer just the subjects of study, but the instruments of study. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
580:only a remote possibility in the United States, since existing reproductive procedures such as IVF and PGD, which routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars, are seldom covered by health insurance. But in places like France, Israel, and Sweden, countries whose national health plans cover assisted reproduction, it’s possible that simple economics will incentivize governments to make gene editing available to patients who need it. After all, providing lifelong treatment to a single person with a genetic disease could be much more expensive than prophylactic intervention in the embryo using gene editing. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
581:Il faut être certain qu’aucun fluide cérébral ne pénètre dans l’interface, d’où sortent une centaine de microfils connectés avec l’électrode implantée. Il faut ensuite s’assurer que l’interface communique en Wi-Fi avec une haute bande passante, car une quantité énorme d’informations doit être transmise vers l’extérieur. Pour cela, il faut des batteries durables, tant il est impensable de répéter souvent l’intervention chirurgicale pour en changer ; sur notre prototype, elles peuvent durer cinq ans. Ce dernier a pour l’heure la taille d’une boîte d’allumettes. Mais c’est aussi ce qui se fait de plus complexe au monde. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
582:The termination of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey forms a new epoch in the Roman History, at which a Republic, which had subsisted with unrivalled glory during a period of about four hundred and sixty years, relapsed into a state of despotism, whence it never more could emerge. So sudden a transition from prosperity to the ruin of public freedom, without the intervention of any foreign enemy, excites a reasonable conjecture, that the constitution in which it could take place, however vigorous in appearance, must have lost that soundness of political health which had enabled it to endure through so many ages. ~ Suetonius, #NFDB
583:Silas continued, in his voice like velvet, "You had parents. An older sister. They were killed. I believe that you were to have been killed as well, and that you were not was due to chance, and the intervention of the Owenses."
"And you," said Bod, who had had that night described to him over the years by many people, some of whom had even been there. It had been a big night in the graveyard.
Silas said, "Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you."
Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead. ~ Neil Gaiman,#NFDB
584:It is only in relation to state action that the interests of different men become welded into “classes,” for state action must always privilege one or more groups and discriminate against others. The homogeneity emerges from the intervention of the government in society. Thus, under feudalism or other forms of “land monopoly” and arbitrary land allocation by the government, the feudal landlords, privileged by the state, become a “class’ (or “caste” or “estate”). And the peasants, homogeneously exploited by state privilege, also become a class. For the former thus constitute a “ruling class” and the latter the “ruled. ~ Murray N Rothbard, #NFDB
585:The denier that ID [intelligent design] is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
586:as Bailey loves Aidan, Liam, Dylan and Patrick. Finally, the central issue of the book—how to stop youth gangs—was not an easy one to deal with. What is best—legal intervention or social work? As Bailey and Clay fought heatedly over this issue, I began to see both sides. As they realized, because of the very dire consequences of their actions, that there was no single solution to stopping youth gangs, I agreed. Though the book doesn’t give any answers, it does explore the problem and offers various alternatives to this important issue. I hope you’ll continue on with the series with CLOSE TO YOU and TAKING THE HEAT. Kathryn Shay ~ Kathryn Shay, #NFDB
587:In Germany itself, the strategy was to turn up the volume of propaganda at the alleged oppression of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs. If necessary, incidents to fuel the agitation could be manufactured. Militarily, Hitler was hoping to prevent British intervention, and was certain the French would not act alone. A key deterrent, in his view, was the building of a 400-mile concrete fortification (planned to include ‘dragon’s teeth’ anti-tank devices and gun emplacements, with over 11,000 bunkers and reinforced dug-outs) along Germany’s western border – the ‘Westwall’ – to provide a significant obstruction to any French invasion. ~ Ian Kershaw, #NFDB
588:Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small part of the increasing note-expansion was recovered by the banks through the sale of foreign bills, would necessarily be unsuccessful. Led by the idea of opposing speculation, inflationistic governments have allowed themselves to become involved in measures whose meaning is hardly intelligible. Thus at one time the importation of notes, then their exportation, then again both their exportation and importation, have been prohibited. Exporters have been forbidden to sell for their own country's notes, importers to buy with them. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
589:But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy. Both Hoover and Roosevelt misstepped in a number of ways. Hoover ordered wages up when they wanted to go down. He allowed a disastrous tariff, Smoot-Hawley, to become law when he should have had the sense to block it. He raised taxes when neither citizens individually nor the economy as a whole could afford the change. After 1932, New Zealand, Japan, Greece, Romania, Chile, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden began seeing industrial production levels rise again—but not the United States. ~ Amity Shlaes, #NFDB
590:The health care establishment is structured to profit from chemical and surgical intervention. Diet still takes the back seat to drugs and surgery. One criticism that is constantly leveled at the dietary argument is that patients will not make such fundamental changes. One doctor charges that Dr. Esselstyn’s patients change their eating habits simply because of Esselstyn’s “zealous belief.”47 This criticism is not only wrong and insulting to patients; it is also self-fulfilling. If doctors do not believe that patients will change their diets, they will neglect to talk about diet, or will do it in an off-handed, disparaging way. ~ T Colin Campbell, #NFDB
591:And so it was with the Broad Street well that the decision to remove the pump handle turned out to be more significant than the short-term effects of that decision [Cholera outbreak abated.] . . . .But the pump handle stands for more than that local redemption. It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and V. cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. . . . For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
592:How do I get my point heard? How do I get it noticed? How do I get to belong in the discussion? I am sure it is something some men feel too, but if there’s one thing that bonds women of all backgrounds, of all political colours, in all kinds of business and profession, it is the classic experience of the failed intervention; you’re at a meeting, you make a point, then a short silence follows, and after a few awkward seconds some man picks up where he had just left off: ‘What I was saying was …’ You might as well never have opened your mouth, and you end up blaming both yourself and the men whose exclusive club the discussion appears to be. ~ Mary Beard, #NFDB
593:My sisters were the coolest people I knew, and still are. I have always aspired to be like them and know what they know. My sisters were the color and noise in my black-and-white boy world-how I pitied my friends who had brothers. Boys seemed incredibly tedious and dim compared to my sisters, who were always a rush of energy and excitement, buzzing over all the books, records, jokes, rumors and ideas we were discovering together. I grew up thriving on the commotion of their girl noise, whether they were laughing or singing or staging an intervention because somebody was wearing stirrup pants. I always loved being lost in that girl noise. ~ Rob Sheffield, #NFDB
594:What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of gods. You might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis; that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature, through which the world could be understood without attributing the fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
595:True market fundamentalists in the economics profession are few and far between. Not only are they absent from the center of the profession; they are rare at the “right-wing” extreme. Milton Friedman, a legendary libertarian, makes numerous exceptions, on everything from money to welfare to antitrust: Our principles offer no hard and fast line how far it is appropriate to use government to accomplish jointly what is difficult or impossible for us to accomplish separately through strictly voluntary exchange. In any particular case of proposed intervention, we must make up a balance sheet, listing separately the advantages and disadvantages. ~ Bryan Caplan, #NFDB
596:For some reason the word “chronic” often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, “chronic” means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
597:I DON’T disagree with you, Mother, Clarissa is a very beautiful
woman. But I’m not going to date her.”
Zev didn’t bother trying to hide the frustration in his voice.
Honestly, how many times would he have to tell his family that he
wasn’t interested in their setups? He leaned his large frame against the
back of the leather couch and rubbed his palms over his eyes. He was
exhausted. Sleep rarely came to him, and when it did, he remained
partially alert, terrified of losing his humanity while he was
unconscious. He was barely hanging on as it was; this intervention was
the last thing he needed. ~ Cardeno C,#NFDB
598:Pursing her lips, she seemed to think about that for a long moment. 'I suppose you're right about that, Mr. Rutherford. But don't you find it somewhat particular that when people gather, say, at church matters of divine intervention are expected, but when they gather outside of places specifically relegated as places of worship, the topic of God or anything relating to Him seems to become rather uncomfortable?'
'I would imagine that's because people are cautious, especially members of New York society, about offending those within their social circles. And talk of religion - along with politics, of course - can be a somewhat slippery slope to navigate. ~ Jen Turano,#NFDB
599:So what is it really like? What happens when people die?" Noor asks Alice Bhatti, who after finishing her shift has changed into a loose maxi and is lying down on a wheelie stretcher, her forearm covering her eyes. A half-torn poster on the wall behind the stretcher says : Bhai, your blood will bring a revolution. Someone has scrawled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood. Someone has added Insha'allah in an attempt to introduce divine intervention into the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bhai, the Blood Bank is in Block C. ~ Mohammed Hanif, #NFDB
600:The green man said, “I’m a fool, I suppose, to put any confidence in you. And yet I do. I am a free man, come from your own future to explore your age.” “That is impossible.” “The green color that puzzles your people so much is only what you call pond scum. We have altered it until it can live in our blood, and by its intervention have at last made our peace in humankind’s long struggle with the sun. In us, the tiny plants live and die, and our bodies feed from them and their dead and require no other nourishment. All the famines, and all the labor of growing food, are ended.” “But you must have sun.” “Yes,” the green man said. “And I have not enough here. ~ Gene Wolfe, #NFDB
601:As Bruce Lee famously said, “Under duress, we do not rise to our expectations, but fall to our level of training.” Hundreds of years of living in a context designed by pillagers of the land and captors of people—without sufficient intervention—naturally establishes the curriculum of the training to which we fall. Our methodologies are forged within the default mindset of colonization, capitalism-as-religion, corporation-as-demigod, domination over people and planet, winner take all, rape and plunder as spoils of victory, human and natural resources taken as objects of subjugation to the land-owning, resource-controlling, very, very privileged few. ~ Angel Kyodo Williams, #NFDB
602:To most Europeans, I guess, America now looks like the most dangerous country in the world. Since America is unquestionably the most powerful country, the transformation of America’s image within the last thirty years is very frightening for Europeans. It is probably still more frightening for the great majority of the human race who are neither Europeans nor North Americans, but are Latin Americans, Asians and Africans. They, I imagine, feel even more insecure than we feel. They feel that, at any moment, America may intervene in their internal affairs with the same appalling consequences as have followed from American intervention in Southeast Asia. ~ L Fletcher Prouty, #NFDB
603:Heartbreak is more common than happiness. No one wants to say that, but it's true. We're taught to believe not only that everyone deserves a happy ending, but that if we try hard enough, we will get one. That's simply no the case. Happy endings, life long loves, are the products of both effort and luck. We can control them, to some extent and though our feelings always seem to have a life of their own, we can at least be open to love. But, luck, the other component, well there's nothing we can do about that one. Call it God's plan or predestination or divine intervention, but we're all at its mercy. And sometimes God isn't very merciful. Jane taught me that. ~ Beth Pattillo, #NFDB
604:Deists and theists both believe in the existence of a personal God. The deist, Immanuel Kant said, believes in a God, but theists believe in a living God, an acting God, such as is seen in the familiar biblical stories, while deists do not. So with regard to the intervention and presence of God in human life, deists believe much as atheists do—except old-fashioned deists often held the belief that God has a moral claim upon human lives and even that “in the end” they would stand before his judgment. In practical terms, however, contemporary deists are indistinguishable from atheists. The often rather intense moral interest of earlier deists2 has now vanished. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
605:The DeVoses were devout members of the Dutch Reformed Church, a renegade branch of Calvinism brought to America by Dutch immigrants, many of whom settled around Lake Michigan. By the 1970s, the church had become a vibrant and, some would say, vitriolic center of the Christian Right. Members crusaded against abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and modern science that conflicted with their teachings. Extreme free-market economic theories rejecting government intervention and venerating hard work and success in the Calvinist tradition were also embraced by many followers. Within this community of extreme views, no family was more extreme or more active than the DeVoses. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
606:CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.
What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult. ~ William Gibson,#NFDB
607:Because a Christian sometimes stops short of the Cross in his spiritual conflicts, he fails to defeat the enemy and remains unfruitful and unhappy, until by some special intervention of the great Restorer, he is again brought, in spirit, to that place where God first met him, and welcomed him in Jesus in the fulness of forgiveness and of peace. No intermediate experience, how truthful soever in its character, will meet his case. It is at the cross alone that we regain a thorough right mindedness about ourselves as well as about God. If we would glorify him, we must "hold fast the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end, "Heb 3:14. Arthur Pridham. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
608:In July 1900, at the time of the intervention against the Boxers, between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese were drowned at Blagoveshchensk when they were forced by whip-wielding Cossacks and local Russian police to swim across the wide and fast-flowing Amur to the Chinese side. No boats were provided and those who resisted or refused to get in the water were shot or cut down with sabres. This little-known incident, a harbinger of so many twentieth-century massacres, lay bare the utter contempt with which the Russians regarded all Asiatic peoples. As Nikolai Gondatti, the governor of Tomsk, explained in 1911: ‘My task is to make sure that there are lots of Russians and few yellows here. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
609:Scholars in South Asian Studies departments and liberal think-tanks see India through a secular lens based on Western ideas of human rights. They deploy subaltern studies and postmodern theories to deconstruct the Indian state as a catastrophe constructed artificially by colonialism, and to show its very nature as oppressive, undemocratic, inherently anti-minority, anti-women and anti-Dalit. They export these models to their Indian counterparts, forming a self-sustaining system. They also feed these visions into media and government hearings. Thus, these two supposedly opposing intellectual streams converge to provide an image of India as a frontier necessitating Western intervention. ~ Rajiv Malhotra, #NFDB
610:Intervention Allies
When john howard said
let’s have an intervention
the women shouted yes!
we’re sick of the drinking
the weekend footy trips away
happy hours in hotels
without bringing their pay home to us
and sometimes losing their jobs
when they don’t know when to stop
we’re sick of the sarcasm
the fights the occasional black eye
their priority for their mates
over us and the children
we’re sick of their drunken breath
exploding in unjustified abuse
the words that can’t be retrieved
when he crawls back into bed
Yes the women shouted
let’s have the intervention
The Aboriginal women
weren’t so sure
~ Ali Eckermann,#NFDB
611:Just shut up.”
But he doesn’t. “I’m not saying you should do anything. And that’s why I stepped in and didn’t let you bring her home.”
His tone turns serious.
“All kidding aside, Pike,” he goes on, “she is exactly your type. You shouldn’t be alone with her.”
Yeah.
I know.
I just hope he’s the only person who’s noticed.
“Thanks for the intervention,” I tell him, “but even if I were attracted to her, I’m capable of controlling myself.”
“You’re not seeing yourself from my perspective.” He looks out the front windshield, solemn. “You look at each other like…”
“Like?”
He swallows, an unusually troubled pinch to his brow. “Like the two of you have your own language. ~ Penelope Douglas,#NFDB
612:There is no fact, no detail of our life too sordid for God's intervention. God has seen murder. God has seen rape. God has seen drug addiction's and alcoholism's utter degradation. God is available to us no matter what our circumstances. God can find us in a crack house. God can find us crumpled in a doorway or cowering on a park bench. We need only reach out to discover that God reaches back. We are led a step at a time even when we feel we are alone. Sometimes God talks to us through people. Sometimes God reaches us through circumstances or coincidence. God has a million ways to reach out to us, and when we are open to it, we begin to sense the touch of God coming to us from all directions. ~ Julia Cameron, #NFDB
613:Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War. ~ John Lewis Gaddis, #NFDB
614:While Mbembe warns that pan-Africanism, by contrast, has become “institutionalized and ossified” and can slip easily and dangerously into nativism, we can perhaps also see that its longer history of Africa-centered engagement creates a more stable foundation—which, unlike Afropolitanism, is less likely to be used for aesthetic purposes alone. Afropolitanism, it seems, is a portmanteau in more ways than one: it is a general brand of cosmopolitanism cloaked in African style, as well as a literal “coat hanger” for changing fashions. Hence Wainaina’s intervention, his exorcism of this ghost that several years ago could have perhaps been seen as a lively spirit. Where does literature fit into this debate? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
615:Attacks from adverse forces are inevitable: you have to take them as tests on your way and go courageously through the ordeal. The struggle may be hard, but when you come out of it, you have gained something, you have advanced a step. There is even a necessity for the existence of the hostile forces. They make your determination stronger, your aspiration clearer.
"It is true, however, that they exist because you gave them reason to exist. So long as there is something in you which answers to them, their intervention is perfectly legitimate. If nothing in you responded, if they had no hold upon any part of your nature, they would retire and leave you.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1929-1931, (5 May 1929),#NFDB
616:I am convinced that political and economic policies involving the forced redistribution of wealth via government intervention are neither right nor safe. Such policies are both unethical and ineffective…. On the surface it would seem that socialists are on God's side. Unfortunately, their programs and their means foster greater poverty even though their hearts remain loyal to eliminating poverty. The tragic fallacy that invades socialist thinking is that there is a necessary, causal connection between the wealth of the wealthy and the poverty of the poor. Socialists assume that one man's wealth is based on another man's poverty; therefore, to stop poverty and help the poor man, we must have socialism.4 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
617:The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor or that the woman's body is somehow "inadequate" - what I call the "woman's body as a lemon" assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs. ~ Ina May Gaskin, #NFDB
618:Three people were going to the guillotine. The first was a lawyer, who was led to the platform, blindfolded, and had his head put on the block. The executioner pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. To avoid a messy lawsuit, the authorities allowed the lawyer to go free. The next man to the guillotine was a priest. They put his head on the block and pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. The blade didn’t come down. They thought it must have been divine intervention, so they let the priest go. The third man to the guillotine was an engineer. He waived his right to a blindfold, so they led him to the guillotine and put his head on the block. As he lay there, he said, “Hey, wait. I think I see your problem. ~ Garrison Keillor, #NFDB
619:We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system. The surgeon Atul Gawande wrote in a devastating New Yorker article on aging that “there have been dozens of best-selling books on aging but they tend to have titles like ‘Younger Next Year,’ ‘The Fountain of Age,’ ‘Ageless,’ ‘The Sexy Years.’ Still, there are costs to averting our eyes from the realities. For one thing, we put off changes that we need to make as a society. . . . In thirty years, there will be as many people over eighty as there are under five. ~ Caitlin Doughty, #NFDB
620:A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences, followed by apologies about the “unforeseen” aspect of the consequences, then to another intervention to correct the secondary effects, leading to an explosive series of branching “unforeseen” responses, each one worse than the preceding one. Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
621:In the United States medical treatment is the third highest cause of death (iatrogenic death) after cancer and heart disease. So, despite our undoubted progress in understanding the chemistry and biological structure of the body, and great advances in the techniques of medical intervention, we are not exceeding the achievements of medieval doctors as much as we might expect. In their terms we are doing worse, because the objective of their care was not necessarily to save the body (which would, of course, be wonderful) but to help save the soul by allowing patients to know the hour of their death, and prepare for it. This was itself a genuine medical skill and, again, one that depended on seeing the patient as a human being. ~ Terry Jones, #NFDB
622:Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity—particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not political, but risk-management based. I do not have a political affiliation or allegiance to a specific party; rather, I am introducing the idea of harm and fragility into the vocabulary so we can formulate appropriate policies to ensure we don’t end up blowing up the planet and ourselves. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
623:She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
624:People didn't want to think about boarding schools--the era of forced assimilation was supposed to be over. But then again, kids from chaotic families didn't get to school, or get sleep, or real food, or homework help. And they'd never get out of the chaos--whatever brand of chaos, from addictions to depression to failing health--unless they got to school. To succeed in school, kids had to attend regularly, eat regularly, sleep regularly, and study regularly. Maybe the boarding schools of the earliest days had stripped away culture from the vulnerable, had left adults with little understanding of how to give love or parent, but what now? Kids needed some intervention, but not the wrenching away of foster families and outside adoptions. ~ Louise Erdrich, #NFDB
625:What rubbish, mon père. Does he think God actually answers prayers? God has no time to listen to petty grievances. Did he think that God would drop everything to look into his little life? Did he hope for divine intervention every time something went wrong? You see, this is the problem, mon père. People take things too literally. They expect the universe to revolve around their little preoccupations. They have no sense of the scale of things, no sense of their own insignificance. So God didn’t answer your prayers? Do not imagine you are alone. God doesn’t care that you are alone, or that you are suffering. If God made the stars, then why would He care whether or not you fast for Lent, or whether you drink alcohol, or even if you live or die— ~ Joanne Harris, #NFDB
626:The timing of Thomas Lewis’ illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood’s small intestines had run through the cesspool at 40 Broad. When baby Lewis died, the connection had died with it. But when her husband fell ill, Sarah Lewis began emptying the buckets of soiled water in the cesspool all over again. If Snow had not persuaded the Board of Governors to remove the handle when he did, the disease might have torn through the neighborhood all over again, the well water restocked with a fresh supply of V. cholerae. And so Snow’s intervention did not just help bring the outbreak to a close. It also prevented a second attack. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
627:The principle that every people, insofar as it is possible, must be allowed to live as they want is not based on any notions of cultural relativism, in which all ways of doing things are viewed as being of equal value for all peoples, everywhere.
It is, instead, strictly pragmatic: war and revolutions are without exception worse than the alternative, which is simply to leave the development of each society to the people who are actually living there.
For this reason we should not wage wars or foment revolutions and otherwise subvert the established orders in others’ lands.
In return for this direct opposition to intervention and violence against cultures and peoples, we demand the same for ourselves. Mass immigration to Europe must cease. ~ Daniel Friberg,#NFDB
628:Not only does the messenger who is also a slave subordinate his own will to that of his Lord; there is nothing in his mind or in his memory that could obstruct the free passage of the revelation. Muhammad is 'abd and rasul; he is also nabi al-ummi, the unlettered Prophet; a blank page set before the divine pen. On this page there is no mark made by any other pen, no trace of profane or indirect knowledge. A prophet does not borrow knowledge from the human store, nor is he a man who learns in the slow human way and then transmits his learning. His knowledge derives from a direct intervention of the Divine in the human order, a tajalli, or pouring out of the truth upon a being providentially disposed to receive it and strong enough to transmit it. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton, #NFDB
629:While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
630:Thus it went as she made her way around the biomes of Ring B. Always she found that her mother the great engineer had made some crucial intervention, finding solutions to problems that had stymied the locals. Devi had the knack of sidestepping dilemmas, Badim said when Freya mentioned this, by moving back several logical steps, and coming at the situation from some new way not yet noticed. “It’s sometimes called avoiding acquiescence,” Badim said. “Acquiescence means accepting the framing of a problem, and working on it from within the terms of the frame. It’s a kind of mental economy, but also a kind of sloth. And Devi does not have that kind of sloth, as you know. She is always interrogating the framing of the problem. Acquiescence is definitely not her mode. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
631:The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect. ~ Ina May Gaskin, #NFDB
632:A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence -- often the sole evidence offered -- of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake," when emergency "compels" it to supersede other decision making processes. Such a tableau simple ignores the possibility that there are political incentives for the production and distribution of "emergencies" to justify expansions of power as well as to use episodic emergencies as a reason for creating enduring government institutions. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
633:For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother’s statement, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child. ~ Judith Lewis Herman, #NFDB
634:The typical undergraduate microeconomics textbook describes cases where markets are unlikely to produce efficient outcomes. These textbooks often claim that, in principle, government intervention could solve the market failure. However, these textbooks also assume that government both (1) has full information about how to solve the problem and (2) has the good faith to use its power to solve the problem. It is as if the textbooks say omniscient angels can intervene to solve market failures. Thus, when undergraduate textbooks recommend government intervention, they mean intervention by idealized governments, not necessarily by real governments. In the real world, libertarians believe, sometimes the best response to serious market failure is just to suck it up and live with it. ~ Jason Brennan, #NFDB
635:You can become what you really desire because your divine potential or, as Paul would call it, the Christ, is within you always. Not some of the time, not if you take a class and acquire more knowledge. Human potential studies don’t put potentiality in anyone, but they help you to understand the potential that is always present. You can become what you really desire to be, not because of some divine intervention, not because of some newfangled metaphysical system you’re going to learn, not because someone puts his hands upon you and works some spiritual magic. You can do this because your divine potential, the Christ of you, is always present within you as the Allness of the infinite process expressing as you. This is an important principle by which you can deal with life. ~ Eric Butterworth, #NFDB
636:I will never be able to reduce life with God to a formula for the same reason I cannot reduce my marriage to a formula. It is a living, growing relationship with another free being, very different from me and yet sharing much in common. No relationship has proved more challenging than marriage. I am tempted sometimes to wish for an "old-fashioned" marriage, in which roles and expectations are more clearly spelled out and need not always be negotiated. I sometimes yearn for an intervention from outside which would decisively change one of the characteristics that bring my wife and me pain. So far, that has not happened. We wake up each day and continue the journey on ground that grows incrementally more solid with each step. Love works that way, with partners visible or invisible. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
637:The local cultures around the world that are carried by today’s immigrant poor have been eroded by centuries of colonialism and are in danger of being extinguished by the onslaught of global capitalism’s drive for commodified homogeneity. The church must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a “scattered” human family by nurturing diversity, and must reaffirm the Pentecostal vocation of native-language empowerment. For in the great narrative of the Bible, God’s intervention is always subversive of the centralizing project of empire and always on the side of the excluded and outcast, the refugee and immigrant. The Spirit has busted out and busted up business as usual many times since Babel and Jerusalem, and she is waiting to do the same in our own time—if our tongues would but dare to loosen. ~ Ched Myers, #NFDB
638:Sitting in his parents’ living room and fending off setup attempts
made Zev realize there was a downside to empowering his pack to
speak their minds—now he was forced to listen to them. Maybe he’d
have been better off leaving things as they’d always been. Then
nobody, and certainly not a female, even if she was an elder and a
relative, would dare speak to the Alpha in such a condescending way.
Zev dismissed the thought as soon as it entered his head. He was
glad his family cared, glad his grandmother felt confident enough to
question him, and glad members of his pack felt confident enough to
share their feelings. The pack was stronger for it, even if it meant Zev
had to endure this emotionally debilitating family intervention. ~ Cardeno C,#NFDB
639:It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
640:These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
641:My personal position on counterinsurgency in general, and on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, could therefore be summarized as "Never again, but..." That is, we should avoid any future large-scale, unilateral military intervention in the Islamic world, for all the reasons already discussed. But, recognizing that while our conventional war-fighting superiority endures, any sensible enemy will choose to fight us in this manner, we should hold on to the knowledge and corporate memory so painfully acquired, across all the agencies of all the Coalition partners, in Afghanistan and Iraq. And should we find ourselves (by error or necessity) in a similar position once again, then the best practices we have rediscovered in current campaigns represent an effective approach: effective, but not recommended. ~ David Kilcullen, #NFDB
642:Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment. In some cases, the appropriate medical intervention to mitigate a disease might be to alter the environment to make it “fit” an organismal form (building alternative architectural realms for those with dwarfism; imagining alternative educational landscapes for children with autism). In other cases, conversely, it might mean changing genes to fit environments. In yet other cases, the match may be impossible to achieve: the severest forms of genetic illnesses, such as those caused by nonfunction of essential genes, are incompatible with all environments. It is a peculiar modern fallacy to imagine that the definitive solution to illness is to change nature—i.e., genes—when the environment is often more malleable. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
643:The history of ecosystems and the whole biosystem may be viewed as an aspect of multifold phylogenesis. In the human world, there is a very strong two-way interaction in the much faster processes of technological intervention in the environment, and the conditioning of man by his technologically changed living space. Such a large-scale feedback interaction in the human world now seems to demand a shift from the one-way causal concept of energy-pushing technology (changing the environment) to the mutual-causal concept of a cybernetic technology—recycling, tapping natural energy flows (hydropower, solar and tidal energy) instead of liberating energy stored in fossil or nuclear fuel, biological production processes beyond agriculture, and so forth. ~ Erich Jantsch, Evolution and Consciousness - Human Systems in Transition, #NFDB
644:Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment. In some cases, the appropriate medical intervention to mitigate a disease might be to alter the environment to make it “fit” an organismal form (building alternative architectural realms for those with dwarfism; imagining alternative educational landscapes for children with autism). In other cases, conversely, it might mean changing genes to fit environments. In yet other cases, the match may be impossible to achieve: the severest forms of genetic illnesses, such as those caused by nonfunction of essential genes, are incompatible with all environments. It is a peculiar modern fallacy to imagine that the definitive solution to illness is to change nature—i.e., genes—when the environment is often more malleable. 10. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
645:Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater's apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II--and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation's sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions. ~ David Frum, #NFDB
646:According to Vedder and Galloway, prior to the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, black and white construction unemployment registered similar levels. After the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, however, black unemployment rose relative to that of whites.[31] Vedder and Galloway also argue that 1930 to 1950 was a period of unprecedented and rapidly increasing government intervention in the economy. This period saw enactment of the bulk of legislation restraining the setting of private wage, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, Davis-Bacon Act, Walsh-Healey Act, and National Labor Relations Act. The Social Security Act also played a role, forcing employers to pay for a newly imposed fringe benefit.[32] Vedder and Galloway also note that this period saw a rapid increase in the black/white unemployment ratio. ~ Walter E Williams, #NFDB
647:Mary slips her handbag onto her shoulder and she straightens her suit jacket as
I digest this, and then she adds very quietly, “If you ask me, if the state really
wanted to help women like your sister, wouldn’t they put the thousands of
dollars they’ll spend on her trial and incarcerating her into early intervention
programs, or research into addiction? Or Lord, if it’s really all about the baby—
wouldn’t you funnel the funds into setting up a better foster care system or
maybe some parenting classes that actually help?”
“So why don’t they?” I ask, and Mary sighs and shakes her head.
“Well, it’s a little bit like this. Half the town is on fire, and the townspeople
are all so busy hollering for the fire brigade that no one thinks to find out why
people are still playing with matches. ~ Kelly Rimmer,#NFDB
648:climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert, one of the coauthors on the recent National Research Council report on geoengineering by solar radiation management,9 put it, trying to do this anytime soon would be “wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad.” Though there are a few loud voices advocating them, there is not really very much support for these risky quick-fix geoengineering schemes, and as people look into them more carefully, this support will continue to decline. The National Research Council reports released in 2015 endorsed further study but also stated strongly that none of the intrusive climate-intervention schemes should be implemented. The conversation is valuable if anything because it highlights the uncertainties, the incompleteness of our knowledge, and the fact that we really have no choice but to control our CO2 habit. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
649:although they do not fear them to such an extent as to be drawn to the commission of like iniquities, nay, not by any threats or violence soever; yet those very deeds which they refuse to share in the commission of, they often decline to find fault with, when possibly they might by finding fault prevent their commission. They abstain from interference, because they fear that, if it fail of good effect, their own safety or reputation may be damaged or destroyed; not because they see that their preservation and good name are needful, that they may be able to influence those who need their instruction, but rather because they weakly relish the flattery and respect of men, and fear the judgments of the people, and the pain or death of the body; that is to say, their non-intervention is the result of selfishness, and not of love. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
650:Of all the misapplications of the word “conservative” in recent memory, Nisbet wrote in the 1980s, the “most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of ‘conservative’ to…great increases in military expenditures.… For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and of an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed. ~ Thomas E Woods Jr, #NFDB
651:Looks like they might cancel school on Monday. Woot!
Information like this coming from Lucy is generally pretty reliable, since she happens to live right next door to Mrs. Crawford, the principal of Magnolia Branch High.
Yay, I can sit home and watch more Weather Channel! I text back.
This is an intervention--step away from the TV! NOW!
I laugh aloud at that. It’s such a typical Lucy-like thing to say.
My mom’s worried about you. Wants you to pack up and come over here.
Can’t. But Ryder’s coming over if the storm gets bad.
Lucy’s next text is just a line of googly eyes.
Not funny, I type, even though it kind of us.
You two can plan your wedding menu. Choose your linens. Stuff like that, she texts, followed by a smiley face.
I gaze at my phone with a frown. Also not funny. ~ Kristi Cook,#NFDB
652:Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (pages 351–357). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties. ~ Daron Acemo lu, #NFDB
653:A month after the fall of the Berlin Wall the US invaded Panama, killing a couple of hundred or maybe a couple of thousand people, destroying poor neighborhoods, reinstating a regime of bankers and narcotraffickers—drug peddling and money laundering shot way up, as congressional research bureaus soon advised—and so on. That’s normal, a footnote to history, but there were two differences: one difference is that the pretexts were different. This was the first intervention since the beginning of the Cold War that was not undertaken to defend ourselves from the Russians. This time, it was to defend ourselves from Hispanic narcotraffickers. Secondly, the US recognized right away that it was much freer to invade without any concern that somebody, the Russians, might react somewhere in the world, as former Undersecretary of State Abrams happily pointed out. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
654:Once the habit is ingrained and you become the starter, the center of the circle, you will find more and more things to notice, to instigate, and to initiate. Momentum builds and you get better at generating it. If you go to bed at night knowing that people are expecting you to initiate things all day the next day, you’ll wake up with a list. And as you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. What might be considered a board-level decision at one of your competitors’ companies gets done as a matter of course. What might be reserved for a manager’s intervention gets handled at the customer level, saving you time and money (and generating customer joy). This incredibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating, is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a defensible business asset. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
655:Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the "superman" Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche's Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to "create a god for yourself out of your seven devils." Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~ Carl Jung, "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942), CW 13, § 163., #NFDB
656:Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of raeding: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
657:golf, oddly, gave Updike a spiritual thrill; from the very beginning, he was acutely sensitive to what he called “the eerie religious latency” of the game; when he wrote about it, he invariably invoked the supernatural. “Intercession” set the pattern, ending with a curse and turning on a seeming miracle. On his second time around, long after his progress across the course has become “a jumbled rout,” Paul yearns for divine intervention: All he wanted was that his drive be perfect; it was very little to ask. If miracles, in this age of faint faith, could enter anywhere, it would be here, where the causal fabric was thinnest, in the quick collisions and abrupt deflections of a game. Paul drove high but crookedly over the treetops. It dismayed him to realize that the angle of a metal surface striking a rubber sphere counted for more with God than the keenest human hope. ~ Adam Begley, #NFDB
658:Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, warned in his zeitgeist-shifting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that without aggressive government intervention economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere was likely to rise inexorably, to the point where the small portion of the population that currently held a growing slice of the world’s wealth would in the foreseeable future own not just a quarter, or a third, but perhaps half of the globe’s wealth, or more. He predicted that the fortunes of those with great wealth, and their inheritors, would increase at a faster rate of return than the rate at which wages would grow, creating what he called “patrimonial capitalism.” This dynamic, he predicted, would widen the growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots to levels mimicking the aristocracies of old Europe and banana republics. ~ Jane Mayer, #NFDB
659:The larger point is that as society and the economy go through this shift there will not only be less economic opportunity to fulfill your role as “father, protector, provider, and bread winner,” there will be less appreciation for such roles. Therefore, to make sure you have purpose and agency in life, you need to find hobbies and interests that are not dependent on economic circumstances and cannot be supplanted by government intervention. Fun – Because of the Darwinistic programming you have, many men will approach life from the angle of attaining financial security first, and THEN relaxing and enjoying life. You will get everything in order, get your degree, get your career, pay off your debts, pay off your house, and then, once financially stable, finally permit yourself to enjoy life. There is just one minor problem with that approach: Life doesn’t work that way. Not ~ Aaron Clarey, #NFDB
660:Aden St. George managed to avoid having to kill the guard stationed outside his quarry’s crypt-like cell, although the thug outside the caves hadn’t been so lucky. Still, that bastard had tried to knife him in the gut so Aden could hardly be faulted for returning the favor. And knowing what he did about the men who’d kidnapped Lady Vivien Shaw, he wouldn’t waste his fitful conscience on that brutal but necessary act. Killing was not a favorite pastime, but only rarely did it disturb his sleep.
Tonight’s rescue mission carried no inconvenient opportunities for remorse since a woman’s life and innocence hung in the balance. True, the gossips whispered that Lady Vivien’s innocence was an open question, but what would happen to her if Aden failed wasn’t. Without his intervention she would disappear into a nightmarish life, forever beyond the protection of her family and friends. ~ Vanessa Kelly,#NFDB
661:A USEFUL WAY to think of an orbiting object like the International Space Station is that it is going fast enough that the force of gravity keeps it curving around the Earth. We think of objects in orbit as being stable, staying at the same distance above the planet, but in reality the small amount of atmospheric drag that exists at 250 miles above the Earth’s surface pulls on us even when we are whizzing along at 17,500 miles per hour. Without intervention our orbit would tighten until we eventually crashed into the Earth’s surface. This will be allowed to happen some day when NASA and our international partners decide that the station has finished its useful life. It will be deorbited in a controlled manner to make sure that when it hits the planet, it will be in a safe area in the Pacific Ocean, and I hope to be there to watch. This is how the Russian space station Mir ended its life. ~ Scott Kelly, #NFDB
662:A close examination of the instructions in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta reveals that the meditator is never instructed to interfere actively with what happens in the mind. If a mental hindrance arises, for example, the task of satipaṭṭhāna contemplation is to know that the hindrance is present, to know what has led to its arising, and to know what will lead to its disappearance. A more active intervention is no longer the domain of satipaṭṭhāna, but belongs rather to the province of right effort (sammā vāyāma).
The need to distinguish clearly between a first stage of observation and a second stage of taking action is, according to the Buddha, an essential feature of his way of teaching. The simple reason for this approach is that only the preliminary step of calmly assessing a situation without immediately reacting enables one to undertake the appropriate action. ~ An layo,#NFDB
663:One of Sherrington's greatest pupils, Sir John Eccles, held similar views. Eccles won a Nobel Prize for his seminal contributions to our understanding of how nerve cells communicate across synapses, or nerve junctions. In his later years, he worked toward a deeper understanding of the mechanisms mediating the interaction of mind and brain-including the elusive notion of free will. Standard neurobiology tells us that tiny vesicles in the nerve endings contain chemicals called neurotransmitters; in response to an electrical impulse, some of the vesicles release their contents, which cross the synapse and transmit the impulse to the adjoining neuron. In 1986 Eccles proposed that the probability of neurotransmitter release depended on quantum mechanical processes, which can be influenced by the intervention of the mind. This, Eccles said, provided a basis for the action of a free will. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
664:No. No!” he says.
“I . . .” He looks wildly around the room. For inspiration? For divine intervention? I don’t know.
“You can’t go. Ana, I love you!”
“I love you, too, Christian, it’s just—”
“No . . . no!” he says in desperation and puts both hands on his head. “Christian . . .”
“No,” he breathes, his eyes wide with panic, and suddenly he drops to his knees in front of me, head bowed, long-fingered hands spread out on his thighs. He takes a deep breath and doesn’t move. What?
“Christian, what are you doing?”
He continues to stare down, not looking at me.
“Christian! What are you doing?”
My voice is high-pitched. He doesn’t move.
“Christian, look at me!” I command in panic. His head sweeps up without hesitation, and he regards me passively with his cool gray gaze—he’s almost serene . . . expectant.
Holy Fuck . . . Christian. The submissive. ~ E L James,#NFDB
665:We chose to focus on creative problem solving for several reasons. One was its obvious utility, an important consideration at that juncture because of those who doubted that psychedelics were good for anything at all. Besides, many of the spontaneous occurrences we had observed were of this problem-solving kind. Finally, extensive research activity in the field of creativity had yielded a number of objective measures to use. The study attempted to shed light on three questions: Can the psychedelic experience enhance creative problem-solving ability, and if so, what is the concrete evidence of enhancement? Can this enhancement lead to concrete, valid, and feasible solutions assessable by the pragmatic criteria of modern industry and mainstream science? In working with creative individuals, would there be changes indicative of increased creativity continuing after the psychedelic intervention? ~ James Fadiman, #NFDB
666:Pakistan first tried to seize Kashmir in 1947. As British decolonization of South Asia loomed, the sovereign of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, hoped to keep the country independent of either of the two new states, India or Pakistan. As Singh held out, marauders from Pakistan’s tribal areas invaded the territory of Jammu-Kashmir in hopes of taking it for Pakistan and were supported extensively by Pakistan’s nascent provincial and federal governments. This attack expanded into the first war between India and Pakistan. When it was over and the cease-fire line was drawn, Pakistan controlled about one-third of Kashmir, and India controlled the remainder. Although the war ended in a stalemate with international intervention, Pakistan may have rightly concluded that the strategy of using irregular fighters succeeded. After all, Pakistan had claimed at least some part of Kashmir, which it would not have had ~ C Christine Fair, #NFDB
667:Mexico is a lawless place. I don’t care what the UN says, or what the State Department travel advisories tell you. The fact is that Mexico, as a whole, is a narco-state run by powerful regional cartels, with a hollow and largely irrelevant central government that is nothing more than window-dressing to appease the international community. Freedom is for those who can afford it, law is for sale, and what is fair is determined by who is most powerful. That’s the reality of Mexico. Cancun, Playa, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta- they are all much better than the interior of Mexico, but that is only because their survival depends on a steady flow of tourists with money to burn. To protect that, the government does a good job maintaining the appearance of western-style law and order through the direct threat of massive military intervention. Underneath it all, those places are not much different from the rest of Mexico. ~ Tucker Max, #NFDB
668:surprised about it. The case presents no unsettled question of law that requires our intervention. Need I say more?” He threw up his hands. “In your opinion?” A tinge of red eased across Ramsey’s face. “In the published opinions of this Court over the last fifty years. All I ask is that you accord the Court’s precedents the respect they deserve.” “You’ll find no one who holds this institution in higher regard than I do.” “Very happy to hear that.” “And I’ll be delighted to entertain your thoughts further on the Chance case after we hear oral argument.” Ramsey looked at her dully. “It will be a very short discussion, considering that it doesn’t take long to say yes or no. Bluntly speaking, at the end of the day, I’ll have at least five votes and you won’t.” “Well, I convinced three other justices to vote to hear the case.” Ramsey looked as though he might laugh. “You’ll quickly learn that the difference between votes ~ David Baldacci, #NFDB
669:The obsession with control was an overarching flaw in the U.S. occupation, from start to finish. In any postconflict international intervention, there is always a certain tension between legitimacy and control. Because it started with such gaping legitimacy deficits within Iraq and internationally, the American-led occupation needed to be especially sensitive to this problem, which could only have been overcome by either surrendering a good measure of control to a more collaborative structure, or by rapid and decisive progress to reconstruct the country and hand it fully back to Iraqis. Such a rapid transformation was not in the cards; the situation was too intractable, and the United States, in any case, lacked the wisdom and was unwilling to commit the resources to bring it off. Still, for most of the first year of occupation, the American administration opted for control over legitimacy whenever the trade-off presented itself. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
670:Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand. To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box. They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society. Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for “democratic” intervention in the affairs of the people.12 ~ Murray N Rothbard, #NFDB
671:Some form of natural teleology, a type of explanation whose intelligibility I briefly defended in the last chapter, would be an alternative to a miracle— either in the sense of a wildly improbable fluke or in the sense of a divine intervention in the natural order. The tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the nonteleological laws of physics and chemistry. This seems like an admissible conjecture given the available evidence. And once there are beings who can respond to value, the rather different teleology of intentional action becomes part of the historical picture , resulting in the creation of new value. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future—though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
672:Often when people think of social involvement, they think of providing something that will meet people’s needs in some way. We will do something for the poor. We will provide for them food, furniture, help, education, skills, or whatever. These can all be good starting points. But we need to go further. Poverty is about marginalization and powerlessness. And some forms of charitable intervention can leave people marginalized. They can reinforce a sense of powerlessness. Something is done for the poor. They remain passive. They are not becoming contributors to society. They become more dependent on others. So social involvement is more than presenting people with solutions. Good social involvement is helping people to find their own solutions. We want people to be proactive in their lives and to regain their God-given dignity as human beings made to contribute to community life. So at the heart of good social action is the participation of those in ~ Tim Chester, #NFDB
673:It is similar to one brother asking another, “Why did you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.” The second brother then asks, “Why didn’t you grow up to be a drunk?” The answer is “Because Dad was a drunk.” Some more complete answers are found in Robert Ressler’s classic book Whoever Fights Monsters. He speaks of the tremendous importance of the early puberty period for boys. Before then, the anger of these boys might have been submerged and without focus, perhaps turned inward in the form of depression, perhaps (as in most cases) just denied, to emerge later. But during puberty, this anger collides with another powerful force, one of the most powerful in nature: sexuality. Even at this point, say Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest. I can say from experience that it doesn’t take much. ~ Gavin de Becker, #NFDB
674:There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the following premises: The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history. ~ Francis S Collins, #NFDB
675:We end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating moderniest slogans stripped of all depth...The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do not harm; even more we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in decision making (p.10).
Their three flaws 1) they think in statics not dynamics 2) they think in low, not high dimensions 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions....The first flaw is they are incapable in thinking in second steps and unaware of the need of them...The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations. The third flaw is they can't forecast the evolution of those one helps by attaching, or the magnification one gets from feedback. (p.9) ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,#NFDB
676:I stood here
in this kitchen
elaborating and embellishing this fantasy for some time instead of taking responsibility for what was happening around me because in truth what really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and proper alignment, everything gathering towards some point of chaos beyond which it would be impossible to restore the place to its proper order and yet I stood looking at it, locked into a silent battle with the house itself and all the things which were slowly vacating their proper place, furniture and dishes and cutlery all over the place, curtains hanging awry and chairs and tables strewn about while books and papers slid across the floor, everything slowly shifting through the house as if they had a meeting to keep somewhere else, possibly in some higher realm where all this chaos would resolve into a refined harmony which had no need of my hand or intervention ~ Mike McCormack,#NFDB
677:The consequence model, the logical one, the amoral one, the one which refuses any divine intervention, is a problem really for just the (hypothetical) logician. You see, towards God I would rather be grateful for Heaven (which I do not deserve) than angry about Hell (which I do deserve). By this the logician within must choose either atheism or theism, but he cannot possibly through good reason choose anti-theism. For his friend in this case is not at all mathematical law: the law in that 'this equation, this path will consequently direct me to a specific point'; over the alternative and the one he denies, 'God will send me wherever and do it strictly for his own sovereign amusement.' The consequence model, the former, seeks the absence of God, which orders he cannot save one from one's inevitable consequences; hence the angry anti-theist within, 'the logical one', the one who wants to be master of his own fate, can only contradict himself - I do not think it wise to be angry at math. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
678:V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion. On the old side, you’re left with wrinkled age and whatever fractured, end-of-the-line knowledge might have accrued. Wisdom as exhaustion. And on the other side—which V still remembers with molecular vividness—youth and yearning and urgency for something not yet fully defined. Undiluted hope and desire. But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger. —I’ll assume you’re right, James says. But I wouldn’t know much about long family relationships. When I was ~ Charles Frazier, #NFDB
679:To sum up: the respective inadequacies of materialism and theism as transcendent conceptions, and the impossibility of abandoning the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe, lead to the hope for an expanded but still naturalistic understanding that avoids psychophysical reductionism. The essential character of such an understanding would be to explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge neither as accidental side effects of the physical laws of nature nor as the result of intentional intervention in nature from without but as an unsurprising if not inevitable consequence of the order that governs the natural world from within. That order would have to include physical law, but if life is not just a physical phenomenon, the origin and evolution of life and mind will not be explainable by physics and chemistry alone. An expanded, but still unified, form of explanation will be needed, and I suspect it will have to include teleological elements. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
680:So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes. What was even more distracting and confusing was that the job of punishing the expressions of patriarchy, racism, and poverty was assigned to the police, who also cause violence. This responsibility, in some cases, produced additional acts of violence on the part of the government, like “stop and frisk,” and racial profiling that committed violence in the name of claiming to fight violence. These laws also produced more access for the state into the homes and families of the poor, and more incarceration of Black and other poor men. Instead of empowering women and the poor, the fate of the traumatized was increasingly in the hands of the power of the police acting as a group to represent oppressive systems. Now, ~ Sarah Schulman, #NFDB
681:The most significant innovation in Chisholm’s overhaul of the office involves an “early intervention” program, which begins after a defendant is arrested but before arraignment. Each defendant is given an eight-question assessment, which can be conducted in about fifteen minutes and is compared to the information on the rap sheet and in the police report. The questions include: “Two or more prior adult convictions?” “Arrested under age sixteen?” “Currently unemployed?” “Some criminal friends?” A low score can lead to an offer of “diversion”—a kind of unofficial probation that, if successfully completed, leaves the individual without a criminal record. A high score leads to a second, more detailed, fifty-four-question assessment. The questions include: “Ever walked away/escaped from a halfway house?” “Were you ever suspended or expelled from school?” “Does your financial situation contribute to your stress?” “Tell me the best thing about your supervisor/teacher.” Results of the assessment may ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
682:According to the current view, the maintenance of sound monetary conditions is only possible with a 'credit balance of payments'.
The confutation of this and related objections is implicit in the Quantity Theory and in Gresham's Law. The Quantity Theory shows that money can never permanently flow abroad from a country in which only metallic money is used (the 'purely metallic currency' of the Currency Principle). The tightness in the domestic market called forth by the efflux of part of the stock of money reduces the prices of commodities, and so restricts importation and encourages exportation, until there is once more enough money at home. The precious metals which perform the function of money are distributed among individuals, and consequently among separate countries, according to the extent and intensity of the demand of each for money. State intervention to assure to the community the necessary quantity of money by regulating its international nlovements is supererogatory. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
683:Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connection with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological facilities that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic operations of trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy.
Just as these capabilities are formed in relationships with other people, they must be reformed in such relationships.
The first principle of recovery is empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure.
Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor founder because this basic principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest. ~ Judith Lewis Herman,#NFDB
684:The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it before assets have increased in cost. By the time it reaches ordinary people, the money is worth less. This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect – after Richard Cantillon, who noticed that the creation of paper money in the South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first. Frisby argues that the process of money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. ‘This is not the free market at work, but a gross, unintended economic distortion caused by the colossal government intervention.’ The ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
685:In April 2004, Google had one of its countless minicrises, over an anti-Semitic website called Jew Watch. When someone typed “Jew” into Google’s search box, the first result was often a link to that hate site. Critics urged Google to exclude it in its search results. Brin publicly grappled with the dilemma. His view on what Google should do—maintain the sanctity of search—was rational, but a tremor in his voice betrayed how much he was troubled that his search engine was sending people to a cesspool of bigotry. “My reaction was to be really upset about it,” he admitted at the time. “It was certainly not something I want to see.” Then he launched into an analysis of why Google’s algorithms yielded that result, mainly because the signals triggered by the keyword “Jew” reflected the frequent use of that abbreviation as a pejorative. The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. “I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,” he said. “It’s a bad technology practice. ~ Steven Levy, #NFDB
686:The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny. ~ William F Buckley Jr, #NFDB
687:One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
688:You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
689:It is the impulse of science to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology. Genes were not abstractions anymore. They could be liberated from the genomes of organisms where they had been trapped for millennia, shuttled between species, amplified, purified, extended, shortened, altered, remixed, mutated, mixed, matched, cut, pasted, edited; they were infinitely malleable to human intervention. Genes were no longer just the subjects of study, but the instruments of study. There is an illuminated moment in the development of a child when she grasps the recursiveness of language: just as thoughts can be used to generate words, she realizes, words can be used to generate thoughts. Recombinant DNA had made the language of genetics recursive. Biologists had spent decades trying to interrogate the nature of the gene-but now it was the gene that could be used to interrogate biology. We had graduated, in short, from thinking about genes, to thinking in genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
690:What better way to lose that hangover headache than get drunk again? Oh, the joys of being Canadian with socialized health care and legal drinking age of nineteen. After a year (officially) honing that skill, I imbibed at an Olympic level. The red wine on the modular coffee table gleamed in a shaft of sunlight like its position had been ordained by the gods. I snatched up the crystal decanter, sloshing the liquid into the glass conveniently placed next to it. Once in a while, a girl could actually catch a break. I fanned myself with one hand. The myriad of lit candles seemed a bit much for Ari’s romantic encounter, but wine drinking trumped curiosity so I chugged the booze back. My entire body cheered as the cloyingly-sweet alcohol hit my system, though I hoped it wasn’t Manischewitz because hangovers on that were a bitch. I’d slugged back half the contents when I saw my mom on the far side of the room clutch her throat, eyes wide with horror. Not her usual, “you need an intervention” horror. No, her expression indicated I’d reached a whole new level of fuck-up. “Nava Liron Katz,” she gasped in full name outrage. ~ Deborah Wilde, #NFDB
691:But there are nevertheless three conclusions that seem to follow from our critical examination of the possibilities of inflationary policy. In the first place, all the aims of inflationism can be secured by other sorts of intervention in economic affairs, and secured better, and without undesirable incidental effects. If it is desired to relieve debtors, moratoria may be declared or the obligation to repay loans may be removed altogether; if it is desired to encourage exportation, export premiums may be granted; if it is desired to render importation more difficult, simple prohibition may be resorted to, or import duties levied. All these measures permit discrimination between classes of people, branches of production, and districts, and this is impossible for an inflationary policy. Inflation benefits all debtors, including the rich, and injures all creditors, including the poor; adjustment of the burden of debts by special legislation allows of differentiation. Inflation encourages the exportation of all commodities and hinders all importation; premiums, duties, and prohibitions can be employed discriminatorily. ~ Ludwig von Mises, #NFDB
692:Meanwhile, it needs to be recognized, and talked about more frankly, that for philosophy the elephant in the kitchen is organized religion. More precisely, the understanding of human condition often foretold by the blending of science and religion is inhibited by the intervention of supernatural creation stories, each defining a separate tribe. It is one thing to hold and share the elevated spiritual values of theological religion, with a belief in the divine and trust in the existence of an afterlife. It is another thing entirely to adopt a particular supernatural creation story. Faith in a creation story gives comforting membership in a tribe. But it bears stressing that not all creation stories can be true, no two can be true, and most assuredly, all are false. Each is sustained by blind tribalistic faith alone.
The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madaris, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story. ~ Edward O Wilson,#NFDB
693:it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West did nothing; nor did the West do much against the ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus because there, too, was a Russian sphere of influence. In the Western Pacific in the coming decades, morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make at least some room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands? (And barring a social-economic collapse internally, China’s military will keep on expanding.) For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom. That also will be a lesson of the South China Sea in the twenty-first century—one more that humanists do not want to hear. ~ Robert D Kaplan, #NFDB
694:Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) - that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real - thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
695:Exquisitely sensitive to her infant’s nonverbal messages, the “good” mother empathically divines the needs of her baby with near clairvoyant accuracy, relying on her capacity to regressively revive in herself this early communication channel that, Spitz felt, is lost to most adults. She senses why her infant is crying, a mystery to others, and is able to respond correctly. Each accurate reading and satisfying intervention—picking him up, feeding him, jostling him, soothing him—becomes another interaction in the essential cycle of meaning-making. Spitz saw these repetitions as also helping the infant sort out feeling states into discernible, sequential categories with beginnings and endings (for example: I was upset, then I felt better), contributing to the laying down of memory traces of recognizable experience. Thus Spitz offered psychoanalysis a very different kind of developmental progression, adding to the unfolding psychosexual sequence of drive discharge (from oral to anal to phallic to oedipal) the increasing structuralization of ego capacities which emerge, in the first year of life, within crucial transformations in the relationship to the libidinal object. ~ Stephen A Mitchell, #NFDB
696:In his brief dialogue between the King and the Queen - two of the chess piece sovereigns of the Looking Glass House - Lewis Carroll captured the complementary sides of the coin we term memory The King, having experienced a "horrifying" event (being set on a table by Alice, a relative giant whom the King could neither see nor hear), expresses absolute faith in the durability of memory. The Queen, in contrast, presents a less flattering view of the capacity: that without some intervention (a memorandum), even a salient event will be forgotten. In a rare instance, the reality experienced by the King and Queen on their side of the looking glass is reflected on the drawing room side as well. Memory is at times seemingly and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is at times seemingly indelible and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is more, in true looking glass fashion, the same past experience can at one moment impinge on consciousness unbidden and at another elude deliberate attempts to recollect it. ~ Bauer, Patricia J. (2007). Remembering the times of our lives: memory in infancy and beyond. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-5733-8. OCLC 62089961., p. 3., #NFDB
697:Charles Lewis had investigated the deaths from diphtheria of several children whose parents were Peculiar People, members of a Wesleyan sect formed in Essex in 1838. In accordance with their interpretation of a passage in St James’s Epistle, the parents had not called a doctor when their children fell ill, and instead tried to cure them through prayer and the anointment of oil. The Children’s Act of 1889 enabled the state to prosecute a parent for the ill-treatment or culpable neglect of a child, and an amendment of 1894 specified that failure to obtain medical help could be an offence. Yet all that the coroner’s court was able to do in the Peculiar People cases was give a verdict of death from natural causes – it was hard to prove that a death from diphtheria could have been prevented or even delayed by medical intervention. Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’ of having these cases reported to him when he was powerless to act, and demanded that the law be tightened up. When a Peculiar father explained to him, ‘I stand up for the Lord’, Lewis returned: ‘You can lie [down] and die, if you like, but it is cowardly, most cowardly, to allow helpless children to do so. ~ Kate Summerscale, #NFDB
698:Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
699:Fear or terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death, exhibits exactly the same effects, approaching in violence to those just mentioned, in proportion to the nearness of the cause, and the weakness of the subject. [...] From hence I conclude, that pain and fear act upon the same parts of the body, and in the same manner, though somewhat differing in degree: that pain and fear consist in an unnatural tension of the nerves; that this is sometimes accompanied with an unnatural strength, which sometimes suddenly changes into an extraordinary weakness; that these effects often come on alternately, and are sometimes mixed with each other. This is the nature of all convulsive agitations, especially in weaker subjects, which are the most liable to the severest impressions of pain and fear. The only difference between pain and terror is, that things which cause pain operate on the mind by the intervention of the body; whereas things that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the operation of the mind suggesting the danger; but both agreeing, either primarily or secondarily, in producing a tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves, they agree likewise in everything else. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
700:Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.
The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation. ~ Noam Chomsky,#NFDB
701:The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs: if Nixon had made up his mind which he wanted, the Northern Negro or Southern white vote; if the Puerto Rican Catholic bishops had made their intolerant intervention into Puerto Rican politics earlier and if Nixon had taken advantage of it; if the hysterical States-Righters of Dallas had not roughed up Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in the hotel lobby; if Eisenhower had been used earlier; if Nixon had moved as forthrightly as did John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the Martin Luther King arrest; if only the citizen Democrats of California and the new coagulating boss groups of California had been able to work together in harness, as they could not; if Nixon had clung to his original television strategy and not panicked; if Nixon had clung to the original Forward theme of Hall and Shepley—an interminable series of ifs can be strung together to account for, reverse or multiply the tiny margin of 112,000 popular votes by which Kennedy led Nixon. Yet when all these ifs are strung together, they are only the froth and the foam in the wake of the strategies of the two candidates who sought to lead the American people. ~ Theodore H White, #NFDB
702:We can’t understand what happened in 2016 without confronting the audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin, the unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI, a political press that told voters that my emails were the most important story, and deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture. I know some people don’t want to hear about these things, especially from me. But we have to get this right. The lessons we draw from 2016 could help determine whether we can heal our democracy and protect it in the future, and whether we as citizens can begin to bridge our divides. I want my grandchildren and all future generations to know what really happened. We have a responsibility to history—and to a concerned world—to set the record straight. I also share with you the painful days that followed the election. A lot of people have asked me, “How did you even get out of bed?” Reading the news every morning was like ripping off a scab. Each new revelation and outrage made it worse. It has been maddening to watch our country’s standing in the world plummet and to see Americans live in fear that their health care might be taken away so that the superrich can get a tax cut. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton, #NFDB
703:IN THE PAST, when dying was typically a more precipitous process, we did not have to think about a question like this. Though some diseases and conditions had a drawn-out natural history—tuberculosis is the classic example—without the intervention of modern medicine, with its scans to diagnose problems early and its treatments to extend life, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and dying was commonly a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Others did have a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from progressive and far longer-lasting (and highly dreaded) tubercular consumption. Ulysses Grant’s oral cancer took a year to kill him. But, as end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people generally experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather—as something that struck with little warning. And you either got through it or you didn’t. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
704:But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination—we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television—compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
705:Fervent partisans of democracy often grant that democracy and the market are substitutes. As Kuttner puts it, “The democratic state remains the prime counterweight to the market.”45 Their complaint is that the public has less and less say over its destiny because corporations have more and more say over theirs. To “save democracy,” the people must reassert its authority. Fair enough. Though their opponents greatly overstate the extent of privatization and deregulation, these policies take decisions out of the hands of majorities and put them into the hands of business owners. But the critics rarely wonder if this transfer might be desirable. They treat less reliance on democracy as automatically objectionable. This is another symptom of democratic fundamentalism. If all that an economist had to say against a government program were, “That’s government intervention. Government is supplanting markets!” he would be pigeonholed, then marginalized, as a market fundamentalist. But when an equally simplistic cry goes up in the name of democracy, there is a sympathetic audience. It is logically possible that clear-eyed business greed makes better decisions than confused voter altruism. Why not at least compare their performance, instead of prejudging? ~ Bryan Caplan, #NFDB
706:Mithoefer completed an FDA- and DEA-approved trial of MDMA for the treatment of severe PTSD, with stunning results. In 2011, with the support of MAPS, he and his team created a double-blind design in which twelve severely traumatized patients were given MDMA and psychotherapy, and eight patients were given an active placebo and psychotherapy. The researchers used the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) as a means of measuring symptom reduction after intervention. In the placebo group, only two out of the eight subjects had a significantly lowered CAPS score post-intervention, whereas in the MDMA group, ten out of the twelve subjects had significantly lowered CAPS scores and were able to maintain those scores at a two-month follow-up. Furthermore, in the MDMA group, ten of the twelve patients were so improved that they no longer met the DSM criteria for PTSD. The second phase of the study allowed seven subjects who had previously taken the placebo (six of whom had failed to respond to the placebo and one of whom had relapsed after the placebo) to now try MDMA. They found a clinical response rate of 100 percent, and the three people who had previously said they weren’t able to perform their jobs on account of their PTSD were now able to work once again. ~ Lauren Slater, #NFDB
707:In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large-scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
708:Brzeziński: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army had invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the truth, kept secret up to now, is quite different: it was in fact on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive on clandestine aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my view aid was going to bring about a Soviet military intervention.
Nouvel Observateur: When the Soviets justified their intervention by claiming that they meant to counter a secret intervention by the United States in Afghanistan, no one believed them. However there was some truth in that.... You don't regret anything today?
Brzeziński: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border I wrote to President Carter roughly the following: "We now have the opportunity to give the USSR its own Vietnam War".
[warmonger's unrepentant admission that the U.S. overthrew the government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and sold it as a Soviet invasion] ~ Zbigniew Brzezi ski,#NFDB
709:Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview. ~ Jaclyn Friedman, #NFDB
710:Happy birthday,” he whispered, his breath landing warm and suddenly close to my lips, making my insides flip. And just as quickly as he’d surprised me with the cake, he kissed me, one frosting-covered hand moving from my hair to the back of my neck, the other solid and warm in the small of my back, pressing us together, my chest against his ribs, my hip bones just below his, the tops of our bare summer legs hot and touching. I stopped breathing. My eyes were closed and his mouth tasted like marzipan flowers and clove cigarettes, and in ten seconds the whole of my life was wrapped up in that one kiss, that one wish, that one secret that would forever divide my life into two parts.
Up, down. Happy, sad. Shock, awe. Before, after.
In that single moment, Matt, formerly known as friend, became something else entirely.
I kissed him back. I forgot time. I forgot my feet. I forgot the people outside, waiting for us to rejoin the party. I forgot what happens when friends cross into this space. And if my lungs didn’t fill and my heart didn’t beat and my blood didn’t pump without my intervention, I would have forgotten about them, too.
I could have stayed like that all night, standing in front of the sink, Matt’s black apple hair brushing my cheeks, heart thumping, lucky and forgetful… ~ Sarah Ockler,#NFDB
711:Insofar as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned, however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se, it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological reaction; in other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome-depression, aggression, addiction-are due to what is called in logotherapy "the existential vacuum," a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.
It goes without saying that not each and every case of depression is to be traced back to a feeling of meaninglessness, nor does suicide-in which depression sometimes eventuates-always result from an existential vacuum. But even if each and every case of suicide had not been undertaken out of a feeling of meaninglessness, it may well be that na individual's impulse to take his life would have been overcome had he been aware of some meaning and purpose worth living for.
If, thus, a strong meaning orientation plays a decisive role in the prevention of suicide, what about intervention in cases in which there is a suicide risk? ~ Viktor E Frankl,#NFDB
712:A bell of mindfulness, whether it is an actual bell or some other sound, is a wonderful reminder to come back to ourselves, to come back to life here in the present moment. The sound of the bell is the voice of the Buddha within. Every one of us has Buddha nature—the capacity for compassionate, clear, understanding nature—within us. So when we hear the sound of the bell, if we like practicing mindfulness, we can respond to that intervention with respect and appreciation. In my tradition, every time we hear the bell, we pause. We stop moving, talking, and thinking, and we listen to the voice of the heart. We don’t say that we “hit the bell” or “strike the bell.” Rather, we say we “invite the bell” to sound, because the bell is a friend, an enlightened friend that helps us wake up and guides us home to ourselves. Gentleness and nonviolence are characteristics of the sound of the bell. Its sound is gentle but very powerful. When you hear the sound of the bell, take the opportunity to come home to yourself and enjoy your breathing. Take a few moments to inhale and exhale deeply and touch a little happiness. If you want to experience what the end of suffering will feel like, it is in the here and the now with this breath. If you want nirvana, it’s right here. Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I smile. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
713: What hidden sweetness there is in this emptiness of the belly!
Man is surely like a lute, no more and no less;
For if, for instance, the belly of the lute becomes full, no
lament high or low will arise from that full lute.
If your brain and belly are on fire through fasting, because of
the fire every moment a lament will arise from your breast.
Every moment you will burn a thousand veils by that fire; you
will mount a hundred steps with zeal and endeavor.
Become empty of belly, and weep entreatingly like the reed
pipe; become empty of belly, and tell secrets with the reed pen.
If your belly is full at the time of concourse, it will bring Satan
in place of your reason, an idol in place of the Kaaba.
When you keep the fast, good habits gather together before
you like slaves and servants and retinue.
Keep the fast, for that is Solomons ring; give not the ring to
the div, destroy not your kingdom.
Even if your kingdom has gone from your head and your army
has fled, your army will rise up, pennants flying above them.
The table arrived from heaven to the tents of the fast, by the
intervention of the prayers of Jesus, son of Mary.
In the fast, be expectant of the table of bounty, for the table of
bounty is better than the broth of cabbages.
~ Jalaluddin Rumi, What Hidden Sweetness Is There
,#NFDB
714:A well-known geneticist and an outspoken
evolutionist, Richard C. Lewontin from Harvard University,
confesses that he is "first and foremost a materialist and
then a scientist":
It is not that the methods and institutions of science
somehow compel us accept a material explanation of the
phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are
forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to
create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how
counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, so we cannot
allow a Divine [intervention]…
These are explicit statements that Darwinism is a
dogma kept alive just for the sake of adherence to materialism.
This dogma maintains that there is no being save
matter. Therefore, it argues that inanimate, unconscious
matter created life. It insists that millions of different living
species (e.g., birds, fish, giraffes, tigers, insects, trees,
flowers, whales, and human beings) originated as a result
of the interactions between matter such as pouring rain,
lightning flashes, and so on, out of inanimate matter. This
is a precept contrary both to reason and science. Yet
Darwinists continue to defend it just so as "not to allow a
Divine intervention. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
715:And that’s when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to call “First World.” One of the delegates from a prewar “developing” country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and pillaging the “victim nations of the south.” Maybe, he said, by keeping the “white hegemony” distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to develop “without imperialist intervention.” Maybe the living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they had brought justice for the future. Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a “white hegemony” when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba? How could you call the colder countries a northern issue when so many people were just barely surviving in the Himalayas, or the Andes of my own Chile? No, this man, and those who agreed with him, weren’t talking about justice for the future. They just wanted revenge for the past.
[Sighs.] After all we’d been through, we still couldn’t take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other’s throats. ~ Max Brooks,#NFDB
716:The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.”
It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion. ~ Graham E Fuller,#NFDB
717:Affecting just a few dozen people worldwide, WHIM is a painful, potentially deadly immunodeficiency disease that makes life difficult for those unfortunate enough to suffer from it. It is caused by a tiny mutation—a single incorrect letter among some six billion total letters of one’s DNA, amounting to a change of just a dozen or so atoms. This minute transformation leaves WHIM victims profoundly susceptible to infection by human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes uncontrollable warts that cover the patient’s skin and can eventually progress to cancer. It’s a testament to the rareness of the disease that the patient in whom WHIM syndrome had first been diagnosed back in the 1960s was the same person whom the NIH researchers met all those years later. In the scientific literature, she’s known simply as WHIM-09, but I’ll call her Kim. Kim had been afflicted with WHIM since birth, and over the course of her life, she had been hospitalized multiple times with serious infections stemming from the disease. In 2013, Kim—then fifty-eight—presented herself and her two daughters, both in their early twenties, to the staff at NIH. The younger women had classic signs of the disease, but the scientists were surprised to discover that Kim herself seemed fine. In fact, she claimed to have been symptom-free for over twenty years. Shockingly, and without any medical intervention, Kim had been cured. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
718:Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street. ~ Zadie Smith,#NFDB
719:So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc. But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
720:Hardly any worker today engages in the kind of backbreaking labor that was common a century or so ago and that is still common over most of the globe. Working conditions are better; hours of work are shorter; vacations and other fringe benefits are taken for granted. Earnings are far higher, enabling the ordinary family to achieve a level of living that only the affluent few could earlier enjoy. If Gallup were to conduct a poll asking: "What accounts for the improvement in the lot of the worker?" the most popular answer would very likely be "labor unions," and the next, "government"—though perhaps "no one" or "don't know" or "no opinion" would beat both. Yet the history of the United States and other Western countries over the past two centuries demonstrates that these answers are wrong. During most of the period, unions were of little importance in the United States. As late as 1900, only 3 percent of all workers were members of unions. Even today fewer than one worker in four is a member of a union. Unions were clearly not a major reason for the improvement in the lot of the worker in the United States. Similarly, until the New Deal, regulation of and intervention in economic arrangements by government, and especially central government, were minimal. Government played an essential role by providing a framework for a free market. But direct government action was clearly not the reason for the improvement in the lot of the worker. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
721:Fine. I understand,” she said with a little shrug, turning her head slightly so he couldn’t see her eyes. “If it’s really that important to you, I’ll go have sex with a human male first. Then I’ll know what I’m talking about before I broach the matter with you again.”
Jacob felt the statement the same way he had felt the blast of Elijah’s intervention the first night he had touched her. It slammed into him with breathtaking brutality, destroying his sense of direction and balance. Rage surged through him, turning his eyes into glistening black voids. The idea of another man touching that precious skin, kissing her sweet, delicious mouth, was more than he could stand. What she was suggesting this time was too much. Beyond too much.
“Over my dead body . . . over my obliterated soul will I ever allow such a thing.” The declaration was a cross between a growl and a soft roar. Bella could see him shaking from head to toe, could feel it vibrating through the door behind her. In all of an instant, the cool, sophisticated Jacob disappeared and a possessive beast reared its head in his place.
Now that’s more like it, Isabella mused, with a mental smile.
“But”—she blinked her wide eyes up at him in all innocence—“you just said—“
“I said forget it, Isabella!” the Enforcer exploded, the pressure of his hands on the door at her back making the wood pop and creak ominously. “No one is going to touch you, do you understand? ~ Jacquelyn Frank,#NFDB
722:But the period I studied -- the rollicking eighteenth century engraved by Hogarth -- was the one that saw the birth of America, of women's rights, and of the novel. The novel started as a low-class form, fit only to be read by serving maids, and it is the only literary form where women have distinguished themselves so early and with such excellence that even the rampant misogyny of literary history cannot erase them. Ever wonder about women and the novel? Women, like any underclass, depend for their survival on self-definition. The novel permitted this -- and pages could still be hidden under the embroidery hoop.
From the writer's mind to the reader's there was only the intervention of printing presses. You could stay at home, yet send your book abroad to London -- the perfect situation for women.
In a world where women are still the second sex, many still dream of becoming writers so they can work at home, make their own hours, nurse the baby. Writing still seems to fit into the interstices of a woman's life. Through the medium of words, we have hopes of changing our class. Perhaps the pen will not always be equated with the penis. In a world of computers, our swift fingers may yet win us the world. One of these days we'll have class. And so we write as feverishly as only the dispossessed can. We write to come into our own, to build our houses and plant our gardens, to give ourselves names and histories, inventing ourselves as we go along. ~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
723:The socialists are sometimes wont to reproach liberalism with a lack of
consistency, It is, they maintain, illogical to restrict the activity of the state in the economic sphere exclusively to the protection of property. It is difficult to see why, if the state is not to remain completely neutral, its intervention has to be limited to protecting the rights of property owners.
This reproach would be justified only if the opposition of liberalism to all governmental activity in the economic sphere going beyond the protection of property stemmed from an aversion in principle against any activity on the part of the state. But that is by no means the case. The reason why liberalism opposes a further extension of the sphere of governmental activity is precisely that this would, in effect, abolish private ownership of the means of production. And in private property the liberal sees the principle most suitable for the organization of man's life in society.
38
The Foundations of Liberal Policy
Liberalism is therefore far from disputing the necessity of a machinery of state, a system of law, and a government. It is a grave misunderstanding to associate it in any way with the idea of anarchism. For the liberal, the state is an absolute necessity, since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it: the protection not only of private property, but also of peace, for in the absence of the latter the full benefits of private property cannot be reaped. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
724:Would the behavior of the United States during the war—in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home—be in keeping with a “people’s war”? Would the country’s wartime policies respect the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas, exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought? These questions deserve thought. At the time of World War II, the atmosphere was too dense with war fervor to permit them to be aired. For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Hatian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
725:(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.)
The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region.
But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99) ~ Bernard Lewis,#NFDB
726:The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
727:Yet the hunger to treat patients still drove Farber. And sitting in his basement laboratory in the summer of 1947, Farber had a single inspired idea: he chose, among all cancers, to focus his attention on one of its oddest and most hopeless variants—childhood leukemia. To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement. And despite its many idiosyncrasies, leukemia possessed a singularly attractive feature: it could be measured. Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. If cancer medicine was to be transformed into a rigorous science, then cancer would need to be counted somehow—measured in some reliable, reproducible way. In this, leukemia was different from nearly every other type of cancer. In a world before CT scans and MRIs, quantifying the change in size of an internal solid tumor in the lung or the breast was virtually impossible without surgery: you could not measure what you could not see. But leukemia, floating freely in the blood, could be measured as easily as blood cells—by drawing a sample of blood or bone marrow and looking at it under a microscope. If leukemia could be counted, Farber reasoned, then any intervention—a chemical sent circulating through the blood, say—could be evaluated for its potency in living patients. He could watch cells grow or die in the blood and use that to measure the success or failure of a drug. He could perform an “experiment” on cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
728:The first result of this randomized trial was predictable from prior studies: in the control group, children with the short variant-i.e., the "high risk" form of the gene- were twice as likely to veer toward high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity as adolescents, confirming earlier studies that had suggested an increased risk within this genetic subgroup. The second result was more provocative: these very children were also the most likely to respond to the social interventions. In the intervention group, children with the high-risk allele were most strongly and rapidly "normalized"-i.e., the most drastically affected subjects were also the best responders. In a parallel study, orphaned infants with the short variant of 5HTTLRP appeared more impulsive and socially disturbed than their long-variant counterparts as baseline-but were also the most likely to benefit from placement in a more nurturing foster-care environment.
In both cases, it seems, the short variant encodes a hyperactive "stress sensor" for psychic susceptibility, but also a sensor most likely to respond to an intervention that targets the susceptibility. The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments-but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments.) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,#NFDB
729:I have spoken of Sri Aurobindo's life as a series of radical turns that changed the movement, the mode of life, almost radically every time the turn came. The turn meant a break with the past and a moving into the future. We have a word for this phenomenon of radical and unforeseen change. You know the word, it is intervention. Intervention means, as the Mother has explained to us more than once, the entry of a higher, a greater force from another world into the already existent world. Into the familiar established mode of existence that runs on the routine of some definite rules and regulations, the Law of the present, there drops all on a sudden another mode of being and consciousness and force, a Higher Law which obliterates or changes out of recognition the familiar mode of living; it is thus that one rises from level to level, moves out into wider ranges of being, otherwise one stands still, remains for ever what he is, stagnant, like an unchanging clod or at the most a repetitive animal. The higher the destiny, the higher also the source of intervention, that is to say, more radical - more destructive yet more creative - destructive of the past, creative of the future.
I have spoken of the passing away of Sri Aurobindo as a phenomenon of intervention, a great decisive event in view of the work to be done. Even so we may say that his birth too was an act of intervention, a deliberate divine intervention. The world needed it, the time was ripe and the intervention happened and that was his birth as an embodied human being - to which we offer our salutation and obeisance today. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta,#NFDB
730:Even working within the laws of physics, researchers with an anti-God bias often make blind leaps of faith to escape any evidence of God’s involvement in the universe. For centuries Christians were criticized for their God-of-the-gaps arguments. Sometimes that criticism was deserved. Christians tended to use gaps in understanding or data to build a case for God’s miraculous intervention. Then, when scientific discoveries uncovered a natural explanation for the “divine phenomenon,” ridicule was heaped not only on those proposing the divine explanation but also on belief in God’s existence. In the twenty-first century we see the reverse of the God-of-the-gaps arguments. Nontheists, confronted with problems when ample research leads to no natural explanations and instead points to the supernatural, utterly reject the possibility of the supernatural and insist on a natural explanation even if it means resorting to absurdity. For example, steady state models were supported by an imagined force of physics for which there was not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. The oscillating universe model depended on an imagined bounce mechanism for which there was likewise not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. Similar appeals to imagined forces and phenomena have been the basis for all the cosmological models proposed to avoid the big bang implications about God (see chs. 8 and 9). The disproof of these models and the ongoing appeal by nontheists to more and more bizarre unknowns and unknowables seem to reflect the growing strength of the case for theism (see chs. 8, 9, 13, and 16). ~ Hugh Ross, #NFDB
731:The aim of the next nine sections will be to present careful arguments to show that none of the loopholes (a), (b), and (c) can provide a plausible way to evade the contradiction of the robot. Accordingly, it, and we also, are driven to the unpalatable (d), if we are still insistent that mathematical understanding can be reduced to computation. I am sure that those concerned with artificial intelligence would find (d) to be as unpalatable as I find it to be. It provides perhaps a conceivable standpoint-essentially the A/D suggestion, referred to at the end of 1.3, whereby divine intervention is required for the implanting of an unknowable algorithm into each of our computer brains (by 'the best programmer in the business'). In any case, the conclusion 'unknowable'-for the very mechanisms that are ultimately responsible for our intelligence-would not be a very happy conclusion for those hoping actually to construct a genuinely artificially intelligent robot! It would not be a particularly happy conclusion, either, for those of us who hope to understand, in principle and in a scientific way, how human intelligence has actually arisen, in accordance with comprehensible scientific laws, such as those of physics, chemistry, biology, and natural selection-irrespective of any desire to reproduce such intelligence in a robot device. In my own opinion, such a pessimistic conclusion is not warranted, for the very reason that 'scientific comprehensibility' is a very different thing from 'computability'. The conclusion should be not that the underlying laws are incomprehensible, but that they are non-computable. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
732:Il existe certaines zones de la psyché humaine qui demeurent mal connues, parce qu'elles ont été peu explorées, parce que heureusement peu de gens se sont trouvés en situation d'avoir à le faire, et que ceux qui l'ont fait ont en général conservé trop peu de raison pour en produire une description acceptable. Ces zones ne peuvent guère être approchées que par l'emploi de formules paradoxales et même absurdes, dont l'expression 'espérer au-delà de toute espérance' est la seule qui me revienne réellement. Ce n'est pas similaire à la nuit, c'est bien pire ; et sans avoir personnellement connu cette expérience j'ai l'impression que même lorsqu'on plonge dans la vraie nuit, la nuit polaire, celle qui dure six mois consécutifs, demeure le concept ou le souvenir du soleil. J'étais entré dans une 'nuit sans fin', pourtant il demeurait, tout au fond de moi il demeurait quelque chose, bien moins qu'une espérance, disons une incertitude. On pourrait aussi dire que même lorsqu'on a personnellement perdu la partie, lorsqu'on a joué sa dernière carte, demeure chez certains - pas chez tous, pas chez tous - l'idée que 'quelque chose dans les cieux' va reprendre la main, va décider arbitrairement de distribuer une nouvelle donne, de relancer les dés, et cela même lorsqu'on n'a jamais ressenti, à aucun moment de sa vie, l'intervention ni même la présence d'une divinité quelconque, même lorsqu'on est conscient de ne pas particulièrement mériter l'intervention d'une divinité favorable, et même lorsqu'on se rend compte, considérant l'accumulation des erreurs et des fautes qui constitue votre vie, qu'on la mérite moins que personne. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
733:Even though the woman was not human—the land—or was less than human—a cow—farming had the symbolic overtones of old-fashioned agrarian romance: plowing the land was loving it, feeding the cow was tending it. In the farming model, the woman was owned privately; she was the homestead, not a public thoroughfare. One farmer worked her. The land was valued because it produced a valuable crop; and in keeping with the mystique of the model itself, sometimes the land was real pretty, special, richly endowed; a man could love it. The cow was valued because of what she produced: calves, milk; sometimes she took a prize. There was nothing actually idyllic in this. As many as one quarter of all acts of battery may be against pregnant women; and women die from pregnancy even without the intervention of a male fist. But farming implied a relationship of some substance between the farmer and what was his: and it is grander being the earth, being nature, even being a cow, than being a cunt with no redeeming mythology. Motherhood ensconced a woman in the continuing life of a man: how he used her was going to have consequences for him. Since she was his, her state of being reflected on him; and therefore he had a social and psychological stake in her welfare as well as an economic one. Because the man farmed the woman over a period of years, they developed a personal relationship, at least from her point of view: one limited by his notions of her sex and her kind; one strained because she could never rise to the human if it meant abandoning the female; but it was her best chance to be known, to be regarded with some tenderness or compassion meant for her, one particular woman. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
734:The great concentration of wealth in the hands of the owners of chaebol has also had the consequence feared by the KMT in Taiwan: the entry into politics of a wealthy industrialist. This happened for the first time with the candidacy of Chung Ju Yung, founder of Hyundai, for president in the 1993 election. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a Ross Perot-style billionaire’s entering politics in a democracy, but the degree of concentrated wealth in the Korean business community has made other political actors on both the right and the left nervous. The result for Korea thus far has not been propitious; while losing the election to Kim Young Sam, the seventy-seven-year-old Chung was jailed in late 1993 on rather specious corruption charges—a warning to all would-be politicians among the business class that their participation in politics would not be welcome.74 Despite the apparent anomaly between its Chinese-style familistic culture and its large corporations, Korea continues to fit my overall hypothesis. That is, Korea, like China, is a familistic culture with a relatively low degree of trust outside kinship. In default of this cultural propensity, the Korean state has had to step in to create large organizations that would otherwise not be created by the private sector on its own. The large Korean chaebol may have been run more efficiently than the state-owned companies of France, Italy, and a number of countries in Latin America, but they were no less the product of subsidy, protection, regulation, and other acts of government intervention. While most countries would be quite happy to have had Korea’s growth record, it is not clear that they could achieve it using Korean methods. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
735:The triad, being the fundamental principle of the whole Kabalah, or Sacred Tradition of our fathers, was necessarily the fundamental dogma of Christianity, the apparent dualism of which it explains by the intervention of a harmonious and all-powerful unity. Christ did not put His teaching into writing, and only revealed it in secret to His favored disciple, the one Kabalist, and he a great Kabalist, among the apostles. So is the Apocalypse the book of the Gnosis or Secret Doctrine of the first Christians, and the key of this doctrine is indicated by an occult versicle of the Lord's Prayer, which the Vulgate leaves untranslated, while in the Greek Rite, the priests only are permitted to pronounce it. This versicle, completely kabalistic, is found in the Greek text of the Gospel according to St Matthew, and in several Hebrew copies, as follows:
Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εις τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήν.
The sacred word MALKUTH substituted for KETHER, which is its kabalistic correspondent, and the equipoise of GEBURAH and CHESED, repeating itself in the circles of heavens called eons by the Gnostics, provided the keystone of the whole Christian Temple in the occult versicle. It has been retained by Protestants in their New Testament, but they have failed to discern its lofty and wonderful meaning, which would have unveiled to them all the Mysteries of the Apocalypse. There is, however, a tradition in the Church that the manifestation of this mysteries is reserved till the last times. ~ liphas L vi,#NFDB
736:ZEV walked out of his parents’ house and over to his truck, dropped
his head against the door, and took in a deep breath, letting the fresh air
cool his lungs. Standing up to his family once again and garnering their
support for his future mating was all well and good, but none of it
meant a thing if his mate didn’t return and accept his place in the pack
beside Zev. If Jonah didn’t come home soon, Zev wasn’t sure whether
there’d be a Hassick male available to lead the Etzgadol pack.
He looked up at the sky. The stars were beautiful out here. They
sparkled above him, showing the spirits of those who came before.
Come back to me, Jonah. Our spirits are intertwined, and my body
cannot endure without its other half for much longer.
He felt the pain deep in his bones, the urge to shift and run. But
he pushed it back, grateful that, at least for now, his human could still
exert his will. His wolf was tired of waiting for his human to find their
mate and the wolf wanted control of their form so he could go find
Jonah and claim him. But their mate was long gone, well out of scent
distance, and the chance of Zev’s wolf finding him before running into
hunters or vehicles was slim.
Zev knew that unless he claimed his mate the time was fast
approaching when his human would no longer be able to control his
wolf. When that happened, the fear driving the intervention his family
had staged that night would become a reality: Zev’s human would be
forever lost. And without his human’s wisdom to limit him, Zev’s wolf
would likely end his life trying to find his mate. ~ Cardeno C,#NFDB
737:As long as the nascent institutions are constructed and maintained only in the interaction of A and B, their objectivity remains tenuous, easily changeable, almost playful, even while they attain a measure of objectivity by the mere fact of their formation. To put this a little differently, the routinized background of A’s and B’s activity remains fairly accessible to deliberate intervention by A and B. Although the routines, once established, carry within them a tendency to persist, the possibility of changing them or even abolishing them remains at hand in consciousness. A and B alone are responsible for having constructed this world. A and B remain capable of changing or abolishing it. What is more, since they themselves have shaped this world in the course of a shared biography which they can remember, the world thus shaped appears fully transparent to them. They understand the world that they themselves have made. All this changes in the process of transmission to the new generation. The objectivity of the institutional world “thickens” and “hardens,” not only for the children, but (by a mirror effect) for the parents as well. The “There we go again” now becomes “This is how these things are done.” A world so regarded attains a firmness in consciousness; it becomes real in an ever more massive way and it can no longer be changed so readily. For the children, especially in the early phase of their socialization into it, it becomes the world. For the parents, it loses its playful quality and becomes “serious.” For the children, the parentally transmitted world is not fully transparent. Since they had no part in shaping it, it confronts them as a given reality that, like nature, is opaque in places at least. Only ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
738:In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting. ~ Ben S Bernanke, #NFDB
739:the aim of our yoga :::
The aim set before our Yoga is nothing less than to hasten this supreme object of our existence here. Its process leaves behind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth through the evolution of Nature. For the natural evolution is at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pressure of the environment, partly by a groping education and an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes, - though veiling a secret divine intervention and guidance. In Yoga we replace this confused crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us. In a certain sense it may be an error to speak of a goal anywhere in a progression which may well be infinite. Still we can conceive of an immediate goal, an ulterior objective beyond our present achievement towards which the soul in man can aspire. There lies before him the possibility of a new birth; there can be an ascent into a higher and wider plane of being and its descent to transform his members. An enlarged and illumined consciousness is possible that shall make of him a liberated spirit and a perfected force - and, if spread beyond the individual, it might even constitute a divine humanity or else a new, a supramental and therefore a superhuman race. It is this new birth that we make our aim: a growth into a divine consciousness is the whole meaning of our Yoga, an integral conversion to divinity not only of the soul but of all the parts of our nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, 89-90,#NFDB
740:Faut-il regretter le temps des guerres "à sens" ? souhaiter que les guerres d'aujourd'hui "retrouvent" leur sens perdu ? le monde irait-il mieux, moins bien, indifféremment, si les guerres avaient, comme jadis, ce sens qui les justifiait ? Une part de moi, celle qui a la nostalgie des guerres de résistance et des guerres antifascistes, a tendance à dire : oui, bien sûr ; rien n'est plus navrant que la guerre aveugle et insensée ; la civilisation c'est quand les hommes, tant qu'à faire, savent à peu près pourquoi ils se combattent ; d'autant que, dans une guerre qui a du sens, quand les gens savent à peu près quel est leur but de guerre et quel est celui de leur adversaire, le temps de la raison, de la négociation, de la transaction finit toujours par succéder à celui de la violence ; et d'autant (autre argument) que les guerres sensées sont aussi celles qui, par principe, sont les plus accessibles à la médiation, à l'intervention - ce sont les seules sur lesquelles des tiers, des arbitres, des observateurs engagés, peuvent espérer avoir quelque prise...Une autre part hésite. L'autre part de moi, celle qui soupçonne les guerres à sens d'être les plus sanglantes, celle qui tient la "machine à sens" pour une machine de servitude et le fait de donner un sens à ce qui n'en a pas, c'est-à-dire à la souffrance des hommes, pour un des tours les plus sournois par quoi le Diabolique nous tient, celle qui sait, en un mot, qu'on n'envoie jamais mieux les pauvres gens au casse-pipe qu'en leur racontant qu'ils participent d'une grande aventure ou travaillent à se sauver, cette part-là, donc, répond : "non ; le pire c'était le sens"; le pire c'est, comme disait Blanchot, "que le désastre prenne sens au lieu de prendre corps" ; le pire, le plus terrible, c'est d'habiller de sens le pur insensé de la guerre ; pas question de regretter, non, le "temps maudit du sens". (ch. 10
De l'insensé, encore) ~ Bernard Henri L vy,#NFDB
741:Until recently, three unspoken principles have guided the arena of genetic diagnosis and intervention. First, diagnostic tests have largely been restricted to gene variants that are singularly powerful determinants of illness—i.e., highly penetrant mutations, where the likelihood of developing the disease is close to 100 percent (Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease). Second, the diseases caused by these mutations have generally involved extraordinary suffering or fundamental incompatibilities with “normal” life. Third, justifiable interventions—the decision to abort a child with Down syndrome, say, or intervene surgically on a woman with a BRCA1 mutation—have been defined through social and medical consensus, and all interventions have been governed by complete freedom of choice. The three sides of the triangle can be envisioned as moral lines that most cultures have been unwilling to transgress. The abortion of an embryo carrying a gene with, say, only a ten percent chance of developing cancer in the future violates the injunction against intervening on low-penetrance mutations. Similarly, a state-mandated medical procedure on a genetically ill person without the subject’s consent (or parental consent in the case of a fetus) crosses the boundaries of freedom and noncoercion. Yet it can hardly escape our attention that these parameters are inherently susceptible to the logic of self-reinforcement. We determine the definition of “extraordinary suffering.” We demarcate the boundaries of “normalcy” versus “abnormalcy.” We make the medical choices to intervene. We determine the nature of “justifiable interventions.” Humans endowed with certain genomes are responsible for defining the criteria to define, intervene on, or even eliminate other humans endowed with other genomes. “Choice,” in short, seems like an illusion devised by genes to propagate the selection of similar genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
742:The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms. ~ Mark Fisher,#NFDB
743:the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART ~ Chris Voss, #NFDB
744:Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c’est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du Moyen-Âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n’en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l’ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l’ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l’intervalle. Nous n’entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu’il semble difficile d’admettre qu’il ait pu s’opérer spontanément et sans l’intervention d’une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d’en dépasser les avantages, n’avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d’ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d’elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l’histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n’irons pas plus avant dans l’examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c’est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.
(1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l’imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l’Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu’on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge. ~ Ren Gu non,#NFDB
745:In fact, when I came to Detroit, Coleman Young had just become a hero in the black community because he had stood up against the House Un-American Activities Committee, declaring, “If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I’m a Communist.” Like most of his friends Jimmy was aware that the American Communists had provided indispensable leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow and to create the unions: it was the intervention of the Communist Party that stopped the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys, and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) would probably not have been organized in the 1930s without the active participation of Communist Party members. At the shop and community level Jimmy worked with Communists as comrades; they were his coworkers, friends, and neighbors. During World War II he participated with black members of the Communist Party in sitdown strikes to protest union and management discrimination against black workers. During the Reuther-led witchhunt, when management and the union tried to get rid of radicals, he mobilized black workers to support Van Brooks, a Chrysler-Jefferson coworker and Communist Party member. He was very conscious that without the existence of the Soviet Union and its opposition to Western imperialism, the struggles of blacks in this country for civil rights and of Third World peoples for political independence would have been infinitely more difficult. Jimmy was not unaware of the atrocities that had been committed by the party and Stalin. However, what mattered to him was not the party’s or the Soviet Union’s record but where people stood on the concrete issue at hand, and he was grateful to the party because, as he used to say, “It gave me the fortitude to stand up against the odds.” Like other politically conscious blacks of his generation he recognized that without the Communists it would have taken much longer for blacks to make the leap from being regarded as inferior to being feared as subversive, that is, as a social force. ~ Grace Lee Boggs, #NFDB
746:This immense, still impending total human sacrifice cannot be appraised in the rational or scientific terms that those who have created this system favor: it is, I stress again, an essentially religious phenomenon. As such it offers a close parallel with the original doctrines of Buddhism, even down to the fact that it shares Prince Gautama's atheism. What, indeed, is the elimination of man himself from the process he in fact has discovered and perfected, with its promised end of all striving and seeking, but the Buddha's final escape from the Wheel of Life? Once complete and universal, total automation means total renunciation of life and eventually total extinction: that very retreat into Nirvana that Prince Gautama pictured as man's only way to free himself from sorrow and pain and misfortune. When the life-impulse is depressed, this doctrine, we know, exerts an immense attraction upon masses of disappointed and disheartened souls: for a few centuries Buddhism became dominant in India and swept over China. For similar reasons it is reviving again today.
But note: those who originally accepted this view of man's ultimate destiny, and sought to meet death halfway, did not go to the trouble of creating an elaborate technology to accomplish this end: in that direction they went no farther, significantly enough, than the invention of a water-driven prayer wheel. Instead they practiced concentrated meditation and inner detachment, acts as free from technological intervention as the air they breathed. And they earned an unexpected reward for this mode of withdrawal, a reward that the worshippers of the machine will never know. Instead of extinguishing forever their capacity to feel pleasure or pain, they intensified it, creating poems, philosophies, paintings, sculptures, monuments, ceremonies that restored their hope, their organic animation, their creative zeal: revealing once more in the erotic exuberance an impassioned and exalted sense of man's own potential destiny. Our latter-day technocratic Buddhism can make no such promises ~ Lewis Mumford,#NFDB
747:Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c'est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du moyen âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n'en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l'ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l'ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l'intervalle. Nous n'entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu'il semble difficile d'admettre qu'il ait pu s'opérer spontanément et sans l'intervention d'une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d'en dépasser les avantages, n'avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d'ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d'elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l'histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n'irons pas plus avant dans l'examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c'est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus.»
(1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l'imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l'Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu'on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge. ~ Ren Gu non,#NFDB
748:From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science. ~ Kevin Fedarko, #NFDB
749:widening. “Don’t you dare draw their fire.” Lynn. Jonathan committed the name to memory. The outsiders didn’t seem to notice the man’s slip. They kept their weapons trained on the girl. She glared at them as if daring them to kill her. “Go ahead! Shoot! I’m sick of being hunted by you! Kill me and claim the fame. Do it!” Parker dodged forward, rushing past any and all that stood between him and the woman named Lynn. He shoved his body in front of hers in a protective manner and glared at the men. “You’ll not harm her. She’s under my protection now.” Eli let out a low whistle. “Never did I see that coming. Saw-bones is a born skirt-chaser. Think he might have The Fever or something? He’s always doctorin’ folks with weird ailments.” Well, if The Fever included an uncontrollable urge to protect a woman, then his brother most certainly had caught it. He could only hope Parker’s case was curable. Jonathan knew his own case wasn’t. Molly had infected him long ago and he knew he’d never get her out of his veins. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. His exploits of the female persuasion were legendary—so was the fact he refused to commit. “Are you stupid?” Lynn asked, giving Parker a good shove. At five-eight, she was tall by female standards but short compared the MacSweeny boys. Still, she managed to get Parker to budge ever so slightly, shocking Jonathan. “Move! They’ll gun you down to get to me.” “Then so be it.” Jonathan shook his head. Parker was bound to get himself killed without some serious intervention. “Parker, get her and your ass out of there. We’ll take care of our guests. We’ll even be sweet enough to give ‘em that welcome speech you had worked out.” “Parker?” the girl asked. She glanced at Jonathan and Eli and her eyes widened. “That means one of you is Jonathan.” The feel of a cold, hard barrel pressed against the back of Jonathan’s head. Cursing himself for letting his guard down, he put his hands up as his attacker shoved harder with the gun. “Lookie, boys, we got us a sheriff. He’s got to bring a good amount of coinage, don’t ya think?” There was a flash of black. A blur. Several shots. Screams. Jonathan caught movement out of the corner of his eye and realized someone had shot the man who had him at gunpoint. Chapter Four Molly ~ Mandy M Roth, #NFDB
750:Ezra asked me to bring you this,' I said and handed him the jar. 'He said you would know what it was.'
He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.
'You son of a bitch,' he said. 'You bastard.'
'Ezra said you might need it,' I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.
'You are sure you don't need it?' I asked.
He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door.
I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket.
'He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound," I said to the concierge.
'Perhaps he will be tranquil now,' she said.
'Perhaps he has some of his own,' I said.
'Poor Monsieur Dunning,' she said.
The lovers of poetry that Ezra organized rallied to Dunning's aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase 'Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre' gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very good poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery.
'We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,' he once said to me. 'The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance. ~ Ernest Hemingway,#NFDB
751:Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
752:Looking down, she felt heat traveling up her face when she saw that, in her mad dash to get away from the goat, she’d completely neglected to realize that not only had she forgotten her shoes and stockings, she’d also forgotten that she hadn’t buttoned her gown up all the way. “Goodness,” she muttered as she yanked the neckline of her dress up as high as she could. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe anyone took note of your somewhat questionable state of dishabille.” Her head shot up as she met Bram’s eyes. “You obviously noticed.” He sent her a charming smile. “Noticed what?” He extended her his arm. “There’s a lovely grove right through those trees, which is nowhere near the barn, I might add. It’ll afford you a bit of privacy to set yourself to rights since I don’t believe you’ll be keen to face all the people still lingering outside the castle doors.” Glancing to where Bram was now looking, Lucetta found a small cluster of people looking her way, although Mr. Kenton and Archibald were walking back toward the castle, the skirts of their dresses fluttering in the breeze. Abigail, however, seemed to be in the midst of a heated conversation with her daughter, both women gesturing wildly with their hands as the remaining members of Bram’s staff edged ever so slowly away from them. “Should we intervene?” she asked with a nod Abigail’s way. “I willingly admit I’m not that familiar with my grandmother when she’s in a temper, but my mother is not a woman who would appreciate an intervention. I suggest you get yourself straightened about, and then I’ll take you for a lovely walk around the grounds. By the time we get back, they’ll have hopefully settled a few of their differences from the past thirty years.” “It’s fortunate your grounds seem to be extensive.” “Quite,” Bram agreed as she took the arm he was still holding out to her. He turned his attention back to Abigail and Iris. “I’m taking Miss Plum for a tour of the grounds,” he called. “We’ll be back in an hour or two.” Abigail and Iris stopped arguing and turned their attention Bram and Lucetta’s way. It was immediately clear that Abigail took no issue with Bram giving Lucetta a tour of the grounds. She lifted her arm and sent them a cheery wave before she spun on her heel and headed back toward the castle, spinning around again a moment later. Putting her hands on her hips, she marched her way back to Iris—who’d not moved at all—took her daughter’s arm, and with what looked to be a bit of wrestling, hauled Iris inside with her. “Perhaps we’ll mosey around the grounds for more than an hour or two,” Bram said as he steered Lucetta toward the trees. ~ Jen Turano, #NFDB
753:For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses.
While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
Mrs. Bush is not getting any younger. When she eventually ceases to walk among us we will undoubtedly see photographs of her flag-draped coffin. Whatever obituaries that run will admiringly mention those wizened, dynastic loins of hers and praise her staunch refusal to color her hair or glamorize her image. But will they remember this particular statement of hers, this "Let them eat cake" for the twenty-first century? Unlikely, since it received far too little play and definitely insufficient outrage when she said it. So let us promise herewith to never forget her callous disregard for other parents' children while her own son was sending them to make the ultimate sacrifice, while asking of the rest of us little more than to promise to go shopping. Commit the quote to memory and say it whenever her name comes up. Remind others how she lacked even the bare minimum of human integrity, the most basic requirement of decency that says if you support a war, you should be willing, if not to join those nineteen-year-olds yourself, then at least, at the very least, to acknowledge that said war was actually going on. Stupid fucking cow. ~ David Rakoff,#NFDB
754:I have talked with many pastors whose real struggle isn’t first with the hardship of ministry, the lack of appreciation and involvement of people, or difficulties with fellow leaders. No, the real struggle they are having, one that is very hard for a pastor to admit, is with God. What is caused to ministry become hard and burdensome is disappointment and anger at God.
We have forgotten that pastoral ministry is war and that you will never live successfully in the pastorate if you live with the peacetime mentality. Permit me to explain. The fundamental battle of pastoral ministry is not with the shifting values of the surrounding culture. It is not the struggle with resistant people who don't seem to esteem the Gospel. It is not the fight for the success of ministries of the church. And is not the constant struggle of resources and personnel to accomplish the mission. No, the war of the pastor is a deeply personal war. It is far on the ground of the pastor’s heart. It is a war values, allegiances, and motivations. It's about the subtle desires and foundational dreams. This war is the greatest threat to every pastor. Yet it is a war that we often naïvely ignore or quickly forget in the busyness of local church ministry.
When you forget the Gospel, you begin to seek from the situations, locations and relationships of ministry what you already have been given in Christ. You begin to look to ministry for identity, security, hope, well-being, meeting, and purpose. These things are already yours in Christ.
In ways of which you are not always aware, your ministry is always shaped by what is in functional control of your heart.
The fact of the matter is that many pastors become awe numb or awe confused, or they get awe kidnapped. Many pastors look at glory and don't seek glory anymore. Many pastors are just cranking out because they don't know what else to do. Many pastors preach a boring, uninspiring gospel that makes you wonder why people aren't sleeping their way through it. Many pastors are better at arguing fine points of doctrine than stimulating divine wonder. Many pastors see more stimulated by the next ministry, vision of the next step in strategic planning than by the stunning glory of the grand intervention of grace into sin broken hearts. The glories of being right, successful, in control, esteemed, and secure often become more influential in the way that ministry is done than the awesome realities of the presence, sovereignty, power, and love of God.
Mediocrity is not a time, personnel, resource, or location problem. Mediocrity is a heart problem. We have lost our commitment to the highest levels of excellence because we have lost our awe. ~ Paul David Tripp,#NFDB
755:Government servants. These provisions are applicable only to the employees of the various Ministries, Departments and Attached and Subordinate Offices.Further, the employees, being citizens of the country also enjoy Fundamental Rights guaranteed under Part III of the Constitution and can enforce them though the Writ jurisdiction of the Courts. In addition to the constitutional provisions, there are certain rules which are applicable to the conduct of the proceedings for taking action against the erring employees. Central Civil Services (Classification, Control, and Appeal) Rules 1965 cover a vast majority of the Central Government employees.Besides, there are also several other Rules which are applicable to various sections of the employees in a number of services.(b) Semi Governmental Organisations: By this, we mean the Public Sector Undertakings and Autonomous Bodies and Societies controlled by the Government. Provisions of Part XIV of the Constitution do not apply to the employees of these Organisations.However, as these organisations can be brought within the definition of the term ‘State’ as contained in Article 12 of the Constitution, the employees of these organisations are protected against the violation of their Fundamental Rights by the orders of their employer. The action of the employer can be challenged by the employees of these organisations on the grounds of arbitrariness, etc. These organisations also have their own sets of rules for processing the cases for conducting the disciplinary proceedings against their employees.(c) Purely private organisations: These are governed by the various industrial and labour laws of the country and the approved standing orders applicable for the establishment.4. Although the CCS (CCA) Rules 1965 apply only to a limited number of employees in the Government, essentially these are the codification of the Principles of Natural Justice, which are required to be followed in any quasi judicial proceedings. Even the Constitutional protections which are contained in Part XIV of the Constitution are the codification of the above Principles.Hence, the procedures which are followed in most of the Government and semi-governmental organisations are more or less similar. This handout is predominantly based on the CCS (CCA) Rules 1965.5. Complexity of the statutory provisions, significance of the stakes involved, high proportion and frequency of the affected employees seeking judicial intervention, high percentage of the cases being subjected to judicial scrutiny, huge volume of case law on the subject - are some of the features of this subject.These, among others have sparked the need for a ready reference material on the subject. Hence this handbook2 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
756:Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover, ~ Pierre Bourdieu, #NFDB
757:I made myself listen to the music I loved as I worked. I would not be a coward anymore. If I acted like a lunatic, so be it! In my mind I raged and I vowed that Samuel’s leaving would not make me resort to musical holocaust. I was done with that nonsense! I played Grieg until my fingers were stiff, and I worked with the frenzy of Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ pounding out of the loud speakers. My dad came inside during that one and turned around and walked right back out again.
On day 15, I made a chocolate cake worthy of the record books. It was disgustingly rich and fattening, teetering several stories high, weighing more than I did, laden with thick cream cheese frosting, and sprinkled liberally with chocolate shavings. I sat down to eat it with a big fork and no bib. I dug in with a gusto seen only at those highly competitive hotdog eating contests where the tiny Asian girl kicks all the fat boys’ butts.
“JOSIE JO JENSEN!” Louise and Tara stood at the kitchen door, shock and revulsion, and maybe just a little envy in their faces. Brahms ‘Rhapsodie No. 2 in G Minor’ was making my little kitchen shake. Eating cake to Brahms was a new experience for me. I liked it. I dug back in, ignoring them.
“Well Mom,” I heard Tara say, “what should we do?!”
My Aunt Louise was a very practical woman. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!” She quoted cheerfully.
Before I knew it, Tara and Louise both had forks, too. They didn’t seem to need bibs either. We ate, increasing our tempo as the music intensified.
“ENOUGH!” My dad stood in the doorway. He was good and mad, too. His sun-browned face was as ruddy as my favorite high heels.
“I sent you two in for an intervention! What is this?! Eater’s Anonymous Gone Wild?”
“Aww, Daddy. Get a fork,” I replied, barely breaking rhythm.
My dad strode over, took the fork from my hand and threw it, tines first, right into the wall. It stuck there, embedded and twanging like a sword at a medieval tournament. He pulled out my chair and grabbed me under the arms, pushing me out of the kitchen. I tried to take one last swipe at my cake, but he let out this inhuman roar, and I abandoned all hope of making myself well and truly sick.
“Tara! Aunt Louise!” I shouted frantically. “I want you gone!!! That’s my cake! You can’t have any more without me!”
My dad pushed me through the front door and out onto the porch, the screen banging behind him. I sunk to the porch swing, sullenly wiping chocolate crumbs from my mouth. My dad stomped back inside the house and suddenly the music pouring from every nook and cranny stopped abruptly. I heard him tell Louise he’d call her later, and then the kitchen door banged, indicating my aunt’s and Tara’s departure. Good. They would have eaten that whole cake. I saw the way they were shoveling it in. ~ Amy Harmon,#NFDB
758:I glanced over and saw Wyatt glaring at me. Journey’s “Lovin’ Touchin’, Squeezin’” was playing on the radio.
“What?” I asked.
“You secretly hate me, don’t you.” He gestured toward the radio. “You can’t stand the thought of me taking a much needed nap and leaving you to drive without conversation. You’re torturing me with this sappy stuff.”
“It’s Journey. I love this song.”
Wyatt mumbled something under his breath, picked up the CD case, and started looking through it. He paused with a choked noise, his eyes growing huge.
“You’re joking, Sam. Justin Bieber? What are you, a twelve-year old girl?”
There’s gonna be one less lonely girl, I sang in my head. That was a great song. How could he not like that song? Still, I squirmed a bit in embarrassment.
“A twelve-year old girl gave me that CD,” I lied. “For my birthday.”
Wyatt snorted. “It’s a good thing you’re a terrible liar. Otherwise, I’d be horrified at the thought that a demon has been hanging out with a bunch of giggling pre-teens.”
He continued to thumb through the CDs. “Air Supply Greatest Hits? No, no, I’m wrong here. It’s an Air Supply cover band in Spanish.” He waved the offending CD in my face. “Sam, what on earth are you thinking? How did you even get this thing?”
“Some tenant left it behind,” I told him. “We evicted him, and there were all these CDs. Most were in Spanish, but I’ve got a Barry Manilow in there, too. That one’s in English.”
Wyatt looked at me a moment, and with the fastest movement I’ve ever seen, rolled down the window and tossed the case of CDs out onto the highway. It barely hit the road before a semi plowed over it.
I was pissed. “You asshole. I liked those CDs. I don’t come over to your house and trash your video games, or drive over your controllers. If you think that will make me listen to that
Dubstep crap for the next two hours, then you better fucking think again.”
“I’m sorry Sam, but it’s past time for a musical intervention here. You can’t keep listening to this stuff. It wasn’t even remotely good when it was popular, and it certainly hasn’t gained anything over time. You need to pull yourself together and try to expand your musical interests a bit. You’re on a downward spiral, and if you keep this up, you’ll find yourself friendless, living in a box in a back alley, stinking of your own excrement, and covered in track marks.”
I looked at him in surprise. I had no idea Air Supply led to lack of bowel control and hard core drug usage. I wondered if it was something subliminal, a kind of compulsion programmed into the lyrics. Was Russell Hitchcock a sorcerer? He didn’t look that menacing to me, but sorcerers were pretty sneaky. Even so, I was sure Justin Bieber was okay. As soon as we hit a rest stop, I was ordering a replacement from my iPhone. ~ Debra Dunbar,#NFDB
759:A bare two years after Vasco da Gama’s voyage a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral delivered a letter from the king of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudra-raja or Sea-king), the Hindu ruler of the city-state of Calicut, demanding that he expel all Muslims from his kingdom as they were enemies of the ‘Holy Faith’. He met with a blank refusal; then afterwards the Samudra steadfastly maintained that Calicut had always been open to everyone who wished to trade there…
During those early years the people who had traditionally participated in the Indian Ocean trade were taken completely by surprise. In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown, no state or kings or ruling power had ever before tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms. The territorial and dynastic ambitions that were pursued with such determination on land were generally not allowed to spill over into the sea.
Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war. When a defeat is as complete as was that of the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of choice and preference. Yet it is worth allowing for the possibility that the peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade may have been, in a quiet and inarticulate way, the product of a rare cultural choice — one that may have owed a great deal to the pacifist customs and beliefs of the Gujarati Jains and Vanias who played such an important part in it. At the time, at least one European was moved to bewilderment by the unfamiliar mores of the region; a response more honest perhaps than the trust in historical inevitability that has supplanted it since. ‘The heathen [of Gujarat]’, wrote Tomé Pires, early in the sixteenth century, ‘held that they must never kill anyone, nor must they have armed men in their company. If they were captured and [their captors] wanted to kill them all, they did not resist. This is the Gujarat law among the heathen.’
It was because of those singular traditions, perhaps, that the rulers of the Indian Ocean ports were utterly confounded by the demands and actions of the Portuguese. Having long been accustomed to the tradesmen’s rules of bargaining and compromise they tried time and time again to reach an understanding with the Europeans — only to discover, as one historian has put it, that the choice was ‘between resistance and submission; co-operation was not offered.’ Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores. ~ Amitav Ghosh,#NFDB
760:On Sunday, November 10, Kaiser Wilhelm II was dethroned, and he fled to Holland for his life. Britain’s King George V, who was his cousin, told his diary that Wilhelm was “the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war,” having “utterly ruined his country and himself.” Keeping vigil at the White House, the President and First Lady learned by telephone, at three o’clock that morning, that the Germans had signed an armistice. As Edith later recalled, “We stood mute—unable to grasp the significance of the words.” From Paris, Colonel House, who had bargained for the armistice as Wilson’s envoy, wired the President, “Autocracy is dead. Long live democracy and its immortal leader. In this great hour my heart goes out to you in pride, admiration and love.” At 1:00 p.m., wearing a cutaway and gray trousers, Wilson faced a Joint Session of Congress, where he read out Germany’s surrender terms. He told the members that “this tragical war, whose consuming flames swept from one nation to another until all the world was on fire, is at an end,” and “it was the privilege of our own people to enter it at its most critical juncture.” He added that the war’s object, “upon which all free men had set their hearts,” had been achieved “with a sweeping completeness which even now we do not realize,” and Germany’s “illicit ambitions engulfed in black disaster.” This time, Senator La Follette clapped. Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Lodge complained that Wilson should have held out for unconditional German surrender. Driven down Capitol Hill, Wilson was cheered by joyous crowds on the streets. Eleanor Roosevelt recorded that Washington “went completely mad” as “bells rang, whistles blew, and people went up and down the streets throwing confetti.” Including those who had perished in theaters of conflict from influenza and other diseases, the nation’s nineteen-month intervention in the world war had levied a military death toll of more than 116,000 Americans, out of a total perhaps exceeding 8 million. There were rumors that Wilson planned to sail for France and horse-trade at the peace conference himself. No previous President had left the Americas during his term of office. The Boston Herald called this tradition “unwritten law.” Senator Key Pittman, Democrat from Nevada, told reporters that Wilson should go to Paris “because there is no man who is qualified to represent him.” The Knickerbocker Press of Albany, New York, was disturbed by the “evident desire of the President’s adulators to make this war his personal property.” The Free Press of Burlington, Vermont, said that Wilson’s presence in Paris would “not be seemly,” especially if the talks degenerated into “bitter controversies.” The Chattanooga Times called on Wilson to stay home, “where he could keep his own hand on the pulse of his own people” and “translate their wishes” into action by wireless and cable to his bargainers in Paris. ~ Michael R Beschloss, #NFDB
761:In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative. It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
762:The government has a great need to restore its credibility, to make people forget its history and rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as "stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost."
Why? Because soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams.
But this time, these will have to be successful intervention, which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even possible for the press to criticize successful interventions - the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. - as long as these criticisms don't exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises, and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to liberal ideology.
How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant officials. The war's savagery is also denounced, but that too, is used as a neutral category...Presumably the goals were legitimate - it would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely...
The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war - on a pragmatic basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity, historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share the same presuppositions as the hawks. They do not question the right of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful intervention is not brought into question.
...
The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates - indeed, encourages - a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment of force by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations - that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way. ~ Noam Chomsky,#NFDB
763:Build houses and make yourselves at home. You are not camping. This is your home; make yourself at home. This may not be your favorite place, but it is a place. Dig foundations; construct a habitation; develop the best environment for living that you can. If all you do is sit around and pine for the time you get back to Jerusalem, your present lives will be squalid and empty. Your life right now is every bit as valuable as it was when you were in Jerusalem, and every bit as valuable as it will be when you get back to Jerusalem. Babylonian exile is not your choice, but it is what you are given. Build a Babylonian house and live in it as well as you are able. Put in gardens and eat what grows in the country. Enter into the rhythm of the seasons. Become a productive part of the economy of the place. You are not parasites. Don’t expect others to do it for you. Get your hands into the Babylonian soil. Become knowledgeable about the Babylonian irrigation system. Acquire skill in cultivating fruits and vegetables in this soil and climate. Get some Babylonian recipes and cook them. Marry and have children. These people among whom you are living are not beneath you, nor are they above you; they are your equals with whom you can engage in the most intimate and responsible of relationships. You cannot be the person God wants you to be if you keep yourself aloof from others. That which you have in common is far more significant than what separates you. They are God’s persons: your task as a person of faith is to develop trust and conversation, love and understanding. Make yourselves at home there and work for the country’s welfare. Pray for Babylon’s well-being. If things go well for Babylon, things will go well for you. Welfare: shalom. Shalom means wholeness, the dynamic, vibrating health of a society that pulses with divinely directed purpose and surges with life-transforming love. Seek the shalom and pray for it. Throw yourselves into the place in which you find yourselves, but not on its terms, on God’s terms. Pray. Search for that center in which God’s will is being worked out (which is what we do when we pray) and work from that center. Jeremiah’s letter is a rebuke and a challenge: “Quit sitting around feeling sorry for yourselves. The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible—to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love. You didn’t do it when you were in Jerusalem. Why don’t you try doing it here, in Babylon? Don’t listen to the lying prophets who make an irresponsible living by selling you false hopes. You are in Babylon for a long time. You better make the best of it. Don’t just get along, waiting for some miraculous intervention. Build houses, plant gardens, marry husbands, marry wives, have children, pray for the wholeness of Babylon, and do everything you can to develop that wholeness. The only place you have to be human is where you are right now. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at this moment. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
764:In some instances, even when crisis intervention has been intensive and appropriate, the mother and daughter are already so deeply estranged at the time of disclosure that the bond between them seems irreparable. In this situation, no useful purpose is served by trying to separate the mother and father and keep the daughter at home. The daughter has already been emotionally expelled from her family; removing her to protective custody is simply the concrete expression of the family reality.
These are the cases which many agencies call their “tragedies.” This report of a child protective worker illustrates a case where removing the child from the home was the only reasonable course of action:
Division of Family and Children’s Services received an anonymous telephone call on Sept. 14 from a man who stated that he
overheard Tracy W., age 8, of [address] tell his daughter of a forced oral-genital assault, allegedly perpetrated against this child by her mother’s boyfriend, one Raymond S.
Two workers visited the W. home on Sept. 17. According to their report, Mrs. W. was heavily under the influence of alcohol at the time of the visit. Mrs. W. stated immediately that she was aware why the two workers wanted to see her, because Mr. S. had “hurt her little girl.” In the course of the interview, Mrs. W. acknowledged and described how Mr. S. had forced Tracy to have relations with him. Workers then interviewed Tracy and she verified what mother had stated. According to Mrs. W., Mr. S. admitted the sexual assault, claiming that he was drunk and not accountable for his actions. Mother then stated to workers that she banished Mr. S. from her home.
I had my first contact with mother and child at their home on Sept. 20 and I subsequently saw this family once a week. Mother was usually intoxicated and drinking beer when I saw her. I met Mr. S. on my second visit. Mr. S. denied having had any sexual relations with Tracy. Mother explained that she had obtained a license and planned to marry Mr. S.
On my third visit, Mrs. W. was again intoxicated and drinking despite my previous request that she not drink during my visit. Mother explained that Mr. S. had taken off to another state and she never wanted to see him again. On this visit mother demanded that Tracy tell me the details of her sexual involvement with Mr. S.
On my fourth visit, Mr. S. and Mrs. S. were present. Mother explained that they had been married the previous Saturday.
On my fifth visit, Mr. S. was not present. During our discussion, mother commented that “Bay was not the first one who had
Tracy.” After exploring this statement with mother and Tracy, it became clear that Tracy had been sexually exploited in the same manner at age six by another of Mrs. S.'s previous boyfriends.
On my sixth visit, Mrs. S. stated that she could accept Tracy’s being placed with another family as long as it did not appear to Tracy that it was her mother’s decision to give her up. Mother also commented, “I wish the fuck I never had her.”
It appears that Mrs. S. has had a number of other children all of whom have lived with other relatives or were in foster care for part of their lives. Tracy herself lived with a paternal aunt from birth to age five. ~ Judith Lewis Herman,#NFDB
765:Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between. Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit. Economists typically argue that the formation of social groups can be explained as the result of voluntary contract between individuals who have made the rational calculation that cooperation is in their long-term self-interest. By this account, trust is not necessary for cooperation: enlightened self-interest, together with legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose. Groups can be formed at any time based on self-interest, and group formation is not culture-dependent. But while contract and self-interest are important sources of association, the most effective organizations are based on communities of shared ethical values. These communities do not require extensive contract and legal regulation of their relations because prior moral consensus gives members of the group a basis for mutual trust. The social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision. That is, an individual can decide to “invest” in conventional human capital like a college education, or training to become a machinist or computer programmer, simply by going to the appropriate school. Acquisition of social capital, by contrast, requires habituation to the moral norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honesty, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt common norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. In other words, social capital cannot be acquired simply by individuals acting on their own. It is based on the prevalence of social, rather than individual virtues. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy. Another term that I will use widely throughout this book is spontaneous sociability, which constitutes a subset of social capital. In any modern society, organizations are being constantly created, destroyed, and modified. The most useful kind of social capital is often not the ability to work under the authority of a traditional community or group, but the capacity to form new associations and to cooperate within the terms of reference they establish. This type of group, spawned by industrial society’s complex division of labor and yet based on shared values rather than contract, falls under the general rubric of what Durkheim labeled “organic solidarity.”7 Spontaneous sociability, moreover, refers to that wide range of intermediate communities distinct from the family or those deliberately established by governments. Governments often have to step in to promote community when there is a deficit of spontaneous sociability. But state intervention poses distinct risks, since it can all too easily undermine the spontaneous communities established in civil society. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
766:Religion, then, is far from "useless." It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor. Religious misinterpretation is a truly constructive force, for it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis as it actually took place.
To think religiously is to envision the city's destiny in terms of that violence whose mastery over man increases as man believes he has gained mastery over it. To think religiously (in the primitive sense) is to see violence as something superhuman, to be kept always at a distance and ultimately renounced. When the fearful adoration of this power begins to diminish and all distinctions begin to disappear, the ritual sacrifices lose their force; their potency is not longer recognized by the entire community. Each member tries to correct the situation individually, and none succeeds. The withering away of the transcendental influence means that there is no longer the slightest difference between a desire to save the city and unbridled ambition, between genuine piety and the desire to claim divine status for oneself. Everyone looks on a rival enterprise as evidence of blasphemous designs. Men set to quarreling about the gods, and their skepticism leads to a new sacrificial crisis that will appear - retrospectively, in the light of a new manifestation of unanimous violence - as a new act of divine intervention and divine revenge.
Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without the surrogate victim. Also, violence itself offers a sort of respite, the fresh beginning of a cycle of ritual after a cycle of violence. Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine. The meaning of this word must remain hidden, the mechanism of unanimity remain concealed. For religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed. To drive the monster from its secret lair is to risk loosing it on mankind. To remove men's ignorance is only to risk exposing them to an even greater peril. The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception. In fact, the sacrificial crisis is simply another form of that knowledge which grows grater as the reciprocal violence grows more intense but which never leads to the whole truth. It is the knowledge of violence, along with the violence itself, that the act of expulsion succeeds in shunting outside the realm of consciousness. From the very fact that it belies the overt mythological messages, tragic drama opens a vast abyss before the poet; but he always draws back at the last moment. He is exposed to a form of hubris more dangerous than any contracted by his characters; it has to do with a truth that is felt to be infinitely destructive, even if it is not fully understood - and its destructiveness is as obvious to ancient religious thought as it is to modern philosophers. Thus we are dealing with an interdiction that still applies to ourselves and that modern thought has not yet invalidated. The fact that this secret has been subjected to exceptional pressure in the play [Bacchae] must prompt the following lines:
May our thoughts never aspire to anything higher than laws! What does it cost man to acknowledge the full sovereignty of the gods? That which has always been held as true owes its strength to Nature. ~ Ren Girard,#NFDB
767:In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same rate of 1.5–2 percent per year throughout the period 1820–2012. To be sure, growth slowed a bit between 1930 and 1950 to just over 1.5 percent, then increased again to just over 2 percent between 1950 and 1970, and then slowed to less than 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. In Western Europe, which suffered much more from the two world wars, the variations are considerably greater: per capita output stagnated between 1913 and 1950 (with a growth rate of just over 0.5 percent) and then leapt ahead to more than 4 percent from 1950 to 1970, before falling sharply to just slightly above US levels (a little more than 2 percent) in the period 1970–1990 and to barely 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012.
Western Europe experienced a golden age of growth between 1950 and 1970, only to see its growth rate diminish to one-half or even one-third of its peak level during the decades that followed.
[...]
If we looked only at continental Europe, we would find an average per capita output growth rate of 5 percent between 1950 and 1970—a level well beyond that achieved in other advanced countries over the past two centuries.
These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown.
In Great Britain and the United States, postwar history is interpreted quite differently. Between 1950 and 1980, the gap between the English-speaking countries and the countries that had lost the war closed rapidly. By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels.
In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914–1945 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized [...] Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it. ~ Thomas Piketty,#NFDB
768:No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.
Whoever is convinced that indulgence or excessive indulgence in these poisons is pernicious is not hindered from living abstemiously or temperately. This question cannot be treated exclusively in reference to alcoholism, morphinism, cocainism, etc., which all reasonable men acknowledge to be evils. For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious? In sports too, many people are prone to carry their indulgence further than their strength will allow. Why should not the state interfere here as well? Few men know how to be temperate in their sexual life, and it seems especially difficult for aging persons to understand that they should cease entirely to indulge in such pleasures or, at least, do so in moderation. Should not the state intervene here too?
More harmful still than all these pleasures, many will say, is the reading of evil literature. Should a press pandering to the lowest instincts of man be allowed to corrupt the soul? Should not the exhibition of pornographic pictures, of obscene plays, in short, of all allurements to immorality, be prohibited? And is not the dissemination of false sociological doctrines just as injurious to men and nations?
Should men be permitted to incite others to civil war and to wars against foreign countries? And should scurrilous lampoons and blasphemous diatribes be allowed to undermine respect for God and the Church?
We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual's mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. The personal freedom of the individual is abrogated. He becomes a slave of the community, bound to obey the dictates of the majority. It is hardly necessary to expatiate on the ways in which such powers could be abused by malevolent persons in authority.
The wielding, of powers of this kind even by men imbued with the best of intentions must needs reduce the world to a graveyard of the spirit. All mankind's progress has been achieved as a result of the initiative of a small minority that began to deviate from the ideas and customs of the majority until their example finally moved the others to accept the innovation themselves. To give the majority the right to dictate to the minority what it is to think, to read, and to do is to put a stop to progress once and for all.
Let no one object that the struggle against morphinism and the struggle against
"evil" literature are two quite different things. The only difference between them is that some of the same people who favor the prohibition of the former will not agree to the prohibition of the latter. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
769:Manage Your Team’s Collective Time Time management is a group endeavor. The payoff goes far beyond morale and retention. ILLUSTRATION: JAMES JOYCE by Leslie Perlow | 1461 words Most professionals approach time management the wrong way. People who fall behind at work are seen to be personally failing—just as people who give up on diet or exercise plans are seen to be lacking self-control or discipline. In response, countless time management experts focus on individual habits, much as self-help coaches do. They offer advice about such things as keeping better to-do lists, not checking e-mail incessantly, and not procrastinating. Of course, we could all do a better job managing our time. But in the modern workplace, with its emphasis on connectivity and collaboration, the real problem is not how individuals manage their own time. It’s how we manage our collective time—how we work together to get the job done. Here is where the true opportunity for productivity gains lies. Nearly a decade ago I began working with a team at the Boston Consulting Group to implement what may sound like a modest innovation: persuading each member to designate and spend one weeknight out of the office and completely unplugged from work. The intervention was aimed at improving quality of life in an industry that’s notorious for long hours and a 24/7 culture. The early returns were positive; the initiative was expanded to four teams of consultants, and then to 10. The results, which I described in a 2009 HBR article, “Making Time Off Predictable—and Required,” and in a 2012 book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone , were profound. Consultants on teams with mandatory time off had higher job satisfaction and a better work/life balance, and they felt they were learning more on the job. It’s no surprise, then, that BCG has continued to expand the program: As of this spring, it has been implemented on thousands of teams in 77 offices in 40 countries. During the five years since I first reported on this work, I have introduced similar time-based interventions at a range of companies—and I have come to appreciate the true power of those interventions. They put the ownership of how a team works into the hands of team members, who are empowered and incentivized to optimize their collective time. As a result, teams collaborate better. They streamline their work. They meet deadlines. They are more productive and efficient. Teams that set a goal of structured time off—and, crucially, meet regularly to discuss how they’ll work together to ensure that every member takes it—have more open dialogue, engage in more experimentation and innovation, and ultimately function better. CREATING “ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY” DAYS One of the insights driving this work is the realization that many teams stick to tried-and-true processes that, although familiar, are often inefficient. Even companies that create innovative products rarely innovate when it comes to process. This realization came to the fore when I studied three teams of software engineers working for the same company in different cultural contexts. The teams had the same assignments and produced the same amount of work, but they used very different methods. One, in Shenzen, had a hub-and-spokes org chart—a project manager maintained control and assigned the work. Another, in Bangalore, was self-managed and specialized, and it assigned work according to technical expertise. The third, in Budapest, had the strongest sense of being a team; its members were the most versatile and interchangeable. Although, as noted, the end products were the same, the teams’ varying approaches yielded different results. For example, the hub-and-spokes team worked fewer hours than the others, while the most versatile team had much greater flexibility and control over its schedule. The teams were completely unaware that their counterparts elsewhere in the world were managing their work differently. My research provide ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
770:As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely
and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.
Still, as Jacob Burckhardt says, power is evil in itself, no matter who exercises it.
It tends to corrupt those who wield it and leads to abuse. Not only absolute sovereigns and aristocrats, but the masses also, in whose hands democracy entrusts the supreme power of government, are only too easily inclined to excesses.
In the United States, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages are
prohibited. Other countries do not go so far, but nearly everywhere some
restrictions are imposed on the sale of opium, cocaine, and similar narcotics. It is universally deemed one of the tasks of legislation and government to protect the individual from himself. Even those who otherwise generally have misgivings about extending the area of governmental activity consider it quite proper that the freedom of the individual should be curtailed in this respect, and they think that only a benighted doctrinairism could oppose such prohibitions. Indeed, so general is the acceptance of this kind of interference by the authorities in the life of the individual that those who, are opposed to liberalism on principle are prone to base their argument on the ostensibly undisputed acknowledgment of the necessity of such prohibitions and to draw from it the conclusion that complete freedom is an evil and that some measure of restriction must be imposed upon the freedom of the
individual by the governmental authorities in their capacity as guardians of his welfare. The question cannot be whether the authorities ought to impose restrictions upon the freedom of the individual, but only how far they ought to go in this respect.
No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.
Whoever is convinced that indulgence or excessive indulgence in these poisons is pernicious is not hindered from living abstemiously or temperately. This question cannot be treated exclusively in reference to alcoholism, morphinism, cocainism, etc., which all reasonable men acknowledge to be evils. For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the state generally prescribe which foods may be indulged in and which must be avoided because they are injurious? In sports too, many people are prone to carry their indulgence further than their strength will allow. Why should not the state interfere here as well? Few men know how to be temperate in their sexual life, and it seems especially difficult for aging persons to understand that they should cease entirel ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
771:The perfect supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule.It is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an illumined and uplifted being, will and knowledge and not by the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will be an action not bound by the dualities but full and large in the spirit's impartial joy of existence. The happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant ego.
If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, 206,#NFDB
772:Intuition And The Value Of Concentration :::
Mother, how can the faculty of intuition be developed?
... There are different kinds of intuition, and we carry these capacities within us. They are always active to some extent but we don't notice them because we don't pay enough attention to what is going on in us. Behind the emotions, deep within the being, in a consciousness seated somewhere near the level of the solar plexus, there is a sort of prescience, a kind of capacity for foresight, but not in the form of ideas: rather in the form of feelings, almost a perception of sensations. For instance, when one is going to decide to do something, there is sometimes a kind of uneasiness or inner refusal, and usually, if one listens to this deeper indication, one realises that it was justified. In other cases there is something that urges, indicates, insists - I am not speaking of impulses, you understand, of all the movements which come from the vital and much lower still - indications which are behind the feelings, which come from the affective part of the being; there too one can receive a fairly sure indication of the thing to be done. These are forms of intuition or of a higher instinct which can be cultivated by observation and also by studying the results. Naturally, it must be done very sincerely, objectively, without prejudice. If one wants to see things in a particular way and at the same time practise this observation, it is all useless. One must do it as if one were looking at what is happening from outside oneself, in someone else. It is one form of intuition and perhaps the first one that usually manifests. There is also another form but that one is much more difficult to observe because for those who are accustomed to think, to act by reason - not by impulse but by reason - to reflect before doing anything, there is an extremely swift process from cause to effect in the half-conscious thought which prevents you from seeing the line, the whole line of reasoning and so you don't think that it is a chain of reasoning, and that is quite deceptive. You have the impression of an intuition but it is not an intuition, it is an extremely rapid subconscious reasoning, which takes up a problem and goes straight to the conclusions. This must not be mistaken for intuition. In the ordinary functioning of the brain, intuition is something which suddenly falls like a drop of light. If one has the faculty, the beginning of a faculty of mental vision, it gives the impression of something coming from outside or above, like a little impact of a drop of light in the brain, absolutely independent of all reasoning. This is perceived more easily when one is able to silence one's mind, hold it still and attentive, arresting its usual functioning, as if the mind were changed into a kind of mirror turned towards a higher faculty in a sustained and silent attention. That too one can learn to do. One must learn to do it, it is a necessary discipline.
When you have a question to solve, whatever it may be, usually you concentrate your attention here (pointing between the eyebrows), at the centre just above the eyes, the centre of the conscious will. But then if you do that, you cannot be in contact with intuition. You can be in contact with the source of the will, of effort, even of a certain kind of knowledge, but in the outer, almost material field; whereas, if you want to contact the intuition, you must keep this (Mother indicates the forehead) completely immobile. Active thought must be stopped as far as possible and the entire mental faculty must form - at the top of the head and a little further above if possible - a kind of mirror, very quiet, very still, turned upwards, in silent, very concentrated attention. If you succeed, you can - perhaps not immediately - but you can have the perception of the drops of light falling upon the mirror from a still unknown region and expressing themselves as a conscious thought which has no connection with all the rest of your thought since you have been able to keep it silent. That is the real beginning of the intellectual intuition.
It is a discipline to be followed. For a long time one may try and not succeed, but as soon as one succeeds in making a mirror, still and attentive, one always obtains a result, not necessarily with a precise form of thought but always with the sensations of a light coming from above. And then, if one can receive this light coming from above without entering immediately into a whirl of activity, receive it in calm and silence and let it penetrate deep into the being, then after a while it expresses itself either as a luminous thought or as a very precise indication here (Mother indicates the heart), in this other centre.
Naturally, first these two faculties must be developed; then, as soon as there is any result, one must observe the result, as I said, and see the connection with what is happening, the consequences: see, observe very attentively what has come in, what may have caused a distortion, what one has added by way of more or less conscious reasoning or the intervention of a lower will, also more or less conscious; and it is by a very deep study - indeed, almost of every moment, in any case daily and very frequent - that one succeeds in developing one's intuition. It takes a long time. It takes a long time and there are ambushes: one can deceive oneself, take for intuitions subconscious wills which try to manifest, indications given by impulses one has refused to receive openly, indeed all sorts of difficulties. One must be prepared for that. But if one persists, one is sure to succeed.
And there comes a time when one feels a kind of inner guidance, something which is leading one very perceptibly in all that one does. But then, for the guidance to have its maximum power, one must naturally add to it a conscious surrender: one must be sincerely determined to follow the indication given by the higher force. If one does that, then... one saves years of study, one can seize the result extremely rapidly. If one also does that, the result comes very rapidly. But for that, it must be done with sincerity and... a kind of inner spontaneity. If one wants to try without this surrender, one may succeed - as one can also succeed in developing one's personal will and making it into a very considerable power - but that takes a very long time and one meets many obstacles and the result is very precarious; one must be very persistent, obstinate, persevering, and one is sure to succeed, but only after a great labour.
Make your surrender with a sincere, complete self-giving, and you will go ahead at full speed, you will go much faster - but you must not do this calculatingly, for that spoils everything! (Silence) Moreover, whatever you may want to do in life, one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the basis of everything, the capacity of concentrating the attention. If you are able to gather together the rays of attention and consciousness on one point and can maintain this concentration with a persistent will, nothing can resist it - whatever it may be, from the most material physical development to the highest spiritual one. But this discipline must be followed in a constant and, it may be said, imperturbable way; not that you should always be concentrated on the same thing - that's not what I mean, I mean learning to concentrate.
And materially, for studies, sports, all physical or mental development, it is absolutely indispensable. And the value of an individual is proportionate to the value of his attention.
And from the spiritual point of view it is still more important.
There is no spiritual obstacle which can resist a penetrating power of concentration. For instance, the discovery of the psychic being, union with the inner Divine, opening to the higher spheres, all can be obtained by an intense and obstinate power of concentration - but one must learn how to do it. There is nothing in the human or even in the superhuman field, to which the power of concentration is not the key. You can be the best athlete, you can be the best student, you can be an artistic, literary or scientific genius, you can be the greatest saint with that faculty. And everyone has in himself a tiny little beginning of it - it is given to everybody, but people do not cultivate it.
~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,#NFDB
773:The Science of Living
To know oneself and to control oneself
AN AIMLESS life is always a miserable life.
Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life.
Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.
But whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realised unless you have realised perfection in yourself.
To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action. It is an assiduous study which demands much perseverance and sincerity. For man's nature, especially his mental nature, has a spontaneous tendency to give a favourable explanation for everything he thinks, feels, says and does. It is only by observing these movements with great care, by bringing them, as it were, before the tribunal of our highest ideal, with a sincere will to submit to its judgment, that we can hope to form in ourselves a discernment that never errs. For if we truly want to progress and acquire the capacity of knowing the truth of our being, that is to say, what we are truly created for, what we can call our mission upon earth, then we must, in a very regular and constant manner, reject from us or eliminate in us whatever contradicts the truth of our existence, whatever is opposed to it. In this way, little by little, all the parts, all the elements of our being can be organised into a homogeneous whole around our psychic centre. This work of unification requires much time to be brought to some degree of perfection. Therefore, in order to accomplish it, we must arm ourselves with patience and endurance, with a determination to prolong our life as long as necessary for the success of our endeavour.
As you pursue this labour of purification and unification, you must at the same time take great care to perfect the external and instrumental part of your being. When the higher truth manifests, it must find in you a mind that is supple and rich enough to be able to give the idea that seeks to express itself a form of thought which preserves its force and clarity. This thought, again, when it seeks to clothe itself in words, must find in you a sufficient power of expression so that the words reveal the thought and do not deform it. And the formula in which you embody the truth should be manifested in all your feelings, all your acts of will, all your actions, in all the movements of your being. Finally, these movements themselves should, by constant effort, attain their highest perfection.
All this can be realised by means of a fourfold discipline, the general outline of which is given here. The four aspects of the discipline do not exclude each other, and can be followed at the same time; indeed, this is preferable. The starting-point is what can be called the psychic discipline. We give the name "psychic" to the psychological centre of our being, the seat within us of the highest truth of our existence, that which can know this truth and set it in movement. It is therefore of capital importance to become conscious of its presence in us, to concentrate on this presence until it becomes a living fact for us and we can identify ourselves with it.
In various times and places many methods have been prescribed for attaining this perception and ultimately achieving this identification. Some methods are psychological, some religious, some even mechanical. In reality, everyone has to find the one which suits him best, and if one has an ardent and steadfast aspiration, a persistent and dynamic will, one is sure to meet, in one way or another - outwardly through reading and study, inwardly through concentration, meditation, revelation and experience - the help one needs to reach the goal. Only one thing is absolutely indispensable: the will to discover and to realise. This discovery and realisation should be the primary preoccupation of our being, the pearl of great price which we must acquire at any cost. Whatever you do, whatever your occupations and activities, the will to find the truth of your being and to unite with it must be always living and present behind all that you do, all that you feel, all that you think.
To complement this movement of inner discovery, it would be good not to neglect the development of the mind. For the mental instrument can equally be a great help or a great hindrance. In its natural state the human mind is always limited in its vision, narrow in its understanding, rigid in its conceptions, and a constant effort is therefore needed to widen it, to make it more supple and profound. So it is very necessary to consider everything from as many points of view as possible. Towards this end, there is an exercise which gives great suppleness and elevation to the thought. It is as follows: a clearly formulated thesis is set; against it is opposed its antithesis, formulated with the same precision. Then by careful reflection the problem must be widened or transcended until a synthesis is found which unites the two contraries in a larger, higher and more comprehensive idea.
Many other exercises of the same kind can be undertaken; some have a beneficial effect on the character and so possess a double advantage: that of educating the mind and that of establishing control over the feelings and their consequences. For example, you must never allow your mind to judge things and people, for the mind is not an instrument of knowledge; it is incapable of finding knowledge, but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a much higher domain than that of the human mind, far above the region of pure ideas. The mind has to be silent and attentive to receive knowledge from above and manifest it. For it is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action, and it is in these functions that it attains its full value and real usefulness.
There is another practice which can be very helpful to the progress of the consciousness. Whenever there is a disagreement on any matter, such as a decision to be taken, or an action to be carried out, one must never remain closed up in one's own conception or point of view. On the contrary, one must make an effort to understand the other's point of view, to put oneself in his place and, instead of quarrelling or even fighting, find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties; there always is one for men of goodwill.
Here we must mention the discipline of the vital. The vital being in us is the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts. It can set everything in motion, build and realise; but it can also destroy and mar everything. Thus it may be the most difficult part to discipline in the human being. It is a long and exacting labour requiring great patience and perfect sincerity, for without sincerity you will deceive yourself from the very outset, and all endeavour for progress will be in vain. With the collaboration of the vital no realisation seems impossible, no transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but most often it seeks its own satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, the vital gets vexed, sulks and goes on strike. Its energy disappears more or less completely and in its place leaves disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression and dissatisfaction. At such moments it is good to remain quiet and refuse to act; for these are the times when one does stupid things and in a few moments one can destroy or spoil the progress that has been made during months of regular effort. These crises are shorter and less dangerous for those who have established a contact with their psychic being which is sufficient to keep alive in them the flame of aspiration and the consciousness of the ideal to be realised. They can, with the help of this consciousness, deal with their vital as one deals with a rebellious child, with patience and perseverance, showing it the truth and light, endeavouring to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses may be frequent, but if a courageous will is maintained, one is sure to triumph one day and see all difficulties melt and vanish before the radiance of the truth-consciousness.
Lastly, by means of a rational and discerning physical education, we must make our body strong and supple enough to become a fit instrument in the material world for the truth-force which wants to manifest through us.
In fact, the body must not rule, it must obey. By its very nature it is a docile and faithful servant. Unfortunately, it rarely has the capacity of discernment it ought to have with regard to its masters, the mind and the vital. It obeys them blindly, at the cost of its own well-being. The mind with its dogmas, its rigid and arbitrary principles, the vital with its passions, its excesses and dissipations soon destroy the natural balance of the body and create in it fatigue, exhaustion and disease. It must be freed from this tyranny and this can be done only through a constant union with the psychic centre of the being. The body has a wonderful capacity of adaptation and endurance. It is able to do so many more things than one usually imagines. If, instead of the ignorant and despotic masters that now govern it, it is ruled by the central truth of the being, you will be amazed at what it is capable of doing. Calm and quiet, strong and poised, at every minute it will be able to put forth the effort that is demanded of it, for it will have learnt to find rest in action and to recuperate, through contact with the universal forces, the energies it expends consciously and usefully. In this sound and balanced life a new harmony will manifest in the body, reflecting the harmony of the higher regions, which will give it perfect proportions and ideal beauty of form. And this harmony will be progressive, for the truth of the being is never static; it is a perpetual unfolding of a growing perfection that is more and more total and comprehensive. As soon as the body has learnt to follow this movement of progressive harmony, it will be possible for it to escape, through a continuous process of transformation, from the necessity of disintegration and destruction. Thus the irrevocable law of death will no longer have any reason to exist.
When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and harmony.
Bulletin, November 1950
~ The Mother, On Education, #self-knowledge,#NFDB
224 Integral Yoga
15 Occultism
10 Psychology
8 Christianity
4 Poetry
3 Philosophy
3 Education
3 Cybernetics
2 Fiction
2 Buddhism
1 Yoga
1 Thelema
1 Integral Theory
1 Alchemy
141 The Mother
92 Sri Aurobindo
77 Satprem
29 Nolini Kanta Gupta
11 Carl Jung
6 Nirodbaran
6 Aleister Crowley
5 Saint Augustine of Hippo
5 Paul Richard
5 George Van Vrekhem
5 A B Purani
3 William Wordsworth
3 Norbert Wiener
2 Saint John of Climacus
2 Plotinus
2 James George Frazer
2 H P Lovecraft
2 Bokar Rinpoche
16 The Life Divine
15 Record of Yoga
13 The Synthesis Of Yoga
11 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
10 Agenda Vol 06
9 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
9 Prayers And Meditations
9 Letters On Yoga IV
9 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
8 Questions And Answers 1955
8 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
8 Agenda Vol 01
7 Questions And Answers 1956
7 Letters On Yoga II
7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
7 Agenda Vol 10
7 Agenda Vol 07
7 Agenda Vol 05
7 Agenda Vol 03
6 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
6 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
6 Agenda Vol 12
6 Agenda Vol 04
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 Questions And Answers 1953
5 Preparing for the Miraculous
5 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
5 City of God
4 The Practice of Psycho therapy
4 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
4 Some Answers From The Mother
4 Mysterium Coniunctionis
4 Essays On The Gita
4 Agenda Vol 11
3 Wordsworth - Poems
3 Words Of The Mother II
3 Savitri
3 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
3 On Education
3 Magick Without Tears
3 Cybernetics
3 Agenda Vol 13
3 Agenda Vol 09
3 Agenda Vol 02
2 Words Of The Mother III
2 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
2 The Golden Bough
2 Tara - The Feminine Divine
2 Questions And Answers 1954
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
2 Lovecraft - Poems
2 Liber ABA
2 Letters On Yoga I
2 Essays Divine And Human
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
2 Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin
2 Aion
2 Agenda Vol 08
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
of the Phallus made complete through the intervention
of the Yoni. This again connects with the IO and OI
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
obtained the intervention of the Divine Grace. This prompted
Attila to alter the route of his troops, and so he gave the city a
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
through my intervention.
Now, if you don't like me to show you your faults, I can very
--
intervene and on the other refuse my intervention.
If you are vexed by what I tell you, it proves that you do not
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A divine intervention thrones above.
Alive in a dead rotating universe
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Abrupt interventions stark and absolute
And the Superconscient's unaccountable acts,
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Are the presence and intervention of the Americans
in Vietnam justifiable?
01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Satan proposes to lead man down into hell through a sure means, nothing more sure, according to him, viz., love for a woman and a woman's love in return. Nothing like that to make man earth-bound or hell-bound and force out of him the nostalgic cry, "Time must have a stop." A most simple, primal and primeval lyric love will most suit Satan's purpose. Hence the Margaret episode. Love=Passion=Lust=Hell; that is the inevitable equation sequence, and through which runs the magic thread of infatuation. And that charm is invincible. Satan did succeed and was within an ace, as they say, of the final and definitive triumph: but that was not to be, for he left out of account an incalculable element. Love, even human love has, at least can have, a wonderful power, the potency of reversing the natural decree and bring about a supernatural intervention. Human love can at a crucial momentin extremiscall down the Divine Grace, which means God's love for man. And the soul meant for perdition and about to be seized and carried away by Satan finds itself suddenly free and lifted up and borne by Heaven's messengers. Human Jove is divine love itself in earthly form and figure and whatever its apparent aberrations it is in soul and substance that thing. Satan is hoisted with his own petard. That is God's irony.
But Goethe's Satan seems to know or feel something of his fate. He knows his function and the limit too of his function. He speaks of the doomsday for people, but it is his doomsday also, he says in mystic terms. Yes, it is his doomsday, for it is the day of man's liberation. Satan has to release man from the pact that stands cancelled. The soul of man cannot be sold, even if he wanted it.
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
being, which has slowly been formed by divine intervention in
order to manifest the Divine in the human being.
0 1955-03-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Mother, once more I come to ask you for Mahakalis1 intervention. After a period when everything seemed much better, I again awake to impossible mornings when I live badly, very badly, far from you, incapable of calling you and, whats more, of feeling your Presence or your help.
I dont know what mud is stirring about in me, but everything is obscured, and I cannot dissociate myself from these vital waves.
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This means that before hoping to realize such a gnostic collectivity, each one must first of all become (or at least start to become) a gnostic being. It is obvious that the individual work must take the lead and the collective work follow; but the fact remains that spontaneously, without any arbitrary intervention of will the individual progress IS restrained or CHECKED, as It were, by the collective state. Between the collectivity and the individual, there exists an interdependence from which one cannot be totally free, even if one tries. And even he who might try, in his yoga, to free himself totally from the human and terrestrial state of consciousness, would be at least subconsciously bound by the state of the whole, which impedes and PULLS BACKWARDS. One can attempt to go much faster, one can attempt to let all the weight of attachments and responsibilities fall off, but in spite of everything, the realization of even the most advanced or the leader in the march of evolution is dependent upon the realization of the whole, dependent upon the state in which the terrestrial collectivity happens to be. And this PULLS backwards to such an extent that sometimes one has to wait centuries for the earth to be ready before being able to realize what is to be realized.
This is why Sri Aurobindo has also written somewhere else that a double movement is necessary: the effort for individual progress and realization must be combined with the effort of trying to uplift the whole so as to enable it to make a progress indispensable for the greater progress of the individual: a mass progress, if you will, that allows the individual to take a further step forward.
0 1957-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
During the flu epidemic, for example, I spent every day in the midst of people who were germ carriers. And one day, I clearly felt that the body had decided not to catch this flu. It asserted its autonomy. You see, it was not a question of the higher Will deciding, no. It didnt take place in the highest consciousness: the body itself decided. When you are way above in your consciousness, you see things, you know things; but in actual fact, once you descend again into matter, it is like water running through sand. In this respect, things have changed, the body has a DIRECT power, independent of any outer intervention. Even though it is barely visible, I consider this to be a very important result.
And this new vibration in the body has allowed me to understand the mechanism of the transformation. It is not something that comes from a higher Will, not a higher consciousness that imposes itself upon the body: it is the body itself awakening in its cells, a freedom of the cells themselves, an absolutely new vibration that sets disorders righteven disorders that existed prior to the supramental manifestation.
0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have just now received your letter of the 28th. On that day I definitely felt that there was a decisive change in the situation and I understood right away that you had spoken to Swami and also that what I had written to you gave you the opportunity to take a great step. I am very happy and can say with certitude that the worst is over. However, from several points of view, I infinitely appreciate Xs offer. And although I do not think it necessary, or even desirable, that they both come here (it would create a veritable revolution and perhaps even a panic among the ashramites), I am sure that their intervention in Rameswaram itself would not only be useful but most effective
Yes, everything has changed since you now understand that your battle is not only a personal battle and that by winning it, it is a real service you are rendering to the Divine Work.
0 1959-01-06, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
His action here has been very effective and really very interesting. I still do not know whether someone has really done black magic, and the villain has yet to appear before me. But already several days ago the malefic influence completely disappeared without leaving any trace in the atmosphere. Also their mantric intervention did not stop at that, for it has had another most interesting result. I am preparing a long letter for Swami to explain all this to him
The pain on the left side has not entirely gone and there have been some complications which have delayed things. But I feel much better. In fact, I am rebuilding my health, and I am in no hurry to resume the exhausting days as before. It is quiet upstairs for working, and I am going to take advantage of this to prepare the Bulletin1 at leisure. As I had not read over the pages on the message that we had prepared for the 31st, I have revised and transformed them into an article. It will be the first one in the February issue. I am now going to choose the others. I will tell you which ones I have chosen and in what order I will put them.
0 1960-10-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
When I say to someone, I shall take care of you, do you know what I do? I join his body to mine. And then all the work is done in me (as far as possibleessentially its possible, but there is a relativity because of time; but as far as possible ). So I find it very interesting to make cross-references and find out the results of my interventionnot so I can boast (theres nothing much to boast about), but for the sake of the SCIENTIFIC study of the problem: to know how to proceed, how to discriminate, what is active and what isnt, what are the guide lines, etc.
And even if at the moment you dont feel very good, you are able to say, It doesnt matter; what we have to do, well do (this fear of not being able to do what has to be done is the most irksome), if at that moment you can sincerely say to yourself, No, I trust in the Divine Grace no, I will do what I have to do, and Ill be given the power to do it, or the power to do it will be created in me then that is the true attitude.
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Symbolically, in life, we might think of tamas as the earth (the solid and obdurate earth), and this intervention of the vital is water flowing onto it. But when first it touches the earth, it stirs up mud! Theres no reason to protest, for its like that. And thereby the earth becomes less hard and resistant, and it begins receiving.
Its an approach which is not at all mental nor intellectual nor (God knows!) moral in the leastno notion of Good or Evil nor any of those things, absolutely none of that. Theres a moment in life when you begin thinking a little and you see all this from an overall or universal point of view in which all moral notions completely disappearFOR ANOTHER REASON. This experience with Z reminded me of a certain way of approaching Beauty that enables you even to find it in what appears dirty and ugly to the common vision. It is She trying to express herself in this something which to the common vision is ugly, dirty, hypocritical. But of course, if you yourself have striven assiduously and have greatly held yourself in, then you look at it reprovingly.
0 1960-11-26, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I felt your intervention very clearly. I was really in a bad way, but when I came out of the japa, I knew it was cured. There is still something in the leg that pulls a little, but it has practically disappeared.
Its the memory, the memory in the cells.
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have had this experience, and I remember it even went on for several days; I saw all material circumstances as an absolutean absolute that we perceive as an unfolding, but which is an eternally existing absolute. I had this experience, and at the same time I had a very clear perception of what falsehood is the lie; what, from the psychological, the mental point of view, Sri Aurobindo, translating from the Sanskrit, called crookedness.3 We attribute the course of circumstances to our psychological reactionsand indeed, they are used momentarily because everything collaborates either consciously or unconsciously to make things be what they have to be but things could be what they have to be without the intervention of this falsehood. I lived in that consciousness for several days, and it became apparent that this was what separated falsehood from truth. In this state of knowledge-consciousness, the distinction can be made between falsehood and truth; and when seen in that truth-consciousness, material circumstances change character.
Now I no longer have the experience of that state except as a memory, so I cant formulate it accurately. But what was very clear and comes very oftenvery oftenis the perception of a superimposition of falsehood over a real fact. This brings us back to what I was telling you some time ago,4 that everything is very simple in its truth, that human consciousness is what complicates everything. But the former was an even more total experience of it.
0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the final analysis, everything obviously depends upon the Supremes Will because, if one looks deeply enough into the question, even physical laws and resistances are nothing for Him. But this kind of direct intervention takes place only at the extreme limit; if His Will is to be expressed in opposition, as it were, to the whole set of laws governing the Manifestationwell, that only comes at the very last second. Sri Aurobindo has expressed this so well in Savitri, so well! At least three times in the book he has expressed this Will that abolishes all established laws, all of them, and all the consequences of these laws, the whole formidable colossus of the Manifestation, so that in the face of it all, That can express itself and this takes place at the very last second, so to speak, at the extreme limit of possibility.
I must say that there was a time when, as Sri Aurobindo had entrusted his work to me, there was a kind of tension to do it (it cant be called an anxiety); a tension in the will. This too has now ended (Mother stretches her arms into the Infinite). Its finished. But there MAY still be something tense lurking somewhere in the subconscient or the inconscient I dont know, its possible. Why? I dont know. I mean I have never been told, at any time, neither through Sri Aurobindo nor directly, whether or not I would go right to the end. I have never been told the contrary, either. I have been told nothing at all. And if at times I turn towards Thatnot to question, but simply to know the answer is always the same: Carry on, its not your problem; dont worry about it. So now I have learned not to worry about it; I am consciously not worried about it.
0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the trouble is that people will say: whats the need for a descent if all is involved and then evolves? Why a descent? Why should there be an intervention from a higher plane?
I beg your pardon, but what was built up through this involution had to be unbuilt. The CAUSE of this involution had to be undone.
--
Not only that. For example, Sri Aurobindo says that when Life appeared there was a pressure from below, from evolution, to make Life emerge from Matter, and simultaneously a descent of Life from its own plane. Then, when Mind emerged out of Life, the same thing from above happened again. Why this intervention from above each time? Why dont things emerge normally, one after another, without needing a descent?
You may as well ask why everything has gone wrong!
0 1962-01-12 - supramental ship, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Another thing I didnt mention to you when I related the experience was that the ship had no engine. Everything was set in motion through will powerpeople, things (even the clothes people wore were a result of their will). And this gave all things and every persons shape a great suppleness, because there was an awareness of this willwhich is not a mental will but a will of the Self, what could be called a spiritual will or a soul-will (to give the word soul that particular meaning). I have that experience right here when theres an absolute spontaneity in action, I mean when the action for instance, an utterance or a movementis not determined by the mind, and not even (not to mention thought or intellect), not even by the mind that usually sets us in motion. Generally, when we do something, we can perceive in ourselves a will to do it; when you watch yourself, you see this: there is always (it can happen in a flash) the will to do. When you are conscious and watch yourself doing something, you see in yourself the will to do itthis is where the mind intervenes, its normal intervention, the established order in which things happen. But the supramental action is decided by a leap over the mind. The action is direct, with no need to go through the mind. Something enters directly into contact with the vital centers and activates them without going through the mindyet in full consciousness. The consciousness doesnt function in the usual sequence, it functions from the center of spiritual will straight to matter.
And so long as you can keep that absolute immobility in the mind, the inspiration is absolutely pureit comes pure. When you can catch and hold onto this while youre speaking, then what comes to you is unmixed too, it stays pure.
0 1962-01-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other motive for anubhava is of a more general applicability; for in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the degradation of a higher and true movement. It is this or something like it that is attempted crudely and improperly with a rudimentary and insufficient knowledge in the system of psycho-analysis. The process of raising up the lower movements into the full light of consciousness in order to know and deal with them is inevitable; for there can be no complete change without it. But it can truly succeed only when a higher light and force are sufficiently at work to overcome, sooner or later, the force of the tendency that is held up for change. Many, under the pretext of anubhava, not only raise up the adverse movement, but support it with their consent instead of rejecting it, find justifications for continuing or repeating it and so go on playing with it, indulging its return, eternising it; afterwards when they want to get rid of it, it has got such a hold that they find themselves helpless in its clutch and only a terrible struggle or an intervention of divine grace can liberate them.Some do this out of a vital twist or perversity, others out of sheer ignorance; but in yoga, as in life, ignorance is not accepted by Nature as a justifying excuse. This danger is there in all improper dealings with the ignorant parts of the nature; but none is more ignorant, more perilous, more unreasoning and obstinate in recurrence than the lower vital subconscious and its movements. To raise it up prematurely or improperly for anubhava is to risk suffusing the conscious parts also with its dark and dirty stuff and thus poisoning the whole vital and even the mental nature. Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and eliminate them by the strength of the divine calm, light, force and knowledge. Even so, there will be enough of the lower stuff rising up of itself to give you as much of the anubhava as you will need for getting rid of the obstacles; but then they can be dealt with with much less danger and under a higher internal guidance.
***
0 1962-02-24, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This explanation is clear; and the healing was the result of tapasya. Its self-explanatory. Something was even saying to my body, to the bodys SUBSTANCE, O unbelieving substance, now you wont be able to say there are no miracles. Throughout all the work that was being done on the 20th, something was saying (I dont know who, because it doesnt come like something foreign to me any more, its like a Wisdom, it seems like a Wisdom, something that knows: not someone in particular, but that which knows, whatever its form), something that knows was insisting to the body, by showing it certain things, vibrations, movements, From now on, O unbelieving substance, you cant say there are no miracles. Because the substance itself is used to each thing having its effect, to illnesses following a particular course and certain things even being necessary for it to be cured. This process is very subtle, and it doesnt come from the intellect, which can have a totally different interpretation of it; its rather a kind of consciousness ingrained in physical substance, and thats what was being addressed and being shown certain movements, certain vibrations and so forth: You see, from now on you cant say there are no miracles. In other words, a direct intervention of the Lord, who doesnt follow the beaten path, but does things in His own way.
There was also that attack (it was rather serious and threw the doctor into a fit of anxiety) which took place, I think, the day before sari distribution.6 The next morning, throughout the distribution, someone else seemed to have taken possession of my body and to be doing what had to be done, taking care of all the difficulties; I was comfortable, serene, simply like a carefree spectator. I had nothing to worry about, someone was. (What someone? Someone, something, I dont know, theres no more difference, its not delineated like that any more; but anyway, it was a being, a force, a consciousness perhaps a part of myself, I dont know; none of this is clear-cut; its quite precise, but not divided, very smoothMo ther makes a rounded gestureno breaks.) Something, then, a will or a force or a consciousness plainly a powerhad taken possession of the body and was doing all the work, looking after everything. I was witnessing everything, smiling. But its gone now. It came specifically for that work (I was in pretty bad shape); when the work was over, it dissolvedit didnt leave abruptly but it became inactive. Afterwards, I felt rather confident. Well in any case, I thought, something similar could happen on the 21st, since it just happened now.
0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But that is a singular state: there is no mental intervention at all; you live things POSITIVELY, just as you experience them physically, in the same way that this (Mother knocks on the table next to her) is physically a table. Its that kind of perception something positive. I positively said, I am going to my cousins place, and the relationship had an absolutely positive vibrationit wasnt at all something thought or even remembered: theres no remembering anything, its simply there, alive. A strange state. I have had it on several occasions, and when I have it I am aware that this must be the state people who know what is happening and make predictions are inin this state there is no possibility of doubt. No thoughts intervenenone at all, not one. Absolutely nothing intellectual: simply certain vital-physical vibrations, and then you know. And you dont even wonder how you know; its not that kind of thingits self-evident. And since I was in that state when I saw the reincarnation of the cousin, I am perfectly sure of what I saw. And god knows (Mother laughs), when I came out of it and began to look at it all with my usual consciousness, I said to myself, My word! I would never have thought of such a thing! It was millions of miles from any thought of mine. Besides, I never used to think of that cousin; he was a fine boy but I never paid much attention to him, he had no place in my active consciousness.
Its fun.
0 1962-06-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Previously, when I had an experience, I took great care to keep everything quiet and still so that it wouldnt be interrupted; but afterwards it was always made use of by the mind in its typical way (not exactly typical, but typical to the mind), and this appeared to be inevitable. But now it doesnt work in the same way: its limited to a few inevitable interventions; I mean people speak to me or I to them (I keep as silent as I can, but they still chatter away about every possible subject and I am obliged to answer), and its limited to that. But as it is, even that as soon as I am a bit concentrated, even that seems so not wrong or distorted, not that, but INADEQUATE. It expresses absolutely nothing, thats all I can say.
The TRUE thing escapes completely.
--
Some interesting things have been happening in that world [since the supramental descent]. How can I explain? Those beings have an independence, an absolute freedom of movement (although at the same time, they are all a single Being), but they had the true sense of perfect Unity only with the supreme Consciousness. And now with this present intervention [Mothers], with this incarnation and the establishment of the Consciousness here, like this (Mother makes a fist in a gesture of immutable solidity), in such an absolute way (I mean there are no fluctuations) HERE, on earth, in the terrestrial atmosphere, this incarnation has a radiating action throughout all those worlds, all those universes, all those Entities. And it results in small events,7 incidents scaled to the size of the earthwhich in themselves are quite interesting.
(long silence)
0 1962-09-08, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its a strange sensation, a bizarre perception of both the true functioning and the functioning distorted by the sense of being an individual body. Theyre not even you cant even say theyre superimposed, theyre almost simultaneous, and thats why it is so hard to explain. A number of things are malfunctioning in the body; I dont know if they can be called illnesses (maybe the doctors would call them illnesses), but in any case, theyre malfunctionings in the bodys organs: the heart, the stomach, the intestines, the lungs and so on. And at the same time theres (it cant be called a functioning) the true state. And thus certain disorders appear only when the consciousness as if the consciousness were pulled or pushed or poised in a certain way, and then, those malfunctionings INSTANTLY appearnot as a consequence: I mean the consciousness becomes aware of their existence. And if the consciousness stays in that position long enough, there are what we conventionally call consequences: the malfunctioning has its consequences (tiny things, such as physical discomforts, for instance). And if through (is it yogic discipline, is it the Lords intervention? Call it what you will) but if the consciousness regains its true position, the consequences cease IMMEDIATELY. Sometimes, though, its like this (Mother makes a gesture of an overlapping or interpenetration by interlacing the fingers of her two hands), in other words, this way, then that, this way, then that (Mother slips the fingers of her right hand back and forth through the fingers of her left to show the consciousness alternating between two states), this position, then that position, this one, then that one. This movement takes only a few seconds, so I can almost perceive the two functionings simultaneously. Thats what gave me the knowledge of the process, otherwise I wouldnt understand; I would simply think I am falling from one state into another. Thats not it, its just. The substance, the vibrations, everything is probably following its normal course, you see, and all that is really changing is the way consciousness perceives things.
So pushing this knowledge to its limit that is, applying it generallylife (what we usually call life, the physical life of the body) and death are THE SAME THING, simultaneous its just that the consciousness moves back and forth, back and forth (same gesture). I dont know if I am making myself clear. But its fantastic.
0 1962-11-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And with the consciousness here, I looked (of course I was asked how he could write or think such things), and I said that each realm has its own determinism, and if you see only that determinism, things seem absolutely decreed. Xs vision, I said, belongs to the vital-physical determinism of the earth (Life and Matter), in which the catastrophe seems inevitable; but there are higher realms whose intervention can change everything.
But one must see and live in those higher regions.
--
I do not know why you want a line of thought to be indicated to you for your guidance in the affair of Korea. There is nothing to hesitate about there, the whole affair is as plain as a pike-staff. It is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of South East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the rest of the continentin passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India.9 If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps until they are ready to deal with America. That is, provided the war can be staved off with America until Stalin can choose his time. Truman seems to have understood the situation if we can judge from his moves in Korea, but it is to be seen whether he is strong enough and determined enough to carry the matter through. The measures he has taken are likely to be incomplete and unsuccessful, since they do not include any actual military intervention except on sea and in the air. That seems to be the situation; we have to see how it develops. One thing is certain that if there is too much shillyshallying and if America gives up now her defence of Korea, she may be driven to yield position after position until it is too late: at one point or another she will have to stand and face the necessity of drastic action even if it leads to war. Stalin also seems not to be ready to face at once the risk of a world war and, if so, Truman can turn the tables on him by constantly facing him with the onus of either taking that risk or yielding position after position to America. I think that is all that I can see at present; for the moment the situation is as grave as it can be.10
Sri Aurobindo
0 1963-03-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We might say that the sense of miracle can only belong to a finite world, a finite consciousness, a finite conception. It is the abrupt, unexpected entryor appearance or intervention or penetrationof something that did not exist in this physical world. So it follows that any manifestation of a will or consciousness belonging to a realm more infinite and eternal than the earth is necessarily a miracle on the earth. But if you go beyond the finite world or the understanding proper to the finite world, then miracle does not exist. The Lord can play at miracles if He enjoys it, but theres no such thing as a miracleHe plays all possible games.
You can begin to understand Him only when you FEEL it that way, that He plays all possible gamesand possible not according to human conception but according to His own conception!
--
If what belongs to the supramental world materialized abruptly, rather than through a slow evolution that would be something which man, as a mental being, even if his mentality, his mental domain, were brought to perfection, could call a miracle, for it is the intervention in his conscious life of something he doesnt consciously carry within him. The taste for miracles, which is very strong (much stronger in children or in hearts that have remained childlike than in highly mentalized beings), is basically the faith that the aspiration for the Marvelous will come true, that things beyond all that we may expect of normal life will come true.
In fact, for education, people should always encourage both tendencies side by side: the thirst for the Marvelous, the seemingly unrealizable, for something that fills you with a sense of divinity, while at the same time encouraging, in the perception of the world as it is, an exact, correct and sincere observation, the abolition of all imaginings, a constant control, and a most practical and meticulous feeling for exactness in details. Both tendencies should go side by side. Generally, people kill one with the idea that its necessary in order to develop the otherwhich is totally erroneous. The two can coexist, and as knowledge grows, a moment comes when you understand that they are two aspects of the same thing, namely, a clear vision, a superior discernment. But instead of the vision and discernment being limited and narrow, they become absolutely sincere, correct, exactAND immense, embracing an entire field thats not yet part of the concrete Manifestation.
--
In Sri Aurobindos case, I only know what he told me several times: what people call miracles are just interventions in the physical or vital worlds. And those interventions are always mixed with ignorant or arbitrary movements.
But the number of miracles Sri Aurobindo performed in the Mind is incalculable. Of course, only if you had a very honest, sincere and pure vision could you see them I saw them. Others too saw them. But he refused (this I know), he refused to perform any vital or material miracle, because of the admixture.
0 1963-04-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am conscious of the body, but it isnt the consciousness of this body (Mother touches her body): its the consciousness of THE Body it may be anyones body. I am conscious, for instance, of vibrations of disorder (most often they come in the form of suggestions of disorder) in order to see whether they are accepted and have an effect. Lets take the example of a suggestion of hemorrhage, or some such suggestion (I mention hemorrhage because it will soon come into the picture). Under the higher Influence, the body consciousness rejects it. Then begins the battle (all this takes place all the way down in the cells, in the material consciousness) between what we could call the will for hemorrhage, for example, and the reaction of the bodys cells. But its very like a real battle, a real confrontation. And all of a sudden, theres something like a general issuing a comm and and saying, Whats this! You understand, that general is conscious of the higher forces, the higher realities and the divine intervention in Matter; and after trying to use the will, this reaction, that feeling of peace and so on, suddenly he is SEIZED by a very strong determination and issues a commandin no time the effect begins to make itself felt, and little by little everything returns to order.
All this takes place in the material consciousness. Physically, the body has all the sensations but not the hemorrhage, you understand. But it does have the sensations, that is, the effects: all the sensory effects. It goes on for a while and then follows a whole curve. All right. Once the battle is over, I take a look and wonder (I observe the whole thing, I see my body, which has been fairly shaken, mind you), I say to myself, What in the world is all this? But just for a second, then I forget about it.
0 1963-04-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He told the story to some friends, who in turn told it to some friends, so in the end the story became known. There was even a sort of collective thanks from the city for my intervention. But the whole thing stemmed from that: What Is this illness? Youre able to find out, arent you? (Laughter) Go and catch it!
But that feeling of being absolutely paralyzed, a prey to somethingabsolutely paralyzed, you cant You are no longer in your body, you understand, you cant act on it any more. And a sense of liberation when you are able to turn around.
0 1963-05-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So personally, my attitude (all this has nothing to do with the Bulletin, by the way), my attitude is to watch it all: this opinion, that opinion, this attitude, that attitude, and I stay like this (gesture of a Witness completely outside and passive). I refrain from deciding or acting, I become exclusively a witnessa non-interfering witness. I say to the Lord, Its for You to decide; it isnt my business, You will decide. Whatever happens is Your concern. So far, this has always resulted in an intervention that restored order, but but with no positive proof that the order was restored in this way or that, because of this or that. There is no certainty.2
In this field, we know nothing. Oh, as soon as we get into the field even the field of sensation, the vital, all problems are solved. Nothing could be easier, theres nothing to discuss; in the field of feelings, the work was done long ago. Thats not what I mean: I mean when we get to the bottom of the problem. There, everything, everything is in a sort of incomprehension, of total ignorance, along with all the ideas that result from the intellectual and scientific development and are so sure of themselves, so full of impregnable certainty! The certainty of the material experience, of the thing you touch.
--
Mother means that there is no proof that the order was restored because of the Lord's intervention rather than by some other, "natural" mechanism.
Let us recall that it was in 1952 that the biochemist Stanley Miller discovered the structure of the DNA molecule.
0 1963-07-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it isnt total Victory, no. It isnt the power of transformation. The other day, I told you, I think, that one of my present activities consisted of a sort of conscious concentration on one person or another, one thing or another, to obtain the desired result. For years on end, the Will and Force acted from above, and the outer conscious being [of Mother] wasnt concerned with anything further, knowing that it would only make things more complicated instead of helping them, and that the Force left to itself, directly under the supreme Impulsion, worked things out far better and far more accurately. But over these last months, there have come a will and a tendency to make the material being [of Mother] participate consciously in the details of execution. It has a kind of passive obedience, and so, once that was willed [the need for Mothers material intervention], it began to happen. There was a case recently, with a very good friend of the Ashram, a man with an important position who has been very, very useful. He had to be operated on (I wont tell the whole story, it would be too long); we received two or three wires a day, I followed the thing step by step. There was a very powerful force of destructionit was a very grim battle and there was a will to keep him, because in this body he had been very useful, he was still very useful and could still be very useful. He had a great faith, a great trust, and he was conscious (his consciousness was very sufficiently developed: I saw him constantly and constantly he came to me). He fell into a butchers hands; anyway, it was a wretched thing. Still, even though everyone expected him to leave his body, he held on and was constantly saying (we were kept informed by his son) and feeling that it was I who was keeping him alive. I could even see what they should have done and constantly I sent the formation, the thought, But THIS is what should be done, insistently. Finally they caught my thought, but I think (I cant say, I dont know the details, the small material details), I think probably they didnt do exactly what they should have thats why I say they must have been butchers. Thus they performed three operations in a row, and after undergoing all that, he came to me (before also he used to come very oftenthey said he was drowsy all the time, in a semi-coma, but thats not it: he was living inwardly), he came to me, totally conscious as usual, but he said, I am afraid my body is irretrievably ruined, and if I survive now, instead of this body being a help and a tool of work, it will be a hindrance, an impediment, a source of difficulty, so I have come to ask to be freed I prefer to enter a new body. I answered immediately, But as you are, you are useful, very useful; the position you occupy makes you very useful; you are totally conscious; it would be good if you could recover. He listened, again insisted a little, I too insisted, and then he left.
The next morning, he was much better. I was hoping he had decided to stay, but we were without news for about twenty-four hours, till suddenly we were told he had stopped breathing and was being given oxygen. And then he left.
0 1963-08-03, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Physical Matter, physical substance the very elementary consciousness thats in physical substancehas been so ill-treated (since mans presence on earth, I suppose, because before man, there probably wasnt enough self-consciousness to be aware of being ill-treated; the substance wasnt conscious enough, I suppose, to make a distinction between a normal peaceful state and unfavorable conditions; but anyway, that goes back quite long time), so ill-treated that it finds it very hard to believe things can be different. That consciousness has an aspirationan aspiration especially for a LUMINOUS peace, something that isnt the dark peace of Unconsciousness, which it doesnt like (I dont know if it ever liked it, but it no longer does). It aspires to a luminous peace; not to a consciousness full of various things, not that: simply to a peaceful consciousness, very peaceful, very quiet, very luminous thats what it wants. Yet at the same time, it has some difficulty believing that its possible. I am experiencing it: the concrete and absolutely tangible intervention of the supreme Power, supreme Light and supreme Goodnessit [the consciousness in physical substance] has the experience of that, and every time it has a new sense of wonder, but in that sense of wonder I can see something like: Is it really possible?
It gives me the impression, you know, of a dog that has been beaten so much that it expects nothing but blows.
0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday again, the experience was quite concrete and powerful: it isnt necessary to move, or to move anything, for this Truth-Consciousness to replace the consciousness of deformation or distortion. In other words, the capacity to live in and be this true Vibrationessential and trueseems to have the power to SUBSTITUTE this Vibration for the vibration of Falsehood and Distortion, to such an extent that For instance, the outcome of Distortion or of the vibration of distortion should naturally have been an accident or catastrophe, but if, within those vibrations, there is a consciousness that has the power to become aware of the Vibration of Truth and therefore manifest the Vibration of Truth, it canit mustcancel the other vibration. Which would be translated, in the external phenomenon, by an intervention that would stop the catastrophe.
There is a growing feeling that the True is the only way to change the world; that all the other processes of slow transformation are always at a tangent (you draw nearer and nearer but you never arrive), and that the last step must be this the substitution of the true Vibration.
There are partial proofs. But as they are partial, they arent conclusive. Because, to the ordinary vision and understanding, you can always find explanations: you can say it was foreseen and predestined that the accident would miscarry, for example, and that consequently that intervention isnt at all what made it miscarryit was Determinism that had decided it. And how do you prove anything? How do you even prove to yourself that it is otherwise? Its not possible.
You see, as soon as we express things we enter the mind, and as soon as we enter the mind theres that kind of logic, which is frightful because it is all-powerful: if everything has already been existing and coexisting from all eternity, how can you change one thing into another? How can anything at all change?
--
To come back to that very easily understood example of the aborted accident, we may very well conceive that the intervention of the Truth-Consciousness had been decided from all eternity and that there isnt any new element; but that does nothing to alter the fact that this intervention is what stopped the accident (which gives an exact image of the power of this true consciousness over the other one). If we project our way of being onto the Supreme, we may conceive that He enjoys carrying out many experiments to see how it all plays (this is something else, it doesnt follow that there isnt an All-Consciousness that knows all things from all eternityall this with utterly inadequate words), but that does nothing to alter the fact that, when we look at the process, this intervention is what was able to make the accident miscarry: the substitution of a true consciousness for a false consciousness stopped the process of the false consciousness.
And it seems to me it occurs often enoughmuch more often than people think. For example every time an illness is cured, every time an accident is avoided, every time a catastrophe, even a global one, is avoided, all that is always the intervention of the Vibration of Harmony into the vibration of Disorder, allowing Disorder to cease.
So the people, the faithful, who always say, Through the Divine Grace this has happened, arent so wrong.
I only note the fact that it is this Vibration of Order and Harmony that intervened (were not concerned with the reasons for its intervention, this is only a scientific observation), and of this Ive had a fairly large number of experiences.
So that would be the process of transformation of the world?
--
I dont know if I can make myself understood, but it is something I have felt very, very clearly, and which one cannot feel as long as the physical ego is there, because the physical ego has the sense of its own importance, and that disappears entirely with the physical ego. When it disappears, one has a clear perception that the intervention or manifestation of the true Vibration doesnt depend on egos or individualities (human or national individualities, or even individualities of Nature: animals, plants and so on), it depends on a certain play of the cells and Matter in which there are aggregates particularly favorable for the transformation to occurnot transformation: the substitution, to be precise, the substitution of the Vibration of Truth for the vibration of Falsehood. And the phenomenon may be very independent of groupings and individualities (it may happen in one part here, another part there, one thing here, another thing there); and it always corresponds to a certain quality of vibration that causes a sort of swellinga receptive swelling and then, the thing can occur.
Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, all words belong to the world of appearances.
0 1964-07-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
At the same time, there was a telegram from E. (who wanted to be present at the operation), an exultant telegram saying that for her (E.), it was proof that S. would be cured not by surgery, but by a supramental intervention. She said it to S. too, who was rather unhappy (!) Anyway, he is coming back.
But in this case, there was such a precise action of the Force. And at the same time I had another experience (but a much more personal and subjective one), which confirmed me in my perception Did you read Rodogune by Sri Aurobindo? In Rodogune, there is a scene in which an eremite meets a young prince and utters these words, This man has around him the atmosphere of someone who is going to die. (The prince had just won a great victory, anyway all was for the best, and he had decided to go to such and such a place; thats when the eremite uttered those words.) When I read that, I tried to make contact with that vibration the eremite called the atmosphere of a man who is going to die. And when I received S.s letter telling me that with the talisman, he was sure all would be wellexactly the same vibration. That sort of exultation, of assertion of power and force, and, behind, there was exactly the same vibration. So it confirmed for me what I had seen.
--
And when I received Els telegram saying it was proof that S. would be cured by a supramental intervention and not by surgery, in her telegram there was a lightE. is a very impassioned person, but suddenly I saw the light of a revelation. So I thought, Thats why.
But (laughing) S. isnt too enthusiastic! He doesnt have faith, you see. He says he will be very glad to be worthy of this Grace, instead of saying, I have faith that the Grace will Its a polite way of saying (Mother laughs), I dont believe in it.
0 1964-08-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every passing year brings me closer to a certainty that we know nothing; and yet, the consciousness keeps growing and growing and growing. Everything is becoming a LIVING consciousness, each thing emanates its own consciousness and EXISTS because of it. For instance, as I have already told you, knowing in ones consciousness just a second or a minute beforehand: The clock is going to strike, someone is going to enter, someone is going to move. And those things arent mental, they are part of the mechanism of things, yet they are all phenomena of consciousness. The things themselves LIVE (I say live, but thats not it), they let you know where they are, where youll find them; other things suddenly go OUT of the consciousness and disappear. Its a whole worlda world of tiny, microscopic phenomena that are another way of living, a world that seems to be the result of consciousness WITHOUT the intervention of what we call knowledge: its something that has nothing to do with knowledge or thought.
There are ups and downs, moments when its more present and moments where its less so; to be exact: moments when its active and moments when it isnt. And whenever there is a period during which it isnt active, when it starts again it does so on a higher rung, that is, more intensely and clearly. The whole thing is obviously following a process of development. Its a sort of the word awareness might be the nearest; it isnt a perception, which still belongs to the mind, its a sort of phenomenon of vision. And it has an absolute character. For instance, from time to time, when I hear people speak of something or other and say, It will be like this and like that, instantly there comes a sort of tactile vision how can I explain this? It resembles touch and sight (yet its neither touch nor sight, but both together): its the thing as it is, thats IT; and they may say what they like, thats IT and it is irrefutable. And so far, there has never been any contradiction.
0 1964-09-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Does he believe in the possibility of an intervention of another order?
Oh, yes, certainly. On the contrary, hes trying to get hold of
0 1964-10-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then (Mother points to her own body), this seems to be the lesson for these aggregates (bodies, you know, seem to me to be simply aggregates). And as long as there is, behind, a will to keep this together for some reason or other, it stays together, but These last few days (yesterday or the day before), there was this: a sort of completely decentralized consciousness (I am always referring to the physical consciousness, of course, not at all to the higher consciousness), a decentralized consciousness that happened to be here, there, there, in this body, that body (in what people call this person and that person, but that notion doesnt quite exist anymore), and then there was a kind of intervention of a universal consciousness in the cells, as though it were asking these cells what their reason was for wanting to retain this combination (if we may say so) or this aggregate while in fact making them understand or feel the difficulties that come, for example, from the number of years, wear and tear, external difficultiesfrom all the deterioration caused by friction, wear and tear. But they seemed to be perfectly indifferent to that! The response of the cells was interesting enough, in the sense that they seemed to attach importance ONLY TO THE CAPACITY TO REMAIN IN CONSCIOUS CONTACT WITH THE HIGHER FORCE. It was like an aspiration (not formulated in words, naturally), and like a what in English they call yearning, a longing for that Contact with the divine Force, the Force of Harmony, the Force of Truth and the Force of Love, and [the cells response was] that because of that, they valued the present combination.
It was an altogether different point of view.
0 1964-10-10, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How many times, you know, it comes, it swells up like a tide, like a rising wave, that aspiration of all, all the material being, of all the cells, towards the Supreme: All depends on Youall depends on You. A sense of total helplessness and total incapacity, which in a second can be transformed through an intervention into a total Wisdom.
And its the cells that feel this the thought has said it says all sorts of things, the earth is full of (when you see it in its totality, its really interesting!), the earth is full of all the human imaginings (which have been turned into statements of facts), even the most fantastic, the most contradictory, the most unexpectedits full of all that, it lives on that, it swarms with thatand the result is that the material world is convinced that all by itself, it can do nothing! Nothing. Nothing, nothing but that: that inextricable and apparently senseless jumble, which is nothing, which is an unbridled imagination in comparison with what can be.
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that wisdom! Its an almost cellular wisdom (its odd). For instance, I was looking at the relationship I had with all those great beings of the Overmind and higher, the perfectly objective and very familiar relationship I had with all those beings and the inner perception of being the eternal Motherall that is very well, but for me its almost ancient history! The me that exists now is HERE, its at ground level, in the body; its the body, its Matter; its at ground level; and to tell the truth, it doesnt care much about the intervention of all those beings who ultimately know nothing at all! They dont know the true problem: they live in a place where there are no problems. They dont know the true problem the true problem is here.
Its an amused way of looking at religions and all the gods the way you would look at they are like theater performances. Theyre pastimes; but thats not what can teach you to know yourself, not at all, not at all! You must go right down to the bottom.
0 1965-01-12, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its only now and then, for a precise action (sometimes it comes like a flash, sometimes just for a few minutes), that the great Power of the past (which I used to feel constantly) comes, brrm! does its work, then goes away. But NEVER FOR THIS BODY. Never. It doesnt do anything for this body it isnt a higher intervention that will change it, its from within.
And because, first, of what you know, because of what you have seen, because of your contact with Sri Aurobindo, because of your contact with me, the same thing is happening to you, and thats what makes the difficulty. Thats why I am telling you, It doesnt matter, dont worry if you are preoccupied with your body: simply try to take ADVANTAGE of thisadvantage of this preoccupationto bring the Peace, the Peace into your body. I am constantly enveloping you, as it were, in a cocoon of peace. And then if in this mind, too, which vibrates and vibrates, fidgets all the time (really like a monkey), if you can bring into it its a Peace that doesnt come through the higher mind: its a Peace that acts DIRECTLY in this material vibrationa Peace in which everything relaxes.
0 1965-04-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats how we began, and it began that way because there was a descent of the higher human mental consciousness into the form that existed. The phenomenon may recur in the same way, with the difference that it can be more conscious and willed there may be the intervention of a conscious will. It would, or it could happen through an occult processwell, I dont know, there are all sorts of possibilities, one of which could be the conscious passage of a being who has used the old human body for his development and his yoga, and who would leave that form once it became unnecessary in order to enter a form capable of adapting to the new growth.
Here, the two possibilities meet.
0 1965-05-19, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats why certain minds have postulated that the creation was the result of an error. But we find all the possible conceptions: the perfect creation, then a fault that introduced the error; the creation itself as a lower movement, which must end since it began; then the conception of the Vedas according to what Sri Aurobindo told us about it, which was a progressive and infinite unfolding or discoveryindefinite and infiniteof the All by Himself. Naturally, all these are human translations. For the moment, as long as we express ourselves humanly, its a human translation; but depending on the initial stand of the human translator (that is, a stand that accepts the primordial error, or the accident in the creation, or the conscious supreme Will since the beginning, in a progressive unfolding), the conclusions or the descents in the yogic attitude are different. There are the nihilists, the Nirvanists and the illusionists, there are all the religions (like Christianity) that accept the devils intervention in one form or another; and then pure Vedism, which is the Supremes eternal unfolding in a progressive objectification. And depending on your taste, you are here or there or here, and there are nuances. But according to what Sri Aurobindo felt to be the most total truth, according to that conception of a progressive universe, you are led to say that, every minute, what takes place is the best possible for the unfolding of the whole. The logic of it is absolute. And I think that all the contradictions can only stem from a more or less pronounced tendency for this or that position, that other position; all the minds that accept the intrusion of a fault or an error and the resulting conflict between forces pulling backward and forces pulling forward, can naturally dispute the possibility. But you are forced to say that for someone who is spiritually attuned to the supreme Will or the supreme Truth, what happens is necessarily, every instant, the best for his personal realizationthis is true in all cases. The unconditioned best can only be accepted by one who sees the universe as an unfolding, the Supreme growing more and more conscious of Himself.
(silence)
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Even if in front of them a kind of miracle takes place, they will find a material explanation for it; to them, it wont be a miracle in the sense of the intervention of a force and power different from material forces and powers. They will find their own material explanation for it, it wont be convincing.
You can understand only if you have yourself touched that domain in your experience.
0 1965-06-26, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the idea (not the ideaoh, you see, its impossible to speak, mon petit) what was seen was this: this man has never believed in a divine force or a reality higher than what is manifested in man or anything, and the idea was that he should feel an intervention (which he would call by any name he liked) higher than anything known on earth.
Did he recognize it? What does she say?
0 1965-07-17, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother had already spoken of this case in the conversation of 26 June 1965: the man who was cured of a cancer of the brain but still did not believe in the intervention of a higher force.
The letter excerpted above also announced the patient's relapse.
0 1965-08-04, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
between personal intervention, the will that wants to do something, and then what I think ought to come in absolute silence.
I have now reached the state in which I dont hear Him, but I perceive Him very concretely: Do, do this, do that, do that. So
0 1965-08-31, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is increasingly a sort of certitude in the cells that everything that happens is with a view to this transformation and this transfer of the directing power. And at the very moment when things are materially painful (not even physically: materially painful), the cells keep that certitude. And so they withstand, they endure the suffering without being depressed or affected in the least, with that certitude that it is to prepare for the transformation, that it is even the process of transformation and of the transfer of the directing power. As I said, its in the nerves that the experience is the most painful (naturally, since they are the most sensitive cells, those with the sharpest sensation). But they have a very great receptivity, and very spontaneous, a spontaneously strong receptivity and effortlessto the harmonious physical vibration (which is very rare, but still it exists in some individuals), and that physical vibration what we could call a physical FORCE, a harmonious physical vibration (spontaneously harmonious, of course, without the need for mental interventionlike the vibrations of a flower, for instance; there are physical vibrations that are like that, that carry in themselves a harmonious force), and the nerves are extremely sensitive and receptive to that vibration, which immediately puts them right again.
Its very interesting, it explains many, many things. A day will come when all this will be explained and put in its proper place. Now isnt the time to reveal it yet, but its very interesting.
0 1965-09-11, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So it is clearly a very exceptional intervention that has brought this about.
But while I was having the experience, there was absolutely no awareness of the goal, the motive, the purpose, nothing: it was like this (same massive gesture taking hold of everything), a sort of absolute, without explanation.
0 1965-12-18, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ultimately, the whole difficulty comes from the amount of unconsciousness left in the Matter we are made of. Thats thats terrible. And then, thats what it takes to pull this Matter out of its unconsciousness: all the suffering, all the disorder, all the pummeling. Thats what I see every day. And the degree of stupidity To us its stupidity, we call it stupidity, but You know, the intermediary to which this unconsciousness responds is the mentality of the cell, the material mentality, but then, when this material mentality is seized with an idea, it is actually possessed by the idea and its almost impossible (not impossible but extremely difficult) for it to free itselfit takes an intervention from another domain.
Diseases are just that. Its the same thing with the doctors illness: this tremor is the possession by an idea, its what in the conscious intelligence is expressed as the possession by an idea, a hypnosisa sort of hypnosis accompanied by a fear in matter. The two things together: possession and fear, a sort of fearfulness. And a sense of helplessness in all that. The possession by an idea and a helplessness to reject it, and a fear, a helplessness to resist. And then a sort of fearfulness that is translated in us by, Oh, its going to be that way oh, its going to be a disease.
0 1966-04-24, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have already spoken about the bad conditions of the world; the usual idea of the occultists about it is that the worse they are the more is probable the coming of an intervention or a new revelation from above. The ordinary mind cannot knowit has either to believe or disbelieve or wait and see.
As to whether the Divine seriously means something to happen, I believe it is intended. I know with absolute certitude that the Supramental is a truth and its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. For in the terrestrial world the predetermined result is hidden and what we see is a whirl of possibilities and forces attempting to achieve some thing with the destiny of it all concealed from human eyes. This is, however, certain that a number of souls have been sent to see that it shall be now. That is the situation. My faith and will are for the now. I am speaking of course on the level of the human intelligencemystically-rationally, as one might put it. To say more would be going beyond that line. You dont want me to start prophesying, I suppose? As a rationalist, you cant.
0 1966-07-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Are the Americans presence and intervention in Vietnam justifiable?
Mothers answer
0 1966-09-14, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I meant, whats the best attitude? Is it an attitude of intervention or an attitude of laissez-faire? Which is the best? One wonders.
Ah, thats the whole question: in order to intervene you must be sure you are right; you must be sure that your view of things is superior, preferable to or truer than that of others or of the other. Of course, its always wiser not to intervenepeople intervene without rhyme or reason, simply because they are in the habit of giving their opinion to others.
But even when you have the vision of the true thing, its RARELY wise to intervene. It becomes indispensable only if someone wants to do something that will necessarily end in a catastrophe. And even then (smiling), the intervention isnt always very effective.
Ultimately, its only when you are absolutely sure you have the vision of the truth that its legitimate to intervene. Not only that, but also the clear vision of consequences. In order to intervene in anothers actions, you must be a propheta prophet. And a prophet with total benevolence and compassion. You must even have the vision of the consequence the intervention will have in the others destiny. People are constantly giving each other advice: Do this, dont do that. I see that, they dont realize the extent to which they create confusion, they add to the confusion and disorder. And sometimes they harm the individuals normal development.
I consider opinions to be always dangerous things, and most of the time without any value whatever.
0 1966-09-21, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Besides, even quite outwardly, that fight between India and Pakistan1 was clearly (how can I put it? The words that come to me are English) initiated and driven, that is to say, set in motion by and under the impulsion of the forces of Truth that wanted to create a great Asian Federation with the power to counterbalance Red China and its movement. It was a federation that, as a matter of fact, needed the return of Pakistan and all those regions, and which includes Nepal, Tibet, also Burma, and in the south, Ceylon. A great federation with each country having its autonomous development, perfectly free, but which would be united in a common single aspiration for peace and fight against the invasion of forces of dissolution. That was very clear, it was willed and its the intervention of this United Nations that stopped everything.2
I am not saying anything officially; because I have said and always repeat that politics is in complete Falsehood, based on Falsehood, and I am not dealing with it, meaning that I am not in politics, I dont want to be but that doesnt stop me from seeing clearly! People have come and asked me (from every side, by the way) for my opinion, view or advice; I said, No, I dont deal in politics. You see, all diplomacy is absolutely based on a DELIBERATE Falsehood. As long as it is like that, theres no hope: the inspirations will always come from the wrong side; inspirations, impulsions, ideas, everything will always come from the wrong sidewhich means the inescapable blunder, for everyone. A few rare individuals feel that and are aware of it, and they are half desperate because nobody listens to them.
0 1966-09-28, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But then, when that true Compassion of divine Love comes and you see all those things that look so horrible, so abnormal, so absurd, that great pain over all beings and even over things Then there was born in this physical being the aspiration to relieve, to cure, to make all that disappear. There is something in Love in its Origin that is constantly expressed by the intervention of the Grace; a force, a sweetness, something like a vibration of solace, spread everywhere, but which an enlightened consciousness can direct, concentrate on certain points. And thats just where I saw the true use one could make of thought: thought is used as a channel to carry the vibration from place to place, wherever its necessary. This force, this vibration of sweetness is there over the world in a static way, pressing to be received, but its an impersonal action, and thoughtenlightened thought, surrendered thought, the thought that is nothing more than an instrument, that no longer tries to set things in motion, that is satisfied with being moved by the higher Consciousness thought is used as an intermediary to make contact, to build a connection and allow this impersonal Force to act wherever its necessary, on precise points.
(silence)
--
All this is like microscopic studies of the phenomena of consciousness independent of mental intervention. The need to use words to express ourselves brings in that mental intervention, but in the experience it doesnt exist. And its very interesting because the pure experience holds a content of truth, of reality, which disappears as soon as the mind intervenes. There is a flavor of true reality which totally eludes expression for that reason. Its the same difference as between an individual and his portrait, between a fact and the story told about it. Thats how it is. But its far more subtle.
So then, to return to the letter, when you are conscious of this Forcethis Force, this Compassion in its essential reality and see how it can be exerted through a conscious individual, you have the key to the problem.
0 1966-09-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oddly, these last few days again, this has been the subject of my meditations (not willed ones: they are imposed from above). Because in all the transition from plant to animal and from animal to man (especially from animal to man), the differences of form are, ultimately, minor: the true transformation is the intervention of another agent of consciousness. All the differences between the life of the animal and the life of man stem from the intervention of the Mind; but the substance is essentially the same and it obeys the same laws of formation and construction. There isnt much difference, for instance, between the calf being formed in a cows womb and the child being formed in its mothers womb. There is one difference: that of the Minds intervention. But if we envisage a PHYSICAL being, that is, as visible as the physical now is and with the same density, for instance a body that wouldnt need blood circulation and bones (especially these two things: the skeleton and blood circulation) its very hard to imagine. And as long as it is like this, with this blood circulation, this functioning of the heart, we could imaginewe can imagine the renewal of strength, of energy through a power of the Spirit, through other means than food. Its conceivable. But the rigidity, the solidity of the body, how is it possible without a skeleton? So it would be an infinitely greater transformation than that from animal to man; it would be a transition from man to a being that would no longer be built in the same way, that would no longer function in the same way, that would be like a densification or concretization of something. Up till now, it doesnt correspond to anything we have seen physically, unless the scientists have found something I am not aware of.
We may conceive of a new light or force giving the cells a sort of spontaneous life, a spontaneous strength.
0 1966-12-07, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But in what Ive read of yours (I set apart the book on Sri Aurobindo because that was a very special case: all sensitive people have instantly been brought into contact with Sri Aurobindo; that was a very special case), but in your first book [The Goldwasher] which I read, I felt it came from above. I feel that. Only, of course, it would be unreadable: it has to be concretized, materialized. But if one has oneself a relationship with this plane above, one must feel it in what is written: many people feel a something that suffuses the whole thing. Thats why I want you to read me your new book, its to see if that is there. You know, I am like this (gesture to the forehead showing a vast stillness), it has become a constant state: a screen. A screen for absolutely everything. And really nothing comes from within: its either this way (horizontal gesture around Mother) or this way (gesture from above); horizontally from outside, or the response from above. Here (gesture to the level of the emotive heart), its something so neutral as to be nonexistent; and here (gesture to the forehead), its vast, even, still. So if I stop (gesture turned upward), right away, instantly, it comes in waves: a continuous light which comes down and through, comes down and through, comes down (gesture of a circulation through Mother as through a transmitter-receiver device). When something is read out to me or people ask me questions or they tell me about some matter or other, its always like that (a screen). And whats very interesting is that when its a question that deserves no answer or a matter that doesnt require my intervention, or anyway anything that can be expressed by Its no concern of mine, its none of my business, then theres an absolute blank: absolutely empty, neutral, without answer. I am obliged to say that there is no answer (if I were to tell the truth I should say, I cant hear anything, I dont understand). So its absolutely still and neutral, and if it remains like that, it means theres nothing, I have nothing to do with it. Otherwise, when there is an answer no time even elapses, theres hardly any lapse of time: the answer seems to come even as I am spoken to. Then I take the paper or letter right away and answer. Its automatic. The whole work is done like that. Theres nothing here (gesture to the forehead).
Obviously we have to reconcile ourselves to it. The world is in a state of considerable imperfection, so everything that manifests in the world partakes of that imperfectionwhat can we do about it? The only thing we can do is to slowly try and transform but thats slow, so slow, unceasingtransform this body.
0 1967-01-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is that where you envisage the vitals intervention?
Yes.
--
No, because the transformation is the only thing that doesnt call for the minds intervention: the mind befuddles everything.
I clearly see what its use will bewhy there has been the mind, why it exists, what its use will be but that will come afterwards.
0 1967-02-08, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The attitude taken by the cells, the action of the will, the habit of Nature, the interventionall that was seen minutely, phase after phase. Because these cells (in the throat) were complaining; they were the ones that said things werent changing, that they remained as they were. They clearly saw that things were kept under control, but there was no sign of transformation. And that cold came as a magnifying glass, you understand. It came and magnified everything so it would become more visible and more easily observed. And the detail of all thats going on is, oh, really marvellous: its a whole world, and they are tiny little things that generally go unobserved because we observe mentally. But like that For instance, at a certain point during those successive phases, all the signs are there that the bodys will is going to flag and that you are going either to faint or to fall sick for a while. Then comes the choice made within by the cells, which weigh up the possibilities from the standpoint of the progress of transformation: What can act? What can be the most useful in order to produce the greatest result? Is it to yield and have an apparent fall (its only apparent), and in that fall, to allow the Force to do its work without interference; or is it to follow the course of conscious transformation? And thats where this marvellous discovery of the cells came in: they really felt Nature knew better (laughing) because it was used to it. That was exquisite! Admirable.
All this must be going on in everyone, only people are unconscious. Its the consciousness of the cells which has awakened, you understand. Its so interesting! And how illnesses can be avoided, how things All this based on the experience of the UNREALITY OF APPEARANCES: a play is going on behind, which is altogether different from what we see or know.
0 1968-05-22, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The other thing is about R., who had had an attack of filariasis a few years ago. He had told me about it and it had passed. Then it came back. It came back after some three or four years, very strongly, and he couldnt get rid of it. He wrote to me complaining. I told him there was a drop in his faith. It appears it was the third time Id written that to him (I knew nothing about it I never know either why or how I write things). So he wrote back to ask me, Its the third time youve told me that, what does it mean? I explained it to him. But while receiving his letter and explaining it to him, I did what I always do (I always do it, all the time), I put him in contact with the Lord and asked for his intervention. He got my letter, and today he writes to me that while he was reading it, in the space of about ten minutes, he actually saw (his foot had grown twice as big, his leg was swollen, you know how it is with elephantiasis), he actually saw it shrink and shrink, and in ten or fifteen minutes it was gone! He wrote it to me this morning. I had told him that the Force was the same, it was his faith that was no longer the same, and that was why the Force no longer had the same effect. And he writes in his letter, I was simply reading your letter, and it went away before my very eyes!
And this body, if you ask it, the only thing There are two things its conscious of: a more and more intense adoration in the cells, oh, like this (gesture like a rising flame), and at the same time, such an acute sense of the extent to which the cells are not what they should be, of the unworthiness of their condition. Those two things are constant and constantly together. And thats all. And when I am told of cases like this one, of disease or something else (I am told three, four, five such cases every day, things like that constantly happen I gave you this one as a very concrete example because its happened just now and you know R.), the body isnt even aware of being used as an intermediary, because its too conscious of its infirmity, of what it should be and isnt yet. Its like that cure [of the swelling of Mothers face], it was a cure like R.s, almost spontaneous: it happened all of a sudden and went away. But of course, the body is perfectly conscious of the splendor of a Marvel a Marvel beyond all understanding.
0 1968-06-15, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The whole inner functioning is becoming more and more the result of that conscious action and conscious will; with, even, in part (at least in part) clearly the true functioning already. You understand, the impression is of a remnant, but the remnant isnt something thats rejected: its something which hesitates, lags behind, has difficulty and triesit would be only too pleased: if, for instance, there is in one spot a perceptible disorder, a pain, the body no longer starts fidgeting, worrying, wanting medicine or doctors or interventions, no, not at all; it asks it goes, O Lord, like that. Thats all. And it waits. And generally, in the space of a few seconds, the pain goes away.
What complicates matters is the ENTRY from outside of formations, with thoughts, ignorant attitudes (swarming gesture around), impressionsall kinds of impressions. Most of the time it has no effect, but sometimes it gives a shock. So that complicates matters somewhat.
--
Yes, for this body, its what we might call purely material: theres no vital or mental intervention. What generally happens to people is that the vital intervenes and so does the mind that never, ever happens [in Mother]. That belongs to the past, theres no question of it any longer. Everything takes place purely in the physical consciousness. So for the ordinary consciousness, its disequilibriums between the various functionings of breathing, digestion, blood circulation and so on. But for me, all that has become the expression of something else.
Yes!
0 1968-12-28, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All that still seems to be in a limited field, but I am not sure its not far more general. All the time (almost all the time), there seems to be an intervention of the psychic, as if the psychic made the body remember (I dont know how to put it), made the body remember its universality, and as if it werent only for itself that the body is expressing movements of consciousness the movements of the higher Consciousness that it expresses: the effect is general.
Well know that. Well know all that later, in
0 1969-01-01, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, thats it. Oh, it has an extraordinary power on the vital atmosphere. I have seen it since I was quite small I noticed it before knowing anything outwardly, before anyone explained it to me. And I saw it LEFT TO ITSELF, that is to say, without the intervention of all ideas and all that. Strange. And invincible (how should I put it?), it cannot be affected in any way: it doesnt receive from outside, it receives only from the psychic consciousness, or directly from the supreme Consciousness.
And now its going about here and there! (Mother laughs)
0 1969-03-15, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theres a line from my mother. [Satprem reads a letter relating his mothers sudden cure after a cancer had been feared: My condition suddenly became normal again, and I didnt doubt Mothers intervention.]
Its good.
0 1969-03-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it was it was really amusing! And the objections of age, possibility, capacity, no longer existed. If this intermediary method is considered useful (I mean, practical), the possibility is there; this Consciousness was showing the body that the possibility is there. Foroh, for hours and hoursit insisted, it didnt want to go! It insisted until the body had completely understood. And there is no need of a material intervention: it can be done (thats known, there have been fully recognized cases), the physical intervention wasnt necessary, it was replaced by an intervention in the subtle physical, which was sufficient. All that in every detail, with every explanation and everything. Then, when it was thoroughly done, it was over, the chapter was closed. But it was really unexpected, I had never thought of such a thing! And the way it was presented! It was so concrete and so simpleso simple, so concrete and all objections were resolved.
So the body said, Very well, we shall see. (Mother laughs) Well see.
--
There are obviously certain things that come in corroboration; they are based on certain scientific experiments theyre now making, such as birth through an operation:1 theres no need of a deliberate intervention anymore. So then, it had lost all that morbid, unpleasant side it has in lifeall that was completely gone! It was in a wholly different region. That is, a DIFFERENT consciousness, a DIFFERENT way of seeing, of feeling wholly different. Its strange, you know, all the reactions we usually have towards things it all appears meaningless. A sort of vision the equivalent of a scientific vision, but it doesnt have that mental character, its not like that: it keeps a smile. Everything, everything was seen in a very curious way, very curious.
So the body really has a great goodwill, it says, Very well, when the decision is made, well see! But the body itself knows (just like what we have just heard2) that there is no intervention of personal effort, personal willits not like that, its oh, like beautiful music, you know, unfolding indefinitely (gesture like an immense rhythm). its extraordinary. And all that tension, all of it is gone, entirely.
So then, while the vision was developing, there was the answer to all possible objections, based precisely on the presence of this new consciousness which CHANGES things but changes things while leaving them as they are! I dont know how to explain.
0 1969-07-12, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I told you, the body repeats the mantra (which is also japa) spontaneously, and absolutely without the intervention of the consciousness. It has got into the habit; as soon as it has the least difficulty, it repeats the mantra. So you can obtain the same result.
Of course, but how? It would have to be ingrained.
0 1969-10-25, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is it an illusion, or is it a promise? I dont know You see, for his hernia, it was rather interesting, because when you told me about it, I concentrated, I looked, and I saw the Force come, I saw that if he brought his hernia in, it wouldnt come out againwhich is already miraculous. But he says it must go in by itself, without any intervention! Thats its much farther on the scale. If it happens, well, Ill bow down.
I dont know, well see.
0 1969-11-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Trust, you know: being aware that its a higher interventiontrust first of all. Then, perfect surrender: What You willlet the body, in full sincerity, be ready for anything. And then, that sort of perfect peace that comes from surrender: one is like this (Mother opens her arms). Those are the best conditions.
One should avoid emotions and all those things.
0 1969-12-13, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But then, thats the minds intervention.
I dont know.
0 1970-03-18, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its very interesting because its an experiment it has made in every detail and at every stage. The first thing it found was not to think of the disease, not to be concerned with it. Thats the first stage. Afterwards, it found that when it was occupied with something else, the pain was greatly lessened. Later on, it had the experience that if someone comes near it, someone who knows you are in pain, it comes back! All that is very, very interesting: lots of small observations of every minute. And finally, it had this repeated and absolutely convincing proof that as soon as it concentrates on the Divine, as soon as it makes contact (because it FEELS, it has the sensation in the cells), as soon as it concentrates (without being concerned with the diseased point: its better not to be concerned with it), the pain totally disappears, to such a point that At such times (those are things that cause pain, so the first effect is not to feel the pain), at times, in the beginning, the body would ask for the intervention and there would be an effect, but there was the sense of a struggle, a resistance (something of the sort): it would take a little time. But when the body succeeded in concentrating WITHOUT DEMAND, you understand (simply giving itself), on the Divine, then it would stop thinking about the pain, the body itself stops thinking about the pain, and after a certain time, it realizes its completely vanished!It stopped thinking about it and it was gone.
That experience has been repeated HUNDREDS of times, for all kinds of different things.
0 1970-04-18, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it gives indications (more and more often, day after day, experience after experience), indications of the extent to which the intervention of this Will (which we call divine Will) through the psychic (or even direct, it depends on the case), to what extent its all-powerful. And it exclusively depends on This Will is always active for perfect Harmonyyes, perfect Harmony as we can conceive it. There also, in this conception, there is the knowledge that that too will progress, that once that harmony is manifested, then the work will begin for another perfection, which for the moment eludes us. That, too, knows.
More and more, theres a sort of not exactly fusion [between the subtle physical and the material physical], but how should I put it? For everything to hold together, this way of being of the material consciousness continues (the material, physical consciousness), but in it a permeation takes place (it really is a permeation), which doesnt drive away the other, but at length, it will probably transform it. It doesnt drive it [the material consciousness] away, but its there and it dominatesat times it doesnt dominate, its the other one that does; and so, depending on the case it changes external circumstances (its hard to explain).
0 1970-06-20, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you could put in the body INTO the body the complete surrender, that is, it should RELY on the Supremes intervention alone, you understand; the BODY, the very body must say to Him, Here (Mother opens her hands), here to the Supreme, with the knowledge that He is there; He is there in the atmosphere, in the cells, in everything, and (gesture, hands open) and thats all. Thats very effective. Because I know, of course, this body has a lot of troubles, and thats its only remedy. It knows no other. And its the only one thats really effective (same gesture, hands open and eyes closed).
When one learns to do it, even pains go away in a few minutes.
0 1970-07-04, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has created the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarch the Christian or Semitic conceptionhas never been mine; it contradicts too much my seeing and experience during thirty years of sadhana. It is against this conception that the atheistic objection is aimed,for atheism in Europe has been a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish exoteric religionism and its popular inadequate and crudely dogmatic notions. But when I speak of the Divine Will, I mean something different,something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater power of the Divine, which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the law of the world as it is, but in full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature. The Divine Grace is there ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the Law of Ignorance into the Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers. If we take the facts of the world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.
Letters on Yoga, 22.174
0 1971-04-14, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
China. A long time ago (a long time, more than a year), I saw Chinas intention. Now shes got her chance.3 And China, that means all India, brff! (gesture of being overrun). No, I tell you, only the Divine can save the situation. There has to be a divine intervention, that alone can save things something extraordinary, abnormal, unexpected. Otherwise otherwise.
(long silence)
--
And you, mon petit, its your destiny. It is your destiny: to become conscious and manifest the Divineit is your destiny. You must. Me, I am in a hurry because I see circumstances becoming more and more acutedangerous. Only a miracle can save us that is to say, what we consider a miracle: an intervention an intervention of the Divine Will in its purity, undistorted, uncontroverted, unobstructedjust That.
(silence)
0 1971-05-15, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Great History tells us that India must again be one, and that particular current of history is so imperative that twice already Destiny has managed to put India before the possibility of her reunification. The first time was in 1965 when Pakistans foolish aggressiveness enabled India to counterattack and carry the battle right into the suburbs of Lahore and up to Karachi had she but had the courage to seize boldly her destiny. The hour was indeed for a decisive choice. The Mother declared categorically: India is fighting for the triumph of Truth, and She must fight until India and Pakistan become ONE again, for such is the truth of their being. At Tashkent, we yielded on the crest of a petty compromise which was to lead us into a second, more bloody and painful reef, Bangladesh. There too destiny graciously arranged to enable India to hasten to the aid of her massacred brethreneven the famous skyjacking incident of January4 was, as it were, arranged by the Grace so as to spare India from delaying her intervention until it was too late (or to spare her the shame of not intervening at all and allowing Pakistans planes to fly over her head loaded with weaponry and murderers to slaughter her brothers). But there again, yielding to the demands of the moment and to the small, shortsighted interests, we refused to accept the challenge of the Great Direction of our History, and we now find ourselves on the brink of a new compromise which will lead us inevitably to a third and even more disastrous and bloody reef. For one day India must inevitably face that which twice she has fled. Only each time the conditions are more disastrous for her and for the worldperhaps so disastrous that the whole earth will even be engulfed in another general conflict, while the whole story could have been resolved at the little symbolic point that is Bangladesh, at the right hour, with the right gesture and a minimum of suffering.
For let there be no doubt about it, the Bangladesh affair is not an Indian event, it is a world event. The division of India is not a local incident, it is a terrestrial Falsehood which must disappear if the division of the world is to disappear. And here again we hear the voice of Sri Aurobindo, six months before his passing, referring to yet another phenomenon which then seemed of such slight importance, so remote, a trifling local affair at the other end of the world: the invasion of South Korea in 1950, twenty-one years ago. And yet that small Korean symbol, like the small symbol of Bangladesh (or the one of Czechoslovakia in 1938), contained in seed the whole fatal course which is still carrying the world toward a sinister destiny: The affair of Korea, wrote Sri Aurobindo, is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of South East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the rest of the continentin passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India. Now, twenty-one years later, we see that Tibet and the whole of South East Asia have been swallowed up and the gate into India has truly been opened wide by the wound of the Pakistani Falsehoodalready, or very shortly, the Chinese are, or will be, in Khulna, some eighty miles from Calcutta, to help Yahya Khan to pacify Bengal. And Sri Aurobindo added, If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps until they are ready to deal with America.
0 1971-05-22, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Just a few days ago, the disaster seemed to be closing in. And so, at that moment, it was as if my whole being whats the word? (Mother clenches her fists), were, yes, you can call it an aspiration for the true Victorynot the one sought by this side or that side or the true Victory. ALL the difficulties seemed to have been as though a light shone: the possibility of Victory. Its still not miraculous, but the intervention its the intervention of the Supreme Wisdomwill it concretize? Well see. It seems, it seems to be coming like this (gesture at a certain height, her two palms turned downward), as a possibility.
Yes, its recent, quite recent. I cant say because it didnt come abruptly, but its a matter of days.
0 1971-06-16, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Satprem suggest several extracts from the Agenda for "Notes on the Way," the first being that of May 22 on the intervention of the Supreme Wisdom: "The possibility of a breathtaking successnot in the sky: here.")
Thats quite good. It brings back the atmosphere. Is it too soon to say it? I dont know.
0 1971-09-22, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But (words are stupid), but I could say that the Divine intervention is becoming increasingly visible (words are stupid, its not that; but its all we can say, all words are stupid).
What do you have to say?
0 1971-10-02, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I was very touched by your note thanking me for On the Way to Supermanhood. Some fifteen years ago, in this Ashram, I was teaching French classes to the young Indian disciples, and I tried to tell them who Malraux was, whose work I admiredtoday they remember and, like me, are moved by your intervention on behalf of Bangladesh.
The problem is deeper, of course, as you well know. What is at stake at the end of the present mental cycle is the creation of a new man that is what we are trying to do here with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Great Forces are at work here, in a humble way. And I am happy that Supermanhood did not leave you insensitive. Indeed, its cry needs you and your capacity to grasp the profound Sense of our human crisis.
0 1972-02-12, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thanks to Mothers Protection, things around me had calmed down a little, when suddenly the storm broke out again. To the former intrigues have now been added slander and a threat of expulsion (which in itself I would not mind, but they should not triumph!). This threat is in fact meant to upset me and force me to change my attitude. I feel the need to go back and see Mother the sooner the better. But practically I cannot do it; furthermore, I am being watched; I am afraid that if they find out I am going to Pondicherry, they will try to set the Bishop against the Ashram, for, as you know, if he is now quiet, it is because of a certain intervention, which was very discreet but effective. Naturally, the others know nothing of my intercession with T.1
I have been preoccupied with him.
0 1972-04-19, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But if the consciousness is turned upward, doesnt the intervention or the Action take place automatically?
Probably.
0 1973-04-07, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The next time, after the intervention of Mother's attendant ("There are still too many people"), and perhaps other persons from Mother's entourage, the "every day" was reduced to three times a week, then two, then none.
The rest of this conversation took place in English. The entire conversation, including the beginning in French, is available on cassette.
02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Called a masked intervention from above;
Else this great, blind inconscient universe
03.09 - Sectarianism or Loyalty, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A spiritual interest is nothing if it is not in this way a question that touches life to its core. That means a definite goal and appropriate means to reach that goal, and that again necessarily involves a choice, a process of acceptance and rejection. The goal is also called the ista, the godhead that one seeks, the Divine that is fulfilled in oneself. Being a personality, an individual, one has to choose, one can best follow the line of evolution and growth and fulfilment of that personality and individuality that is the call of the Psyche, the direction of the Jiva. In other words, one has to be loyal and faithful to one's nature and being. That is why it is said: Better to perish while fulfilling one's own law of life than to flourish by fulfilling another's law. By being curious about another's Dharmait is this kind of curiosity that led to the original fall of man, according to the Bible that is to say, if one is vitally curious, allows oneself to be influenced and so affected and diverted by what is an outside and foreign force, because not in the line of one's own truth and development, one asks for a mixture and intervention which bring confusion, thwart the growth and fulfilment, as that falsifies the nature.
It is not only bad influences that affect you badly, even good influences do solike medicines that depend upon the particular constitution for their action. In ancient times this was called varasankara or dharmasakara, as for example, when a Kshatriya sought to follow the rule of life of a Brahmin or vice versa. This kind of admixture or msalliance was not favoured, as it was likely to bring about an obscurity in the consciousness and in the end frustration in the spiritual life. That was the original psychological reason why heresy was considered such a dangerous thing in all religions.
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So far so good. But two things are to be taken note of. First of all, the resolution of the normal conflict in man's consciousness, the integration of his personality, is not wholly practicable within the scope of the present nature and the field of the actual forces at play. That can give only a shadow of the true resolution and integration. A conscious envisaging of the conflicting forces, a calm survey of the submerged or side-tracked libidos in their true nature, a voluntary acceptance, of these dark elements as a part of normal human nature, does not automatically make for their sublimation and purification or transformation. The thing is possible only through another force and on another level, by the intervention and interfusion precisely of the superconsciousness. And here comes the second point to note. For it is this superconsciousness towards which all the strife and struggle of the under-consciousness are turned and directed. The yearning and urge in the subconsciousness to move forward, to escape outside into the light does not refer merely to the march towards normal awareness and consciousness: it has a deeper direction and a higher aimit seeks that of which it is an aberration and a deformation, the very origin and source, the height from which it fell.
This superconsciousness has a special mode of its quintessential energy which is omnipotent in action, immediate in effectivity. It is pure as the purest incandescent solar light and embodies the concentrated force of consciousness. It is the original creative vibration of the absolute or supreme Being. Sri Aurobindo calls this supreme form of superconscient consciousness-energy, the Supermind. There are of course other layers and strata of superconsciousness leading up to the super-mind which are of various potentials and embody different degrees of spiritual power and consciousness.
04.07 - Matter Aspires, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I said it is an amusing discussion. But what is apt to be forgotten in such "scientific" discussions is, as has been pointed out by Rev. Trethowan in his criticism of Sir Robert, that all genuine creation is a freak, that is to say, it is a movement of freedom, of incalculable spontaneity. A machine is exactly the sum of its component parts; it can give that work (both as regards quantity and quality) which is confined within the frame and function of the parts. Man's creative power is precisely this that it can make two and two not merely four but infinity. There is a force of intervention in him whichupsets the rule of the parallelogram of forces that normally governs Matter and even his own physical brain and mind. There is in him truly a deus ex machine. Poetry, art, all creative act is a revelation, an intrusion of a truth, a reality from another plane, of quite a different order, into the rigid actuality and factual determinism.. Man's secret person is a sovereignly free will. A machine is wholly composed of actualities-the given-and brings out only a resultant of the permutation and combination of the data: it is a pure deduction.
But there is another even more interesting aspect of the matter. The attempt of the machine to embody or express something non-mechanical, to leap as high as possible from material objects to psychological values has a special significance for us today and is not all an amusing or crazy affair. It indicates, what we have been always saying, an involved pressure in Matter, a presence, a force of consciousness secreted there that seeks release and growth and expression.
05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The general idea of a descent of the Spirit, that is to say, the Divine, the conception of avatra and avataraais, of course, not new. But here there is a difference. Avatara or Avatarana in the older disciplines was more or less an intervention of God as God, the working of a Force come specifically in the midst of the world circumstances, maintaining still its divine transcendental character, to work out a given problem, accomplish a special mission and then, when the work is done, retire to its own status. It is, as it were, a weapon of flame and light hurled into the earthly frayeven like the discus of Vishnu and having accomplished its mission, going back into the hand of the thrower, its fount and origin. The task of the Avatara was usually bhbhra-haraa, lightening earth's load: it means removing the sinful and preserving the virtuous, re-establishing the reign of Law. Esoterically, he also embodied the Way to spiritual fulfilment. There was no question of saving humanityit was more serving than savingby transfiguring it, giving it a new body and life and mind, nor was there any idea of raising the level of earth-consciousness.
The Divine acts in three different ways in his three well-known aspects. As the transcendent Reality he is above and beyond creation, he is the Unmanifest, although he may hold within either involved or dissolved the entire manifestation. Next, he is the manifestation, the cosmic or the universal; he is one with creation, immanent in it, still its master and lord. Finally, he has an individual aspect: he is a Person with whom human beings can enter into relations of love and service. The Divine incarnate as a human being, is a special manifestation of the Individual Divine. Even then, as an embodied earthly person, he may act in a way characteristic of any of the three aspects. The Divine descended upon earth, as viewed by Sri Aurobindo, does not come in his transscendental aspect, fundamentally aloof and away, in his absolute power and consciousness, working miracles here; for transcendence can do nothing but that in the midst of conditions left as they are. Nor does he manifest himself only as his cosmic power and consciousness, imbedded in the creation and all-pervading, exercising his influence through the pressure of Universal Law, perhaps in a concentrated form, still working gradually, step by step, as though through a logical process, for the maintenance of the natural order and harmony, lokasagraha. God can be more than that, individualised in a special, even a human sense. His individual being can and does hold within itself his cosmic and transcendental self covertly in a way but overtly too in a singular manner at the same time. The humanised personality of the Divine with his special role and function is at the very centre of Sri Aurobindo's solution of the world enigma. The little poem A God's Labour in its short compass outlines and explains beautifully the grand Mystery.
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God made man, the spirit become flesh: this is Grace, the benediction of the Holy One upon the sinful earth. The working of Grace in one of its characteristic movements has been beautifully envisaged in esoteric Christianity. The burden of sin that is to say, of weakness, impurity and ignorancelies so heavy upon man, the force of gravitation is so absolute, that it is divine intervention alone, and in the most physical sense, which can save him. God takes upon himself man's load and relieves him of it: thus freed he can soar up easily and join the company of the Happy in heaven alongside God. This is the ransom paid by God to His Enemy, the vicarious atonement suffered by the Divine, the cross he has to bear when he comes upon this earth, into this vale of tears. I t is said, in terms of human feeling, pity so moved him that he left the happy abode of heaven, came down among men and lived like one of them, sharing their sorrow and pain and, what is divine, taking up the evil into himself, drinking, as it were, out of the poisoned bowl, so that man, frail mortal creature, may escape his doom.
This way too, as all other ways, has indeed been the way of escape. God came down in order to take away some men with him. They were the blessed ones, but the normal humanity remains as it is, as it has been, on the whole. The few that pass beyond do not seem to leave any trace here below. There was no regeneration of mankind, no reformation of earthly life.
05.17 - Evolution or Special Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Looked at from below, as the lower marches forward and upward, the scene presents itself as Evolution, growth, Nature's gradual unfolding of herself: looked at from above, as the higher seems poised and descends when the time and occasion are ready, creation appears as a series of special intervention. Both movements are facts of Nature and implement each other.
***
05.28 - God Protects, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The conditions under which the Divine's protection can come are simple enough, but difficult to fulfil completely and thoroughly. The ideal conditions that ensure absolute safety are an absolute trust and reliance on the Divine Force, a tranquillity and fearlessness that nothing shakes, .whatever the appearances at the moment, the spirit and attitude of an unreserved self-giving that whatever one is and one has is God's. Between that perfect state at the peak of consciousness and the doubting and hesitant and timid mind at the lower end that of St. Peter, forexample, at his weakest moment there are various gradations of the conditions fulfilled and the protection given is variable accordingly. Not that the Divine Grace acts or has to act according to any such hard and fast rule of mechanics, there is no such mathematical Law of Protection in the scheme of Providence. And yet on the whole and generally speaking Providence, Divine intervention, acts more or less successfully according to the degree of the soul's wakefulness on the plane that needs and possesses the protection.
And yet there is another aspect of the thing that is to be taken into consideration. For in the supreme and ultimate view the world or creation is not divided between God and Asura : the Asura cannot be outside God's infinity, he is there because permitted by him, indeed forms part of him and serves the divine purpose. Asura represents the hard dark passage through which the ignorant human soul cuts out its forward march: it is the crucible in which the growing consciousness is purified of its dross in order to regain the fullness of its divine quality and nature.
05.29 - Vengeance is Mine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Do we then propose taking it all lying down, it may be asked? Is martyrdom then our ideal? Not so, for we do not believe that evil forces can be appeased or conquered or transformed by yielding to them, letting them free to have their own way. Otherwise Krishna would not have enjoined and inspired (almost incited) Arjuna to enter on a bloody battle. Still forces, whether good or bad, are conquered or quelled or transformed truly and permanently by forces that belong not to the same level of being or consciousness, but to a higher one. Instead of working in a parallelogram of forces, we must take recourse, as it were, to a pyramid of forces. We know of the ideal of soul-force standing against and seeking to persuade or peacefully subdue brute force. It is not an impossibility; only we must be able really to get to the true soul and not a semblance or substitute of it. The true soul is .man's spiritual or divine being the consciousness in which man is one in substance and nature with God. It is not a mere thought formation, a mental and moral ideal. The only force that can succeed against a lower or undivine force is God's own force and the success can be complete and absolute by the calling in or intervention of God's force in its highest status. Anything less than that will be no more than a temporary lull or adjustment.
The world is not changed in spite of many efforts, because man is always taking to human means, he is not allowing God to do God's work, but putting his own individual initiative in God's place, taking perhaps God's name on the lips with a secret, unconscious feeling that unless he himself does something nothing will be donekarthamiti manyate. Human means may achieve at its best a compromise, but no permanent solution: it is often the beginning of a worse situation, a greater disharmony and conflictpeace, it has been said, is only a preparation for war. That vicious circle can be and has to be cut by the razor-blade consciousness of the aspirant to life divine who by the clear and tranquil energy of his tapascan call down a divine interference in mortal affairs.
05.30 - Theres a Divinity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Vengeance is Mine Divine intervention
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the GoalTheres a Divinity
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Vengeance is Mine Divine intervention
05.31 - Divine Intervention, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:05.31 - Divine intervention
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the GoalDivine intervention
Divine intervention
What we have named intervention is also known popularly as Providence. It is the element of the incalculable and the unforeseen in Nature. Nature, in one respect, seems to be a closed circle: it is a rigid mechanism and its movements are very definite and absolutely fixed admitting of no change or variation whatsoever. That was the idea which governed our earlier scientists when they spoke or the Law of Nature. Law of Nature was to them, in the great Sophoclean phrase, something indelible and inviolable, immemorially the same which no man or god dare alter or disobey. Laplace, one of the pioneers of the scientific outlook, said, in fact, that he could very well imagine a mathematician recording and calculating all the forces that act and react in the world and from the present position of things foretell the time and place of each and every event in the cosmic field. The idea of Karma, or Kismet, is a parallel conception in the domain of human nature and character. The chain reaction of cause and effect" is rigorous and absolute, follows a single line of movement and possesses a rigidly predetermined disposition. The principle is equally applicable either to a phenomenon of the physical world or to that of man's inner consciousness.
But we have arrived today at a stage when this old-world view has perforce to be discarded. We can no longer take Laplace seriously: for scientists themselves have established as a fact in physical Nature the indeterminacy of her movements, the impossibility of foretelling a laLaplace, not because of any deficiency in the human instrument but because of the very nature of things. Science is of course at a loss to explain the why or even the how of this indeterminacy. We say, however, that it is nothing but the intrusion of another, a different kind of force in the field of the forces actually at play. That force comes from a higher, a subtler level. Things and forces move in their ordinary round, according to the normal laws, bound ,within their present frame: but always there drops in from elsewhere an unknown element, a force or energy or impulse of another quality, which causes a shift of emphasis in the actual, brings about a change unaccountable and unforeseen. This is what is called miracle: the imposition of a higher law, a generic law governing subtler forms and forces upon an inferior and grosser sphere. And the higher or subtler the plane from which the new force descends the plane can be anything between the one nearest to the material, the subtle physical or ethereal, and the one nearest to the other extreme, the spiritual the greater will be the change in nature, quality and extent in the lower order. Such miracles, interventions, providential happenings are not rare. They are always occurring, only they do not attract attention. For it is these phenomena that are the real causes of all progresscosmic as well as individual. Evolution is based upon this truth of Nature.
Man is not bound to the present pattern or complex of his nature and character: he is not irrevocably fixed to the framea Procrustean bedgiven by the parallelogram of actual forces in or around him. Always he can call down forces or forces can descend into him from otherwhere and bring about a change, even a revolution in the mode and make-up of his character and nature and life. What we call "opening" in our. Sadhana refers to this factor in our consciousness. It means the possibility of the descent of a higher force in our normal nature. Nature is not such a solid stream-lined structure as not to admit of any interstices in it. We know of the comparatively vast spaces that separate atom from atom, the immense emptiness across which even the ultimate nuclear particles have to act upon each other. These are the loop-holes in the great net and it is precisely through them that other forces percolate.
05.32 - Yoga as Pragmatic Power, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Divine intervention Caesar versus the Divine
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The Quest and the GoalYoga as Pragmatic Power
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Divine intervention Caesar versus the Divine
06.06 - Earth a Symbol, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The earth is the centre of the material universe. It has been created for concentrating the force that is to transform Matter. It is the symbol of the divine potentiality in Matter. As we have said, the earth was created through a direct intervention of the Divine Consciousness: it is on the earth alone that there is and can be the direct contact with the Divine. The earth absorbs and develops and radiates the divine light; its radiation spreads through space and extends wherever there is Matter. The material universe shares, to some extent, the gift that the earth brings the light and harmony of the Divine Consciousness. But it is upon the Earth alone that there is the full and final flowering of that consciousness.
The psychic being is found on the earth alone, for it is a product of the earth: it is the touch of the Divine upon Matter. The psychic being is a child of the Earth: it is born and grows upon Earth, it is native to nowhere else. Still when it develops sufficiently and becomes an adult individuality, it can go to other physical domains, visit other planets, for example.
06.12 - The Expanding Body-Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The field of our physical activity is very limited. If you look at it closely you will find it indeed extremely narrow and our capacities confined within a small circle. We are bound by the outline of our material body. I cannot, for instance, be sitting in my room and at the same time doing gymnastics in the playground. If you wish to do one thing you cannot do another; if you are at one place you cannot be at another simultaneously. How convenient it would be if while I was writing at the table, I could get there immediately a book from a far-off shelf for consultation without moving or taking anybody's help! And yet is the thing so very impossible? We know, for example, of extraordinaryat least, queerthings happening at what are called spirit sances, things that cannot be explained by the normal functioning of the physical senses; they are explained as interventions from the spirit world. In reality, however, spirits or ghosts have, in general, very little to do in this matter. It is action not of disembodied beings but of the normal human energiesespecially the vital or life energyfreed from the body's control and exerting itself independently. An example, a true fact that happened, will best illustrate what I mean to say.
A young man, in Paris, a clerk at a railway station, used to receive there his fiance and her mother from time to time. One day he was expecting them and waiting for the train time; they had to come by train. As he was busy with his work at the table, at about the appointed hour, people around saw him all on a sudden bending down his head with a loud scream and then resting it on the table; he lay unconscious. In the meantime, what happened on the other side was a terrible railway disaster: the two women were involved in it.
06.16 - A Page of Occult History, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Into the heart of this Darkness and Falsehood and Pain and Death, a seed was sown, a grain that is to be the epitome and symbol of material creation and in and through which the Divine will claim back all the elements gone astray, the prodigal ones who will return to recognise and fulfil the Divine. That was Earth. And the earth, in her turn, in her labour towards the Divine Fulfilment, out of her bosom, threw up a being who would again symbolise and epitomise the earth and material creation. That is Man. For, man came with the soul in him, the Psychic Being, the Divine Flame, the spark of consciousness in the midst of universal unconsciousness, a miniature of the original Divine Light-Truth-Love-Life. In the meantime, to help the evolution, to join hands with the aspiring soul in the human being, there was created, on the defection of the First Lords the Asuric Quaternitya second hierarchy of luminous beingsDevas, gods. (Some-thing of this inner history of the world is reflected in the Greek legend of struggle between the Titans and the Olympians.) These gods, however, being a latter creation, perhaps because they were young and inexperienced, could not cope immediately with their strong Elders. It is why we see in the mythological legends the gods very often worsted at the hands of the Asuras: Indra hiding under the sea, Zeus threatened often with defeat and disaster. It is only an intervention from the Supreme (the Greeks called it Fate) that saved them in the end and restored the balance.
However, the Asuras came to think better of the game and consented to use their freedom on the side of the Divine, for the fulfilment of the Divine; that is to say, they agreed to conversion. Thus they took birth as or in human beings, so that they may be in contact with the human soulPsychewhich is the only door or passage to the Divine in this material world. But the matter was not easy; the process was not straight. For, even agreeing to be converted, even basking in the sunshine of the human psyche, these incorrigible Elders could not forget or wholly give up their old habit and nature. They now wanted to work for the Divine Fulfilment in order to magnify themselves thereby; they consented to serve the Divine in order to make the Divine serve them, utilise the Divine End for their own purposes. They wished to see the new creation after their own heart's desire.
07.07 - Freedom and Destiny, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This addition comes from the aspiration for the supreme consciousness. There is nothing to wonder at the phenomenon. There is an aspiration acting in the world, moving with a certain end in view; the purpose is to bring back the fallen and obscured consciousness to its original and normal state of the divine consciousness. Each time that this aspiring consciousness meets an obstacle in its working, a new resistance to conquer or to transform, it calls for a new Force. And this new Force is a kind of new creation. In the human being, too, there are different domains in obedience to a law of correspondence; in each there is for him a different destiny and each is absolute in its line. But there is also in him, through his aspiration, a capacity to enter into relation with a domain higher than where he happens to be and bring down an action of this higher domain into the lower determinism. So we can say that there is a horizontal determinism in each domain, absolute in its normal working; but there is also a vertical intervention from other higher domains or even from the highest and then the lower determinism is changed completely. Thus every human being is at once a sum of various determinisms, absolute in their way, and there is also an absolute liberty that can intervene by bringing down other forces into the apparently rigid frame of destiny of the lower worlds and alter it. That is how things in the world give the impression of the unforeseen, the incalculable, the miraculous.
You may call this intervention Grace; for without the Divine Grace this could not happen. There is a consciousness and a vision of things where all are brought back to this single source; Grace only exists, nothing else is there. That does everything. But as you have not risen to that summit, not have had that extreme realisation, you have to take into account your own person, your personal aspiration, the thing that calls for the Grace and to which the Grace responds. The two are needed here. Both are ultimately ways of viewing the same truth. The mind, however, finds it difficult to conceive both in a simultaneous movement. The rigid distinctions it makes take away much from the supple and subtle and integral truth of a total experience.
***
07.29 - How to Feel that we Belong to the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Three hundred years is the minimum, I should say. You must realise what it means to transform the body. The body with all its organs and functionings works automatically without the intervention of your consciousness, and is built upon an animal plan. If your heart stops for the hundredth part of a second, your body goes off. You cannot do without a single one of your organs and you must keep watch over their proper functioning. Transformation means the replacement of this purely material arrangement by a systematic concentration of forces. You must bring about an arrangement of forces, according to a certain kind of vibration, replacing each organ by a centre of self-conscious energy which governs through the concentration of a higher force. There will no longer be a stomach, no more a heart even. These things will give place to a system of vibrations which represent what they really are. The material organs are symbols of energy centres; they are not the essential reality, they only give a form or figure to it under certain circumstances. The transformed body will function through its real energy centres, not through their representatives as developed in an animal body. For that you must first of all be conscious of these centres and their functionings; instead of an unconscious automatic movement there has to be a movement of conscious control. Thus one will have at his disposal not physical animal organs but the symbolic vibrations, the symbolic energies. This does not mean that there will not be any definite recognizable form. The form will be built up with qualities rather than with solid (dust) particles. It will be, so to say, a practical or pragmatic form: it will be supple and mobile, unlike the fixed grossly material shape. As the expression of your face changes with your feeling, impulsion, even so the body will change according to the need of the inner movement: have you never had this kind of experience in your dream? You rise up in the air and you give as it were a push with your elbow in one direction and your body extends that way; you give a kick with your foot and you land somewhere else: you can be transparent at will and go easily through a solid wall! The transformed body will behave somewhat in the same way, it will be light, luminous, elastic. Lightness, luminosity, elasticity will be the very fundamental qualities of the body.
To prepare such a body 300 years is nothing; even a thousand years will not be too much. Naturally, I am speaking of the same body. If you change your body in between, it will no longer be the same body. At 50 the body already begins to wear out. But, on the contrary, if you have a body that goes on perfecting itself; if each passing year represents a step in progress, then you can continue indefinitely: for after all, you are immortal.
08.16 - Perfection and Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is evident that the advent of man upon the earth has changed the terrestrial conditions. One cannot say that this has been to the greatest good of all, for it meant much suffering in many places. Also it is evident that the complication which the human being has brought with him into life has not always been favourable to him or to others. But from another point of view it did mean a progress, a marked progress among the lower species. Man mixed himself up with the life of animals, with the life of plants, even with the life of metals and minerals; it was not, as I said, to the great joy of all those with whom he occupied himself; but in any case, their conditions of life were changed by this intervention. In the same way, it is likely that the supramental being, whatever he might be, when he comes, will change considerably the life upon earth. We cherish this hope in our heart and in our mind that all the ills the earth suffers from will be, if not completely cured, at least to a large extent alleviated and that conditions of living here will be more pleasant and harmonious, at least tolerable for all. That is quite possible. In man, the mental consciousness that he embodied acted, by the very force of its nature, for its own satisfaction, for its own growth, without much consideration for the consequences of its actions. The Supramental, on the other hand, will act differently; that is our hope, at least.
Human life, however, is brief and naturally there is a tendency in man to shorten the distances in proportion to his dimensions. Still there will come a time when the thing will happen; there will be a moment or a movement that will at last land into the reality. Once upon a time there came a moment when the mental being could appear upon earth. The start may be poor, very incomplete, very partial, but after all there was the start. Why should not the same thing occur now?
08.28 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
If you are capable of traversing all these planes in your consciousness, so to say, in a vertical line and reach the highest and then, through this joining up, if you are able to bring down this determinism of perfect freedom into the material determinism, then you can change everything. And all the intermediaries also will undergo the change. Because of these changes it will all look like total freedom. For the intervention or the descent of one plane upon another will have unforeseen consequences for the lower one. The higher planes may foresee, but the lower ones cannot. Being unforeseen, things and events have then an air of the absolutely free and the totally unexpected.
It is only when you live consciously and constantly on the highest level, that is to say, the level of the supreme consciousness, that you are able to see that everything is absolutely determined, but at the same time by the very complexity of the intermixture of these determinisms everything is absolutely free. You may call this phenomenon as you like, but it is a kind of absolute determinism and absolute freedom combined. It is the level where there are no contradictions, where all things exist and exist in harmony without contradicting each other.
09.01 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"You gave me what I asked for. You have brought to my close touch experiences that were unknown and that are now wonders which I reach at will. I am infinitely grateful and I offer you this hymn of thanksgiving for your intervention."
VII
09.04 - The Divine Grace, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As soon as you come in contact with it, you find that there is not a second in time, not a point in space which does not show in a signal manner this ceaseless work of the Grace, its constant intervention. And once you have seen that, you feel you are never up to the mark. For you must never forget that you must not have fear or anguish or regret or recoil or even suffering. If you were in union with this Grace, if you saw it everywhere, you would begin to live a life of exultation, all power and infinite happiness. And that would be the best possible collaboration in the Divine Work.
II
09.06 - How Can Time Be a Friend?, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And I have seen with my own eyes, here and in France and Algeria, the rain falling on a very definite spot exactly where it should rain, because it was dry and there was a field that needed to be watered. And at another place, just a few yards away, it was all sunny and dry, because the place needed to be sunny and dry. Naturally, if you proceed very scientifically, they will explain the thing scientifically; but as for myself, I saw it happen as the result of an intervention from someone who had asked for it and got it.
I have told you of my experiences in Algeria. Very many interesting things happened there. For a certain atmosphere was there, an atmosphere, one might say, of a little more real knowledge. There were certain small beings, those that controlled or produced snow. They could come and enter into a room and say: "Now, it must snow here""But there has been no snow in this country! Snow? You don't mean that? Near the Sahara, it's going to snow?""It must snow, because they have planted fir trees on the mountain and when we see fir trees we come. Fir trees mean we are called and so we come." Thus there was a little argument and the little beings went away with the permission to snow. The mountain was covered with snow. And it was quite near the Sahara. You come down a few miles and you reach the Sahara.
10.17 - Miracles: Their True Significance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
A miracle is nothing but the intervention of a force from another plane of consciousness. It must be recognised at the very outset that the physical plane of existence is not the only reality, there are many other planes superimposed' one upon another, each having its own special consciousness and power, its own laws of being and action. Obviously we all know apart from the material or physical being there is the vital being, the life-force and there is the mental being, the mind-force. And there are many other levels like these. A miracle happens, that is to say, a material formation behaves in an abnormal way because a force has come down from the vital region and has influenced or taken control of the material object. So the material object instead of obeying the material law is obliged to obey a vital law which is of a much greater potency. Yogis who do miracles possess this vital power, they have acquired it through a regular discipline and training. Spirit-calling, table-turning, even curing diseases and ailments in a moment and many other activities of the kind are manifestations of very elementary energies of life. From the occult point of view these are very crude and rudimentary examples of what a different kind of force can achieve on a different plane. Even the vital plane possesses deeper and higher energies whose action on the material plane is of deeper and higher category. A deeper or higher vital power can change radically your character and long-standing habits, help to mould them into a different, nobler and more beautiful pattern. The mind too is capable of performing miracles, a strong mental energy can dictate its terms to life and even to the body. Only the miracles here are not of a dazzling kind that astound or confound you. They have a subtler composition, yet they belong to the same category. In the mind itself miracles happen also when a higher light, a superior consciousness intuition, inspiration, revelationdescends into the normal mental working and creates there a thing that is abnormal in beauty and truth and reality. Thus for example, a matter of fact mind is seen turned into a fine poet or a workaday hand is transmuted into a consummate artist.
A miracle can be said to be doubly a miracle; first of all, because it means an intervention from another plane, a superior level of being, and secondly because the process or the action of the intervention is not deployed or staged out but is occult and telescoped, the result being almost simultaneous with the pressure of the moving force. .
The supreme miracle, the miracle of miracles happens when the Supreme, the Divine Himself descends and enters into this lower formation and gradually lifts it up in an incredibly unforeseen way to its divine image.
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
asking for a special intervention which could save this
corrupted universe; and in reply to this prayer there was
--
cial intervention of the manifesting Divine, a recovery of
the lost Godhead became possible. In the succeeding climb
1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
a similar divine intervention. This is the path followed by the
Occasionalists, Geulincx and Malebranche: In Spinoza, who is
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
psycho therapeutic intervention may occasionally run into a latent psychosis
and bring it to full flower. For this reason to dabble in psycho therapy is toplay with fire, against which amateurs should be stringently cautioned. It is
1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
He thought that Tara's intervention was because of
a connection he had with her in a past life since he
--
their country. The savioress' intervention in favor of
those who pray to her is not a rare incident
--
themselves on rock walls without intervention of a
human hand.
1.01 - The Divine and The Universe, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Nothing in advance. Everything immediately, directly, spontaneously, without any intermediary. The intervention of intermediaries has mostly complicated matters rather than simplified. A rather long story to tell.
* *
1.01 - The Science of Living, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
to convince it and awaken in it the goodwill which has been veiled for a time. By means of such patient intervention
each crisis can be turned into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. Progress may be slow, relapses
1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
In contrast to these terrible tales of retri bution, there are also accounts of children who thanks to heaven's miraculous intervention were enabled to carry out acts of great filial devotion: the story of a rare medicinal stone suddenly appearing in the garden of a son who needed it to cure an ailing father; of midwinter ice breaking up and fresh carp leaping into the arms of a son whose stepmo ther had a craving for minced fish; of a poor man whose shovel struck a cauldron filled with gold as he was about to bury his child alive to ensure his mother would be adequately fed; of bamboo shoots emerging in midwinter for a son anxious to feed them to his mother; of a carp-filled fountain gushing up in the garden of a son who wanted to satisfy his mother's yearning for fine water and minced fish.
But even if you don't perform acts of filial devotion like these, of a caliber that elicits heavenly intervention, I devoutly hope you do not commit acts of an unfilial nature that will bring punishment down upon you. A person who ignores or refuses to acknowledge what takes place right under his nose and insists on merely doing as he pleases must be either a stupid man or an evil one.
The people in the half-dozen stories I related, having turned away from reasonable courses of action, convinced themselves that their transgressions were minor and that any retri bution would be minor as well, and because of that they ended up receiving the severe judgment of heaven, dying very unfortunate deaths, leaving behind them names blackened forever as unfilial sons or daughters, and falling into the interminable suffering and torment of the Burning Hells. That this happened because they did not fear the wrath of the gods and were ignorant of heavenly retri bution is a matter each and every person should give the greatest care and consideration.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
perspective something beyond subjective intervention. But it is the case that without the appropriate
attitude [Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For
1.02 - Priestly Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency.
The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as
1.02 - Taras Tantra, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
reporting Tara's intervention to save her followers
from danger. Let us give two examples. The first one
--
Several interventions by Tara were necessary to
convince him.
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
direct interventions in them. 15
When the war was over, life could start anew again, as
--
Sri Aurobindos supreme intervention at the root of
things must have been successful, for only six years later,
10.36 - Cling to Truth, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For two things have happenedtwo mighty happenings in earth's history, in the course of nature's evolution here: two unseen events that have new-oriented the destiny of earth and mankind. First of all human consciousness in its essential achievement has risen to a new level of consciousness, although not in the mass, nor generally even in individuals, but there has come a common acquiescence in the being to a higher status of livingproletarianism at its best means nothing else. Human nature has shed something of its mediaeval crudeness and obscurantism, separatism and selfishness; human mind has been more sharpened and polished and widened so as to receive easily the message of the cosmic rays. There has dawned in the atmosphere the perception or sense, of a higher, purer, more luminous and enlightened status of existence. That is, one may say, Nature's gift, the outcome of the millennial, the aeonic working of an aspiration inherent in matter towards light and order. That is the first event. The second one is more occult but more mighty and even devastating. It is the descent, the manifestation, the intervention of a new force here below. They who have seen it know and there is no question. The Veda has declared long ago: The Unseeing have not the Knowledge, those who have eyes possess the Knowledge.
Today, more than ever, only a little of this pure consciousness will bring you victory, not merely safety from a great perdition. Against the vast, what appears as the all-swallowing gloom of the external space, the inner space is now luminous, doubly luminous and powerful.
1.03 - Hieroglypics Life and Language Necessarily Symbolic, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
And then folk wonder how it is that there should be error and misunderstanding in the transmission of thought from one person to another! Rather regard it as a miraculous intervention of Providence when even one of even the simplest ideas "gets across." Now then, this being so, it is evidently good sense to construct one's own alphabet, with one's own very precise definitions, in order to handle an abstruse and technical subject like Magick. The "ordinary" words such as God, self, soul, spirit and the rest have been used so many thousand times in so many thousand ways, usually by writers who knew not, or cared not for the necessity of definition that to use them to-day in any scientific essay is almost ludicrous.
That is all, just now, sister; no more of your cavilling, please; sit down quietly with your 777, and get it by heart!
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
who were aware of the interventions of Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother in the war thought that, once the war was over,
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The aim set before our Yoga is nothing less than to hasten this supreme object of our existence here. Its process leaves behind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth through the evolution of Nature. For the natural evolution is at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pressure of the environment, partly by a groping education and an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes, - though veiling a secret divine intervention and guidance. In Yoga we replace this confused crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us. In a certain sense it may be an error to speak of a goal anywhere in a progression which may well be infinite. Still we can conceive of an immediate goal, an ulterior objective beyond our present achievement towards which the soul in man can aspire. There lies before him the possibility of a new birth; there can be an ascent into a higher and wider plane of being and its descent to transform his members. An enlarged and illumined consciousness is possible that shall make of him a liberated spirit and a perfected force - and, if spread beyond the individual, it might even constitute a divine humanity or else a new, a supramental and therefore a superhuman race. It is this new birth that we make our aim: a growth into a divine consciousness is the whole meaning of our Yoga, an integral conversion to divinity not only of the soul but of all the parts of our nature.
* *
1.03 - To Layman Ishii, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
Zen teachers who, by giving in to feelings of pity and offering untimely advice to struggling students, end up preventing them from carrying their practice through to completion, ruining their chance of ever reaching the release of final enlightenment. Hakuin contrasts this with the method used by himself, as well as the great Zen figures of the past, of refusing to give any such help until the critical moment is reached and the student is ready to benefit from a teacher's timely intervention. The classic image is that of a mother hen pecking an egg at the exact same time the baby chick is pecking from within the shell to make its way out. Hakuin also stresses the importance of the post-satori training that begins after the original kensh or satori is attained.
This letter is perhaps the earliest written enunciation of these themes, preceding by almost a decade their initial appearance in print, in Talks Introductory to Lectures on the Record of Hsi-keng
1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any
spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is
1.04 - On blessed and ever-memorable obedience, #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
When he had spent seven years there, he attained to deep humility and compunction. Then the glorious father, after the lawful seven years and the mans incomparable patience, judged him fully worthy to be numbered among the brethren and wanted to profess him and have him ordained. But Isidore through others and through my feeble intervention, implored the shepherd many times to let him finish his course as he was living before, vaguely hinting that his end and call were drawing near. And that was actually the case. For when his director had allowed him to remain as he was, ten days later in his lowliness he passed gloriously to the Lord. And on the seventh day after his own falling asleep, the porter of the monastery was also taken. For the blessed man had said to him: If I have found favour in the sight of the Lord, in a short time you also will be inseparably joined to me there.1 And that is what happened, in witness of his unashamed obedience and divine humility.
1 I.e. just as they were joined at the gate.
1.04 - Religion and Occultism, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Palmistry is a very interesting art, but it depends for its exactitude and truthfulness almost entirely upon the real ability of the one who practises it. Moreover, it relates only to the material destiny and this destiny can be altered by the intervention of the higher forces.
3 January 1951
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
We have seen cases in which the lack of proper psychological conditions prevented the effective intervention by the Divine Force. Now I shall cite a serious case where, Sri Aurobindo himself declared, the divine intervention had its full effect.
The patient, S, a thin, wiry man of about 40, used to suffer from acidity and came to me for treatment. But being extremely greedy, he could never observe the essential part of the cure, the diet. In 1934, before I had taken up the Dispensary work, he invited me for a cup of tea. I asked the Mother's permission, for at that time we were supposed to obtain her approval for any external movement not concerned with sadhana, and Sri Aurobindo replied, "It would be better not to take S's things. This cooking has reawakened his greed of food and made him ill again after I had completely cured him."
--
After a long and strenuous vigil, the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's unflagging concentration, daily reports of the progress, the homeopath's blunders and effective medicines, the patient recovered. I did not know really to whom the credit went to the Force or the homeopath. There was a supposition also that the patient's complete surrender to the Mother had made this miracle possible. I had given up all hope of recovery when I saw him vomiting such a lot of blood. Surgical intervention was out of the question, for the local hospital surgeon was not very competent. Sri Aurobindo suggested it by way of keeping ourselves on the safe side of the law, since we had no legal authority to practise. Neither had I much faith in the homeopath when the case was handed over to him, though he had made a big name in the town. One thing I must say in favour of the patient, that he never lost hope and was throughout conscious. If I was in an anxiety he would give me hope saying, "Doctor, don't think that I am going to die." Sri Aurobindo wrote to me, "The man has a belief in yoga-force and that helps." In this predicament I wanted a straight answer from Sri Aurobindo as to which factor played the dominant part in the cure the Force or the doctor. I was doubtful about the latter because he had committed many blunders which were recognised by Sri Aurobindo and they had to be counter acted by the Force. The illuminating answer I received from him is as follows, "It was only when the heart began to misbehave seriously, that, as often happens, in response to the danger a big Force began to come down and S's body also responded it was that response that saved him, not any surrender... I think the Force can take more credit than R's medicines, although the latter were very useful, one might say an indispensable assistance. Yet it was whenever a big Force came in that S made a bound forward and each time on the lines indicated by the Force, first the heart's recovery, next the deliverance of the liver, third the overcoming of the hyperacid excesses. R was an obstacle as well as a help, twice. First, in his confounded decision to encourage 'yellow fever' the bile had to be cleared out of course, but not in that dangerous way; next in his "lime juice" excesses, the orange-juice was useful, but frantically overdone. As soon as he dropped his first mistake, the bile set itself right as soon as he dropped his second to some extent and administered orange juice + medicine reasonably, the rest ameliorated.... If so, it was because the Force got a chance to work straight helped and not impeded."
This then is one case among many others which I have followed step by step, and have Sri Aurobindo's own words to vouch for the cure of the case by his Force.
--
We owe, by the way, a debt of gratitude to the Mother's brother, for it was his indirect intervention in the Colonial Office of the French Government at Paris that went a long way towards removing a very great threat to the Ashram's existence, brought about by the manipulation of the British India Government.
I come now to the last of her day's activities that I have witnessed as well as heard about from others. It was one of the strangest I could think of and could be taken up by her alone, for her inspiration comes from to quote Nishikanto's phrase a "God-white source" riot from human reason. I mean her evening meditation and Pranam. I have already made a reference to them. The meditation started in a very reasonable manner at about 8.00 p.m. She would go down and, standing in the middle of the lower part of the staircase, give a silent meditation to all sitting below for about half an hour; then she would come up, look in on Sri Aurobindo, and come back after a while with his supper. Once she said to him, "After a long time, the gods have come to the meditation." This recalls Sri Aurobindo's verses:
1.04 - The Silent Mind, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
by a rapid intervention or manifestation of Silence with an effect out of all proportion to the means used at the beginning. One commences with a method, but the work it taken up by a Grace from above, from That to which one aspires or an irruption of the infinitudes of the Spirit. It was in this last way that I myself came by the mind's absolute silence, unimaginable to me before I had its actual experience. 31 This is a most important point indeed. For we might think that these yogic experiences are all very nice and interesting, but that they are far beyond our ordinary human grasp; how could we, such as we are, ever get there? Our mistake is in judging with our present self possibilities that belong to another self. By the simple fact of setting out on the path, the yoga automatically awakens a whole range of latent faculties and invisible forces that far exceed the possibilities of our outer being and can do for us things that we are normally incapable of doing: One had to have the passage clear between the outer mind and something in the inner being . . . for they (the Yogic consciousness and its powers) are already there within you,32 and the best way of "clearing"
the passage is to silence the mind. We do not know who we are, and still less what we are capable of.
1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
world. Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver
humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention
man would have been lost. If this paramount power of evil is
1.05 - Computing Machines and the Nervous System, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
this circuit is cleared by intervention from outside. There is
much reason to believe that this happens in our brains during
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the third verse we come across the first confirmation of the spiritual purport of the hymn. The protected of Varuna, Mitra & Aryama the plural is now used to generalise the idea more decisivelyare travellers to a moral & spiritual goal, nayanti durit tirah. It follows that the durgni, the obstacles in the path are moral & spiritual obstacles, not material impediments. It follows equally that the dwishah, the haters, are spiritual enemies, not human; for there would be no sense or appropriateness in the scattering of human enemies by Varuna as a condition of the seeker after Truth & Rights reaching a state of sinlessness. It is the spiritual, moral & mental obstacles, the spiritual beings & forces who are opposed to the souls perfection, Brahmadwishah, whom Varuna, Mitra & Aryama remove from the path of their worshippers. They smite them & scatter them utterly, vi durg vi dwishah,the particle twice repeated in order to emphasise the entire clearance of the path; they scatter them in front,not allowing even the least struggle to be engaged before their intervention, but going in front of the worshippers & maintaining a clear way, suga anrikshara, in which they can pass not only without hurt, but without battle. The image of the sins, the durit is that of an army besetting the way which is scattered to all sides by the divine vanguard & is compelled beyond striking distance. The armed pilgrims of the Right pass on & through & not an arrow falls across their road. The three great Kings of heaven & their hosts, rjnah, have passed before & secured the great passage for the favoured mortal.
The sense is completed & the spiritual character of the journey explicitly & unmistakably brought out in the next, the fourth rik of the Sukta. The traveller is one who is journeying towards the Truth, the ritam. We have already hazarded the conception of the Ritam as the principle of Mahas, the spontaneous, self-existent, self-efficient nature of the infinite & divine consciousness, satyam ritam brihat, to which right action, right emotion, right knowledge, right enjoyment belong inalienably & result naturally & without effort or stumble. In its moral aspect, that conception is now entirely justified. The path of Truth, ritasya panth sdhuy, is suga anrikshara; there are no pitfalls or precipices in that road; for it is the road of the Adityas, the children of Light & Infinity, sons of Aditi, the Infinite Nature, brothers of Surya to whom belongs the revealed knowledge & the divine illumination. It is as we shall see in the next line the straight road rijun path. Sugah panth anrikshara ditysa ritam yate. Ntrvakhdo asti vah.
1.05 - The Creative Principle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Certainly, it is quite possible that each great beginning has been the effect of an exceptional intervention of power or of will. In the great hierarchy of existence, there are formative beings who can thus create things. It is even possible that certain of them, before things took substantial form, drew from themselves the elements and the means of their creation. But does not man at each instant, by his word, by his thought, thus create without knowing it?
And if such beings are called gods, who is not in some sort a god in the infinite relativity? But whatever they be, great or little, all these formative gods are themselves only the effective forms assumed in the course of the evolution by the creative Principle.
1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
On 29.12.40 Savarkar gave a speech in which he said that the British could not be defeated. Sri Aurobindo commented: "Nonsense. They were saved by Divine intervention. They would have been smashed if Hitler had invaded England at the right time after the fall of France."
"Why didn't the Divine intervene in France?" one of us asked.
--
Well, these long extracts sum up Sri Aurobindo's vision of the War. They embody his active interest and participation by his spiritual Force in it. One wonders what would have been the fate of the world without Sri Aurobindo's actual intervention. I often marvelled at the grasp he showed of military affairs. Once I asked him in my letter whether he had any latent military capacity in him, his reply was, "Not in this life." When somebody asked the Mother why England was meeting reverses in spite of Sri Aurobindo's support, she replied, "If he had not helped Britain, she would have been swallowed up by Hitler long ago." Unfortunately I haven't kept further record of the talks on the War. When America joined the Allies and Hitler attacked Russia there was no doubt that behind both these movements, Sri Aurobindo's divine diplomacy played a great part just as his intervention or what he called the Divine intervention saved England from invasion by Hitler. In October 1939, Sri Aurobindo wrote a poem on Hitler in which what he predicted came so literally true!
The closing lines are:
1.06 - The Three Schools of Magick 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
We are in possession of a certain mystical document*[AC13] which we may describe briefly, for convenience sake, as an Apocalypse of which we hold the keys, thanks to the intervention of the Master who has appeared at this grave conjuncture of Fate. This document consists of a series of visions, in which we hear the various Intelligences whose nature it would be hard to define, but who are at the very least endowed with knowledge and power far beyond anything that we are accustomed to regard as proper to the human race.
We must quote a passage from one of the most important of these documents. The doctrine is conveyed, as is customary among Initiates, in the form of a parable. Those who have attained even a mediocre degree of enlightenment are aware that the crude belief of the faithful, and the crude infidelity of the scoffer, with regard to matters of fact, are merely childish. Every incident in Nature, true or false, possesses a spiritual significance. It is this significance, and only this significance, that possesses any philosophical value to the Initiate.
1.07 - Cybernetics and Psychopathology, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
surgical intervention into the brain, leaving behind it perma-
nent damage, mutilation, and the abridgment of the powers of
--
of surgical intervention which has been practiced is known as
prefrontal lobotomy, and consists in the removal or isolation
1.07 - On mourning which causes joy., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
The abyss of mourning has seen comfort, and purity of heart has received illumination. Illumination is an ineffable activity which is unknowingly perceived and invisibly seen. Comfort is the solace of a sorrowing soul which, like a child, at once both whimpers to itself and shouts happily. Divine intervention is the renewal of a soul depressed by grief which in a wonderful way transforms painful tears into painless ones.
Tears over our departure produce fear; and when fear begets fearlessness, joy dawns. And when joy is unfailingly obtained, holy love bursts into flower.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
31:If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions, Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity in oneness.
32:In the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater consciousness than the mind's, governed in all its steps by the light and truth of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape; a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance.
1.07 - THE MASTER AND VIJAY GOSWAMI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"The 'I' that makes one a worldly person and attaches one to 'woman and gold' is the 'wicked I'. The intervention of this ego creates the difference between jiva and tman.
Water appears to be divided into two parts if one puts a stick across it. But in reality there is only one water. It appears as two on account of the stick. This 'I' is the stick.
1.07 - The Primary Data of Being, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
For just as the intervention of Time in Space creates the movement, so also the intervention of Force in Substance, of Quality in Quantity, of Mind in Matter creates form, body, the individualisation of Life, the act of Will.
***
1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
To make the path easy to Heaven, or at least to get Heaven's blessings more easily, is also possible by his intervention. If the Mother is at times reluctant for some reason to give a birthday card to someone or write a person's name or "love and blessings" on it, if she refuses to see another on his birthday, Champaklal appeals to her divine compassion and makes her rescind her decision. The Mother sometimes asks him, "What shall I write?" "Why, love and blessings, Mother!" is his reply. He says that he suffered a lot in his childhood because people could not understand his nature. He now wants to distribute the Divine's largesse whenever and wherever he can. Many people are grateful to him for procuring the Mother's blessings for them, especially her physical touch. Only one must be frank and straightforward. Sometimes he has gone out of his way to help even an unknown and unpresuming person to get the Mother's touch if he thought that he had been overlooked. To sum up, his soul's mission is to serve the Mother, to look after her and to make her love and compassion available to all, rich or poor, worthy or unworthy, young or old, without any distinction. I shall now conclude my "rosy picture" of Champaklal by quoting Sri Aurobindo's estimate of him: "All have their defects, but Champaklal has great qualities to atone for them."
Mulshankar, youngest of the group, was the brother of Esculape, alias Dayashankar, at one time in charge of the Ashram Dispensary. He also worked as an assistant in the Dispensary after Esculape's retirement and came to serve Sri Aurobindo as a medical aid. An excellent worker, he had the privilege of massaging Sri Aurobindo's body for a certain period. He was no masseur and in fact knew nothing about it, but he picked it up from some casual lessons and was gifted with the natural lightness and suppleness of finger movements. During the short interval that Sri Aurobindo had to wait for the Mother to come, before he started walking, Mulshankar would sit behind and apply a good massage to his back. It was really as if an expert masseur was at work; his hands moved so lightly and fast, up and down the back and spine; sometimes using delicate finger strokes or the edge of the palms and swinging and bending the body as the various movements demanded and then finishing off with very gentle touches of the fingertips. One was tempted to take a photograph of his agile figure and beaming face visibly moved beyond measure by the unique privilege of touching the Lord's body, while Sri Aurobindo kept on sitting like a statue looking downwards as the massage proceeded, or in front, sometimes smiling by himself, perhaps oblivious of all the hundred kinds of fleeting, fluttering, striking movements being made on his back. Both the figures supplied us food for a good deal of merriment, the Guru sitting on the edge of the bed, the shishya briskly massaging his back. But the poor fellow had to miss his service because of an intractable headache that crippled him often. And every time that happened we would report to Sri Aurobindo; his comment would be: "Again?", or an exclamatory expression; we could feel at the same time that the inner help was being given.
1.08 - Sri Aurobindos Descent into Death, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
of Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers decisive interventions
in the Second World War, the fiercest and most deadly of
--
Now we are further again. Sri Aurobindos intervention
at the root of things has enabled the manifestation of the
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
In what prayers do men allow themselves! Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity is vicious. [True] Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not a unity in nature and consciousness.39 God's "supernatural" intervention in "nature": this bears no relation to the contemplative view of the psychic and subtle stages. God or Spirit is not set apart from nature, but rather is the Ground of nature, and indeed of all manifestation-as Teresa puts it, "God is in all things by presence and power and essence." "Supernatural," in this usage, simply means that the natural union of Spirit with all things becomes a conscious realization in some, and that conscious realization is called supernatural, not because the union is present only in them and not in nature, but because they are directly realizing it. Teresa's spiritual friend and collaborator, the extraordinary John of the Cross, explains it thus:
This union between God and creatures always exists. By it He conserves their being so that if the union would end they would cease to exist [Spirit as Ground of Being]. Consequently, in discussing union with God, we are not discussing the substantial union which is always existing, but the union and transformation of the soul in God. This transformation is supernatural, the other natural.40
1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
hem, is wafted by divine intervention into the Beyond (sea =
unconscious). From the very beginning his childhood is so
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
We shall see how it can be solved and by what intervention of a principle opposed to that of desire, the cycle of the creative involution gives place to the cycle of an evolution that redeems.
While in its spatial manifestation, in its descending evolution, the movement tends towards the repose of a material inertia, the being on the contrary in its ascending evolution through Time seeks to regain the repose of the absolute movement by a progressive acceleration of what might be called an internal rapidity, which is of the mind, greatly surpassing the velocity of Light.
--
Thus, when the desire of being has projected something of the absolute consciousness into the profound Night of the inconscient, into the dark field of pure impulsions, of blind and violent instinct, the obstacle of a mysterious intervention, the miracle of Matter stopping the cosmic being in its fall permits it to recover knowledge of itself and its highest possibilities.
After it has tended by a progressive materialisation towards the growing obscurity of the relative, it tends in the forms of physical life to the recovery, by a sort of absolute individualisation, of full activity of mind.
But does not this individualisation imply the intervention of a new absolute principle? And is it not precisely this that is intended by the religions when they speak of an incarnation of the Divinity in the world?
May not even the term, creation, in the sense in which the theologians understand it, be applied to such an intervention of a supreme principle, the principle of Love, in the substance of Desire?
After the creation by Desire, its transformation or new creation by Love; after the progressive formation of all energies in a state of disorder, the formation of spheres of harmony in which all these energies by organising themselves may give birth to conscient life.
1.10 - Foresight, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In fact, the higher a being stands on the human scale, the more complex is his being, the more numerous are his destinies and the more unforeseeable his fate seems to be as a consequence. This is however only an appearance. The knowledge of these various states of being and their corresponding inner worlds gives at the same time the capacity to discern the various destinies, their interpenetration and their combined or dominant action. Higher destinies are quite obviously the closest to the central truth of the universe, and if they are allowed to intervene, their action is necessarily beneficent. The art of living would then consist in maintaining oneself in ones highest state of consciousness and thus allowing ones highest destiny to dominate the others in life and action. So one can say without any fear of making a mistake: be always at the summit of your consciousness and the best will always happen to you. But that is a maximum which is not easy to reach. If this ideal condition turns out to be unrealisable, the individual can at least, when he is confronted by a danger or a critical situation, call upon his highest destiny by aspiration, prayer and trustful surrender to the divine will. Then, in proportion to the sincerity of his call, this higher destiny intervenes favourably in the normal destiny of the being and changes the course of events insofar as they concern him personally. It is events of this kind that appear to the outer consciousness as miracles, as divine interventions.
Bulletin, February 1950
1.1.1.01 - Three Elements of Poetic Creation, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The originating source may be anywhere; the poetry may arise or descend from the subtle physical plane, from the higher or lower vital itself, from the dynamic or creative intelligence, from the plane of dynamic vision, from the psychic, from the illumined mind or Intuition,even, though this is the rarest, from the Overmind widenesses. To get the Overmind inspiration is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it. When the source of inspiration is in the heart or the psychic there is more easily a good will in the vital channel, the flow is spontaneous; the inspiration takes at once its true form and speech and is transmitted without any interference or only a minimum of interference by the brain-mind, that great spoiler of the higher or deeper splendours. It is the character of the lyrical inspiration, to flow in a jet out of the beingwhe ther it comes from the vital or the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect is an absurdly overactive part of the nature; it always thinks that nothing can be well done unless it puts its finger into the pie and therefore it instinctively interferes with the inspiration, blocks half or more than half of it and labours to substitute its own inferior and toilsome productions for the true speech and rhythm that ought to have come. The poet labours in anguish to get the one true word, the au thentic rhythm, the real divine substance of what he has to say, while all the time it is waiting complete and ready behind; but it is denied free transmission by some part of the transmitting agency which prefers to translate and is not willing merely to receive and transcribe. When one gets something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say, then there is something fine or adequate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work trying to fashion out of itself or to give its own version of what the higher sources are trying to pour down, then there results a manufacture or something quite inadequate or faulty or, at the best, good on the whole, but not the thing that ought to have come.
2 June 1931
1.11 - Correspondence and Interviews, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Then there were the long series of regular interviews with Surendra Mohan Ghose extending over some years up to even a few months before Sri Aurobindo's withdrawal. I should not call them interviews, for he was Sri Aurobindo's political follower in the early days, and later his disciple, and a prominent political leader of Bengal. Whenever he visited the Ashram, he had meetings with the Master to get guidance in his political work which he had accepted as his work. Sri Aurobindo used him as his instrument and said to us, "He is my man." In the talks he gave to the students of our Centre of Education, Surendra Mohan partially disclosed the various issues he had discussed with him. They were mostly international, national and provincial situations as well as spiritual matters. They constitute a very illuminating document testifying to Sri Aurobindo's external intervention in politics, besides his occult action. I often used to see Surendra Mohan in advance to get current news and Sri Aurobindo would ask, "What does Surendra Mohan say?"
Let me quote an instance to illustrate how Yogis have more insight into politics than politicians themselves. Surendra Mohan writes, "When I came here in October or November 1949, he asked me, 'Why have you not asked me anything about the communal situation in Bengal?' I said, 'There is nothing to report, it is all very quiet.' 'No, no, be careful. Something may happen.' And something terrible did happen the communal killings." Yet, not even great leaders paid any heed to it; they thought it impossible even when Surendra Mohan apprised them of Sri Aurobindo's warning. Sri Aurobindo predicted also "the Russo-Chinese rift and the disintegration of China one day".
We ridicule the idea of Yogis having any knowledge of affairs outside their own "limited" spiritual field. Sri Aurobindo's intervention during the Cripps' Proposals was stigmatised as such an ignorant and illegitimate interference. More than once he demonstrated how false this notion is. Not only are Yogis aware of world-affairs, but those who ordinarily claim cognizance of them are actually ignorant and incompetent. For, according to Sri Aurobindo, unless one knows the domain of the Spirit, one's knowledge of the world remains incomplete.
The Mother too gives directions to those who seek for them, whether they listen to them or not is their affair. Quite often they come to grief if they do not. Yet, are not Yogis supposed to have trikla drsti?
Apropos of the integration of French India and the other French possessions with India, Surendra Mohan writes: "...All of us had to suffer for not having listened to Sri Aurobindo's direction or advice. He sent me back saying, 'Go and tell Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana, Sardar and Rajendra Prasad that it is for the good of India and ultimately for the good of the world that they should act on these lines and here is an opportunity I am giving them, let them accept and work on it.' I went to Delhi there was a meeting of the Working Committee of the Congress, everybody said, 'A very good thing, very good,' but it was never implemented.... The draft which Sri Aurobindo had made about the integration was on this basis that all the French possessions should immediately merge with India, with a right for Pondicherry to maintain its cultural contact with France. Because we did not implement it, a serious problem arose afterwards. To solve it I was again asked to go to Pondicherry after Sri Aurobindo had passed away in 1950." And with the Mother's help and intervention the whole plan of integration with India was finalised here. Yet the Mother was not at all willing at first to meddle in politics; she said she was not interested in it. Political problems were Sri Aurobindo's field. When Surendra Mohan asked for an interview with her, she enquired, "Is he interested in seeing me?" The interview granted, he pressed upon the Mother to take up Sri Aurobindo's cause and won his case.
I have purposely given long quotations in order to dispel our ignorant notions that Yogis live in a rarefied atmosphere of the Spirit and are indifferent to what passes on this plane of Matter; we forget that Spirit and Matter are two ends of existence. I shall give another minor, even humorous, instance of Matter's reality to Sri Aurobindo the Yogi, the poet and the philosopher. Sri Aurobindo was taking his meal, the Mother was serving him and we were standing nearby. She said, "X promised to offer us a big sum, but he has given only Rs.100 with a promise that the rest will follow. Shall we accept or refuse, Lord?" Sri Aurobindo quietly replied "Accept it and hope for the best." All of us, including the Mother, burst out laughing.
1.11 - Oneness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Even in the stone he is there." (Rig Veda I.70.2). All is one because all is the One. Did Christ not say, "This is my body, this is my blood," of two most material, most earthly symbols bread and wine to convey that Matter, too, is the body of the One, the blood of God? 147 If He had not been already there in the stone, how would He have come to be in man, through what miraculous intervention? We are the result of an evolution, not of a sequence of arbitrary miracles. All the earth-past is there in [our human nature] . . . the very nature of the human being presupposes a material and a vital stage which prepare his emergence into mind and an animal past which moulded a first element of his complex humanity. And let us not say that this is because material Nature developed by evolution his life and his body and his animal mind, and only afterwards did a soul descend into the form so created . . . for that supposes a gulf between soul and body,
between soul and life, between soul and mind, which does not exist;
1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
the intervention of the Avatar is needed at a time of world
crisis a crisis in the consciousness of humanity when it
1.11 - The Second Genesis, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
If desire had been the sole creator, it could only have created a chaos. And from this chaos how could anything better than itself have issued? From the disorder of blind forces how, without the intervention of another principle, could there have ever arisen the harmony of a world? How could light have been barn out of the darkness and out of egoism love?
Desire could, by blinding itself, break the first unity; it could tear to pieces, not the Absolute, but the consciousness of the Absolute in each being; it could, by shutting up that consciousness in the narrow limits of its categories, create Number, Time, Space, the very stuff of the relative; from it are born the inertia and the resistance out of which form has been carved, but it could not be the sole formative power; it could create the dust from which the worlds were born, but it has not created the worlds themselves. In order that its Matter might be fertilised, all that it has excluded must first be present in that Matter and over the chaos of its creation there must brood that which was other than it.
1.11 - The Soul or the Astral Body, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
As the spirit would not be able to operate without the intervention of the soul, the astral body is the seat of all the qualities the immortal spirit has. According to its development and maturity, spirit has a different electric or magnetic fluid vibration, which becomes outwardly patent, in soul, in the four temperaments. In accordance with the predominant elements, we distinguish the choleric, the sanguine, the melancholic, and the phlegmatic temper. The choleric temper is due to the element of air, the sanguine temper is due to the element of air, the melancholic temper is born from the water element, and the phlegmatic one is ascribed to the earthy element. The strength and vibration of the respective element corresponds in the various properties to the strength, vigour, and expansion of the respective fluid vibrations.
Each of these four elements, which determine mans temper, in the active form, owns the good properties, and in its passive form, the contrary or bad qualities. It would be too prolix to inform here about the effects of the elements, and it is better for the incipient adept to find out himself further effects by his own meditation. This manner also has a very special reason, on the path to initiation. Here I shall a few examples only:
1.12 - God Departs, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
He was consulted. He confirmed Dr. Sanyal's previous diagnosis and said that the gland had enlarged. Sri Aurobindo remarked that he too had the same feeling. "But what is the remedy?" he asked. Surgical intervention was the only radical cure, but Dr. Sen knew that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo would not approve of it. Not to speak of an operation, the mere use of a catheter was not favoured. One night the urine flow stopped altogether. I ran in a panic to call Sen, as there were signs of some distress. In my absence, the urine had started flowing. He seemed to have asked for me and on learning that I had gone to fetch the doctor, he remarked, "Why? Has he lost his head?" I was so happy to learn of the release of the obstruction that even my "loss of head" did not matter. Then he said to me, "Why have you unnecessarily troubled this poor fellow? You see, I had a dream in which I was freely passing water, but when I woke up, I found this obstruction. Nothing more. Do you understand?" His tone was very sweet. Then I understood that it was his look of surprise and concern that had given me the impression of distress. But obstruction was obstruction and one had to relieve it. Nevertheless all of us were happy. Next day when the Mother learnt the story, she too made a remark to the same effect. She said, "Having passed so many years with Sri Aurobindo, you still get frightened?" "What to do, Mother?" I replied humbly. "We are dealing with no other person than Sri Aurobindo." "That is exactly why you should never be afraid. Don't you know that his mighty Force is always with you and helping you? No, fear has no place at all, especially among you who are serving him." I felt ashamed but uplifted as well.
The Darshan was now upon us. A letter had arrived from an astrologer stating that Sri Aurobindo would be subject to a grave malady which might even threaten his life. We simply pooh-poohed the idea, but Sri Aurobindo did not pass it off so lightly. He asked, "Will you enquire what exactly he has written? I feel that he has caught some truth." Sometime previously Dr. Manilal was also told by an astrologer that Sri Aurobindo was going to leave his body and if Dr. Manilal wanted to see his Guru, he had better rush to Pondicherry. When he reported this prediction to Sri Aurobindo, he simply smiled. There were quite a number of predictions about this time to the same effect. Surendra Mohan Ghose has narrated a similar one published in Mother India which I have already described at some length in the previous chapter. Still, I was not a little surprised to find Sri Aurobindo giving credence to such seemingly wild forecasts. For his view with regard to astrology was that its predictions were often uncertain, more especially about the Yogis, since they can change their own and others' destiny. The predictions of Narayan Jyotishi, a famous astrologer of Calcutta, about him had all come true, except the one about a serious illness at the age of 63. But that too, it was said, would be overcome by his yogic force, and he would live up to a ripe old age. Sri Aurobindo writes in Savitri,
--
The symptoms grew more serious and a partial obstruction to the flow of urine made us think of mechanical intervention. When it became complete and was causing distress, Dr. Sen and we had no other alternative but to pass a catheter, much against his will. It was followed by immediate relief. We felt light and cheerful. Then a wire was sent to Dr. Sanyal to come down at once. He had been forewarned to be ready for such an emergency call. Our joy was unfortunately short-lived, for in the wake of the intervention crept in the dark shadow of the fever, a not unusual complication, but all the same it brought a cold shiver. At this juncture, Sanyal's arrival acted like warm sunshine.[3]
We apprised him of the whole clinical picture since his last visit. He approached Sri Aurobindo, did pranam but found him "seemingly unconcerned, with eyes closed, like a statue of massive peace". Then he opened his eyes, recognised him and gave him a serene smile. The doctor asked him regular professional questions to which he answered, "Trouble? Nothing troubles me, and suffering one can be above it." I mentioned the urinary difficulties. "Well, yes; I had some difficulties, but they were relieved and now I don't feel anything," he replied reassuringly. Sanyal told the Mother that there was a mild kidney infection, but nothing serious. We were consoled. But he wondered how, after Sri Aurobindo had cured himself, there could be this recrudescence.
1.12 - Love The Creator, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
In that case there would be a resorption of the spontaneities of desire into the bottomless ocean of the Non-manifest, a return of the being into its origins but no intervention of new forces, no creation of more perfect forms and activities.
Perhaps this mystic issue, this escape out of the manifested world, is the last step, the transcendental end of egoism. But to this evasion love opposes the invasion of redeeming activities. And if evolution in a general sense means prowess, it is because the worlds history only transforms into visible results the hidden work of an actual involution. That which becomes does not evolve, does not come out of that which was, but arises out of that which is neither Being nor Non-Being and so by a permanent creation comes into existence.
1.13 - Conclusion - He is here, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Along with his mysterious self-immolation another question which is also somewhat mysterious puzzles us: Why did he choose the "natural way" to leave his body when he could have easily left it in the yogic way, as Yogis usually do? The answer that I have found is that Sri Aurobindo's life has respected the rules and laws of Nature, what he has called the conditions of the game. But even these conditions are adapted to a new direction of which Nature, though not pursuing it, is secretly capable. Thus Nature is put to a supernatural use. Whenever any directly miraculous or special intervention has been made either in his own case or in the case of others, then too it is not by utter flouting of those rules and laws, a freakish and ultimately inconsequential movement. A process is still followed. Sri Aurobindo sums up the several sides of the Divine's action thus: "The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them first, not proceed, while maintaining the conditions, to act by a series of miracles." In following this course of Nature, he probably wanted to have the concrete experience of Death which would help him in the conquest of the Power of Death for the world from across the barrier. Also this natural way created conditions of crisis which would bring about an urgent and extraordinary response from the spiritual Force so that side by side with the progression towards death there would be the precipitation of the Supramental Light. A sign of what was being done may be seen from the Mother's statement: "As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he had called the Mind of Light got realised in me." We can understand also how after death and as a result of it, the Supramental Light suffused his body for several days.
The shock and desolation, however, that we felt can be more imagined than described. Though we could see the Master only four times a year, his Presence was vibrant in the very air we breathed, in our sleep, in every moment of our life; particularly after the accident, even physically he seemed to have come nearer. So the sudden absence was felt like a yawning abyss ready to engulf our very existence. I wonder what would have happened to the vast life qf the Ashram, if the Mother was not there to envelop all of us, the whole earth, in the embrace of her infinite love and compassion. Yet, have we any measure of knowing what she must have felt, though she is the Divine? Just as he "worked, struggled, suffered", so did she suffer and bear. We witnessed it in the early period of the accident; but the command was upon her from the Lord to carry on his work. And the immense vacuum that was created could be filled by her alone. From these verses in Savitri in a different context we get such an indication:
--
The second effect whose purport will not be evident to those who are unfamiliar with Sri Aurobindo's Yoga was, to quote the Mother, "As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he had called the Mind of Light got realised here. The Supermind had descended long ago very long ago in the mind and even in the vital: it was working in the physical also, but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question now was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. This physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."[1] It is because the Mother as his supreme collaborator was there to receive the Light and continue his work that Sri Aurobindo could make that holocaust of himself. The holocaust has also had one effect which cannot but be regarded as being eminently in accord with Sri Aurobindo's own vision. It is clear that the Ashram "instead of dwindling after the Master's self-withdrawal has leaped gloriously forward under the Mother's leadership". Earlier Sri Aurobindo's towering personality, though in seclusion, dominated the scene. Now the picture, as I said, is entirely different. We can see that all the world is coming to the Mother and accepting her as the Divine Mother, the Shakti who rules, guides and saves. This is what Sri Aurobindo had wanted and laid down since the Mother took charge of the Ashram, as the prime desideratum of his Supramental Yoga. It has been rendered possible and quickly effective by his unprecedented sacrifice. It is also in keeping with his nature. He had admitted that temperamentally he was always prone to act from behind the veil, the way of the Supreme to move men and forces without their knowledge. His political life, except for a short period, and life in Pondicherry, bear testimony to its truth. So the final retirement was consistent with that disposition and is its highest culmination. This culmination has carried the Mother even more to the forefront. There she stands now and plays the role of Shakti and, as she has said, is doing Sri Aurobindo's work and giving his final dream, of which he has spoken in his Independence Day message, a concrete shape on this earth. Sri Aurobindo constantly helps her from behind. The Mother has said in the Bulletin, as I have stated before, what a vast amount of work Sri Aurobindo has done in the occult field in consequence of which the work of transformation of the physical has become easier. Similarly, can we have any idea of his world-action, particularly in the political field, for example his occult contribution to the liberation of Bangladesh? Let us remember Sri Aurobindo's prophetic voice, "Division must go." His Force has not ceased to act in that direction. On the contrary it is moving powerfully towards the realisation of this prophecy. These are his works on a cosmic scale that we are aware of. In our individual cases too his Presence and his dynamic action have been testified to by devotees and disciples all over India and in the West We hear his voice, get his touch, protection, active intervention. The Mother told me more than once that she always saw Sri Aurobindo working on me. I had a personal proof of his surprisingly direct intervention, saving me from a critical situation that could have otherwise put my sadhana in peril. I have mentioned another occult phenomenon in the preface of my Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Vol. I to illustrate his subtle help. A third small instance will suffice: when the Ashram was passing through a financial difficulty, the Mother reported the matter to Sri Aurobindo. He replied, "Ask Prodyot." And it is well known that Prodyot brings a lot of money for the Ashram.
Still, it cannot be denied that we do miss his physical Presence, especially those of us whom he had drawn near by his personal intimacy and those who had the exceptional privilege of living with him and serving him. "Nirod is no doctor to me; he has come to serve me," is one of his few utterances I cannot forget, though I know too well how poorly I served him. Sometimes when we think of the old days that will never come back, when I go over his unparalleled correspondence with me, a void, a sore loss fills my heart. A few days after Sri Aurobindo's departure, the Mother asked a group of sadhaks what was the greatest loss caused by his absence. Different answers were given, but the Mother replied, "No, not these; the biggest loss is that I can no longer approach him for his advice. For instance, if he were there, I could have gone and asked him to stop the rain." (It was raining heavily at that moment.) To this, someone said, "But, Mother, you can look into yourself." She kept quiet. Here I may speculate on this incident. To deal with any serious problem needs a degree of concentration. The Mother has always been a very busy person; She often fell back on Sri Aurobindo to do the concentration needed. The more important point, however, seems to be that certain problems are better dealt with by an embodied spiritual force than a disembodied one, problems concerned perhaps with the most outward material aspect of existence. We see how our difficulties and problems get quickly solved by the Mother's direct intervention. Apropos of the above incident, I may further ask: Did not the Mother hint at something more poignant? The difference between a physical presence and a subtle one? Whenever there was an intricate situation to face, some crucial stage to be crossed, she quietly came and laid the burden at his feet with an utter trust, that he would see it through. The ineffable physical Presence of an Avatar of Sri Aurobindo's stature, one whose work ultimately was transformation and divinisation of the very body, was a heavenly boon to our corporeal earthly life. The incarnation itself would have otherwise lost much of its significance.
Both the external and the internal development towards physical divinisation is going on apace in the Mother so that in a not distant future it will be seen that the sacrifice, the martyrdom has not gone in vain, but has resulted in the emergence of a glorified body the consummation of the Supramental victory over Matter.
--- Overview of noun intervention
The noun intervention has 5 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (3) intervention, intercession ::: (the act of intervening (as to mediate a dispute, etc.); "it occurs without human intervention")
2. intervention, interference ::: (a policy of intervening in the affairs of other countries)
3. interposition, intervention ::: (the act or fact of interposing one thing between or among others)
4. intervention ::: ((law) a proceeding that permits a person to enter into a lawsuit already in progress; admission of person not an original party to the suit so that person can protect some right or interest that is allegedly affected by the proceedings; "the purpose of intervention is to prevent unnecessary duplication of lawsuits")
5. treatment, intervention ::: (care provided to improve a situation (especially medical procedures or applications that are intended to relieve illness or injury))
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun intervention
5 senses of intervention
Sense 1
intervention, intercession
=> engagement, participation, involvement, involution
=> group action
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
intervention, interference
=> foreign policy
=> policy
=> argumentation, logical argument, argument, line of reasoning, line
=> 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 3
interposition, intervention
=> placement, location, locating, position, positioning, emplacement
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
intervention
=> proceeding, legal proceeding, proceedings
=> due process, due process of law
=> group action
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 5
treatment, intervention
=> care, attention, aid, tending
=> work
=> activity
=> act, deed, human action, human activity
=> event
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun intervention
2 of 5 senses of intervention
Sense 1
intervention, intercession
=> mediation, intermediation
Sense 5
treatment, intervention
=> medical care, medical aid
=> massage
=> modality
=> detoxification
=> chiropractic
=> fomentation
=> naturopathy
=> naprapathy
=> orthodontic treatment
=> orthoptics
=> osteopathy
=> osteoclasis
=> acupuncture, stylostixis
=> acupressure, G-Jo, shiatsu
=> autogenic therapy, autogenic training, autogenics
=> hydropathy, hydrotherapy
=> rest-cure
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun intervention
5 senses of intervention
Sense 1
intervention, intercession
=> engagement, participation, involvement, involution
Sense 2
intervention, interference
=> foreign policy
Sense 3
interposition, intervention
=> placement, location, locating, position, positioning, emplacement
Sense 4
intervention
=> proceeding, legal proceeding, proceedings
Sense 5
treatment, intervention
=> care, attention, aid, tending
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun intervention
5 senses of intervention
Sense 1
intervention, intercession
-> engagement, participation, involvement, involution
=> commitment
=> intervention, intercession
=> group participation
Sense 2
intervention, interference
-> foreign policy
=> brinkmanship
=> imperialism
=> intervention, interference
=> nonintervention, noninterference
=> nonaggression
=> isolationism
=> Monroe Doctrine
=> Truman doctrine
=> neutralism
=> regionalism
=> trade policy, national trading policy
Sense 3
interposition, intervention
-> placement, location, locating, position, positioning, emplacement
=> stratification
=> juxtaposition, apposition, collocation
=> interposition, intervention
=> orientation
=> planting
=> implantation
=> repositioning
=> set
=> superposition
=> fingering
=> superposition
Sense 4
intervention
-> proceeding, legal proceeding, proceedings
=> foreclosure
=> intervention
=> procedure
=> legal action, action, action at law
=> lawsuit, suit, case, cause, causa
=> adoption
=> appeal
=> bankruptcy
=> receivership
=> litigation, judicial proceeding
=> naturalization, naturalisation
=> trial
=> review
=> hearing
Sense 5
treatment, intervention
-> care, attention, aid, tending
=> hair care, haircare, hairdressing
=> maternalism
=> babysitting, baby sitting
=> pet sitting
=> dental care
=> first aid
=> treatment, intervention
=> incubation
=> livery
=> manicure
=> pedicure
=> nourishment
=> nursing
=> tender loving care, TLC
=> nurturance
=> personal care
=> skin care, skincare
=> faith healing, faith cure
=> tree surgery
=> healthcare, health care
--- Grep of noun intervention
crisis intervention
intervention
nonintervention
Wikipedia - 2015 Egyptian military intervention in Libya
Wikipedia - Abecedarian Early Intervention Project
Wikipedia - Adverse effect -- Undesired harmful effect resulting from a medication or other medical intervention
Wikipedia - A Few Words on Non-Intervention
Wikipedia - Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
Wikipedia - American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War
Wikipedia - American military intervention in Somalia (2007-present) -- US military intervention against extremist groups in Somalia
Wikipedia - Anne C. Roberts -- American interventional radiologist
Wikipedia - Art intervention
Wikipedia - Ashok Seth -- Indian interventional cardiologist
Wikipedia - Batch processing -- Execution of a series of jobs without manual intervention
Wikipedia - Battle of Camaron -- last-stand battle during the second French intervention in Mexico
Wikipedia - Battle of Furth -- Battle during the Period of Swedish Intervention in the Thirty Years War
Wikipedia - Battle of Puebla -- Part of the French intervention in Mexico
Wikipedia - Bi Academic Intervention -- A group of bisexual academics, researchers, scholars and writers active in the UK from 1993 - 1997.
Wikipedia - Biomedical sciences -- Set of applied sciences applying portions of natural science or formal science, or both, to knowledge, interventions, or technology that are of use in healthcare or public health
Wikipedia - Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018
Wikipedia - Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis -- Polish intervention in the war of Kievan succession
Wikipedia - Brad Lamm -- Interventionist and author
Wikipedia - Brief intervention
Wikipedia - British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War -- British forces involvement in Sierra Leone, 2000
Wikipedia - Bystander intervention
Wikipedia - CAHOOTS (crisis response) -- Mental health crisis intervention program in Eugene, Oregon
Wikipedia - Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiological Society of Europe -- Organisation involved in scholarly research
Wikipedia - Category:Non-interventionism
Wikipedia - Central Powers intervention in the Russian Civil War
Wikipedia - Century of humiliation -- period of intervention and subjugation of China by foreign powers
Wikipedia - Climate engineering -- Deliberate and large-scale intervention in the EarthM-bM-^@M-^Ys climate system
Wikipedia - Cognitive Interventions
Wikipedia - Cognitive interventions
Wikipedia - Comparative effectiveness research -- Direct comparison of health care interventions to determine which work best for which patients and which pose the greatest benefits and harms
Wikipedia - Contingent sovereignty -- Interventionist theory
Wikipedia - Crisis intervention
Wikipedia - Currency intervention -- Monetary policy operation
Wikipedia - Curse of expertise -- Psychological concept where the intervention of experts may be counterproductive to acquiring new skills
Wikipedia - Department of Social Policy and Intervention
Wikipedia - Divine providence -- God's intervention in the Universe
Wikipedia - Early intervention in psychosis
Wikipedia - Economic interventionism -- Economic policy perspective
Wikipedia - Educational interventions for first-generation students
Wikipedia - Emergency -- Situation requiring urgent intervention
Wikipedia - Emotional Freedom Techniques -- Form of counseling intervention
Wikipedia - Enabling -- Psychological intervention
Wikipedia - Ex vivo -- Process of testing biological interventions on extracted fragments of organisms
Wikipedia - Foreign electoral intervention
Wikipedia - Forensic engineering -- Investigation of failures associated with legal intervention
Wikipedia - Government intervention
Wikipedia - Iatrogenic anemia -- Anemia caused by medical interventions
Wikipedia - International military intervention against ISIL -- Military actions against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
Wikipedia - Internet Interventions for Posttraumatic Stress
Wikipedia - Interrupted time series -- Method of analysis involving tracking a long-term period around an intervention
Wikipedia - Interventional pain management -- Medical subspeciality about treating pain
Wikipedia - Interventional radiology
Wikipedia - Intervention AUV -- Type of autonomous underwater vehicle capable of autonomous interventions
Wikipedia - Intervention (counseling)
Wikipedia - Interventionism (politics)
Wikipedia - Intervention (law) -- Court procedure to allow a nonparty to join ongoing litigation
Wikipedia - Interventions
Wikipedia - Intervention (TV series) -- TV series
Wikipedia - In vivo -- Process of testing biological interventions on whole, living organisms
Wikipedia - Italian military intervention in Spain -- Assistance given to the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War
Wikipedia - Japanese intervention in Siberia -- Dispatch of Japanese military forces to the Russian Far East
Wikipedia - Liberal hawk -- A left-wing interventionist
Wikipedia - Libertarian perspectives on foreign intervention
Wikipedia - List of aviation shootdowns and accidents during the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen -- Wikimedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Intervention episodes -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of military awards and decorations of the international military intervention against ISIL -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Love is in the Bin -- 2018 art intervention from a 2006 Banksy painting
Wikipedia - Medical intervention
Wikipedia - Military intervention against ISIL
Wikipedia - Mind-body interventions -- Health and fitness interventions that are supposed to work on a physical and mental level such as yoga, tai chi, and pilates.
Wikipedia - Monitored Emergency Use of Unregistered and Investigational Interventions -- Ethical protocol to evaluate the potential use of experimental drugs in the event of public health emergencies
Wikipedia - Multiple organ dysfunction syndrome -- Organ dysfunction in an acutely ill person requiring medical intervention
Wikipedia - Nicole Karam -- Interventional cardiologist
Wikipedia - Non-interventionism
Wikipedia - Non-pharmaceutical intervention (epidemiology) -- Method to reduce epidemic spread
Wikipedia - Nursing Interventions Classification
Wikipedia - Operation Inherent Resolve -- Military intervention against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
Wikipedia - Paleolibertarianism -- ideology combining combining conservative values with a libertarian opposition to government intervention
Wikipedia - Panama crisis of 1885 -- US military intervention in a rebellion in Panama
Wikipedia - Parachute Intervention Squadron of the National Gendarmerie -- French parachute-trained intervention squadron
Wikipedia - Percutaneous coronary intervention -- Medical techniques used to manage coronary occlusion
Wikipedia - Police crisis intervention team -- Mental health crisis response training for police officers
Wikipedia - Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports
Wikipedia - Praxis intervention
Wikipedia - Program process monitoring -- Assessment of the process of a program or intervention
Wikipedia - Protests against the 2011 military intervention in Libya
Wikipedia - Psychological intervention
Wikipedia - Public health intervention -- Government effort or policy that attempts to improve public health
Wikipedia - Quarantine -- Epidemiological intervention to prevent disease transmission
Wikipedia - Reach Every Reader -- A web based project aims to screen children with reading difficulty and develop personalized intervention
Wikipedia - Red Army intervention in Afghanistan (1929) -- Soviet military action
Wikipedia - Relationship Development Intervention -- Proprietary treatment program for autism spectrum disorders
Wikipedia - Response to intervention -- Educational teaching and assessment model
Wikipedia - Russian interference in British politics -- Political intervention in the United Kingdom by the Russian state
Wikipedia - Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War
Wikipedia - Sailing stones -- Geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention
Wikipedia - Samin Sharma -- American interventional cardiologist
Wikipedia - Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen -- Saudi war against Yemen launched in 2015
Wikipedia - Shapeshifting -- The ability to physically transform through an inherent ability, divine intervention or generic tendencies
Wikipedia - Siberian Intervention
Wikipedia - Sino-Nepalese War -- Invasion of Tibet by Nepalese Army and Chinese military intervention
Wikipedia - Social interventionism
Wikipedia - Spy Intervention -- A 2020 American action comedy spy film directed by Drew Mylrea
Wikipedia - State intervention
Wikipedia - Suicide intervention
Wikipedia - Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years' War -- Swedish Phase of the Thirty Years' War
Wikipedia - The Intervention (film) -- 2016 American film directed by Clea DuVall
Wikipedia - Traveller Double Adventure 6: Divine Intervention/Night of Conquest -- Science-fiction role-playing game supplement
Wikipedia - Treatments for PTSD -- Therapeutic interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder
Wikipedia - Treaty of BM-CM-$rwalde -- France agrees to provide financial support for Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War
Wikipedia - Triple Intervention -- aspect of Japanese history
Wikipedia - Turkish military intervention in the Second Libyan Civil War -- Turkish troop deployment in Libya, 2020
Wikipedia - Workover -- Any kind of oil well intervention involving invasive techniques
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1067336.Architects_of_Intervention
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13644334-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17228509-intervention-course-corrections-for-the-athlete-and-trainer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18874565-alien-species-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19784801-military-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2110057.The_Psychotherapist_s_Interventions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21768722-divine-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21768722.Divine_Intervention__Divine_Trilogy___1_
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571304-grace-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226100.Crude_Interventions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23390772-allowing-divine-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2364211.Cultural_Political_Interventions_in_the_Unfinished_Project_of_Enlightenment
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24003984-treatment-plans-and-interventions-for-depression-and-anxiety-disorders
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24241135-grace-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24893955-creative-interventions-with-children
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25252934-klinische-psychologie---intervention-und-beratung
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26255218-divine-intervention
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28627757-interventions-in-contemporary-thought
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29361919.State_of_Rebellion_Violence_and_Intervention_in_the_Central_African_Republic
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34419296-enactivist-interventions
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35721438-play-based-interventions-for-childhood-anxieties-fears-and-phobias
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35721439-play-based-interventions-for-childhood-anxieties-fears-and-phobias
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39096794-divine-intervention-is-a-real-thing
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39337092-smart-trauma-interventions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39873903-equine-assisted-mental-health-interventions
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/464429.Play_Therapy_Interventions_with_Children_s_Problems
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8804975-eating-disorders-providing-effective-recreational-therapy-interventions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9596303-can-intervention-work
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/2014_American_intervention_in_Iraq
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/British_military_intervention_in_the_Sierra_Leone_Civil_War
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Military_intervention_against_ISIL
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Spanish_Empire#Spanish_intervention_in_Europe
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Template_talk:United_States_intervention_in_Latin_America
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Template:United_States_intervention_in_Latin_America
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux#Worship_and_interventions
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Mind-body_interventions
Integral World - A "Letter" of Intervention and Invitation to Ken, Don, and the Integral Community, by Sara Ross
Integral World - Response to: A "Letter" of Intervention and Invitation to Ken, Don, and the Integral Community, by Sara Ross
selforum - psychotherapeutic intervention based on
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2010/11/seeking-intervention-of-government-of.html
Dharmapedia - Category:Mind-body_interventions
Psychology Wiki - Category:Mind-body_interventions
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/Interventions
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/SpyIntervention
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheIntervention
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheIntervention1968
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DivineIntervention
Xanadu(1980) - Sonny Malone (Michael Beck) is an artist, who is forced to go back to work when his plans to freelance don't pay off. Unhappy and stuck in a dead end job, he gets a little heavenly intervention in the form of Kira (Olivia Newton John, "Grease"). So when Sonny meets aging clarinet player Danny McGu...
The Wrecking Crew(1999) - The streets of Detroit are cleared of all gang members and their various illegal activities through the intervention of a top secret governmentally-funded goon squad. Al
Divine Intervention (2002) ::: 6.6/10 -- Yadon ilaheyya (original title) -- Divine Intervention Poster Separated by a checkpoint, Palestinian lovers from Jerusalem and Ramallah arrange clandestine meetings. Director: Elia Suleiman Writer: Elia Suleiman Stars:
The Baby of Mcon (1993) ::: 7.0/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 2min | Drama, History | 17 September 1993 (UK) -- A movie about the corruption in all levels of society. A baby is born from a supposed-to-be virgin woman, so a chain of hysteria about divine intervention in the birth takes place. Director: Peter Greenaway Writer: Peter Greenaway Stars:
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/1919-1933_(Venezuelan_Intervention)
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/1934-1939_(Venezuelan_Intervention)
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya_(SIADD)
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_Yemen_(ICSP)
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Intervention:_Road_to_Armageddon
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/No_Chinese_Intervention
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/No_Supernatural_Intervention
https://aqua-teen-hunger-force.fandom.com/wiki/Intervention
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Outsiders:_Crisis_Intervention
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Young_Justice_(TV_Series)_Episode:_Intervention
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_Intervention
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Miraculous_Intervention
https://dreamlords.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_Interventions
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Almsivi_Intervention
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Aralor's_Intervention
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_Intervention_(ESO_Morrowind)
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Divine_Intervention_(Morrowind)
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Pious_Intervention
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Timely_Intervention
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Enhance:_Death_Interventions
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Enhance:_Master's_Intervention
https://guildopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Godly_Intervention
https://how-i-met-your-mother.fandom.com/wiki/Intervention
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Strategic_Hazard_Intervention_Espionage_Logistics_Directorate
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https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Strategic_Hazard_Intervention_Espionage_Logistics_Directorate_(Earth-616)
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Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou 2nd Season -- -- Asread -- ? eps -- Light novel -- Action Adventure Harem Fantasy -- Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou 2nd Season Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou 2nd Season -- Second season of Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou. -- TV - Jan ??, 2022 -- 93,600 N/A -- -- Kyou kara Maou! -- -- Studio Deen -- 78 eps -- Light novel -- Adventure Comedy Demons Fantasy Shoujo -- Kyou kara Maou! Kyou kara Maou! -- Kyou kara Maou! revolves around Yuri Shibuya, your average Japanese teenager. One day, Yuri sees a classmate being harassed by bullies. Thanks to this intervention, his friend is able to escape, but unfortunately Yuri becomes the new target of the bullies in the process and gets his head shoved into a toilet. But instead of water, the toilet contains a swirling portal that sucks him into another world, largely resembling medieval Europe. There, he is told that he will become the next Demon King due to his black hair and black eyes, traits only possessed by the demon's royal lineage. -- -- Yuri's arrival is met with some skepticism by some of the demons, who view him as unworthy to be their king. However, after Yuri wins a duel by utilizing his magical powers, the demons slowly begin to acknowledge him as their monarch. Yuri must now learn what it takes be a true Demon King, as he tries to keep the peace between demons and humans in this strange new realm. -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media -- TV - Apr 3, 2004 -- 93,555 7.69
Blame! Movie -- -- Polygon Pictures -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Psychological Drama Mecha Seinen -- Blame! Movie Blame! Movie -- A young girl named Zuru sets out on an expedition through a post-apocalyptic city controlled by machines in a desperate hunt for food. Things go awry when her team accidently triggers the city's AI defense program called the Safeguard. Attacked by the machines, her companions are on the verge of being annihilated when a mysterious man named Killy arrives and exterminates the hostile units. -- -- Despite his heroic intervention, Zuru is hesitant to trust Killy and questions his motives. He reveals to have come from thousands of levels below the city in order to find humans possessing the Net Terminal Genes—a trait that would allow humans to regain control of their civilization and shut down the Safeguard. After hearing his story, Zuru and the rest of her team join Killy and embark on a journey in search of the Genes that could prove to be mankind's last hope of survival. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- Movie - May 20, 2017 -- 83,997 7.11
Blame! Movie -- -- Polygon Pictures -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Psychological Drama Mecha Seinen -- Blame! Movie Blame! Movie -- A young girl named Zuru sets out on an expedition through a post-apocalyptic city controlled by machines in a desperate hunt for food. Things go awry when her team accidently triggers the city's AI defense program called the Safeguard. Attacked by the machines, her companions are on the verge of being annihilated when a mysterious man named Killy arrives and exterminates the hostile units. -- -- Despite his heroic intervention, Zuru is hesitant to trust Killy and questions his motives. He reveals to have come from thousands of levels below the city in order to find humans possessing the Net Terminal Genes—a trait that would allow humans to regain control of their civilization and shut down the Safeguard. After hearing his story, Zuru and the rest of her team join Killy and embark on a journey in search of the Genes that could prove to be mankind's last hope of survival. -- -- Movie - May 20, 2017 -- 83,997 7.11
Devilman: Tanjou-hen -- -- Oh! Production -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Demons Horror Sci-Fi Supernatural -- Devilman: Tanjou-hen Devilman: Tanjou-hen -- Akira Fudou leads the life of a typical high school student. After a chance encounter with school bullies, he is rescued by his childhood friend Ryou Asuka. Ryou and Akira catch up over the course of an afternoon that ends with them crashing a party at a nightclub. Initially uncomfortable with the environment, Akira is shocked when violence provokes some of the club's partygoers to transform into demonic monsters. He and Ryou are only saved from the encounter thanks to the intervention of a great demon known as Amon. Amon possesses Akira, and the two together form the powerful Devilman—a being that, due to the influence of Akira's strong empathy for his fellow man, is resolved to keep the human race safe from the threats of demonkind. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media, Manga Entertainment -- OVA - Nov 1, 1987 -- 22,690 7.15
Devilman: Tanjou-hen -- -- Oh! Production -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Demons Horror Sci-Fi Supernatural -- Devilman: Tanjou-hen Devilman: Tanjou-hen -- Akira Fudou leads the life of a typical high school student. After a chance encounter with school bullies, he is rescued by his childhood friend Ryou Asuka. Ryou and Akira catch up over the course of an afternoon that ends with them crashing a party at a nightclub. Initially uncomfortable with the environment, Akira is shocked when violence provokes some of the club's partygoers to transform into demonic monsters. He and Ryou are only saved from the encounter thanks to the intervention of a great demon known as Amon. Amon possesses Akira, and the two together form the powerful Devilman—a being that, due to the influence of Akira's strong empathy for his fellow man, is resolved to keep the human race safe from the threats of demonkind. -- -- OVA - Nov 1, 1987 -- 22,690 7.15
Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu Gaiden (1999) -- -- Artland -- 28 eps -- Novel -- Action Drama Military Sci-Fi Space -- Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu Gaiden (1999) Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu Gaiden (1999) -- Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu Gaiden (1999) is the second of two OVA adaptations of side stories from the Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu novel series. This second adaptation follows the achievements of Yang Wen-li of the Free Planets Alliance before the fateful Battle of Astarte, and continues the tales of Reinhard von Müsel and Siegfried Kircheis of the Galactic Empire. -- -- Spiral Labyrinth -- Yang is propelled to the spotlight after his famous evacuation of civilians from El Facil. Following an unofficial double promotion and a flurry of media attention, he chronicles his research of the Year 730 Mafia—a close-knit group of Alliance military officers centered around the famed tactician Bruce Ashbey. He investigates a startling claim by Ashbey's deceased widow that may have enormous political ramifications: that the great war hero was not killed in action but murdered. -- -- The Mutineer -- Reinhard and Kircheis are posted on the destroyer Hameln II, docked at Iserlohn Fortress. After gaining the respect of the crew, Reinhard's leadership is tested when the captain is severely wounded and passes command authority to Reinhard, the next-highest ranking officer on deck. -- -- The Duelist -- While Reinhard and Kircheis are working in the Imperial capital Odin, Reinhard learns of a mining rights dispute involving Dorothea von Schaffhausen, a friend of his sister Annerose von Grünewald. Upon hearing that Count Herxheimer intends to settle the matter with a duel, Reinhard volunteers to represent the Schaffhausen family. -- -- The Retriever -- After falling out of favor with the nobility, Count Herxheimer is trying to escape to the Free Planets Alliance with a stolen Seffle particle generator prototype. Reinhard is tasked with retrieving both the prototype and the defector, but is only assigned the cruiser Hässliche Entlein due to the confidential nature of the mission. -- -- The Third Battle of Tiamat -- To commemorate the 30th year of the reign of Kaiser Friedrich IV, the Empire announces a large-scale military campaign against the Free Planets Alliance. In the ensuing clash between the Imperial expeditionary force and three Alliance fleets, Reinhard's timely intervention shapes the tides of war. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- OVA - Dec 24, 1999 -- 16,215 8.08
Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen -- -- Bandai Namco Pictures -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Historical Parody Samurai Sci-Fi Shounen -- Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen -- After the fierce battle on Rakuyou, the untold past and true goal of the immortal Naraku leader, Utsuro, are finally revealed. By corrupting the Altana reserves of several planets, Utsuro has successfully triggered the intervention of the Tendoshuu’s greatest enemy: the Altana Liberation Army. With Earth as the main battleground in this interplanetary war, Utsuro's master plan to destroy the planet—and himself—is nearly complete. -- -- An attack on the O-Edo Central Terminal marks the beginning of the final battle to take back the land of the samurai. With the Yorozuya nowhere in sight, the bakufu all but collapsed, and the Shogun missing, the people are left completely helpless as the Liberation Army begins pillaging Edo in the name of freeing them from the Tendoshuu's rule. -- -- Caught in the crossfire between two equally imposing forces, can Gintoki, Kagura, Shinpachi, and the former students of Shouyou Yoshida put aside their differences and unite their allies to protect what they hold dear? -- -- 135,931 8.81
Junketsu no Maria -- -- Production I.G -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Historical Magic Romance Fantasy Seinen -- Junketsu no Maria Junketsu no Maria -- Maria is a powerful young witch living with her two familiars in medieval France during the Hundred Years' War against England. As the war rages on and the innocent get caught in its destruction, Maria becomes fed up with the situation and begins using her magic to try and prevent further conflict in hopes of maintaining peace. However, her constant intervention soon attracts the attention of the heavens, and the archangel Michael is sent to keep her from meddling in human affairs. The divine being confronts Maria, and he forbids her from using her powers, issuing a decree that her magic will be taken if she loses her virginity. Though she is now labeled a heretic, Maria adamantly refuses to heed Michael's warning and continues to disrupt the war between the two nations. But as the Church begins plotting to take away the witch's power and put a stop to Maria's interference once and for all, her peacemaking may soon come to an end. -- -- 131,598 7.15
Junketsu no Maria -- -- Production I.G -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Historical Magic Romance Fantasy Seinen -- Junketsu no Maria Junketsu no Maria -- Maria is a powerful young witch living with her two familiars in medieval France during the Hundred Years' War against England. As the war rages on and the innocent get caught in its destruction, Maria becomes fed up with the situation and begins using her magic to try and prevent further conflict in hopes of maintaining peace. However, her constant intervention soon attracts the attention of the heavens, and the archangel Michael is sent to keep her from meddling in human affairs. The divine being confronts Maria, and he forbids her from using her powers, issuing a decree that her magic will be taken if she loses her virginity. Though she is now labeled a heretic, Maria adamantly refuses to heed Michael's warning and continues to disrupt the war between the two nations. But as the Church begins plotting to take away the witch's power and put a stop to Maria's interference once and for all, her peacemaking may soon come to an end. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 131,598 7.15
Kyou kara Maou! -- -- Studio Deen -- 78 eps -- Light novel -- Adventure Comedy Demons Fantasy Shoujo -- Kyou kara Maou! Kyou kara Maou! -- Kyou kara Maou! revolves around Yuri Shibuya, your average Japanese teenager. One day, Yuri sees a classmate being harassed by bullies. Thanks to this intervention, his friend is able to escape, but unfortunately Yuri becomes the new target of the bullies in the process and gets his head shoved into a toilet. But instead of water, the toilet contains a swirling portal that sucks him into another world, largely resembling medieval Europe. There, he is told that he will become the next Demon King due to his black hair and black eyes, traits only possessed by the demon's royal lineage. -- -- Yuri's arrival is met with some skepticism by some of the demons, who view him as unworthy to be their king. However, after Yuri wins a duel by utilizing his magical powers, the demons slowly begin to acknowledge him as their monarch. Yuri must now learn what it takes be a true Demon King, as he tries to keep the peace between demons and humans in this strange new realm. -- TV - Apr 3, 2004 -- 93,555 7.69
Mobile Suit Gundam 00 -- -- Sunrise -- 25 eps -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Space Drama Mecha -- Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Mobile Suit Gundam 00 -- In the distant future, mankind's dependence on fossil fuels will lead to their complete depletion, an energy crisis unlike anything the world witnessed. Out of retaliation and fear, humanity began focusing at an alternative source of energy: solar power. Different nations have united together to form three major factions—the Union of Solar Energy and Free Nations, the Advanced European Union, and the Human Reform League. Each of these sectors has access to a solar power generator, which gives them limitless energy. -- -- As a result, countries that were once dependent on the sale of fossil fuels are now plunged in poverty, leading to years of warfare and internal strife over the control of solar energy. Amid this chaos, an unknown paramilitary organization appeared identifying themselves as "Celestial Being," aspire to end all warfare through armed intervention by using mysterious and technologically advanced Mobile Suits known as Gundams. -- -- Mobile Suit Gundam 00 follows the story of Celestial Being's Gundam Meisters Setsuna F. Seiei, Lockon Stratos, Allelujah Haptism, and Tieria Erde. These four dive into the devastating battle between the three superpowers to accomplish their goal of changing the world. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment -- 187,895 8.14
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - Urðr Hunt -- -- Sunrise Beyond -- ? eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Space Drama Mecha -- Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - Urðr Hunt Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - Urðr Hunt -- Year P.D. 323. Gjallarhorn's political intervention into the Arbrau central parliament escalated into an armed conflict using mobile suits. The incident was brought to an end by Tekkadan, a group of boys who came from Mars. -- -- News of Tekkadan's exploits has also reached the ears of Wistario Afam, a youth born and raised at the Radonitsa Colony near Venus. Venus, which lost to Mars in the contest for development, is a remote frontier planet in which the four great economic blocs show little interest. It is now used only as a penal colony for criminals, whose inhabitants don't even have IDs. -- -- Then Wistario, who hopes to change the status quo of this homeland, encounters a girl who claims to be the guide to the Urdr-Hunt. -- -- (Source: Gundam Global Portal) -- -- ONA - ??? ??, ???? -- 7,528 N/AFinal Fantasy XV: Episode Ardyn - Prologue -- -- Satelight -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action -- Final Fantasy XV: Episode Ardyn - Prologue Final Fantasy XV: Episode Ardyn - Prologue -- In an age when gods walk alongside mankind, the world of Eos finds itself falling into darkness. Calamity befalls the human race when malevolent creatures known as "daemons" scourge the land and obliterate armies with seemingly unstoppable brute force. In these dire times, nobles of House Caelum rise to prominence. Owing to their god-given healing powers, which allow them to purge the plague spread by the monsters, they earn the people's trust and allegiance. -- -- With no leader to rule the first human kingdom and guide the masses, the gods fervently seek to fill this vacancy—a man of the Caelum bloodline seems to be a desirable choice. The ambitious and charismatic pragmatist, Somnus Lucis Caelum, is pit against his humble and altruistic brother, Ardyn Lucis Caelum, in competition for the throne. As tensions rise between the rivals and anticipations surge, the fate of the world rests upon one of the two's decisive victory. -- -- ONA - Feb 17, 2019 -- 7,489 6.60
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - Urðr Hunt -- -- Sunrise Beyond -- ? eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Space Drama Mecha -- Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - Urðr Hunt Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans - Urðr Hunt -- Year P.D. 323. Gjallarhorn's political intervention into the Arbrau central parliament escalated into an armed conflict using mobile suits. The incident was brought to an end by Tekkadan, a group of boys who came from Mars. -- -- News of Tekkadan's exploits has also reached the ears of Wistario Afam, a youth born and raised at the Radonitsa Colony near Venus. Venus, which lost to Mars in the contest for development, is a remote frontier planet in which the four great economic blocs show little interest. It is now used only as a penal colony for criminals, whose inhabitants don't even have IDs. -- -- Then Wistario, who hopes to change the status quo of this homeland, encounters a girl who claims to be the guide to the Urdr-Hunt. -- -- (Source: Gundam Global Portal) -- -- ONA - ??? ??, ???? -- 7,528 N/ASayonara Ginga Tetsudou 999: Andromeda Shuuchakueki -- -- Studio World, Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Adventure Space Drama -- Sayonara Ginga Tetsudou 999: Andromeda Shuuchakueki Sayonara Ginga Tetsudou 999: Andromeda Shuuchakueki -- Despite the destruction of the mechanization home world Andromeda, the machine empire is still swept across the galaxy and Earth has become a battleground. Having returned from his journey aboard the train Galaxy Express 999, Tetsurou Hoshino joins the resistance and fights alongside others who have retained their humanity. -- -- When the 999 returns to Earth, Tetsurou receives an enigmatic recorded message from his former traveling companion Maetel, telling him to board the train once more. Fighting his way to Megalopolis station, he makes it onto the train just as it departs. This time, however, Tetsurou is met with several mysteries: Maetel is nowhere to be seen, an ominous "Ghost Train" has appeared, and the ultimate destination of the 999 is unknown. Amid all this, Tetsurou finds himself confronted by the mysterious black knight Faust and soon discovers the machine empire's darkest secret. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media -- Movie - Jan 8, 1981 -- 7,501 7.29
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz Movie -- -- Sunrise -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Space Mecha Military Drama Sci-Fi -- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz Movie Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz Movie -- At the climax of the Eve Wars, on December 24 of the year AC 195, the armies of the World Nation and White Fang met in a ferocious battle. World Nation leader Treize Khushrenada was slain, White Fang leader Zechs Merquise disappeared, and Earth was saved from destruction by the intervention of the five Gundam pilots. Having witnessed the consequences of war and hatred, the people of Earth and the space colonies put aside their differences and together founded a new world government. Under this newly-formed Earth Sphere Unified Nation, a year has passed in peace. The government and the populace have disarmed themselves, and almost every remaining mobile suit has been destroyed. Deciding to follow suit, Gundam pilots Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell, Trowa Barton, and Quatre Raberba Winner place their mighty mobile suits inside an asteroid and send them on a one-way voyage into the sun. But even as they bid their Gundams farewell, a new conflict is drawing near. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment -- Movie - Aug 1, 1998 -- 50,948 7.81
Roujin Z -- -- APPP -- 1 ep -- Original -- Comedy Drama Mecha Sci-Fi -- Roujin Z Roujin Z -- The Z Project was intended to give the new generation a break from caring for the old. The original intenion was to create a machine to care for them without any intervention. At first glance, it looked like an excellent plan, and many of the younger generation approved of its application. But when old Mr. Takazawa become the test subject for the Z-001 machine, Haruko questioned both the tactics of the hospital and the moral implications of the machine. This is just the beginning, as Haruko has not just the hospital, but the odds against her. But then, she discovers an odd quirk about the machine: it uses a biochip, and it eventually acquires a mind of its own! -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media -- Movie - Sep 14, 1991 -- 25,750 7.06
Roujin Z -- -- APPP -- 1 ep -- Original -- Comedy Drama Mecha Sci-Fi -- Roujin Z Roujin Z -- The Z Project was intended to give the new generation a break from caring for the old. The original intenion was to create a machine to care for them without any intervention. At first glance, it looked like an excellent plan, and many of the younger generation approved of its application. But when old Mr. Takazawa become the test subject for the Z-001 machine, Haruko questioned both the tactics of the hospital and the moral implications of the machine. This is just the beginning, as Haruko has not just the hospital, but the odds against her. But then, she discovers an odd quirk about the machine: it uses a biochip, and it eventually acquires a mind of its own! -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- Movie - Sep 14, 1991 -- 25,750 7.06
Yu☆Gi☆Oh! Zexal -- -- Gallop -- 73 eps -- Manga -- Action Game Fantasy Shounen -- Yu☆Gi☆Oh! Zexal Yu☆Gi☆Oh! Zexal -- In the bustling and futuristic city of Heartland, a young boy named Yuuma Tsukumo has a dream that everyone his age wants to achieve—earning the title of the greatest duelist! Sadly, due to his lackluster dueling skills, this dream is far from achievable. But when the school bully, Ryouga "Shark" Kamishiro, splits the key given to him by his father into two pieces, he inadvertently sets Yuuma on a collision course with his dream. -- -- Retaining one half of the key, Yuuma begins a duel with Shark, but soon realizes that his inexperienced skills are no match for him. In a sudden turn of events, Yuuma's key repairs itself, and the "Door of Destiny'' appears before him. Using the key to open it, Yuuma is greeted by an alien by the name of Astral—a being only he can see. -- -- The bewildered Yuuma soon learns that his memories have been divided into 100 "Number Cards," all of which he must retrieve. However, he is also not the only one looking for them. Bombarded by these revelations, Yuuma, alongside Astral, must defend the world from the upcoming threats that loom over Heartland City—regardless of any divine intervention that may occur. -- -- -- Licensor: -- 4Kids Entertainment, Konami -- TV - Apr 11, 2011 -- 57,016 6.34
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Behavioral_intervention_technology
2011 military intervention in Libya
Abecedarian Early Intervention Project
A Few Words on Non-Intervention
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
American intervention in Libya (2015present)
American-led intervention in Iraq (2014present)
American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War
American military intervention in Somalia (2007present)
American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians
Art intervention
Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies
Assessment for Effective Intervention
Australian contribution to the Allied Intervention in Russia 19181919
Biomedical Imaging and Intervention Journal
Bolesaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis
Brief intervention
British and Creole intervention in the Sierra Leone hinterland in the 19th century
British intervention in Spanish American independence
British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War
Bystander intervention
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran
Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiological Society of Europe
CardioVascular and Interventional Radiology
Central Powers intervention in the Russian Civil War
Chadian intervention in northern Mali
CheyTac Intervention
Clinical Interventions in Aging
Cognitive intervention
Combat Stress Intervention Program
Computer-assisted interventions
Corps Lger d'Intervention
Cuban intervention in Angola
Culturally Responsive Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports
Currency intervention
Democratic Intervention
Department of Social Policy and Intervention
Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology
Divine Intervention
Divine Intervention (album)
Divine Intervention (film)
Drug Interventions Programme
Dutch intervention in Bali
Dutch intervention in Bali (1849)
Dutch intervention in northern Bali (1846)
Dutch intervention in northern Bali (1848)
Dutch military intervention against ISIL
Early childhood intervention
Early intervention in psychosis
Early versus Late Intervention Trial with Estradiol
Economic interventionism
ECOWAS military intervention in the Gambia
Educational interventions for first-generation students
European Intervention Initiative
European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training
Foreign electoral intervention
Framework for Intervention
Franco-British plans for intervention in the Winter War
Genocide Intervention Network
George: A Zombie Intervention
German intervention against ISIL
Government intervention during the subprime mortgage crisis
Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center
Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie royale
Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program
Humanitarian intervention
International Classification of Health Interventions
International Convention Relating to Intervention on the High Seas in Cases of Oil Pollution Casualties
International military intervention against ISIL
International reactions to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen (2015present)
International Squadron (Cretan intervention, 18971898)
Internet interventions for posttraumatic stress
Intersex medical interventions
Intervention
Interventional cardiology
Interventional magnetic resonance imaging
Interventional Neuroradiology
Interventional neuroradiology
Interventional oncology
Interventional pain management
Interventional pulmonology
Interventional radiology
Intervention AUV
Intervention Brigade (Portugal)
Intervention (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Intervention (counseling)
Intervention forces
Intervention (international law)
Interventionism
Interventionism (politics)
Intervention (law)
Intervention mapping
Intervention prices
Interventions + Lullabies
Intervention stocks
Intervention (TV series)
Iranian intervention in Iraq (2014present)
Italian military intervention in Spain
JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions
Japanese intervention in Siberia
Japanese veterans in overseas interventions (18941927)
Journalistic interventionism
Journal of Early Intervention
Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery
Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions
Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology
Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention
Libertarian perspectives on foreign intervention
List of African Union military interventions
List of aviation shootdowns and accidents during the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen
List of Intervention episodes
Market intervention
Military intervention against ISIL aerial order of battle
Mindbody interventions
Minimal intervention dentistry
Monitored Emergency Use of Unregistered and Investigational Interventions
Monument to the Victims of the Intervention
National Police Intervention Force
National Police Intervention Groups
NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War
Non-interventionism
Non-pharmaceutical intervention
Non-pharmaceutical intervention (epidemiology)
North Russia intervention
Onyx (interventional radiology)
Ottaviani Intervention
Parachute Intervention Squadron of the National Gendarmerie
Parkfield Interventional EQ Fieldwork
Percutaneous coronary intervention
Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports
Positive non-interventionism
Postmenopausal Estrogen/Progestin Interventions
Pretrial Intervention Program
Protected percutaneous coronary intervention
Public health intervention
Red Army intervention in Afghanistan (1929)
Red Army intervention in Afghanistan (1930)
Relationship Development Intervention
Research and Intervention Brigade
Research and Intervention Brigade (Algeria)
Response to intervention
Revolutions and interventions in Hungary (19181920)
Romanian military intervention in Bessarabia
Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War
Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen
Saudi-led intervention in Bahrain
Screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment
Second French intervention in Mexico
Siberian intervention
Social interventionism
Society of Interventional Radiology
Southern African Development Community intervention in Lesotho
Southern Russia intervention
Soviet intervention in Mongolia
Special Intervention Group
Special Intervention Regiment (Algeria)
Sugar Intervention
Suicide intervention
Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years' War
Swedish intervention in the Winter War
Symptom targeted intervention
Systemic intervention
Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial
The Apostolic Intervention
The Intervention (EP)
The Intervention of the Sabine Women
Third Party Non-violent Intervention
Timeline of the 2011 Libyan Civil War and military intervention (16 August 23 October)
Timeline of the 2011 Libyan Civil War and military intervention (19 MarchMay)
Timeline of the 2011 Libyan Civil War and military intervention (June15 August)
Timeline of the 2011 Libyan Civil War before military intervention
Timeline of the American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War
Triple Intervention
Turkish military intervention in the Second Libyan Civil War
United Nations Force Intervention Brigade
Urban Interventionism
Well intervention
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