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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Evolution_II
Full_Circle
Heart_of_Matter
Life_without_Death
Modern_Man_in_Search_of_a_Soul
Moral_Disengagement__How_Good_People_Can_Do_Harm_and_Feel_Good_About_Themselves
My_Burning_Heart
On_Thoughts_And_Aphorisms
Sex_Ecology_Spirituality
The_Act_of_Creation
The_Divine_Milieu
The_Mothers_Agenda
The_Study_and_Practice_of_Yoga
The_Wit_and_Wisdom_of_Alfred_North_Whitehead
The_Yoga_Sutras
Toward_the_Future

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.013_-_Defence_Mechanisms_of_the_Mind

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0_0.01_-_Introduction
0.00_-_The_Wellspring_of_Reality
0.05_-_The_Synthesis_of_the_Systems
0.06_-_Letters_to_a_Young_Sadhak
01.03_-_Mystic_Poetry
01.03_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Souls_Release
01.08_-_A_Theory_of_Yoga
01.14_-_Nicholas_Roerich
0.14_-_Letters_to_a_Sadhak
0_1957-10-17
0_1958-12-28
0_1961-01-22
0_1961-01-27
0_1961-02-11
0_1961-04-18
0_1961-04-25
0_1961-06-06
0_1961-06-24
0_1961-08-05
0_1961-10-02
0_1962-02-24
0_1962-02-27
0_1962-03-06
0_1962-05-31
0_1962-06-02
0_1962-06-20
0_1962-08-04
0_1962-09-05
0_1962-12-28
0_1963-01-30
0_1963-05-18
0_1963-10-16
0_1964-07-18
0_1964-07-28
0_1964-08-05
0_1964-08-26
0_1964-09-26
0_1964-11-21
0_1965-03-20
0_1965-03-24
0_1965-04-17
0_1965-07-10
0_1965-10-10
0_1966-10-22
0_1967-06-30
0_1967-09-20
0_1968-09-07
0_1969-10-08
0_1970-10-31
0_1971-12-11
0_1972-01-12
0_1972-02-01
02.04_-_The_Kingdoms_of_the_Little_Life
03.03_-_The_House_of_the_Spirit_and_the_New_Creation
03.05_-_Some_Conceptions_and_Misconceptions
04.01_-_The_Divine_Man
04.01_-_The_March_of_Civilisation
04.02_-_Human_Progress
05.04_-_The_Measure_of_Time
05.07_-_The_Observer_and_the_Observed
05.13_-_Darshana_and_Philosophy
05.31_-_Divine_Intervention
05.32_-_Yoga_as_Pragmatic_Power
07.08_-_The_Divine_Truth_Its_Name_and_Form
1.008_-_The_Principle_of_Self-Affirmation
1.00a_-_Introduction
1.00_-_PREFACE
1.013_-_Defence_Mechanisms_of_the_Mind
10.17_-_Miracles:_Their_True_Significance
1.01_-_Newtonian_and_Bergsonian_Time
1.01_-_The_First_Steps
1.02.3.2_-_Knowledge_and_Ignorance
1.02_-_Groups_and_Statistical_Mechanics
1.02_-_MAPS_OF_MEANING_-_THREE_LEVELS_OF_ANALYSIS
1.02_-_SOCIAL_HEREDITY_AND_PROGRESS
1.02_-_The_Age_of_Individualism_and_Reason
1.02_-_The_Pit
1.02_-_The_Vision_of_the_Past
1.02_-_THE_WITHIN_OF_THINGS
1.03_-_Self-Surrender_in_Works_-_The_Way_of_The_Gita
1.03_-_THE_EARTH_IN_ITS_EARLY_STAGES
1.03_-_THE_GRAND_OPTION
1.03_-_The_Tale_of_the_Alchemist_Who_Sold_His_Soul
1.04_-_Descent_into_Future_Hell
1.04_-_Feedback_and_Oscillation
1.04_-_Magic_and_Religion
1.04_-_SOME_REFLECTIONS_ON_PROGRESS
1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP
1.04_-_The_Sacrifice_the_Triune_Path_and_the_Lord_of_the_Sacrifice
1.04_-_The_Silent_Mind
1.04_-_Wherefore_of_World?
1.05_-_Computing_Machines_and_the_Nervous_System
1.05_-_Consciousness
1.05_-_Problems_of_Modern_Psycho_therapy
1.05_-_The_Activation_of_Human_Energy
1.05_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_-_The_Psychic_Being
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
1.05_-_The_New_Consciousness
1.06_-_A_Summary_of_my_Phenomenological_View_of_the_World
1.06_-_Gestalt_and_Universals
1.06_-_LIFE_AND_THE_PLANETS
1.06_-_Quieting_the_Vital
1.06_-_The_Breaking_of_the_Limits
1.06_-_THE_FOUR_GREAT_ERRORS
1.06_-_The_Objective_and_Subjective_Views_of_Life
1.07_-_Cybernetics_and_Psychopathology
1.07_-_On_Dreams
1.07_-_Standards_of_Conduct_and_Spiritual_Freedom
1.07_-_THE_GREAT_EVENT_FORESHADOWED_-_THE_PLANETIZATION_OF_MANKIND
1.07_-_The_Psychic_Center
1.08a_-_The_Ladder
1.08_-_Independence_from_the_Physical
1.08_-_The_Supreme_Will
1.09_-_Man_-_About_the_Body
1.09_-_SKIRMISHES_IN_A_WAY_WITH_THE_AGE
1.09_-_Sleep_and_Death
1.10_-_THE_FORMATION_OF_THE_NOOSPHERE
1.11_-_The_Change_of_Power
1.11_-_The_Master_of_the_Work
1.12_-_The_Superconscient
1.13_-_Reason_and_Religion
1.13_-_THE_HUMAN_REBOUND_OF_EVOLUTION_AND_ITS_CONSEQUENCES
1.14_-_The_Suprarational_Beauty
1.14_-_TURMOIL_OR_GENESIS?
1.15_-_Index
1.15_-_The_Possibility_and_Purpose_of_Avatarhood
1.16_-_The_Suprarational_Ultimate_of_Life
1.17_-_Astral_Journey__Example,_How_to_do_it,_How_to_Verify_your_Experience
1.17_-_DOES_MANKIND_MOVE_BIOLOGICALLY_UPON_ITSELF?
1.19_-_ON_THE_PROBABLE_EXISTENCE_AHEAD_OF_US_OF_AN_ULTRA-HUMAN
1.20_-_The_End_of_the_Curve_of_Reason
1.21_-_FROM_THE_PRE-HUMAN_TO_THE_ULTRA-HUMAN,_THE_PHASES_OF_A_LIVING_PLANET
1.21_-_The_Spiritual_Aim_and_Life
1.22_-_THE_END_OF_THE_SPECIES
1.3.5.03_-_The_Involved_and_Evolving_Godhead
1.4.01_-_The_Divine_Grace_and_Guidance
1.62_-_The_Fire-Festivals_of_Europe
1.71_-_Morality_2
1915_04_19p
1929-04-21_-_Visions,_seeing_and_interpretation_-_Dreams_and_dreaml_and_-_Dreamless_sleep_-_Visions_and_formulation_-_Surrender,_passive_and_of_the_will_-_Meditation_and_progress_-_Entering_the_spiritual_life,_a_plunge_into_the_Divine
1929-04-28_-_Offering,_general_and_detailed_-_Integral_Yoga_-_Remembrance_of_the_Divine_-_Reading_and_Yoga_-_Necessity,_predetermination_-_Freedom_-_Miracles_-_Aim_of_creation
1951-03-01_-_Universe_and_the_Divine_-_Freedom_and_determinism_-_Grace_-_Time_and_Creation-_in_the_Supermind_-_Work_and_its_results_-_The_psychic_being_-_beauty_and_love_-_Flowers-_beauty_and_significance_-_Choice_of_reincarnating_psychic_being
1953-04-22
1953-05-27
1953-06-03
1953-08-05
1953-11-18
1956-06-06_-_Sign_or_indication_from_books_of_revelation_-_Spiritualised_mind_-_Stages_of_sadhana_-_Reversal_of_consciousness_-_Organisation_around_central_Presence_-_Boredom,_most_common_human_malady
1957-04-17_-_Transformation_of_the_body
1958-02-19_-_Experience_of_the_supramental_boat_-_The_Censors_-_Absurdity_of_artificial_means
1958-09-10_-_Magic,_occultism,_physical_science
1958_11_07
1.A_-_ANTHROPOLOGY,_THE_SOUL
1f.lovecraft_-_At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
1f.lovecraft_-_Cool_Air
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Challenge_from_Beyond
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shadow_out_of_Time
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Shunned_House
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Temple
1.ltp_-_The_Hundred_Character_Tablet_(Bai_Zi_Bei)
1.pbs_-_Prometheus_Unbound
2.01_-_Indeterminates,_Cosmic_Determinations_and_the_Indeterminable
2.01_-_On_Books
2.01_-_The_Attributes_of_Omega_Point_-_a_Transcendent_God
2.01_-_The_Road_of_Trials
2.02_-_Brahman,_Purusha,_Ishwara_-_Maya,_Prakriti,_Shakti
2.02_-_THE_EXPANSION_OF_LIFE
2.03_-_DEMETER
2.05_-_The_Tale_of_the_Vampires_Kingdom
2.06_-_The_Wand
2.06_-_Two_Tales_of_Seeking_and_Losing
2.07_-_The_Knowledge_and_the_Ignorance
2.07_-_The_Supreme_Word_of_the_Gita
2.09_-_On_Sadhana
2.1.03_-_Man_and_Superman
2.10_-_The_Primordial_Kings__Their_Shattering
2.1.2_-_The_Vital_and_Other_Levels_of_Being
2.1.3.3_-_Reading
2.13_-_Exclusive_Concentration_of_Consciousness-Force_and_the_Ignorance
2.18_-_The_Evolutionary_Process_-_Ascent_and_Integration
2.2.01_-_The_Problem_of_Consciousness
2.2.02_-_Consciousness_and_the_Inconscient
2.2.03_-_The_Psychic_Being
2.20_-_The_Philosophy_of_Rebirth
2.21_-_1940
2.22_-_Rebirth_and_Other_Worlds;_Karma,_the_Soul_and_Immortality
2.23_-_The_Conditions_of_Attainment_to_the_Gnosis
2.24_-_The_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Man
2.24_-_The_Message_of_the_Gita
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
2.3.10_-_The_Subconscient_and_the_Inconscient
3.00.2_-_Introduction
3.00_-_Introduction
3.00_-_The_Magical_Theory_of_the_Universe
3.01_-_THE_BIRTH_OF_THOUGHT
3.02_-_THE_DEPLOYMENT_OF_THE_NOOSPHERE
3.02_-_The_Great_Secret
3.03_-_Faith_and_the_Divine_Grace
3.03_-_THE_MODERN_EARTH
3.05_-_The_Conjunction
3.05_-_The_Physical_World_and_its_Connection_with_the_Soul_and_Spirit-Lands
3.07_-_The_Formula_of_the_Holy_Grail
3.1.3_-_Difficulties_of_the_Physical_Being
3.2.04_-_Sankhya_and_Yoga
3.2.05_-_Our_Ideal
3.3.02_-_All-Will_and_Free-Will
33.15_-_My_Athletics
3.3.3_-_Specific_Illnesses,_Ailments_and_Other_Physical_Problems
3.4.02_-_The_Inconscient
3.5.03_-_Reason_and_Society
3-5_Full_Circle
3.7.1.01_-_Rebirth
3.7.1.05_-_The_Significance_of_Rebirth
3.7.1.07_-_Involution_and_Evolution
3.7.1.09_-_Karma_and_Freedom
3.7.1.10_-_Karma,_Will_and_Consequence
3.7.1.11_-_Rebirth_and_Karma
3.7.1.12_-_Karma_and_Justice
3.7.2.01_-_The_Foundation
3.7.2.03_-_Mind_Nature_and_Law_of_Karma
3.7.2.05_-_Appendix_I_-_The_Tangle_of_Karma
3_-_Commentaries_and_Annotated_Translations
4.01_-_THE_COLLECTIVE_ISSUE
4.01_-_The_Presence_of_God_in_the_World
4.02_-_BEYOND_THE_COLLECTIVE_-_THE_HYPER-PERSONAL
4.02_-_Humanity_in_Progress
4.03_-_Prayer_to_the_Ever-greater_Christ
4.04_-_The_Perfection_of_the_Mental_Being
4.06_-_Purification-the_Lower_Mentality
4.07_-_Purification-Intelligence_and_Will
4.13_-_The_Action_of_Equality
4.16_-_The_Divine_Shakti
4.23_-_The_supramental_Instruments_--_Thought-process
4.3.1.04_-_The_Disappearance_of_the_I_Sense
4.3.2_-_Attacks_by_the_Hostile_Forces
5.01_-_EPILOGUE
5.02_-_Two_Parallel_Movements
5.03_-_The_Divine_Body
5.05_-_Supermind_and_Humanity
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
7_-_Yoga_of_Sri_Aurobindo
Avatars_of_the_Tortoise
Blazing_P1_-_Preconventional_consciousness
Blazing_P2_-_Map_the_Stages_of_Conventional_Consciousness
Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness
BOOK_II._--_PART_III._ADDENDA._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
ENNEAD_05.08_-_Concerning_Intelligible_Beauty.
ENNEAD_06.05_-_The_One_and_Identical_Being_is_Everywhere_Present_In_Its_Entirety.345
Gorgias
Liber_111_-_The_Book_of_Wisdom_-_LIBER_ALEPH_VEL_CXI
LUX.02_-_EVOCATION
MoM_References
r1914_01_06
r1914_01_15
r1914_04_08
r1914_10_13
r1919_06_27
r1927_04_14
Sophist
Story_of_the_Warrior_and_the_Captive
The_Act_of_Creation_text
The_Coming_Race_Contents
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
The_Logomachy_of_Zos
The_Mirror_of_Enigmas
The_Monadology
The_Shadow_Out_Of_Time

PRIMARY CLASS

SIMILAR TITLES
mechanism

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

mechanism ::: an assembly of moving parts performing a complete functional motion, often being part of a large machine or likened to one; linkage.

mechanism design ::: A field in economics and game theory that takes an engineering approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics (markets, auctions, voting procedures) to networked-systems (internet interdomain routing, sponsored search auctions).

mechanism ::: n. --> The arrangement or relation of the parts of a machine; the parts of a machine, taken collectively; the arrangement or relation of the parts of anything as adapted to produce an effect; as, the mechanism of a watch; the mechanism of a sewing machine; the mechanism of a seed pod.
Mechanical operation or action.
An ideal machine; a combination of movable bodies constituting a machine, but considered only with regard to relative


mechanism ::: The theory that all natural phenomena can be explained by physical causes. It can be contrasted with vitalism, the philosophical theory that vital forces are active in living organisms, so that life cannot be explained solely by mechanism.

Mechanism: (Gr. mechane, machine) Theory that all phenomena are totally explicable on mechanical principles. The view that all phenomena is the result of matter in motion and can be explained by its law. Theory of total explanation by efficient, as opposed to final, cause (q.v.). Doctrine that nature, like a machine, is a whole whose single function is served automatically by its parts. In cosmology, first advanced by Leucippus and Democritus (460 B.C.-370 B.C.) as the view that nature is explicable on the basis of atoms in motion and the void. Held by Galileo (1564-1641) and others in the seventeenth century as the rnechanical philosophy. For Descartes (1596-1650), the essence of matter is extension, and all physical phenomena are explicable by mechanical laws. For Kant (1724-1804), the necessity in time of all occurrence in accordance with causality as a law of nature. In biology, theory that organisms are totally explicable on mechanical principles. Opposite of: vitalism (q.v.). In psychology, applied to associational psychology, and in psychoanalysis to the unconscious direction of a mental process. In general, the view that nature consists merely of material in motion, and that it operates automatically. Opposite of: all forms of super-naturalism. See also Materialism, Atomism. -- J.K.F.

MECHANISM—The structure or means of action of any mechanical contrivance. "A human organism with all its parts in harmonious action is a splendid mechanism."—Winchell.


TERMS ANYWHERE

3. A highly composite and diverse study which attempts to ascertain the limits of the special sciences, to disclose their interrelations one with another, and to examine their implications so fir as these contribute to a theory either of the universe as a whole or of some pervasive aspect of it. This aspect of the philosophy of science is the least precise and definite of the three, and employs the more speculative methods. One of the most characteristic of its problems is that of the classification of the sciences. This involves the attempt to construct a general table, or diagram, or map of the sciences which will properly integrate the sciences according to method, subject-matter, or some other principle of organization. Another characteristic problem is that of the implications of science for some general theory of the universe, e.g., idealism, materialism, positivism, mechanism, teleology, monism, or pluralism. In recent years a new type of problem has appeared which, if it is properly part of the philosophy of science at all, belongs to this aspect of the subject. This is the problem of the social relations of science. It examines such problems as the place of science in a given cultural scheme, e.g., its relations to government, business, art, religion and morality.

According to another interpretation of the notion of whole and of the part-whole principle, a whole is an object whose parts are mutually interdependent in the sense that a change affecting one of its parts will bring about changes in all of the other parts, and because of this interdependence the whole is said to be "more" than the sum of its parts. The part-whole principle then obviously is true simply by definition, and again, lacks explanatory value. Besides, if the above interdependence criterion for wholes is taken literally, then any object turns out to be a whole. What the concept of whole is actually meant to refer to, are specific types of interdependence as found in living organisms, etc., but then, again, an adequate description and explanation of those phenomena can be attained only by a study of their special regularities, not by a sweeping use of the vague concept of whole and of the unclear part-whole principle. (For the points referred to in the preceding remarks, see also Emergent Evolution, Gestalt, Holism, Mechanism, Vitalism.)

Active Reconfiguring Message ::: (hardware) (ARM) An efficient mechanism which allows reconfiguration of the hardware logic of a system according to the particular data received or transmitted.In ARM each message contains extra information in a Reconfiguring Header in addition to the data to be transferred. Upon arrival of the message the hardware reconfiguration. As soon as the hardware has been reconfigured the data information of the message can be processed.[In what contect is this term used?] (1997-06-06)

Active Reconfiguring Message "hardware" (ARM) An efficient mechanism which allows reconfiguration of the hardware logic of a system according to the particular data received or transmitted. In ARM each message contains extra information in a Reconfiguring {Header} in addition to the data to be transferred. Upon arrival of the message the Reconfiguring Header is extracted, decoded and used to perform on-the-fly hardware reconfiguration. As soon as the hardware has been reconfigured the data information of the message can be processed. [In what contect is this term used?] (1997-06-06)

Actors "theory" A model for {concurrency} by {Carl Hewitt}. Actors are autonomous and concurrent {objects} which execute {asynchronously}. The Actor model provides flexible mechanisms for building parallel and {distributed} software systems. {(http://osl.cs.uiuc.edu/)}. ["Laws for Communicating Parallel Processes", C. Hewitt et al, IFIP 77, pp. 987-992, N-H 1977]. ["ACTORS: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems", Gul A. Agha "agha@cs.uiuc.edu", Cambridge Press, MA, 1986]. (1999-11-23)

Actors ::: (theory) A model for concurrency by Carl Hewitt. Actors are autonomous and concurrent objects which execute asynchronously. The Actor model provides flexible mechanisms for building parallel and distributed software systems. .[Laws for Communicating Parallel Processes, C. Hewitt et al, IFIP 77, pp. 987-992, N-H 1977].[ACTORS: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems, Gul A. Agha (1999-11-23)

adaptive algorithm ::: An algorithm that changes its behavior at the time it is run, based on a priori defined reward mechanism or criterion.

Affinity In physics, an unknown force which manifests in cohesion, chemical action, etc. In any particle theory of the universe, affinity has to be assumed, but the assumptions necessary to a mechanical interpretation of nature cannot be defined in terms of mechanism. In the physical world it is but a manifestation of that universal force which tends to bring diversity into unity, the counterpart of the force of repulsion, the two forces cooperating in cosmic harmony. Fohat in its highest aspect as divine love — eros, the electric power of affinity and sympathy — brings spirit into union with subtle nature, producing in man the soul, in nature the first link between the unconditioned and the manifested (SD 1:119).

Al-Musawwir ::: The fashioner of forms. The One who exhibits ‘meanings’ as ‘forms’ and devises the mechanism in the perceiver to perceive them.

Also epigenetic robotics. ::: A scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures, and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines.

Also reasoning engine, rules engine, or simply reasoner. ::: A piece of software able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms. The notion of a semantic reasoner generalizes that of an inference engine, by providing a richer set of mechanisms to work with. The inference rules are commonly specified by means of an ontology language, and often a description logic language. Many reasoners use first-order predicate logic to perform reasoning; inference commonly proceeds by forward chaining and backward chaining.

anitya. [alt. anityatA] (P. anicca; T. mi rtag pa; C. wuchang; J. mujo; K. musang 無常). In Sanskrit, "impermanence"; the first of the "three marks" (TRILAKsAnA) of existence, along with suffering (DUḤKHA), and nonself (ANATMAN). "Impermanence" refers to the fact that compounded objects (SAMSKṚTA) created by causes (HETU) and conditions (PRATYAYA) are inevitably subject to change, decline, and finally destruction. Because conditioned objects are subject to such impermanence, they are seen to be unsuitable objects for either desire (LOBHA) or hatred (DVEsA), thus prompting the meditator to turn away from conditioned objects and toward the unconditioned (ASAMSKṚTA). Mistaking what is in fact impermanent for something permanent is one of the four fundamental "inverted views" (VIPARYASA) and a primary cause of suffering. Two kinds of impermanence (see ER WUCHANG) are sometimes delineated: "impermanence marked by a successive period" (S. prabandhAnitya, C. xiangxu wuchang), i.e., when an event or length of time has elapsed, such as the ending of a human life or the waning daylight at dusk; and "impermanence that occurs at every thought-instant" (S. ksanikAnitya, C. niannian wuchang), i.e., the inexorable change that is taking place anytime and anywhere, even before an event has come to an end (e.g., even before a person's biological death, the person "dies" every instant in the continuum of flux that defines his existence). ¶ In the SARVASTIVADA ABHIDHARMA system, anityatA (more technically "desinence," viz., death) is treated as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought" (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKARA), which functions as one of the four conditioned characteristics (CATURLAKsAnA, SAMSKṚTALAKsAnA) that are associated with all conditioned objects. Because the ontology of the SarvAstivAda school, as its name implies, postulated that "everything exists" in all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future, the school had to posit some mechanism through which to account for the apparent change that conditioned objects underwent through time. Therefore, along with the other three characteristics of birth (JATI), continuance (STHITI), and senescence (JARA), desinence was posited as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought" that serves as the predominant condition of an object's death. The very definition of conditioned objects is that they are subject to these conditioned characteristics, including this inevitability of death, and this is what ultimately distinguishes them from the unconditioned (asaMskṛta), viz., NIRVAnA.

Any attempt by an untrained student, without a teacher, to try to develop these chakras is sure to cause disaster, since it can result only in the arousing of powerful forces which he has not yet acquired the means to control, and which will therefore control him. Once awakened, they cannot be put to sleep again, and the result will be disorganization, physical or mental or both, manifested in disease, insanity, depravity, or death; in the worst cases, the unfortunate dabbler may set his feet on a path of black magic ending in the final separation of his spiritual ego from its hapless psycho-vital-astral-physical vehicle. The spiritual and higher intellectual powers and faculties must be cultivated first; and this cannot be done by any attempt at artificial stimulation based on fixing the attention on spots in the body or head. The only safe way to practice the chela life is to forget about the body and its mechanism, thus allowing evolution to proceed in its natural course, and dangerous forces to life quiescent until they come naturally and harmoniously into operation.

aspect-oriented programming "programming" (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond simple functional modules and thereby improve the {quality} of software. Mechanisms for defining and composing {abstractions} are essential elements of programming languages. The design style supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised components that can be called upon to perform a function. But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components, such as failure handling, {persistence}, communication, replication, coordination, {memory management}, or {real-time} constraints, and tend to cut across groups of functional components. While they can be thought about and analysed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current {component-oriented languages} tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The {source code} becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes. This "tangling" phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. A number of researchers have begun working on approaches to this problem that allow programmers to express each of a system's aspects of concern in a separate and natural form, and then automatically combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form. These approaches have been called aspect-oriented programming. {Xerox AOP homepage (http://parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/)}. {AspectJ (http://AspectJ.org/)}. {ECOOPP'99 AOP workshop (http://wwwtrese.cs.utwente.nl/aop-ecoop99/)}. (1999-11-21)

aspect-oriented programming ::: (programming) (AOP) A style of programming that attempts to abstract out features common to many parts of the code beyond simple functional modules and thereby improve the quality of software.Mechanisms for defining and composing abstractions are essential elements of programming languages. The design style supported by the abstraction mechanisms of most current languages is one of breaking a system down into parameterised components that can be called upon to perform a function.But many systems have properties that don't necessarily align with the system's functional components, such as failure handling, persistence, communication, replication, coordination, memory management, or real-time constraints, and tend to cut across groups of functional components.While they can be thought about and analysed relatively separately from the basic functionality, programming them using current component-oriented languages tends to result in these aspects being spread throughout the code. The source code becomes a tangled mess of instructions for different purposes.This tangling phenomenon is at the heart of much needless complexity in existing software systems. A number of researchers have begun working on combine those separate descriptions into a final executable form. These approaches have been called aspect-oriented programming. . . . (1999-11-21)

attenuator model of attention: Treisman's proposal that, instead of selecting one channel and blocking the others, the filtering mechanism (a) selects one channel and passes it on for semantic analysis, and (b) allows the unattended channels through for processing but in weakened (attenuated) form.

At the same time, practically all antiquity adopted the geocentric point of view for public dissemination of their ideas. Secrecy may have been their reason; or they may have wished to represent the mechanism geocentrically for convenience of use, since they and their readers lived upon the earth and not upon the sun. The same secrecy is not necessary today because we no longer recognize the harmony of nature and the universal correspondences: we can be trusted with the key because we have mislaid the lock.

Attributed File System ::: (storage) (AtFS) The basis of the Shape_VC toolkit.Cooperative work within projects is supported by a status model controlling visibility of version objects, locking, and long transactions for information between individual tools. This mechanism is useful for building integrated environments from a set of unrelated tools.(2000-02-24)

Attributed File System "storage" (AtFS) The basis of the {Shape_VC} toolkit. Cooperative work within projects is supported by a status model controlling visibility of version objects, locking, and "long transactions" for synchronising concurrent updates. The concept of object attributes provides a basis for storing management information with versions and passing this information between individual tools. This mechanism is useful for building integrated environments from a set of unrelated tools. (2000-02-24)

Automatic stabiliser - A mechanism that decreases the size of fluctuations in aggregate expenditure.

backward chaining "algorithm" An {algorithm} for proving a {goal} by recursively breaking it down into sub-goals and trying to prove these until {facts} are reached. Facts are goals with no sub-goals which are therefore always true. Backward training is the program execution mechanism used by most {logic programming} language like {Prolog}. Opposite: {forward chaining}. (2004-01-26)

backward chaining ::: (algorithm) An algorithm for proving a goal by recursively breaking it down into sub-goals and trying to prove these until facts are reached. Facts are the program execution mechanism used by most logic programming language like Prolog.Opposite: forward chaining.(2004-01-26)

Convection Zone - A layer in a star in which convection currents are the main mechanism by which energy is transported outward. In the Sun, a convection zone extends from just below the photosphere to about seventy percent of the solar radius.


   Corona - The outermost layer of the solar atmosphere. The corona consists of a highly rarefied gas with a low density and a temperature greater than one million degrees


belief-desire-intention software model (BDI) ::: A software model developed for programming intelligent agents. Superficially characterized by the implementation of an agent's beliefs, desires and intentions, it actually uses these concepts to solve a particular problem in agent programming. In essence, it provides a mechanism for separating the activity of selecting a plan (from a plan library or an external planner application) from the execution of currently active plans. Consequently, BDI agents are able to balance the time spent on deliberating about plans (choosing what to do) and executing those plans (doing it). A third activity, creating the plans in the first place (planning), is not within the scope of the model, and is left to the system designer and programmer.

BETA Kristensen, Madsen "olmadsen@daimi.aau.dk", Moller-Pedersen & Nygaard, 1983. Object-oriented language with block structure, coroutines, concurrency, {strong typing}, part objects, separate objects and classless objects. Central feature is a single abstraction mechanism called "patterns", a generalisation of classes, providing instantiation and hierarchical inheritance for all objects including procedures and processes. Mjolner Informatics ApS, Aarhus, implementations for Mac, Sun, HP, Apollo. E-mail: "info@mjolner.dk". Mailing list: "usergroup@mjolner.dk". ["Object-Oriented Programming in the BETA Programming Language", Ole Lehrmann et al, A-W June 1993, ISBN 0-201-62430-3]. [{Jargon File}] (1995-10-31)

Bitcoin ::: is a digital currency created in 2009. It follows the ideas set out in a white paper by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, whose true identity has yet to be verified. Bitcoin offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms and is operated by a decentralized authority, unlike government-issued currencies. There are no physical bitcoins, only balances kept on a public ledger in the cloud, that – along with all Bitcoin transactions – is verified by a massive amount of computing power. Bitcoins are not issued or backed by any banks or governments, nor are individual bitcoins valuable as a commodity. Despite its not being legal tender, Bitcoin charts high on popularity, and has triggered the launch of other virtual currencies collectively referred to as Altcoins.

B. Lotze, Rudolph Hermann: (1817-1881) Empiricist in science, teleological idealist in philosophy, theist in religion, poet and artist at heart, Lotze conceded three spheres; Necessary truths, facts, and values. Mechanism holds sway in the field of natural science; it does not generate meaning but is subordinated to value and reason which evolved a specific plan for the world. Lotze's psycho-physically oriented medical psychology is an applied metaphysics in which the concept soul stands for the unity of experience. Science attempts the demonstration of a coherence in nature; being is that which is in relationship; "thing" is not a conglomeration of qualities but a unity achieved through law; mutual effect or influence is as little explicable as being: It is the monistic Absolute working upon itself. The ultimate, absolute substance, God, is the good and is personal, personality being the highest value, and the most valuable is also the most real. Lotze disclaimed the ability to know all answers: they rest with God. Unity of law, matter, force, and all aspects of being produce beauty, while aesthetic experience consists in Einfühlung. Main works: Metaphysik, 1841; Logik, 1842; Medezinische Psychologie, 1842; Gesch. der Aesthetik im Deutschland, 1868; Mikrokosmos, 3 vols., 1856-64 (Eng. tr. 1885); Logik 1874; Metaphysik, 1879 (Eng. tr. 1884). --K. F. L. Love: (in Max Scheler) Giving one's self to a "total being" (Gesamtwesen); it therefore discloses the essence of that being; for this reason love is, for Scheler, an aspect of phenomonelogical knowledge. -- P. A.

mechanism ::: an assembly of moving parts performing a complete functional motion, often being part of a large machine or likened to one; linkage.

mechanism design ::: A field in economics and game theory that takes an engineering approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics (markets, auctions, voting procedures) to networked-systems (internet interdomain routing, sponsored search auctions).

mechanism ::: n. --> The arrangement or relation of the parts of a machine; the parts of a machine, taken collectively; the arrangement or relation of the parts of anything as adapted to produce an effect; as, the mechanism of a watch; the mechanism of a sewing machine; the mechanism of a seed pod.
Mechanical operation or action.
An ideal machine; a combination of movable bodies constituting a machine, but considered only with regard to relative


mechanism ::: The theory that all natural phenomena can be explained by physical causes. It can be contrasted with vitalism, the philosophical theory that vital forces are active in living organisms, so that life cannot be explained solely by mechanism.

bolster ::: n. --> A long pillow or cushion, used to support the head of a person lying on a bed; -- generally laid under the pillows.
A pad, quilt, or anything used to hinder pressure, support any part of the body, or make a bandage sit easy upon a wounded part; a compress.
Anything arranged to act as a support, as in various forms of mechanism, etc.
A cushioned or a piece part of a saddle.


"But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mechanism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit. The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga*

“But in a higher than our present mental consciousness we find that this duality is only a phenomenal appearance. The highest and real truth of existence is the one Spirit, the supreme Soul, Purushottama, and it is the power of being of this Spirit which manifests itself in all that we experience as universe. This universal Nature is not a lifeless, inert or unconscious mechanism, but informed in all its movements by the universal Spirit. The mechanism of its process is only an outward appearance and the reality is the Spirit creating or manifesting its own being by its own power of being in all that is in Nature. Soul and Nature in us too are only a dual appearance of the one existence.” The Synthesis of Yoga

Categorical Abstract Machine Language "language" (Originally "CAML" - Categorical Abstract Machine Language) A version of {ML} by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel Mauny and others of {INRIA} and {ENS}. CAML is intermediate between {LCF ML} and {SML} [in what sense?]. It has {first-class} functions, {static type inference} with {polymorphic} types, user-defined {variant types} and {product types}, and {pattern matching}. It is built on a proprietary run-time system. The CAML V3.1 implementation added {lazy} and {mutable} data structures, a "{grammar}" mechanism for interfacing with the {Yacc} {parser generator}, {pretty-printing} tools, high-performance {arbitrary-precision} arithmetic, and a complete library. CAML V3 is often nicknamed "heavy CAML", because of its heavy memory and CPU requirements compared to {Caml Light}. in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new implementation called {Caml Light}, freeing the previous implementation from too many experimental high-level features, and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end. Following the addition of a {native-code} compiler and a powerful {module} system in 1995 and of the {object} and {class} layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to {Objective Caml}. ["The CAML Reference Manual", P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS, 1989]. (2003-04-12)

Categorical Abstract Machine Language ::: (language) (Originally CAML - Categorical Abstract Machine Language) A version of ML by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel polymorphic types, user-defined variant types and product types, and pattern matching. It is built on a proprietary run-time system.The CAML V3.1 implementation added lazy and mutable data structures, a grammar mechanism for interfacing with the Yacc parser generator, pretty-printing tools, is often nicknamed heavy CAML, because of its heavy memory and CPU requirements compared to Caml Light.in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new implementation called Caml Light, freeing the previous implementation from too many experimental high-level features, and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end.Following the addition of a native-code compiler and a powerful module system in 1995 and of the object and class layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to Objective Caml.[The CAML Reference Manual, P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS, 1989].(2003-04-12)

CFL ::: "Causal Feedback Loop". The mechanism through which consciousness came into being from non-experience, evolved in complexity and diverged in form, and filtered back to the cusp of non-experience to ensure its own evolution. This mirrors the evolution and lifecycle of the Universe and is likely intricately related to cosmology. Jason Miller coined this abbrevation from the concept of a "Creation Feedback Loop". I have mistakenly called it a "Causal Feedback Loop", but honestly prefer that term over the original as it highlights the importance of causality in the creation of reality.

Charles Babbage "person" The British inventor known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his {Analytical Engine}. His previous {Difference Engine} was a special purpose device intended for the production of mathematical tables. Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he published a table of {logarithms} from 1 to 108000. In 1828 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London. Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking. [Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994]. Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of {abstraction}, fell into a trap familiar to {toolsmiths} since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord Moulton: "One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my {Analytical Machine}, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.'" "After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart." "When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to any useful purpose." [Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial volume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage "Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994), p. 34]. Compare: {uninteresting}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}. (1996-02-22)

chime ::: n. --> See Chine, n., 3.
The harmonious sound of bells, or of musical instruments.
A set of bells musically tuned to each other; specif., in the pl., the music performed on such a set of bells by hand, or produced by mechanism to accompany the striking of the hours or their divisions.
Pleasing correspondence of proportion, relation, or sound.
To sound in harmonious accord, as bells.


Chi: The moving power; the subtle beginning of motion; the great Scheme (or germs ?) from which all things came and to which all things return (Chuang Tzu, d. c 295 B.C.); a mechanical arrangement according to which heavenly and earthly bodies revolve (Taoist mechanism, especially Lieh Tzu, third century A.D.); man's pure nature (as in Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.). -- W.T.C.

Classless Inter-Domain Routing "networking" (CIDR) /sid*r/ A technique that summarises a block of {Internet addresses} in a {routing table} as an address in {dotted decimal notation} followed by a {forward slash} and a two-digit decimal number giving the number of leading one bits in the subnet mask. For example, 123.123.123.0/24 specifies a subnet mask of 11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 (binary), implying the block of addresses 123.123.123.0 through 123.123.123.255. CIDR is "classless" because it is not limited to the subnet masks specified by {Internet address} classes A, B and C. According to {RFC 1519}, CIDR was implemented to distribute Internet address space more efficiently and to provide a mechanism for {IP route aggregation}. This in turn reduces the number of entries in IP routing tables, enabling faster, more efficient routing, e.g. using {routing} {protocols} such as {OSPF}. CIDR is supported by {BGP4}. See also {RFC 1467}, {RFC 1518}, {RFC 1520}. (2006-01-26)

Classless Inter-Domain Routing ::: (networking) (CIDR) /sid*r/ A technique that summarises a block of Internet addresses in a routing table as an address in dotted decimal notation subnet mask of 11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 (binary), implying the block of addresses 123.123.123.0 through 123.123.123.255.CIDR is classless because it is not limited to the subnet masks specified by Internet address classes A, B and C.According to RFC 1519, CIDR was implemented to distribute Internet address space more efficiently and to provide a mechanism for IP route aggregation. This in efficient routing, e.g. using routing protocols such as OSPF. CIDR is supported by BGP4.See also RFC 1467, RFC 1518, RFC 1520.(2006-01-26)

CLP(R) ::: Constraint Logic Programming (Real).A constraint logic programming language with real arithmetic constraints developed by Joxan Jaffar of IBM TJWRC and S. Michaylov of Monash University in 1986.The implementation contains a byte-code compiler and a built-in constraint solver which deals with linear arithmetic and contains a mechanism for delaying language. There are also powerful facilities for meta programming with constraints.Significant CLP(R) applications have been published in diverse areas such as molecular biology, finance and physical modelling.Version 1.2 for Unix, MS-DOS and OS/2 is available from the authors. It is free for academic and research purposes.E-mail: Roland Yap .[The CLP(R) Language and System, J. Jaffar et al, IBM RR RC16292 (

CLP(R) "language" Constraint Logic Programming (Real) A {constraint logic programming} language with {real} arithmetic {constraints} developed by Joxan Jaffar "joxan@watson.ibm.com" of {IBM} {TJWRC} and S. Michaylov of {Monash University} in 1986. The implementation contains a {byte-code compiler} and a built-in {constraint} solver which deals with {linear arithmetic} and contains a mechanism for delaying {nonlinear} constraints until they become linear. Since CLP(R) is a superset of {PROLOG}, the system is also usable as a general-purpose {logic programming} language. There are also powerful facilities for {meta programming} with constraints. Significant CLP(R) applications have been published in diverse areas such as molecular biology, finance and physical modelling. Version 1.2 for {Unix}, {MS-DOS} and {OS/2} is available from the authors. It is free for academic and research purposes. E-mail: Roland Yap "roland@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au". ["The CLP(R) Language and System", J. Jaffar et al, IBM RR RC16292 (

Columbia AppleTalk Package ::: (CAP) An implementation of Apple Computer's AppleTalk protocols for Unix 4.2BSD and its derivatives, from Columbia University. There are two different LAP delivery mechanisms for: IPTalk and Ethertalk (possibly using UAB).CAP supports the following AppleTalk protocols: AppleTalk Transaction Protocol (ATP), Name Binding Protocol (NBP), Printer Access Protocol (PAP), AppleTalk software makes it impossible to provide full DDP service. Only the Get Zone List ATP ZIP command is implemented for ZIP. (1995-01-10)

Columbia AppleTalk Package "networking" (CAP) An implementation of {Apple Computer}'s {AppleTalk} {protocols} for {Unix} {4.2BSD} and its derivatives, from {Columbia University}. There are two different {LAP} delivery mechanisms for: {IPTalk} and {Ethertalk} (possibly using {UAB}). CAP supports the following {AppleTalk} {protocols}: {AppleTalk Transaction Protocol} (ATP), {Name Binding Protocol} (NBP), {Printer Access Protocol} (PAP), {AppleTalk Session Protocol} (ASP), {AppleTalk Filing Protocol} (AFP) client side. In addition, the {Datagram Delivery Protocol} (DDP) and {Zone Information Protocol} (ZIP) are partially available. The structure of the {Internet Appletalk Bridge} software makes it impossible to provide full DDP service. Only the Get Zone List ATP ZIP command is implemented for ZIP. (1995-01-10)

condom ::: 1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the write protect tab, the shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk - and can even fatally frustrate insertion.2. The protective cladding on a light pipe.3. keyboard condom: A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust and programming fluid without impeding typing.4. elephant condom: the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect hardware in transit.[Jargon File] (1995-03-14)

condom "jargon" 1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies {3.5-inch microfloppy diskettes}. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the {write protect tab}, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the practice of {SEX} but has also been shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk - and can even fatally frustrate insertion. 2. The protective cladding on a {light pipe}. 3. "keyboard condom": A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust and {programming fluid} without impeding typing. 4. "elephant condom": the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect hardware in transit. [{Jargon File}] (1995-03-14)

critical section ::: A non-re-entrant piece of code that can only be executed by one process at a time. It will usually terminate in bounded time and a process will only have to wait a bounded time to enter it. Some synchronisation mechanism is required at the entry and exit of the critical section to ensure exclusive use.

critical section A non-{re-entrant} piece of code that can only be executed by one process at a time. It will usually terminate in bounded time and a process will only have to wait a bounded time to enter it. Some synchronisation mechanism is required at the entry and exit of the critical section to ensure exclusive use.

Cryptesthesia: This expression, literally meaning hidden sensitivity, was coined by Professor Richert to serve as a collective term for clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychometry, telepathy, dowsing, premonitions, and in general for perception, of the mechanism of which science is ignorant. The cryptesthesia theory denies and intends to disprove the spiritistic explanations of these phenomena. (Cf. extrasensory perception.)

daisywheel printer "printer" A kind of {impact printer} where the characters are arranged on the ends of the spokes of a wheel (resembling the petals on a daisy). The wheel (usually made of plastic) is rotated to select the character to print and then an electrically operated hammer mechanism bends the selected spoke forward slightly, sandwiching an ink ribbon between the character and the paper, as in a typewriter. One advantage of this arrangement over that of a typewriter is that different wheels may be inserted to produce different {typefaces}. (1998-04-28)

daisywheel printer ::: (printer) A kind of impact printer where the characters are arranged on the ends of the spokes of a wheel (resembling the petals on a daisy).The wheel (usually made of plastic) is rotated to select the character to print and then an electrically operated hammer mechanism bends the selected spoke forward slightly, sandwiching an ink ribbon between the character and the paper, as in a typewriter.One advantage of this arrangement over that of a typewriter is that different wheels may be inserted to produce different typefaces. (1998-04-28)

daiva ::: Fate, the influence of the Power or powers other than the human factor, other than the visible mechanism of Nature. ::: daivam [nominative]

damper ::: n. --> That which damps or checks; as: (a) A valve or movable plate in the flue or other part of a stove, furnace, etc., used to check or regulate the draught of air. (b) A contrivance, as in a pianoforte, to deaden vibrations; or, as in other pieces of mechanism, to check some action at a particular time.

Darwin 1. "operating system" An {operating system} based on the {FreeBSD} version of {Unix}, running on top of a {microkernel} ({Mach} 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers advanced networking, services such as the {Apache} {web server}, and support for both {Macintosh} and Unix {file systems}. Darwin was originally released in March 1999. It currently runs on {PowerPC} based Macintosh computers, and, in October 2000, was being ported to {Intel} processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community. 2. "programming, tool" A general purpose structuring tool of use in building complex {distributed systems} from diverse components and diverse component interaction mechanisms. Darwin is being developed by the Distributed Software Engineering Section of the Department of Computing at {Imperial College}. It is in essence a {declarative} binding language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with orthogonally to system structuring. The language allows the specification of both static structures and dynamic structures which evolve during execution. The central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are formed by manipulating references to services. The {operational semantics} of Darwin is described in terms of the {Pi-calculus}, {Milner}'s calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's {operational semantics}. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour. {Distributed Software Engineering Section (http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/)}. {Darwin publications (http://scorch.doc.ic.ac.uk/dse-papers/darwin/)}. E-mail: Jeff Magee "jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk", Naranker Dulay "nd@doc.ic.ac.uk". 3. {Core War}. (2003-08-08)

Data Address Generator "architecture" (DAG) The mechanism which generates temporary memory addresses for data that is transferred between memory and {registers} in a {Digital Signal Processor}. Certain {DSP} architectures incorporate more than one DAG to simplify the programming needed to move blocks of data between buffers. For instance, certain {Fast Fourier Transform} {algorithms} requiring {bit reversing}, can use the DAG for that purpose, or they can use two DAGS, one for Program Memory Data (PMD), and the other for Data Memory Data (DMD). (1997-08-12)

Data Address Generator ::: (architecture) (DAG) The mechanism which generates temporary memory addresses for data that is transferred between memory and registers in a Digital Signal Processor.Certain DSP architectures incorporate more than one DAG to simplify the programming needed to move blocks of data between buffers.For instance, certain Fast Fourier Transform algorithms requiring bit reversing, can use the DAG for that purpose, or they can use two DAGS, one for Program Memory Data (PMD), and the other for Data Memory Data (DMD). (1997-08-12)

defence mechanism: psychological strategies as part of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, that are used to distort or deny reality, in order to cope with anxiety and/or a situation which an individual feels is difficult to cope with.

Defenses (Defense Mechanisms) ::: Psychological forces which prevent undesirable or inappropriate impulses from entering consciousness (e.g., forgetting responsibilities that we really didn&

demand paging ::: (memory management) A kind of virtual memory where a page of memory will be paged in if an attempt is made to access it and it is not already present in a failed memory access or must be suspended while some other mechanism is used to perform the paging.Paging in a page may first require some other page to be moved from main memory to disk (paged out) to make room. If this page has not been modified since it replacement algorithm or policy is used to select the page to be paged out, often this is the least recently used (LRU) algorithm.Prepaging is generally more efficient than demand paging. (1998-04-24)

demand paging "memory management" A kind of {virtual memory} where a {page} of memory will be {paged in} if an attempt is made to access it and it is not already present in main memory. This normally involves a {memory management unit} which looks up the {virtual address} in a {page map} to see if it is paged in. If it is not then the {operating system} will page it in, update the page map and restart the failed access. This implies that the processor must be able to recover from and restart a failed memory access or must be suspended while some other mechanism is used to perform the paging. Paging in a page may first require some other page to be moved from main memory to disk ("paged out") to make room. If this page has not been modified since it was paged in, it can simply be reused without writing it back to disk. This is determined from the "modified" or "dirty" flag bit in the {page map}. A {replacement algorithm} or policy is used to select the page to be paged out, often this is the {least recently used} (LRU) {algorithm}. {Prepaging} is generally more efficient than demand paging. (1998-04-24)

denial: a defence mechanism , whereby an individual may denies or rejects some aspect of reality.

differential ::: a. --> Relating to or indicating a difference; creating a difference; discriminating; special; as, differential characteristics; differential duties; a differential rate.
Of or pertaining to a differential, or to differentials.
Relating to differences of motion or leverage; producing effects by such differences; said of mechanism.


Digital Equipment Computer Users Society "body" (DECUS) A world-wide organisation of {Information Technology} professionals interested in the products, services, and technologies of {Digital Equipment Corporation} and related vendors. Membership in the US chapter is free and provides participants with the means to enhance their professional development, forums for technical training, mechanisms for obtaining up-to-date information, advocacy programs and opportunities for informal disclosure and interaction with professional colleagues of like interest. {DECUS Home (http://www.decus.org/)}. (2014-08-26)

Discharge ::: Flow of surface water in a stream or canal or the outflow of groundwater from a flowing artesian well, ditch, or spring. Can also apply to discharge of liquid effluent from a facility or of chemical emissions into the air through designated venting mechanisms.



disk drive ::: (hardware, storage) (Or hard disk drive, hard drive, floppy disk drive, floppy drive) A peripheral device that reads and writes hard disks or a servo mechanism. It also contains the electronics to amplify the signals from the heads to normal digital logic levels and vice versa.In order for a disk drive to start to read or write a given location a read/write head must be positioned radially over the right track and rotationally over the start of the right sector.Radial motion is known as seeking and it is this which causes most of the intermittent noise heard during disk activity. There is usually one head for accessible with the heads in a given radial position are known as a cylinder. The seek time is the time taken to seek to a different cylinder.The disk is constantly rotating (except for some floppy disk drives where the motor is switched off between accesses to reduce wear and power consumption) so will be on average half a revolution but some big drives have multiple sets of heads spaced at equal angles around the disk.If seeking and rotation are independent, access time is seek time + rotational latency. When accessing multiple tracks sequentially, data is sometimes arranged so that by the time the seek from one track to the next has finished, the disk has rotated just enough to begin accessing the next track.See also sector interleave.The disks may be removable disks; floppy disks always are, removable hard disks were common on mainframes and minicomputers but less so on microcomputers until the mid 1990s(?) with products like the Zip Drive.A CD-ROM drive is not usually referred to as a disk drive.Two common interfaces for disk drives (and other devices) are SCSI and IDE. ST506 used to be common in microcomputers (in the 1980s?). (1997-04-15)

disk drive "hardware, storage" (Or "hard disk drive", "hard drive", "floppy disk drive", "floppy drive") A {peripheral} device that reads and writes {hard disks} or {floppy disks}. The drive contains a motor to rotate the disk at a constant rate and one or more read/write heads which are positioned over the desired {track} by a servo mechanism. It also contains the electronics to amplify the signals from the heads to normal digital logic levels and vice versa. In order for a disk drive to start to read or write a given location a read/write head must be positioned radially over the right track and rotationally over the start of the right sector. Radial motion is known as "{seek}ing" and it is this which causes most of the intermittent noise heard during disk activity. There is usually one head for each disk surface and all heads move together. The set of locations which are accessible with the heads in a given radial position are known as a "{cylinder}". The "{seek time}" is the time taken to seek to a different cylinder. The disk is constantly rotating (except for some {floppy disk} drives where the motor is switched off between accesses to reduce wear and power consumption) so positioning the heads over the right sector is simply a matter of waiting until it arrives under the head. With a single set of heads this "{rotational latency}" will be on average half a revolution but some big drives have multiple sets of heads spaced at equal angles around the disk. If seeking and rotation are independent, access time is seek time + rotational latency. When accessing multiple tracks sequentially, data is sometimes arranged so that by the time the seek from one track to the next has finished, the disk has rotated just enough to begin accessing the next track. See also {sector interleave}. Early disk drives had a capacity of a few {megabytes} and were housed inside a separate cabinet the size of a washing machine. Over a few decades they shrunk to fit a {terabyte} or more in a box the size of a paperback book. The disks may be {removable disks}; floppy disks always are, removable hard disks were common on {mainframes} and {minicomputers} but less so on {microcomputers} until the mid 1990s(?) with products like the {Zip Drive}. A {CD-ROM} drive is not usually referred to as a disk drive. Two common interfaces for disk drives (and other devices) are {SCSI} and {IDE}. {ST-506} used to be common in microcomputers (in the 1980s?). (1997-04-15)

Divine Will ::: The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother, one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience. But this vision of what is to be and th
   refore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 218


Double_Spending ::: The risk that a digital currency can be spent twice. Double-spending is a potential problem unique to digital currencies because digital information can be reproduced relatively easily. Physical currencies do not have this issue because they cannot be easily replicated, and the parties involved in a transaction can immediately verify the bona fides of the physical currency. With digital currency, there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original. This was a concern initially with Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency or "cryptocurrency," since it is a decentralized currency with no central agency to verify that it is spent only once. However, Bitcoin has a mechanism based on transaction logs to verify the authenticity of each transaction and prevent double-counting.

dynamic binding ::: The property of object-oriented programming languages where the code executed to perform a given operation is determined at run time from the class of the message, without changing (or recompiling) the code which sends the message. An class may be created that can receive any set of existing messages.C++ implements dynamic binding using virtual member functions.One important reason for having dynamic binding is that it provides a mechanism for selecting between alternatives which is arguably more robust than explicit don't have incomplete conditionals and broken patterns scattered all over the program.See overloading.

dynamic binding The property of {object-oriented programming} languages where the code executed to perform a given operation is determined at {run time} from the {class} of the operand(s) (the receiver of the message). There may be several different classes of objects which can receive a given message. An expression may denote an object which may have more than one possible class and that class can only be determined at run time. New classes may be created that can receive a particular message, without changing (or recompiling) the code which sends the message. An class may be created that can receive any set of existing messages. {C++} implements dynamic binding using "{virtual member functions}". One important reason for having dynamic binding is that it provides a mechanism for selecting between alternatives which is arguably more robust than explicit selection by conditionals or {pattern matching}. When a new {subclass} is added, or an existing subclass changes, the necessary modifications are localised: you don't have incomplete conditionals and broken patterns scattered all over the program. See {overloading}.

dynamism ::: A cosmological framework developed by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). The idea behind Dynamism in metaphysical cosmology is that the material world can be explained in terms of active, point-like forces, with no extension but with action at a distance. Dynamism describes that which exists as simple elements, or for Leibniz, Monads, and groups of elements that have only the essence of forces. It was developed as a reaction against the passive view of matter in philosophical mechanism.

Dynamism: (Gr. dynamis, power) A term applied to a philosophical system which, in contrast to philosophy of mechanism (q.v.), adopts force rather than mass or motion as its basic explanatory concept. In this sense the Leibnizian philosophy is dynamism in contrast to the mechanism of Descartes' physics. -- L.W.

ECU (European Currency Unit) - The predecessor to the euro a weighted average of EU currencies. It was used as a reserve currency and for the operation of the exchange rate mechanism (ERM).

Efficient market theory – The theory that market mechanism via prices does reflect the expectations and knowledge of all the different investors. Investors who subscribe to this theory believe it is unlikely the market can be predicted by using technical analysis.

Ego Defense Mechanisms ::: See Defenses

ELLIS ::: EuLisp LInda System. An object-oriented Linda system written for EuLisp. Using Object-Oriented Mechanisms to Describe Linda, P. Broadbery et al, in Linda-Like Systems and Their Implementation, G. Wilson ed, U Edinburgh TR 91-13, 1991.

ELLIS EuLisp LInda System. An object-oriented Linda system written for EuLisp. "Using Object-Oriented Mechanisms to Describe Linda", P. Broadbery "pab@maths.bath.ac.uk" et al, in Linda-Like Systems and Their Implementation, G. Wilson ed, U Edinburgh TR 91-13, 1991.

ELSIE ::: (language) A distributed version of ELLIS.[Using Object-Oriented Mechanisms to Describe Linda, P. Broadbery et al, in Linda-Like Systems and Their Implementation, G. Wilson ed, U Edinburgh TR 91-13, 1991]. (1995-11-16)

ELSIE "language" A distributed version of {ELLIS}. ["Using Object-Oriented Mechanisms to Describe Linda", P. Broadbery "pab@maths.bath.ac.uk" et al, in "Linda-Like Systems and Their Implementati"on, G. Wilson ed, U Edinburgh TR 91-13, 1991]. (1995-11-16)

embodied cognitive science ::: An interdisciplinary field of research, the aim of which is to explain the mechanisms underlying intelligent behavior. It comprises three main methodologies: 1) the modeling of psychological and biological systems in a holistic manner that considers the mind and body as a single entity, 2) the formation of a common set of general principles of intelligent behavior, and 3) the experimental use of robotic agents in controlled environments.

endogenous pacemakers: inherited mechanisms important for the regulation of biological rhythms, particularly in the absence of external cues. The principal endogenous pacemaker in mammals is a small group of cells in the hypothalamus, known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which regulates the production of melatonin in the pineal gland.

Epilepsy A disorder recognized in antiquity as an obsession or possession by an elementary which ousts temporarily the astral-vital soul from the physical body and for the time being assumes control of the bodily mechanism. The mind thereby loses direct connection with its physical vehicle and unconsciousness results. The theosophical teaching about elementaries — astral entities whose intense desires draw them to neurotic, mediumistic, and negatively sensitive natures — gives the key to the injurious, purposeless explosions of force in the person who has been dissociated from his body and brain. Of the various bizarre sensations which usher in many typical attacks, one of the most common is the sudden look of fear or terror with which the sufferer stares fixedly as if held in thrall by some gruesome astral sight. The frequent hallucinations are, as a rule, of the same quality which the alcoholic senses in delirium tremens. Blavatsky says that epileptic fits “are the first and strongest symptoms of genuine mediumship” (Key 195).

Equilibrium - A situation in which the plans of buyers and sellers exactly coincide so that there is neither excess supply nor excess demand. Equilibrium is the point where conflicting interests are balanced. Only at this point is the amount that demanders are willing to purchase the same as the amount that suppliers are willing to supply. It is a point that will be automatically reached in a free market through the operation of the price mechanism.

ERM (the exchange rate mechanism) - A system of semi-fixed exchange rates used by most of the EU countries prior to adoption of the euro. Members' currencies were allowed to fluctuate against each other only within agreed bands. Collectively they floated against all other currencies.

Eucken, Rudolf: (1846-1926) Being a writer of wide popularity, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908, Eucken defends a spiritualistic-idealistic metaphysics against materialistic naturalism, positivism and mechanism. Spiritual life, not being an oppositionless experience, is a struggle, a self-asserting action by resistance, a matter of great alternatives, either-ors between the natural and the spiritual, a matter of vital choice. Thus all significant oppositions are, within spiritual life itself, at once created and overcome. Immanence and transcendence, personalism and absolutism are the two native spiritual oppositions that agitate Eucken's system. Reconciliation between the vital dualities therefore depends not on mere intellectual insight, but on personal effort, courageous, heroic, militant and devoted action. He handles the basic oppositions of experience in harmony with the activist tenor of liberal Protestantism. Eucken sought to replace the prevailing intellectualistic idealism by an activistic idealism, founded on a comprehensive and historical consideration of culture at large. He sought to interpret the spiritual content of historical movements. He conceived of historical facts as being so many systematized wholes of life, for which he coined the term syntagma. His distinctive historical method consists of the reductive and the noological aspects. The former considers the parts directly in relation to an inward whole. The latter is an inner dialectic and immanent criticism of the inward principles of great minds, embracing the cosmologicnl and psychological ways of philosophical construction and transcending by the concept of spiritual life the opposition of the world and the individual soul. Preaching the need of a cultural renewal, not a few of his popularized ideas found their more articulated form in the philosophical sociology of his most eminent pupil, Max Scheler, in the cultural psychology of both Spranger and Spengler. His philosophy is essentially a call to arms against the deadening influences of modern life. -- H.H.

evolutionary algorithm (EA) ::: A subset of evolutionary computation,[166] a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduction, mutation, recombination, and selection. Candidate solutions to the optimization problem play the role of individuals in a population, and the fitness function determines the quality of the solutions (see also loss function). Evolution of the population then takes place after the repeated application of the above operators.

exception handler ::: Special code which is called when an exception occurs during the execution of a program. If the programmer does not provide a handler for a given exception, a built-in system exception handler will usually be called resulting in abortion of the program run and some kind of error indication being returned to the user.Examples of exception handler mechanisms are Unix's signal calls and Lisp's catch and throw. (1994-10-31)

exception handler Special code which is called when an {exception} occurs during the execution of a program. If the programmer does not provide a handler for a given exception, a built-in system exception handler will usually be called resulting in abortion of the program run and some kind of error indication being returned to the user. Examples of exception handler mechanisms are {Unix}'s signal calls and {Lisp}'s {catch} and {throw}. (1994-10-31)

Expert Judgement Models "programming" A method of software estimation that is based on consultation with one or more experts that have experience with similar projects. An expert-consensus mechanism such as the {Delphi Technique} may be used to produce the estimate. (1996-05-29)

Expert Judgement Models ::: (programming) A method of software estimation that is based on consultation with one or more experts that have experience with similar projects. An expert-consensus mechanism such as the Delphi Technique may be used to produce the estimate. (1996-05-29)

federation "security" The establishment of some or all of business agreements, {cryptographic} trust and user identifiers or attributes across security and policy domains to enable more seamless business interaction. As {web services} promise to enable integration between business partners through {loose coupling} at the application and messaging layer, federation does so at the identity management layer, insulating each domain from the details of the others' authentication and authorization. Key to this loose coupling at the identity management layer are standardized mechanisms and formats for the communication of identity information between the domains. {SAML} is one such standard. (2011-05-12)

feedback control "electronics" A control system which monitors its effect on the system it is controlling and modifies its output accordingly. For example, a thermostat has two inputs: the desired temperature and the current temperature (the latter is the feedback). The output of the thermostat changes so as to try to equalise the two inputs. Computer {disk drives} use feedback control to position the read/write heads accurately on a recording track. Complex systems such as the human body contain many feedback systems that interact with each other; the homeostasis mechanisms that control body temperature and acidity are good examples. (1996-01-02)

feedback control ::: (electronics) A control system which monitors its effect on the system it is controlling and modifies its output accordingly. For example, a thermostat is the feedback). The output of the thermostat changes so as to try to equalise the two inputs.Computer disk drives use feedback control to position the read/write heads accurately on a recording track. Complex systems such as the human body contain many feedback systems that interact with each other; the homeostasis mechanisms that control body temperature and acidity are good examples. (1996-01-02)

fence 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished ({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items), used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a "sentinel"). The NUL (ASCII 0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence. {Hex} FF is also (though slightly less frequently) used this way. See {zigamorph}. 2. An extra data value inserted in an array or other data structure in order to allow some normal test on the array's contents also to function as a termination test. For example, a highly optimised routine for finding a value in an array might artificially place a copy of the value to be searched for after the last slot of the array, thus allowing the main search loop to search for the value without having to check at each pass whether the end of the array had been reached. 3. [among users of optimising compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimisations. Used when explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill. Typically a hack: "I call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the optimiser's register-colouring info" can be expressed by the shorter "That's a fence procedure". [{Jargon File}] (1999-01-08)

firehose syndrome "networking, jargon" An absence, failure or inadequacy of flow control mechanisms causing the sender to overwhelm the receiver. The implication is that, like trying to drink from a firehose, the consequenses are worse than just loss of data, e.g. the receiver may {crash}. See {ping-flood}. [{Jargon File}] (2007-03-12)

flat thunk ::: (programming) A software mechanism that allows a Win32 application to load and call a 16-bit DLL, or a 16-bit application to load and call a Win32 DLL.See also generic thunk, universal thunk. (1999-04-05)

flat thunk "programming" A software mechanism that allows a {Win32} application to load and call a 16-bit {DLL}, or a 16-bit application to load and call a Win32 DLL. See also {generic thunk}, {universal thunk}. (1999-04-05)

floptical ::: (hardware, storage) (From floppy disk and optical) A floppy disk which uses an optical tracking mechanism to improve the positioning accuracy of an ordinary magnetic head, thereby allowing more tracks and greater density. . (1995-03-15)

floptical "hardware, storage" (From "floppy disk" and "optical") A {floppy disk} which uses an optical tracking mechanism to improve the positioning accuracy of an ordinary magnetic head, thereby allowing more tracks and greater density. {Storage media FAQ (http://cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/arch-storage/part1/faq.html)}. (1995-03-15)

fork "operating system" A {Unix} {system call} used by a {process} (the "parent") to make a copy (the "child") of itself. The child process is identical to the parent except it has a different {process identifier} and a zero return value from the fork call. It is assumed to have used no resources. A fork followed by an {exec} can be used to start a different process but this can be inefficient and some later Unix variants provide {vfork} as an alternative mechanism for this. See also {fork bomb}. (1996-12-08)

fork ::: (operating system) A Unix system call used by a process (the parent) to make a copy (the child) of itself. The child process is identical to the parent except it has a different process identifier and a zero return value from the fork call. It is assumed to have used no resources.A fork followed by an exec can be used to start a different process but this can be inefficient and some later Unix variants provide vfork as an alternative mechanism for this.See also fork bomb. (1996-12-08)

Freud (1856-1939): the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, emphasised the importance of the unconscious mind, childhood experiences and repressed urges. His theory of psychosexual development outlines five stages; oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital, according to the different objects fixated upon at each specific stage. Freud also focused on the structure and development of personality; comprised of three parts - the id, ego and superego. Conflicts between the id and superego are dealt with by the ego that utilizes ?a target="_parent" href="https://www.itseducation.asia/psychology/d.htm

Freudianism ::: The beliefs and practice of psychoanalysis as devised by Sigmund Freud; particularly, the mechanism of psychological repression; the situation of sexual desire as central to the development of the persona; and the efficacy of the "talking cure" or psychoanalytic technique.[13][14]

friction feed "printer" A method some {printers} and {plotters} use to move paper by rotating one or both of a pair of spring-loaded rubber-coated rollers with the paper sandwiched between them. Friction feed printers are notorious for slipping when the rollers wear out, but can take standard typing paper. For printers with a {sheet feeder}, friction feed is more appropriate than {sprocket feed} which requires the holes in the paper to engage with the sprockets of the feed mechanism. (1997-07-09)

friction feed ::: (printer) A method some printers and plotters use to move paper by rotating one or both of a pair of spring-loaded rubber-coated rollers with the paper sandwiched between them.Friction feed printers are notorious for slipping when the rollers wear out, but can take standard typing paper.For printers with a sheet feeder, friction feed is more appropriate than sprocket feed which requires the holes in the paper to engage with the sprockets of the feed mechanism. (1997-07-09)

functional database "database, language" A {database} which uses a {functional language} as its {query language}. Databases would seem to be an inappropriate application for functional languages since, a {purely functional language} would have to return a new copy of the entire database every time (part of) it was updated. To be practically {scalable}, the update mechanism must clearly be {destructive} rather than functional; however it is quite feasible for the {query language} to be purely functional so long as the database is considered as an argument. One approach to the update problem would use a {monad} to encapsulate database access and ensure it was {single threaded}. Alternative approaches have been suggested by Trinder, who suggests non-destructive updating with shared data structures, and Sutton who uses a variant of a Phil Wadler's {linear type} system. There are two main classes of functional database languages. The first is based upon {Backus}' {FP} language, of which {FQL} is probably the best known example. {Adaplan} is a more recent language which falls into this category. More recently, people have been working on languages which are syntactically very similar to modern {functional programming languages}, but which also provide all of the features of a database language, e.g. bulk data structures which can be incrementally updated, type systems which can be incrementally updated, and all data persisting in a database. Examples are {PFL} [Poulovassilis&Small, VLDB-91], and {Machiavelli} [Ohori et al, ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1998]. {Query optimisation} is very important for database languages in general and the {referential transparency} of functional languages allows optimisations which would be harder to verify in presence of {side-effects}. [Trinder, P., "Referentially transparent database languages", 1989 Glasgow Workshop on Functional programming] [Breazu-Tannen et al., DBPL-91]. [Poulovassilis, VLDB-94]. (1995-05-09)

ganying. (J. kanno; K. kamŭng 感應). In Chinese, "sympathetic resonance," or "stimulus and response," a seminal concept in traditional Chinese philosophy, which is appropriated in early Chinese Buddhism to explain the Buddhist concepts of action (KARMAN) and grace (i.e., the "response" of a buddha or BODHISATTVA to a supplicant's invocation, or "stimulus"). Ganying is a mode of seemingly spontaneous (although not "uncaused") response that occurs naturally in a universe conceived holistically in terms of pattern or "principle" (LI) and interdependent order. The notion itself is deceptively simple: objects belonging to the same category or class are conceived as resonating spontaneously with each other, just as would two identically tuned strings on a pair of zithers. The notion of resonance was used in traditional Chinese philosophy to explain or rationalize the mechanism behind the elaborate system of correlated categories generally known as five-phase (wuxing) thought-viz., the primary elements of metal, wood, water, fire, and soil. According to early Chinese cosmology, the underlying principles and patterns of the universe seemingly give rise to, or resonate spontaneously with, correlative manifestations in the physical world. The Chinese conception of the universe as an interconnected harmonious whole finds expression in theories concerning the cyclic progression of the five phases and yin (dark) and yang (light), as well as in elaborate prescriptions pertaining to the ritual life of the court. The universe, according to this view, is in a state of continual motion and flux. The patterns of change are the result of the cyclic interactions between the five phases and the forces (or vital energies, C. qi) of yin and yang, which tend naturally in the direction of rhythmic balance and harmony. Humans do not stand apart from the natural universe but rather constitute a fundamental and integral part of this whole. Early Buddhist thinkers in China adapted the mechanism of sympathetic resonance to explain in Chinese terms how an action (karman) performed in one time period could evoke a corresponding response, or fruition (VIPĀKA), in another. In addition, sympathetic resonance was used by early Chinese Buddhist thinkers to make sense of the notion of grace. In this later sense, sentient beings' faith (sRADDHĀ) and/or roots of virtue (KUsALAMuLA) would invoke a "sympathetic response" in the minds of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, which prompts them to respond accordingly with salvific grace. In the PURE LAND traditions, sentient beings' recitation of the name of AMITĀBHA (see NIANFO) creates a sympathetic response in the mind of that buddha, which prompts him in turn to bring them to his pure land, where they may become enlightened. The rubric of ganying is just as prevalent in popular religious tracts in China, where it refers to the principle of moral retribution-the belief that one's good and evil deeds will result in corresponding rewards and punishments. While the Chinese notion of moral retribution (bao) meted out in this life or the next was indebted to Buddhist notions of karman and rebirth, in the premodern period, such retribution emerged as a fundamental principle of Chinese popular religious belief and practice, irrespective of one's specific religious affiliation. This doctrine was propagated through innumerable tales of miraculous retribution-such as "numinous attestation" (lingyan), "responsive attestation" (yingyan), or "numinous response" (lingying), and so on-that "attested" (yan) to the reality of the "numinous" or "supernatural" (ling) and the inevitability of divine justice.

general adaptation syndrome (GAS): a model, proposed by Hans Selye, depicting physiological mechanisms that occur in response to a stressor over an extended period of time. There are three stages: (a) alarm stage which activates an arousal response (e.g. to fight or flee); (b) resistance stage when body is attempts to cope with the stressor; (c) exhaustion stage takes place if the stressor continues over a long period of time, leading to physical symptoms such as stomach ulcers.

Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface ::: (security, programming) (GSS-API) An application level interface (API) to system security services. It provides a generic interface to services which may be provided by a variety of different security mechanisms. Vanilla GSS-API supports security contexts between two entities (known as principals).GSS-API is a draft internet standard which is being developed in the Common Authentication Technology Working Group (cat-wg) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).Initial specifications for GSS-API appeared in RFC 1508 and RFC 1509. Subsequent revisions appeared in several draft standards documents. . (1996-05-19)

Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface "security, programming" (GSS-API) An application level interface ({API}) to system security services. It provides a generic interface to services which may be provided by a variety of different security mechanisms. {Vanilla} GSS-API supports {security contexts} between two entities (known as "principals"). GSS-API is a draft internet standard which is being developed in the {Common Authentication Technology Working Group} (cat-wg) of the {Internet Engineering Task Force} (IETF). Initial specifications for GSS-API appeared in {RFC 1508} and {RFC 1509}. Subsequent revisions appeared in several draft standards documents. {(http://dstc.qut.edu.au/~barton/work/project.html)}. (1996-05-19)

generic thunk ::: (programming) A software mechanism that allows a 16-bit Windows application to load and call a Win32 DLL under Windows NT and Windows 95.See also flat thunk, universal thunk. (1999-04-05)

generic thunk "programming" A software mechanism that allows a 16-bit {Windows} application to load and call a {Win32} {DLL} under {Windows NT} and {Windows 95}. See also {flat thunk}, {universal thunk}. (1999-04-05)

gimcrack ::: n. --> A trivial mechanism; a device; a toy; a pretty thing.

gimmor ::: n. --> A piece of mechanism; mechanical device or contrivance; a gimcrack.

glob "file system, programming" /glob/ A mechanism that returns a list of {pathnames} that match a pattern containing {wild card} characters. Globbing was available in early versions of {Unix} and, in more limited form, in {Microsoft Windows}. The characters are: * = zero or more characters, e.g. "probab*" would match probabilistic, probabilistically, probabilities, probability, probable, probably. ? = any single character, e.g. "b?g" would match bag, big, bog, bug. [] any of the enclosed characters, e.g. "b[ao]g" would match bag, bog (not on Windows). These have become sufficiently pervasive that hackers use them in written messages. E.g. "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses ambiguity). "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the talk.politics subgroups on {Usenet}). Other examples are given under the entry for {X}. Later Unix shells introduced the {x,y,z} syntax which expands to a comma-separated list of alternatives, thus foo{baz,qux} would expand to "foobaz" and "fooqux". This differs from a glob because it generates a list of all possible expansions, rather than matching against existing files. Glob patterns are similar, but not identical, to {regular expressions}. "glob" was a subprogram that expanded wild cards in archaic pre-{Bourne} versions of the {Unix} {shell}. It is also a {bulit-in function} in {Perl}. (2014-08-22)

Gofer ::: (language) A lazy functional language designed by Mark Jones at the Programming Research Group, Oxford, UK in 1991. expressions, and wild card, as and irrefutable patterns. It lacks modules, arrays and standard classes.Gofer comes with an interpreter (in C), a compiler which compiles to C, documentation and examples. Unix Version 2.30 (1994-06-10) Mac_Gofer version 0.16 beta. Ported to Sun, Acorn Archimedes, IBM PC, Macintosh, Atari, Amiga.Version 2.30 added support for contexts in datatype and member function definitions, Haskell style arrays, an external function calling mechanism for functional state threads, an experimental implementation of do notation for monad comprehensions.Latest version: HUGS.[Introduction to Gofer 2.20, M.P. Jones.][The implementation of the Gofer functional programming system, Mark P. Jones, Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-1030, Yale University, Department of Computer Science, May 1994. FTP: nebula.cs.yale.edu/pub/yale-fp/reports]. . . (1995-02-14)

Gofer "language" A {lazy} {functional language} designed by Mark Jones "mpj@cs.nott.ac.uk" at the {Programming Research Group}, Oxford, UK in 1991. It is very similar to {Haskell} 1.2. It has {lazy evaluation}, {higher order functions}, {pattern matching}, and {type class}es, lambda, case, conditional and let expressions, and wild card, "as" and {irrefutable patterns}. It lacks {modules}, {arrays} and standard {classes}. Gofer comes with an {interpreter} (in C), a {compiler} which compiles to {C}, documentation and examples. Unix Version 2.30 (1994-06-10) Mac_Gofer version 0.16 beta. Ported to {Sun}, {Acorn} {Archimedes}, {IBM PC}, {Macintosh}, {Atari}, {Amiga}. Version 2.30 added support for contexts in datatype and member function definitions, Haskell style {arrays}, an external function calling mechanism for gofc, an experimental implementation of Launchbury/Peyton Jones style lazy functional state threads, an experimental implementation of "do" notation for {monad comprehensions}. ["Introduction to Gofer 2.20", M.P. Jones.] [The implementation of the Gofer functional programming system, Mark P. Jones, Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-1030, Yale University, Department of Computer Science, May 1994. FTP: nebula.cs.yale.edu/pub/yale-fp/reports]. {(http://cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/mpj/)}. {FTP Yale (ftp://nebula.cs.yale.edu/)}, {FTP Glasgow (ftp://ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/)}, {FTP Chalmers (ftp://ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/haskell/gofer/)}. (1995-02-14)

Great Runes Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic {operating systems} still emit these. See also {runes}, {smash case}, {fold case}. Back in the days when it was the sole supplier of long-distance hardcopy transmision devices, the {Teletype Corporation} was faced with a major design choice. To shorten code lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been decided that {teletypes} would use a {monocase} {font}, either ALL UPPER or all lower. The Question Of The Day was therefore, which one to choose. A study was conducted on readability under various conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc. Lowercase won; it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus much easier to read both under ideal conditions and when the letters are mangled or partly obscured. The results were filtered up through {management}. The chairman of Teletype killed the proposal because it failed one incredibly important criterion: "It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity correctly." In this way (or so, at least, hacker folklore has it) superstition triumphed over utility. Teletypes were the major input devices on most early computers, and terminal manufacturers looking for corners to cut naturally followed suit until well into the 1970s. Thus, that one bad call stuck us with Great Runes for thirty years. (1994-12-02)

handover "communications" (HO, or "handoff") the mechanism by which an on-going cellular connection between a {mobile terminal} (MT, typically a {mobile phone}) or {mobile host} (MH) and a corresponding terminal or host is transferred from one point of access of the fixed network to another. Handover may occur because the phone is leaving its current cell, to balance demand between cells, to reduce interference or to transfer a user who has stopped moving to a nearby cell with shorter range. (2010-05-07)

harmonize ::: v. i. --> To agree in action, adaptation, or effect on the mind; to agree in sense or purport; as, the parts of a mechanism harmonize.
To be in peace and friendship, as individuals, families, or public organizations.
To agree in vocal or musical effect; to form a concord; as, the tones harmonize perfectly.


He is in his essential nature a mental being encased in body and enmeshed in the life activities, manu, manomaya purusa. He is more than a thinking, willing and feeling result of the mechanism of the physical or an understanding nexus of the vital forces.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 398


history 1. "history" {Virginia Tech history of computing (http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/index.html)}. {IT Rentals computing timeline (http://www.itrentals.com/historyofcomputing/)}. 2. "operating system" A record of previous user inputs (e.g. to a {command interpreter}) which can be re-entered without re-typing them. The major improvement of the {C shell} (csh) over the {Bourne shell} (sh) was the addition of a command history. This was still inferior to the history mechanism on {VMS} which allowed you to recall previous commands as the current input line. You could then edit the command using cursor motion, insert and delete. These sort of history editing facilities are available under {tcsh} and {GNU Emacs}. 3. The history of the world was once discussed in {Usenet} newsgroups {news:soc.history} and {news:alt.history}. (2013-08-04)

hotlink ::: A mechanism for sharing data between two application programs where changes to the data made by one application appear instantly in the other's copy.Under System 7 on the Macintosh the users establishes a hotlink by doing a Create Publisher on the server and Subscribe on the client.Under Windows 3 it's Cut Special(?) and Paste Special (as opposed to the normal Cut and Paste). (1995-02-16)

hotlink A mechanism for sharing data between two {application programs} where changes to the data made by one application appear instantly in the other's copy. Under {System 7} on the {Macintosh} the users establishes a hotlink by doing a "Create Publisher" on the server and "Subscribe" on the client. Under {Windows 3} it's "Cut Special"(?) and "Paste Special" (as opposed to the normal Cut and Paste). (1995-02-16)

H. Scholz, Geschichte der Logik, Berlin, 1931. Logical Empiricism: See Scientific Empiricism I. Logical machines: Mechanical devices or instruments designed to effect combinations of propositions, or premisses, with which the mechanism is supplied, and derive from them correct logical conclusions. Both premisses and conclusions may be expressed by means of conventional symbols. A contrivance devised by William Stanley Jevons in 1869 was a species of logical abacus. Another constructed by John Venn in 1881 consisted of diagrams which could be manipulated in such a manner that appropriate consequences appeared. A still more satisfactory machine was designed by Allan Marquand in 1882. Such devices would indicate that the inferential process is mechanical to a notable extent. -- J.J.R-

HTTP server "web" (Or "web server") A {server} process running at a {website} which sends out {web pages} in response to {HTTP} requests from remote {browsers}. If one site runs more than one server they must use different {port numbers}. Alternatively, several hostnames may be mapped to the same computer in which case they are known as "{virtual servers}". {Apache} and {NCSA} {HTTPd} are two popular web servers. There are many others including some for practically every {platform}. Servers differ mostly in the "server-side" features they offer such as {server-side include}, and in their {authentication} and access control mechanisms. All decent servers support {CGI} and most have some binary {API} as well. (1997-02-05)

HTTP server ::: (World-Wide Web) (Or web server) A server process running at a website which sends out web pages in response to HTTP requests from remote browsers.If one site runs more than one server they must use different port numbers. Alternatively, several hostnames may be mapped to the same computer in which case they are known as virtual servers.Apache and NCSA HTTPd are two popular web servers. There are many others including some for practically every platform. Servers differ mostly in the authentication and access control mechanisms. All decent servers support CGI and most have some binary API as well. (1997-02-05)

II. Metaphysics of History: The metaphysical interpretations of the meaning of history are either supra-mundane or intra-mundane (secular). The oldest extra-mundane, or theological, interpretation has been given by St. Augustine (Civitas Dei), Dante (Divma Commedia) and J. Milton (Paradise Lost and Regained). All historic events are seen as having a bearing upon the redemption of mankind through Christ which will find its completion at the end of this world. Owing to the secularistic tendencies of modern times the Enlightenment Period considered the final end of human history as the achievement of public welfare through the power of reason. Even the ideal of "humanity" of the classic humanists, advocated by Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Rousseau, Lord Byron, is only a variety of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and in the same line of thought we find A. Comte, H. Spencer ("human moral"), Engels and K. Marx. The German Idealism of Kant and Hegel saw in history the materialization of the "moral reign of freedom" which achieves its perfection in the "objective spirit of the State". As in the earlier systems of historical logic man lost his individuality before the forces of natural laws, so, according to Hegel, he is nothing but an instrument of the "idea" which develops itself through the three dialectic stages of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. (Example. Absolutism, Democracy, Constitutional Monarchy.) Even the great historian L. v. Ranke could not break the captivating power of the Hegelian mechanism. Ranke places every historical epoch into a relation to God and attributes to it a purpose and end for itself. Lotze and Troeltsch followed in his footsteps. Lately, the evolutionistic interpretation of H. Bergson is much discussed and disputed. His "vital impetus" accounts for the progressiveness of life, but fails to interpret the obvious setbacks and decadent civilizations. According to Kierkegaard and Spranger, merely human ideals prove to be too narrow a basis for the tendencies, accomplishments, norms, and defeats of historic life. It all points to a supra-mundane intelligence which unfolds itself in history. That does not make superfluous a natural interpretation, both views can be combined to understand history as an endless struggle between God's will and human will, or non-willing, for that matter. -- S.V.F.

impact printer "printer" The earlier, noisier kind of {printer} where part of the mechanism comes into contact with the paper. The term would only be only used in contrast to "{non-impact printer}". Examples include {line printer}, {daisy wheel printer}, {golf ball printer}, {dot matrix printer}, {Braille printer}. (1998-10-13)

impact printer ::: (printer) The earlier, noisier kind of printer where part of the mechanism comes into contact with the paper. The term would only be only used in contrast to non-impact printer. Examples include line printer, daisy wheel printer, golf ball printer, dot matrix printer, Braille printer. (1998-10-13)

ingenious ::: a. --> Possessed of genius, or the faculty of invention; skillful or promp to invent; having an aptitude to contrive, or to form new combinations; as, an ingenious author, mechanic.
Proseeding from, pertaining to, or characterized by, genius or ingenuity; of curious design, structure, or mechanism; as, an ingenious model, or machine; an ingenious scheme, contrivance, etc.
Witty; shrewd; adroit; keen; sagacious; as, an ingenious reply.


ingenuity ::: n. --> The quality or power of ready invention; quickness or acuteness in forming new combinations; ingeniousness; skill in devising or combining.
Curiousness, or cleverness in design or contrivance; as, the ingenuity of a plan, or of mechanism.
Openness of heart; ingenuousness.


Interface Definition Language ::: (IDL) 1. An OSF standard for defining RPC stubs.[Details?]2. Part of an effort by Project DOE at SunSoft, Inc. to integrate distributed object technology into the Solaris operating system. IDL provides the standard interface between objects, and is the base mechanism for object interaction.The Object Management Group's CORBA 1.1 (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specifies the interface between objects. IDL (Interface Definition Language) is the base mechanism for object interaction.The SunSoft OMG IDL CFE (Compiler Front End) version 1.2 provides a complete framework for building CORBA 1.1-compliant preprocessors for OMG IDL. To use it Sun's current RPCL compiler. The IDL compiler front end allows integration of new back ends which can translate IDL to various programming languages.Several companies including Sunsoft are building back ends to the CFE which translate IDL into target languages, e.g. Pascal or C++, in the context of planned CORBA-compliant products. IDL requires C++ 2.1.Not to be confused with any of the other IDLs.E-mail: . , .Telephone: Mache Creeger, SunSoft, Inc. +1 (415) 336 5884. (1993-05-04)

Interface Definition Language (IDL) 1. An {OSF} standard for defining {RPC} stubs. [Details?] 2. Part of an effort by {Project DOE} at {SunSoft, Inc.} to integrate distributed {object} technology into the {Solaris} {operating system}. IDL provides the standard interface between objects, and is the base mechanism for object interaction. The {Object Management Group}'s {CORBA} 1.1 (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specifies the interface between objects. IDL (Interface Definition Language) is the base mechanism for object interaction. The SunSoft OMG IDL CFE (Compiler Front End) version 1.2 provides a complete framework for building CORBA 1.1-compliant preprocessors for OMG IDL. To use it you write a back-end. A complete compiler of IDL would translate IDL into {client} side and {server} side routines for remote communication in the same manner as {Sun}'s current {RPCL} compiler. The IDL compiler front end allows integration of new back ends which can translate IDL to various programming languages. Several companies including Sunsoft are building back ends to the CFE which translate IDL into target languages, e.g. {Pascal} or {C++}, in the context of planned CORBA-compliant products. IDL requires C++ 2.1. Not to be confused with any of the other {IDLs}. E-mail: "idl-cfe@sun.com". {(ftp://omg.org/pub/omg_idl_cfe.tar.Z)}, {(ftp://omg.org/pub/OMG_IDL_CFE_1.2/)}. Telephone: Mache Creeger, SunSoft, Inc. +1 (415) 336 5884. (1993-05-04)

interrupt handler "software" A routine which is executed when an {interrupt} occurs. Interrupt handlers typically deal with low-level events in the hardware of a computer system such as a character arriving at a {serial port} or a tick of a {real-time clock}. Special care is required when writing an interrupt handler to ensure that either the interrupt which triggered the handler's execution is masked out (inhibitted) until the handler exits, or the handler is {re-entrant} so that multiple concurrent invocations will not interfere with each other. If interrupts are masked then the handler must execute as quickly as possible so that important events are not missed. This is often arranged by splitting the processing associated with the event into "upper" and "lower" halves. The lower part is the interrupt handler which masks out further interrupts as required, checks that the appropriate event has occurred (this may be necessary if several events share the same interrupt), services the interrupt, e.g. by reading a character from a {UART} and writing it to a {queue}, and re-enabling interrupts. The upper half executes as part of a user process. It waits until the interrupt handler has run. Normally the {operating system} is responsible for reactivating a process which is waiting for some low-level event. It detects this by a shared {flag} or by inspecting a shared queue or by some other synchronisation mechanism. It is important that the upper and lower halves do not interfere if an interrupt occurs during the execution of upper half code. This is usually ensured by disabling interrupts during {critical sections} of code such as removing a character from a queue. (2002-07-24)

In the meantime, Taoism degenerated and identified itself with the lowest forms of religious worship. Its naturalistic philosophy was carried to the point of fatalistic mechanism in Lieh Tzu (c. 300 A.D.) and was made the theoretical basis for alchemy and the search for longevity in Ko Hung (c. 268-c. 334 A.D.). In Kuo Hsiang (c. 312 A.D.), however, the true spirit of Taoism revived. He restored and developed the Taoist doctrines of naturalism and spontaneous transformation to a position of dignity.

Intrinsics "operating system, graphics" A library package on top of {Xlib}, extending the basic functions of the {X Window System}. It provides mechanisms for building {widget sets} and application environments. (1996-08-26)

Intrinsics ::: (operating system, graphics) A library package on top of Xlib, extending the basic functions of the X Window System. It provides mechanisms for building widget sets and application environments. (1996-08-26)

ISWIM "language" (If You See What I Mean) An influential but unimplemented computer programming language described in the article by {Peter J. Landin} cited below. Landin attempted to capture all known programming language concepts, including {assignment} and control operators such as {goto} and {coroutines}, within a single {lambda calculus} based framework. ISWIM is an {imperative language} with a functional core, consisting of {sugared} {lambda calculus} plus {mutable variables} and {assignment}. A powerful control mechanism, Landin's {J operator}, enables capture of the current {continuation} (the {call/cc} operator of {Scheme} is a simplified version). Being based on lambda calculus ISWIM had {higher order functions} and {lexically scoped} variables. The {operational semantics} of ISWIM are defined using Landin's {SECD machine} and use {call-by-value} ({eager evaluation}). To make ISWIM look more like mathematical notation, Landin replaced {ALGOL}'s semicolons and begin end blocks with the {off-side rule} and scoping based on indentation. An ISWIM program is a single {expression} qualified by "where" clauses (auxiliary definitions including equations among variables), conditional expressions and function definitions. With {CPL}, ISWIM was one of the first programming languages to use "where" clauses. New {data types} could be defined as a (possibly recursive) {sum of products} like the {algebraic data types} found in modern functional languages. ISWIM variables were probably {dynamically typed} but Landin may have planned some form of {type inference}. Concepts from ISWIM appear in Art Evan's {PAL} and John Reynold's {Gedanken}, Milner's {ML} and purely functional languages with lazy evaluation like {SASL}, {Miranda} and {Haskell}. [{"The Next 700 Programming Languages" (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~wilson/compilers/old/papers/p157-landin.pdf)}, P.J. Landin, CACM 9(3):157-166, Mar 1966]. (2007-03-20)

jarā. (T. rga ba; C. lao; J. ro; K. no 老). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "senescence," "aging," or "decay." Aging and death (JARĀMARAnA) are one of the varieties of the suffering (DUḤKHA) that is said to be inherent in the conditioned realm of existence and together constitute the last of the twelve links of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA). The future buddha is said to have left the life of the householder in search of a state beyond birth, aging, sickness, and death. In the SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA system, senescence is treated as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought" (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA), which functions as one of the four conditioned characteristics (SAMSKṚTALAKsAnA) that is associated with all conditioned objects. Because the ontology of the Sarvāstivāda school, as its name implies, postulated that "everything exists" in all three time periods (TRIKĀLA) of past, present, and future, there had to be some mechanism to account for the apparent change that conditioned objects underwent through time. Therefore, along with the other three characteristics of origination (JĀTI), continuance (STHITI), and desinence (ANITYATĀ; viz., death), aging was posited as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought," which causes the active functioning (kāritra) of a conditioned object to degenerate, initiating the process that leads to its inevitable death. The very definition of conditioned objects is that they are subject to these conditioned characteristics, including this process of decay and change; this is what ultimately distinguishes them from the unconditioned (ASAMSKṚTA), viz., NIRVĀnA.

jāti. (T. skye ba; C. sheng; J. sho; K. saeng 生). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "birth," "origination." Birth is one of the varieties of the suffering (DUḤKHA) that is inherent in the conditioned realm of existence and the eleventh of the twelve links in the chain of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA). The future buddha is said to have left the life of the householder in search of a state beyond birth, aging, sickness, and death. In the SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA system, origination is treated as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought" (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA), which functions as one of the four conditioned characteristics (SAMSKṚTALAKsAnA) that is associated with all conditioned objects. Because the ontology of the Sarvāstivāda school, as its name implies, postulated that "everything exists" in all three time periods (TRIKĀLA) of past, present, and future, there had to be some mechanism to account for the apparent change that conditioned objects underwent through time. Therefore, along with the other three characteristics of continuance (STHITI), senescence (JARĀ), and desinence (ANITYATĀ; viz., death), origination was posited as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought," which prepares an object to be produced and thus pulls that object out of the future and into the present. The very definition of conditioned objects is that they are subject to these conditioned characteristics, including this process of production, and this is what ultimately distinguishes them from the unconditioned (ASAMSKṚTA), viz., NIRVĀnA. In less technical contexts, beginning with the Buddha's first sermon (see DHAMMACAKKAPPAVATTANASUTTA), jāti appears in various lists of the sufferings of SAMSĀRA, with a variety of texts describing at length the pain experienced in the womb and during birth.

jukebox "hardware, storage" A hardware mechanism for allowing access to one of a group of discs, especially CD-ROMs or other optical media. [Or magnetic tapes?] (1996-12-10)

jukebox ::: (hardware, storage) A hardware mechanism for allowing access to one of a group of discs, especially CD-ROMs or other optical media.[Or magnetic tapes?] (1996-12-10)

Keyed-Hashing Message Authentication "messaging, cryptography" (HMAC) A mechanism for message {authentication} using cryptographic {hash functions}. HMAC can be used with any iterative cryptographic hash function, e.g., {MD5}, {SHA-1}, in combination with a secret shared key. The cryptographic strength of HMAC depends on the properties of the underlying hash function. [RFC 2104]. (1997-05-10)

Keyed-Hashing Message Authentication ::: (messaging, cryptography) (HMAC) A mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions. HMAC can be used with any iterative shared key. The cryptographic strength of HMAC depends on the properties of the underlying hash function.[RFC 2104]. (1997-05-10)

key ::: n. --> An instrument by means of which the bolt of a lock is shot or drawn; usually, a removable metal instrument fitted to the mechanism of a particular lock and operated by turning in its place.
An instrument which is turned like a key in fastening or adjusting any mechanism; as, a watch key; a bed key, etc.
That part of an instrument or machine which serves as the means of operating it; as, a telegraph key; the keys of a pianoforte, or of a typewriter.


lace card (Obsolete) A {punched card} with all holes punched (also called a "whoopee card" or "ventilator card"). Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to clear the jam with a "card knife" - which you used on the joker first. [{Jargon File}]

Language Acquisition Device (LAD): an innate mechanism that aids language development, through recognising grammatical structure.

Lazarus (1922-2002): a hugely influential psychologist who focused on the study of cognition, in particular appraisal of emotion and stress, and coping mechanisms in response to stress.

Lily (LIsp LibrarY) A {C++} {class} library by Roger Sheldon "sheldon@kong.gsfc.nasa.gov" which gives C++ programmers the capability to write {Lisp}-style code. Lily's {garbage collection} mechanism is not sufficient for commercial use however and the documentation is incomplete. It is distributed under the {GNU} Library {General Public License}. Version: 0.1. {(ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/uploads/lily-0.1.tar.gz)}. (1993-11-08)

limb ::: n. --> A part of a tree which extends from the trunk and separates into branches and twigs; a large branch.
An arm or a leg of a human being; a leg, arm, or wing of an animal.
A thing or person regarded as a part or member of, or attachment to, something else.
An elementary piece of the mechanism of a lock.
A border or edge, in certain special uses.


link ::: n. --> A torch made of tow and pitch, or the like.
A single ring or division of a chain.
Hence: Anything, whether material or not, which binds together, or connects, separate things; a part of a connected series; a tie; a bond.
Anything doubled and closed like a link; as, a link of horsehair.
Any one of the several elementary pieces of a mechanism, as


linkwork ::: n. --> A fabric consisting of links made of metal or other material fastened together; also, a chain.
Mechanism in which links, or intermediate connecting pieces, are employed to transmit motion from one part to another.


load balancing "operating system, parallel" Techniques which aim to spread tasks among the processors in a {parallel processor} to avoid some processors being idle while others have tasks queueing for execution. Load balancing may be performed either by heavily loaded processors (with many tasks in their queues) sending tasks to other processors; by idle processors requesting work from others; by some centralised task distribution mechanism; or some combination of these. Some systems allow tasks to be moved after they have started executing ("{task migration}") others do not. It is important that the {overhead} of executing the load balancing {algorithm} does not contribute significantly to the overall processing or communications load. Distributed scheduling {algorithms} may be static, dynamic or preemptive. Static algorithms allocate processes to processors at run time while taking no account of current network load. Dynamic algorithms are more flexible, though more computationally expensive, and give some consideration to the network load before allocating the new process to a processor. Preemptive algorithms are more expensive and flexible still, and may migrate running processes from one host to another if deemed beneficial. Research to date indicates that dynamic algorithms yield significant performance benefits, but that further (though lesser) gains may be had through the addition of process migration facilities. (1995-03-13)

Madhav: “The wheel of determinism in material Nature turns mechanically without any saving sensation, it moves under the pressure of a gathered momentum without questioning; it is immaterial in its operations without the slightest breath of the warmth of life. All circumstances are cogs in this wheel of Fate that revolves relentlessly. It is only a force of will from an existence beyond the domain of this mechanism that can hold the movement, change its direction and displace the instrumental condition.” Readings in Savitri, Vol. I.

mainspring ::: n. --> The principal or most important spring in a piece of mechanism, especially the moving spring of a watch or clock or the spring in a gunlock which impels the hammer. Hence: The chief or most powerful motive; the efficient cause of action.

Malkuth: The tenth and final Sephira of the Tree of Life. It is the Sphere of the Earth and represents the densest manifestation of the cosmic current. It is the equivalent of the "daughter" in the formula of IHVH (q.v.). It is on the plane of Malkuth that the process of "redemption" begins. The formula of this redemption varies with successive aeons. It is the purpose of the present book to indicate its mechanism in the New Aeon.

Mark 1 ::: (computer) (Or Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) A first generation computer developed in 1944 by Howard Aiken of Harvard University. The 500 miles of wiring, was used only for numeric calculations, and took three seconds to carry out one multiplication.[Mechanism? Capacity? Programmability?] (1996-11-24)

Market economy or capitalist economy or free enterprise economy - An economic system which allows the market mechanism to allocate resources.

Materialism: A proposition about the existent or the real: that only matter (q.v.) is existent or real; that matter is the primordial or fundamental constituent of the universe; atomism; that only sensible entities, processes, or content are existent or real; that the universe is not governed by intelligence, purpose, or final causes; that everything is strictly caused by material (inanimate, non-mental, or having certain elementary physical powers) processes or entities (mechanism); that mental entities, processes, or events (though existent) are caused solely by material entities, processes, or events and themselves have no causal effect (epiphenomenalism); that nothing supernatural exists (naturalism); that nothing mental exists; a proposition about explanation of the existent or the real: that everything is explainable in terms of matter in motion or matter and energy or simply matter (depending upon conception of matter entertained); that all qualitative differences are reducible to quantitative differences; that the only objects science can investigate are the physical or material (that is, public, manipulable, non-mental, natural, or sensible); a proposition about values: that wealth, bodily satisfactions, sensuous pleasures, or the like are either the only or the greatest values man can seek or attain; a proposition about explanation of human history: that human actions and cultural change are determined solely or largely by economic factors (economic determinism or its approximation); an attitude, postulate, hypothesis, assertion, assumption, or tendency favoring any of the above propositions; a state of being limited by the physical environment or the material elements of culture and incapable of overcoming, transcending, or adjusting properly to them; preoccupation with or enslavement to lower or bodily (non-mental or non-spiritual) values. Confusion of epiphenomenalism or mechanism with other conceptions of materialism has caused considerable misunderstanding. -- M.T.K.

Materialism: A proposition that only matter is existent or real; that matter is the primordial or fundamental constituent of the universe; that only sensible entities, processes, or content are existent or real; that the universe is not governed by intelligence, purpose, or final causes; that everything is strictly caused by material (inanimate, non-mental, or having certain elementary physical powers) processes or entities (mechanism); that mental entities, processes, or events (though existent) are caused solely by material entities, processes, or events and themselves have no causal effect (epiphenomenalism); that nothing supernatural exists (naturalism); that nothing mental exists; that everything is explainable in terms of matter in motion or matter and energy or simply matter (depending upon the conception of matter entertained); that the only objects science can investigate are the physical or material (that is, public, manipulable, non-mental, natural, or sensible). Materialism denies the truth of all doctrines and beliefs of occultism, metaphysics, esoteric philosophy, etc.

Mechanism: (Gr. mechane, machine) Theory that all phenomena are totally explicable on mechanical principles. The view that all phenomena is the result of matter in motion and can be explained by its law. Theory of total explanation by efficient, as opposed to final, cause (q.v.). Doctrine that nature, like a machine, is a whole whose single function is served automatically by its parts. In cosmology, first advanced by Leucippus and Democritus (460 B.C.-370 B.C.) as the view that nature is explicable on the basis of atoms in motion and the void. Held by Galileo (1564-1641) and others in the seventeenth century as the rnechanical philosophy. For Descartes (1596-1650), the essence of matter is extension, and all physical phenomena are explicable by mechanical laws. For Kant (1724-1804), the necessity in time of all occurrence in accordance with causality as a law of nature. In biology, theory that organisms are totally explicable on mechanical principles. Opposite of: vitalism (q.v.). In psychology, applied to associational psychology, and in psychoanalysis to the unconscious direction of a mental process. In general, the view that nature consists merely of material in motion, and that it operates automatically. Opposite of: all forms of super-naturalism. See also Materialism, Atomism. -- J.K.F.

MECHANISM—The structure or means of action of any mechanical contrivance. "A human organism with all its parts in harmonious action is a splendid mechanism."—Winchell.

mediate ::: effect or convey as an intermediate agent or mechanism. mediating.

Memory Management Unit "hardware, memory management" (MMU, "Paged Memory Management Unit", PMMU) A {hardware} device or circuit that supports {virtual memory} and {paging} by translating {virtual addresses} into {physical addresses}. The virtual {address space} (the range of addresses used by the processor) is divided into {pages}, whose size is 2^N, usually a few {kilobytes}. The bottom N {bits} of the address (the offset within a page) are left unchanged. The upper address bits are the (virtual) {page number}. The MMU contains a {page table} which is indexed (possibly associatively) by the page number. Each page table entry (PTE) gives the physical page number corresponding to the virtual one. This is combined with the page offset to give the complete physical address. A PTE may also include information about whether the page has been written to, when it was last used (for a {least recently used} {replacement algorithm}), what kind of processes ({user mode}, {supervisor mode}) may read and write it, and whether it should be {cache}d. It is possible that no physical memory ({RAM}) has been allocated to a given virtual page, in which case the MMU will signal a "{page fault}" to the {CPU}. The {operating system} will then try to find a spare page of RAM and set up a new PTE to map it to the requested virtual address. If no RAM is free it may be necessary to choose an existing page, using some {replacement algorithm}, and save it to disk (this is known as "{paging}"). There may also be a shortage of PTEs, in which case the OS will have to free one for the new mapping. In a {multitasking} system all processes compete for the use of memory and of the MMU. Some {memory management} architectures allow each process to have its own area or configuration of the page table, with a mechanism to switch between different mappings on a process switch. This means that all processes can have the same virtual address space rather than require load-time relocation. An MMU also solves the problem of {fragmentation} of memory. After blocks of memory have been allocated and freed, the free memory may become fragmented (discontinuous) so that the largest contiguous block of free memory may be much smaller than the total amount. With {virtual memory}, a contiguous range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several non-contiguous blocks of physical memory. In early designs memory management was performed by a separate {integrated circuit} such as the {MC 68851} used with the {Motorola 68020} {CPU} in the {Macintosh II} or the {Z8015} used with the {Zilog Z80} family of processors. Later CPUs such as the {Motorola 68030} and the {ZILOG Z280} have MMUs on the same IC as the CPU. (1999-05-24)

metabolic network reconstruction and simulation ::: Allows for an in-depth insight into the molecular mechanisms of a particular organism. In particular, these models correlate the genome with molecular physiology.[220]

MODSIM "language" A general-purpose, modular, block-structured language from {CACI}, which provides support for {object-oriented programming} and {discrete event simulation}. It is intended for building large process-based discrete event simulation models through modular and object-oriented mechanisms similar to those of {Modula-2}. MODSIM is descended from {Modula-2} and {Simula}. It supports {multiple inheritance}, {templates}, {reference types}, {polymorphism}, and {process-oriented simulation} with synchronous and asynchronous activities using explicit simulation time. See also {MODSIM II}, {USAModSim}. (1994-11-11)

MODSIM ::: (language) A general-purpose, modular, block-structured language from CACI, which provides support for object-oriented programming and discrete event simulation models through modular and object-oriented mechanisms similar to those of Modula-2.MODSIM is descended from Modula-2 and Simula. It supports multiple inheritance, templates, reference types, polymorphism, and process-oriented simulation with synchronous and asynchronous activities using explicit simulation time.See also MODSIM II, USAModSim. (1994-11-11)

module 1. "programming" An independent piece of {software} which forms part of one or more larger {programs}. Different languages have different concepts of a module but there are several common ideas. Modules are usually compiled seperately (in compiled languages) and provide an {abstraction} or information hiding mechanism so that a module's implementation can be changed without requiring any change to other modules. In this respect they are similar to {objects} in an {object-oriented language}, though a module may contain many {procedures} and/or {functions} which would correspond to many objects. A module often has its own {name space} for {identifiers} so the same identifier may be used to mean different things in different modules. [Difference from {package}?]. 2. "hardware" An independent assembly of electronic components with some distinct function, e.g. a RAM module consisting of several RAM chips mounted on a small circuit board. (1997-10-27)

module ::: 1. (programming) An independent piece of software which forms part of one or more larger programs. Different languages have different concepts of a module but there are several common ideas.Modules are usually compiled seperately (in compiled languages) and provide an abstraction or information hiding mechanism so that a module's implementation they are similar to objects in an object-oriented language, though a module may contain many procedures and/or functions which would correspond to many objects.A module often has its own name space for identifiers so the same identifier may be used to mean different things in different modules.[Difference from package?].2. (hardware) An independent assembly of electronic components with some distinct function, e.g. a RAM module consisting of several RAM chips mounted on a small circuit board. (1997-10-27)

Moscow ML ::: A light-weight implementation of Standard ML written by Sergei Romanenko of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics with assistance from Peter Sestoft , Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University. Moscow ML is based on CAML Light.Version: 1.20 implements the Standard ML Core language.The sublanguage of Modules implemented by Moscow ML contains signatures and non-nested structures, and identifies structures with source files. It is is the intention to implement the full Standard ML Modules language (including functors) in due course.Compilation of a signature produces a compiled interface file, which is used when compiling other signatures and structures.Compilation of a structure produces a bytecode file. Bytecode files are compact and load fast. For instance, a 3250-line program consisting of 24 structures and Starting the ML system and loading the 24 bytecode files takes 1-2 cpu seconds plus network delays, less that 5 seconds real time in all.Release 1.20 permits loading of precompiled bytecode files into the top-level interactive session. The next release will be able to create stand-alone executables by linking bytecode files.There is a mechanism for adding basis libraries, as in Caml Light. Release 1.20 includes the basis libraries Array, List, and Vector and the MS-DOS version includes the Graphics library from Caml Light.In principle, Moscow ML can be compiled on any platform supported by Caml Light. So far we have tried Intel 80386-based IBM PCs running MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, OS/2 or Linux, DEC MIPS running Ultrix, DEC Alpha running OSF/1, Sun-4 running SunOS, HP9000 running HP/UX, SGI MIPS running IRIX 5.Moscow ML is particularly useful when fast compilation and modest storage consumption are more important than fast program execution.Thanks to the efficient Caml Light run-time system used in Moscow ML, it compiles fast and uses little memory, typically 5-10 times less memory than 10 times slower than SML/NJ 0.93 compiled native code (fast on IBM PCs, slower on RISCs). . . .Caml Light 0.61 and gcc are required to recompile Moscow ML for Unix or Caml Light 0.61, djgpp, Perl, and Borland C++ version 2.0 (or later) to recompile Moscow ML for DOS. (1994-12-12)

Moscow ML A light-weight implementation of {Standard ML} written by Sergei Romanenko "sergei-romanenko@refal.msk.su" of the {Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics} with assistance from Peter Sestoft "sestoft@dina.kvl.dk", {Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University}. Moscow ML is based on {CAML Light}. Version: 1.20 implements the Standard ML Core language. The sublanguage of Modules implemented by Moscow ML contains signatures and non-nested structures, and identifies structures with source files. It is certainly less expressive than the full Standard ML Modules language, but the {type-safe} {separate compilation} facility is simple, useful, and easy to use. It is the intention to implement the full Standard ML Modules language (including functors) in due course. Compilation of a {signature} produces a compiled interface file, which is used when compiling other signatures and structures. Compilation of a structure produces a {bytecode} file. Bytecode files are compact and load fast. For instance, a 3250-line program consisting of 24 structures and 17 signatures compiles to 221 KB of bytecode and 241 KB of compiled signatures. Starting the ML system and loading the 24 bytecode files takes 1-2 cpu seconds plus network delays, less that 5 seconds real time in all. Release 1.20 permits loading of precompiled bytecode files into the top-level interactive session. The next release will be able to create stand-alone executables by linking bytecode files. There is a mechanism for adding basis libraries, as in {Caml Light}. Release 1.20 includes the basis libraries Array, List, and Vector and the {MS-DOS} version includes the Graphics library from {Caml Light}. In principle, Moscow ML can be compiled on any {platform} supported by {Caml Light}. So far we have tried {Intel 80386}-based {IBM PCs} running {MS-DOS}, {Microsoft Windows}, {OS/2} or {Linux}, {DEC MIPS} running {Ultrix}, {DEC Alpha} running {OSF/1}, {Sun-4} running {SunOS}, {HP9000} running {HP/UX}, {SGI MIPS} running {IRIX} 5. Moscow ML is particularly useful when fast compilation and modest storage consumption are more important than fast program execution. Thanks to the efficient Caml Light run-time system used in Moscow ML, it compiles fast and uses little memory, typically 5-10 times less memory than {SML/NJ} 0.93 and 2-3 times less than {Edinburgh ML}. Yet the bytecode is only 3 to 10 times slower than SML/NJ 0.93 compiled native code (fast on {IBM PCs}, slower on {RISCs}). {DOS (ftp://dina.kvl.dk/pub/Peter.Sestoft/mosml/mos12bin.zip)}. {Linux (ftp://dina.kvl.dk:pub/Peter.Sestoft/mosml/linux-mos12bin.tar.gz)}. {Source (ftp://dina.kvl.dk:pub/Peter.Sestoft/mosml/mos12src.tar.gz)}. {Caml Light} 0.61 and {gcc} are required to recompile Moscow ML for {Unix} or Caml Light 0.61, {djgpp}, {Perl}, and {Borland C++} version 2.0 (or later) to recompile Moscow ML for {DOS}. (1994-12-12)

Motivation: Designation of the totality of motives operative in any given act of volition or of the mechanism of the operation of such motives. See Motive. -- L.W.

National Information Infrastructure ::: (project) (NII, or information superhighway) Future integrated communications in the USA. The NII will be based on a nationwide network of networks, and will supposedly allow all Americans to take advantage of the country's information, communication, and computing resources.The NII will include current and future public and private high-speed, interactive, narrow-band and broadband networks. It is the satellite, components and captures the vision of a nationwide, invisible, seamless, dynamic web of transmission mechanisms, information appliances, content, and people. . (1995-04-08)

National Information Infrastructure "project" (NII, or "{information superhighway}") Future integrated communications in the USA. The NII will be based on a nationwide network of networks, and will supposedly allow all Americans to take advantage of the country's information, communication, and computing resources. The NII will include current and future public and private high-speed, interactive, {narrow-band} and {broadband} networks. It is the satellite, terrestrial, and wireless communications systems that deliver content to homes, businesses, and other public and private institutions. It is the information and content that flows over the infrastructure whether in the form of {databases}, the written word, a film, a piece of music, a sound recording, a picture, or computer software. It is the computers, televisions, telephones, radios, and other products that people will employ to access the infrastructure. It is the people who will provide, manage, and generate new information, and those that will help others do the same. And it is the individual Americans who will use and benefit from the NII. The NII is a term that encompasses all these components and captures the vision of a nationwide, invisible, seamless, dynamic web of transmission mechanisms, information appliances, content, and people. {(http://sunsite.unc.edu/nii/NII-Table-of-Contents.html)}. (1995-04-08)

Nature ::: Prakriti, the outer or executive side of the Conscious Force which forms and moves the worlds. The higher, divine Nature (Para Prakriti) is free from Ignorance and its consequences; the lower nature (Prakriti) is a mechanism of active Force put forth for the working of the evolutionary Ignorance. The lower nature of an individual is his mind, life and body.

Necessity ::: “… Necessity is the child of the spirit’s free self-determination. What affects us as Necessity, is a Will which works in sequence and not a blind Force driven by its own mechanism.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

necessity ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . Necessity is the child of the spirit"s free self-determination. What affects us as Necessity, is a Will which works in sequence and not a blind Force driven by its own mechanism.” *Essays in Philosophy and Yoga

network redirector "networking" An {operating system} {driver} that sends data to and receives data from a remote device. A network redirector often provides mechanisms to locate, open, read, write, and delete files and submit print jobs. It also makes available application services such as {named pipes} and {mailslots}. When an application needs to send or receive data from a remote device, it sends a call to the redirector. The redirector provides the functionality of the {Application layer} and {Presentation layer} of the {OSI} model. In {Microsoft Networking}, the network redirectors are implemented as {installable file systems} (IFS). (1999-08-08)

network redirector ::: (networking) An operating system driver that sends data to and receives data from a remote device. A network redirector often provides mechanisms to locate, open, read, write, and delete files and submit print jobs.It also makes available application services such as named pipes and mailslots. When an application needs to send or receive data from a remote device, it sends a call to the redirector. The redirector provides the functionality of the Application layer and Presentation layer of the OSI model.In Microsoft Networking, the network redirectors are implemented as installable file systems (IFS). (1999-08-08)

neural Turing machine (NTM) ::: A recurrent neural network model. NTMs combine the fuzzy pattern matching capabilities of neural networks with the algorithmic power of programmable computers. An NTM has a neural network controller coupled to external memory resources, which it interacts with through attentional mechanisms. The memory interactions are differentiable end-to-end, making it possible to optimize them using gradient descent.[229] An NTM with a long short-term memory (LSTM) network controller can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from examples alone.[230]

noise "communications" Any part of a signal that is not the true or original signal but is introduced by the communication mechanism. A common example would be an electrical signal travelling down a wire to which noise is added by inductive and capacitive coupling with other nearby signals (this kind of noise is known as "{crosstalk}"). A less obvious form of noise is {quantisation} noise, such as the error between the true colour of a point in a scene in the real world and its representation as a {pixel} in a digital image. (2003-07-05)

noise ::: (communications) Any part of a signal that is not the true or original signal but is introduced by the communication mechanism.A common example would be an electrical signal travelling down a wire to which noise is added by inductive and capacitive coupling with other nearby signals (this kind of noise is known as crosstalk).A less obvious form of noise is quantisation noise, such as the error between the true colour of a point in a scene in the real world and its representation as a pixel in a digital image.(2003-07-05)

Not-a-Number ::: (mathematics) (NaN) An IEEE floating point representation for the result of a numerical operation which cannot return a valid number value. A NaN can result from multiplying an infinity by a zero, or from subtracting one infinity from another [what else?].NaN is encoded as a special bit pattern [what pattern?] which would otherwise represent a floating-point number. It is used to signal error returns where other mechanisms are not convenient, e.g. a hardware floating-point unit and to allow errors to propagate through a calculation.Similar bit patterns represent positive and negative overflow and underflow and the positive and negative infinities resulting from division by zero. .[ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985].[Correct?](2001-04-01)

Not-a-Number "mathematics" (NaN) An {IEEE floating point} representation for the result of a numerical operation which cannot return a valid number value. A NaN can result from multiplying an infinity by a zero, or from subtracting one infinity from another [what else?]. NaN is encoded as a special {bit pattern} [what pattern?] which would otherwise represent a {floating-point} number. It is used to signal error returns where other mechanisms are not convenient, e.g. a hardware {floating-point unit} and to allow errors to propagate through a calculation. Similar bit patterns represent positive and negative {overflow} and {underflow} and the positive and negative infinities resulting from {division by zero}. {Bit patterns (http://psc.edu/general/software/packages/ieee/ieee.html)}. [ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985]. [Correct?] (2001-04-01)

obfuscated "programming" Made unclear, used to describe {source code} that has been transformed or written to make it as hard as possible to read, usually for fun, as in the {Obfuscated C Contest}. A {japh} is a kind of obfuscated {Perl} program. The term is not normally used for code that has been transformed for security purposes, e.g. to enforce some kind of licencing mechanism. (2009-05-14)

Objective CAML "language" (Originally "CAML" - Categorical Abstract Machine Language) A version of {ML} by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel Mauny and others of {INRIA}. CAML is intermediate between {LCF ML} and {SML} [in what sense?]. It has {first-class} functions, {static type inference} with {polymorphic} types, user-defined {variant types} and {product types}, and {pattern matching}. It is built on a proprietary run-time system. The CAML V3.1 implementation added {lazy} and {mutable} data structures, a "{grammar}" mechanism for interfacing with the {Yacc} {parser generator}, {pretty-printing} tools, high-performance {arbitrary-precision} arithmetic, and a complete library. in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new implementation called {CAML Light}, freeing the previous implementation from too many experimental high-level features, and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end. Following the addition of a {native-code} compiler and a powerful {module} system in 1995 and of the {object} and {class} layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to Objective CAML. In 2000, Jacques Garrigue added labeled and optional arguments and anonymous variants. {Objective CAML Home (http://ocaml.org/)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.lang.ml}. ["The CAML Reference Manual", P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS, 1989]. (2002-05-21)

Objective CAML ::: (language) (Originally CAML - Categorical Abstract Machine Language) A version of ML by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel types, user-defined variant types and product types, and pattern matching. It is built on a proprietary run-time system.The CAML V3.1 implementation added lazy and mutable data structures, a grammar mechanism for interfacing with the Yacc parser generator, pretty-printing tools, high-performance arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and a complete library.in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new implementation called CAML Light, freeing the previous implementation from too many experimental high-level features, and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end.Following the addition of a native-code compiler and a powerful module system in 1995 and of the object and class layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to Objective CAML. In 2000, Jacques Garrigue added labeled and optional arguments and anonymous variants. .Usenet newsgroup: comp.lang.ml.[The CAML Reference Manual, P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS, 1989].(2002-05-21)

object relational mapping "programming, database" (ORM) The software development activity that defines a correspondence between {objects} in a program and {rows} in a database {table}. {Atomic} object properties correspond to {columns} in the table, non-atomic data types and relations between objects are represented as {foreign keys} referring to other tables. An {object persistence} mechanism is responsible for maintaining the correspondence between objects and the database contents at run-time. (2014-12-03)

Obliq A small, statically scoped untyped language by Luca Cardelli, 1993. Obliq is {object-oriented}, higher order, concurrent, and distributed. State is local to an address space, while computation can migrate over the network. The distributed computation mechanism is based on {Modula-3} network objects. {(ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/Modula-3/contrib)}.

Obliq ::: A small, statically scoped untyped language by Luca Cardelli, 1993. Obliq is object-oriented, higher order, concurrent, and distributed. State is local to an address space, while computation can migrate over the network. The distributed computation mechanism is based on Modula-3 network objects. .

Ode ::: An Object-Oriented Database from AT&T which extends C++ and supports fast queries, complex application modelling and multimedia.Ode uses one integrated data model (C++ classes) for both database and general purpose manipulation. An Ode database is a collection of persistent objects. It persistent objects, querying the database and creating and manipulating versions.The Ode object database provides four object compatible mechanisms for manipulating and querying the database. As well as O++ there are OdeView - an X treated and manipulated like normal Unix files); and CQL++, a C++ variant of SQL for easing the transition from relational databases to OODBs such as Ode.Ode supports large objects (critical for multimedia applications). Ode tracks the relationship between versions of objects and provides facilities for deadlock. 'Hypothetical' transactions allow users to pose what-if scenarios (as with spreadsheets).EOS, the storage engine of Ode, is based on a client-server architecture. EOS supports concurrency based on multi-granularity two-version two-phase locking; mode for multiple users with concurrent access and a single user mode giving improved performance.Ode 3.0 is currently being used as the multimedia database engine for AT&T's Interactive TV project. Ode 2.0 has also been distributed to more than 80 sites available only for Sun SPARCstations running SunOS 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.3. Ode is being ported to Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 95 and SGI platforms.E-mail: Narain Gehani . (1994-08-18)

Ode An {Object-Oriented Database} from {AT&T} which extends {C++} and supports fast queries, complex application modelling and {multimedia}. Ode uses one integrated data model ({C++} {class}es) for both database and general purpose manipulation. An Ode database is a collection of {persistent} {objects}. It is defined, queried and manipulated using the language {O++}. O++ programs can be compiled with C++ programs, thus allowing the use of existing C++ code. O++ provides facilities for specifying transactions, creating and manipulating persistent objects, querying the database and creating and manipulating versions. The Ode object database provides four object compatible mechanisms for manipulating and querying the database. As well as O++ there are OdeView - an {X Window System} interface; OdeFS (a file system interface allowing objects to be treated and manipulated like normal Unix files); and CQL++, a {C++} variant of {SQL} for easing the transition from {relational databases} to OODBs such as Ode. Ode supports large objects (critical for {multimedia} applications). Ode tracks the relationship between versions of objects and provides facilities for accessing different versions. Transactions can be specified as read-only; such transactions are faster because they are not logged and they are less likely to {deadlock}. 'Hypothetical' transactions allow users to pose "what-if" scenarios (as with {spreadsheets}). EOS, the {storage engine} of Ode, is based on a client-server architecture. EOS supports {concurrency} based on {multi-granularity} two-version two-phase locking; it allows many readers and one writer to access the same item simultaneously. Standard two-phase locking is also available. Ode supports both a {client-server} mode for multiple users with concurrent access and a single user mode giving improved performance. Ode 3.0 is currently being used as the {multimedia} {database engine} for {AT&T}'s {Interactive TV} project. Ode 2.0 has also been distributed to more than 80 sites within AT&T and more than 340 universities. Ode is available free to universities under a non-disclosure agreement. The current version, 3.0, is available only for {Sun} {SPARCstations} running {SunOS} 4.1.3 and {Solaris} 2.3. Ode is being ported to {Microsoft} {Windows NT}, {Windows 95} and {SGI} {platforms}. E-mail: Narain Gehani "nhg@research.att.com". (1994-08-18)

Open data - data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. See /r/opendata

Orange Book "security, standard" A standard from the US Government {National Computer Security Council} (an arm of the U.S. National Security Agency), "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December 1985" which defines criteria for trusted computer products. There are four levels, A, B, C, and D. Each level adds more features and requirements. D is a non-secure system. C1 requires user log-on, but allows {group ID}. C2 requires individual log-on with password and an audit mechanism. (Most {Unix} implementations are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to about C2 without excessive pain). Levels B and A provide mandatory control. Access is based on standard Department of Defense clearances. B1 requires DOD clearance levels. B2 guarantees the path between the user and the security system and provides assurances that the system can be tested and clearances cannot be downgraded. B3 requires that the system is characterised by a mathematical model that must be viable. A1 requires a system characterized by a mathematical model that can be proven. See also {crayola books}, {book titles}. [{Jargon File}] (1997-01-09)

Orange Book ::: (security, standard) A standard from the US Government National Computer Security Council (an arm of the U.S. National Security Agency), Trusted which defines criteria for trusted computer products. There are four levels, A, B, C, and D. Each level adds more features and requirements.D is a non-secure system.C1 requires user log-on, but allows group ID.C2 requires individual log-on with password and an audit mechanism. (Most Unix implementations are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to about C2 without excessive pain).Levels B and A provide mandatory control. Access is based on standard Department of Defense clearances.B1 requires DOD clearance levels.B2 guarantees the path between the user and the security system and provides assurances that the system can be tested and clearances cannot be downgraded.B3 requires that the system is characterised by a mathematical model that must be viable.A1 requires a system characterized by a mathematical model that can be proven.See also crayola books, book titles.[Jargon File] (1997-01-09)

organ ::: an instrument consisting of a number of pipes that sound tones when supplied with air and a keyboard that operates a mechanism controlling the flow of air to the pipes.

overcompensation: a Freudian defence mechanism, whereby an individual attempts to offset weakness in an area of their lives by focusing on another aspect of it.

PAL ::: 1. (language) Paradox Application Language.2. For the AVANCE distributed persistent operating system.[PAL Reference Manual, M. Ahlsen et al, SYSLAB WP-125, Stockholm 1987].[AVANCE: An Object Management System, A. Bjornerstedt et al, SIGPLAN Notices 23(11):206-221 (OOPSLA '88) (Nov 1988)].[What is it?]3. (language) An object-oriented Prolog-like language.[Inheritance Hierarchy Mechanism in Prolog, K. Akama, Proc Logic Prog '86, LNCS 264, Springer 1986, pp. 12-21].4. (language) PDP Assembly Language.5. (language) Pedagogic Algorithmic Language.6. (hardware, integrated circuit) Programmable Array Logic.7. (television) phase alternating line.(2001-04-02)

PAL 1. "language" {Paradox Application Language}. 2. For the {AVANCE} distributed {persistent} {operating system}. ["PAL Reference Manual", M. Ahlsen et al, SYSLAB WP-125, Stockholm 1987]. ["AVANCE: An Object Management System", A. Bjornerstedt et al, SIGPLAN Notices 23(11):206-221 (OOPSLA '88) (Nov 1988)]. [What is it?] 3. "language" An {object-oriented} {Prolog}-like language. ["Inheritance Hierarchy Mechanism in Prolog", K. Akama, Proc Logic Prog '86, LNCS 264, Springer 1986, pp. 12-21]. 4. "language" {PDP Assembly Language}. 5. "language" {Pedagogic Algorithmic Language}. 6. "hardware, integrated circuit" {Programmable Array Logic}. 7. "television" {phase alternating line}. (2001-04-02)

Paper Feed Control Character (PFCC) An obscure mechanism used in Fortran run-time systems whereby the first character of a line of output to a line-printer caused various actions after the line was printed: space return newline 0 return newline return newline 1 form-feed + return

Paper Feed Control Character ::: (PFCC) An obscure mechanism used in Fortran run-time systems whereby the first character of a line of output to a line-printer caused various actions after the line was printed: space return newline0 return newline return newline+ return

parallel processing "parallel" (Or "multiprocessing") The simultaneous use of more than one computer to solve a problem. There are many different kinds of parallel computer (or "parallel processor"). They are distinguished by the kind of interconnection between processors (known as "processing elements" or PEs) and between processors and memory. {Flynn's taxonomy} also classifies parallel (and serial) computers according to whether all processors execute the same instructions at the same time ("{single instruction/multiple data}" - SIMD) or each processor executes different instructions ("{multiple instruction/multiple data}" - MIMD). The processors may either communicate in order to be able to cooperate in solving a problem or they may run completely independently, possibly under the control of another processor which distributes work to the others and collects results from them (a "{processor farm}"). The difficulty of cooperative problem solving is aptly demonstrated by the following dubious reasoning: If it takes one man one minute to dig a post-hole then sixty men can dig it in one second. {Amdahl's Law} states this more formally. Processors communicate via some kind of network or bus or a combination of both. Memory may be either {shared memory} (all processors have equal access to all memory) or private (each processor has its own memory - "{distributed memory}") or a combination of both. Many different software systems have been designed for programming parallel computers, both at the {operating system} and programming language level. These systems must provide mechanisms for partitioning the overall problem into separate tasks and allocating tasks to processors. Such mechanisms may provide either {implicit parallelism} - the system (the {compiler} or some other program) partitions the problem and allocates tasks to processors automatically or {explicit parallelism} where the programmer must annotate his program to show how it is to be partitioned. It is also usual to provide synchronisation primitives such as {semaphores} and {monitors} to allow processes to share resources without conflict. {Load balancing} attempts to keep all processors busy by allocating new tasks, or by moving existing tasks between processors, according to some {algorithm}. Communication between tasks may be either via {shared memory} or {message passing}. Either may be implemented in terms of the other and in fact, at the lowest level, shared memory uses message passing since the address and data signals which flow between processor and memory may be considered as messages. The terms "parallel processing" and "multiprocessing" imply multiple processors working on one task whereas "{concurrent processing}" and "{multitasking}" imply a single processor sharing its time between several tasks. See also {cellular automaton},{symmetric multi-processing}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.parallel}. {Institutions (http://ccsf.caltech.edu/other_sites.html)}, {research groups (http://cs.cmu.edu/~scandal/research-groups.html)}. (2004-11-07)

Parlog ::: Clark & Gregory, Imperial College 1983. An AND-parallel Prolog, with guards and committed choice nondeterminism (don't care nondeterminism). Shallow backtracking only.Implementations: MacParlog and PC-Parlog from Parallel Logic Programming Ltd., Box 49 Twickenham TW2 5PH, UK.See also SPM. . E-mail: .[Parlog: A Parallel Logic Programming Language, K.L. Clark and S. Gregory, Imperial College, London, May 1983]. (Parlog83, in which the ouput mechanism was assignment).[Parallel Logic Programming in PARLOG, The Language and Its Implementation, S. Gregory, A-W 1987]. (Parlog86, in which the output mechanism was unification, as in GHC). (See Strand).

Parlog Clark & Gregory, Imperial College 1983. An {AND-parallel} {Prolog}, with {guards} and {committed choice nondeterminism} ({don't care nondeterminism}). {Shallow backtracking} only. Implementations: MacParlog and PC-Parlog from Parallel Logic Programming Ltd., Box 49 Twickenham TW2 5PH, UK. See also {SPM}. {(ftp://ftp.inria.fr/lang/Parlog.tar.Z)}. E-mail: "parlog@doc.ic.ac.uk". ["Parlog: A Parallel Logic Programming Language", K.L. Clark and S. Gregory, Imperial College, London, May 1983]. ("Parlog83", in which the ouput mechanism was assignment). ["Parallel Logic Programming in PARLOG, The Language and Its Implementation", S. Gregory, A-W 1987]. ("Parlog86", in which the output mechanism was unification, as in {GHC}). (See {Strand}).

passive current flow ::: Current flow across neuronal membranes that does not entail the action potential mechanism.

pattern recognition ::: (artificial intelligence, data processing) A branch of artificial intelligence concerned with the classification or description of observations.Pattern recognition aims to classify data (patterns) based on either a priori knowledge or on statistical information extracted from the patterns. The patterns to be classified are usually groups of measurements or observations, defining points in an appropriate multidimensional space.A complete pattern recognition system consists of a sensor that gathers the observations to be classified or described; a feature extraction mechanism that classification or description scheme that does the actual job of classifying or describing observations, relying on the extracted features.The classification or description scheme is usually based on the availability of a set of patterns that have already been classified or described. This set of establishes the classes itself based on the statistical regularities of the patterns.The classification or description scheme usually uses one of the following approaches: statistical (or decision theoretic), syntactic (or structural), or interrelationships of features. Neural pattern recognition employs the neural computing paradigm that has emerged with neural networks. (1995-09-22)

pattern recognition "artificial intelligence, data processing" A branch of {artificial intelligence} concerned with the classification or description of observations. Pattern recognition aims to classify {data} (patterns) based on either a priori knowledge or on statistical information extracted from the patterns. The patterns to be classified are usually groups of measurements or observations, defining points in an appropriate multidimensional space. A complete pattern recognition system consists of a sensor that gathers the observations to be classified or described; a {feature extraction} mechanism that computes numeric or {symbolic} information from the observations; and a classification or description scheme that does the actual job of classifying or describing observations, relying on the extracted features. The classification or description scheme is usually based on the availability of a set of patterns that have already been classified or described. This set of patterns is termed the {training set} and the resulting learning strategy is characterised as {supervised}. Learning can also be {unsupervised}, in the sense that the system is not given an a priori labelling of patterns, instead it establishes the classes itself based on the statistical regularities of the patterns. The classification or description scheme usually uses one of the following approaches: statistical (or {decision theoretic}), syntactic (or structural), or neural. Statistical pattern recognition is based on statistical characterisations of patterns, assuming that the patterns are generated by a {probabilistic} system. Structural pattern recognition is based on the structural interrelationships of features. Neural pattern recognition employs the neural computing paradigm that has emerged with {neural networks}. (1995-09-22)

phakoscope ::: n. --> An instrument for studying the mechanism of accommodation.

Physics: (Gr. physis, nature) In Greek philosophy, one of the three branches of philosophy, Logic and Ethics being the other two among the Stoics (q.v.). In Descartes, metaphysics is the root and physics the trunk of the "tree of knowledge." Today, it is the science (overlapping chemistry, biology and human physiology) of the calculation and prediction of the phenomena of motion of microscopic or macroscopic bodies, e.g. gravitation, pressure, heat, light, sound, magnetism, electricity, radio-activity, etc. Philosophical problems arise concerning the relation of physics to biological and social phenomena, to pure mathematics, and to metaphysics. See Mechanism, Physicalism.. Physis: See Nature, Physics. Picturesque: A modification of the beautiful in English aesthetics, 18th century. -- L.V.

physiological psychology: is a subdivision of biological psychology that studies the neural mechanisms of perception and behavior through direct manipulation of the brains of nonhuman animal subjects in controlled experiments.

Pluggable Authentication Module ::: (security) (PAM) The new industry standard integrated login framework. PAM is used by system entry components, such as the Common Desktop Environment's authentication mechanisms such as RSA, DCE and Kerberos, and thus unify login mechanisms. PAM can also integrate smart card authentication. .[OSF-RFC 86.0 V. Samar, R. Schemers, Unified Login with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), Oct 1995]. (1997-07-18)

Pluggable Authentication Module "security" (PAM) The new industry standard integrated {login} {framework}. PAM is used by system entry components, such as the {Common Desktop Environment}'s dtlogin, to authenticate users logging into a {Unix} system. It provides pluggability for a variety of system-entry services. PAM's ability to {stack} authentication {modules} can be used to integrate {login} with different authentication mechanisms such as {RSA}, {DCE} and {Kerberos}, and thus unify login mechanisms. PAM can also integrate {smart card} authentication. {White paper (http://gr.osf.org/book/psm-wppr.htm)}. [OSF-RFC 86.0 V. Samar, R. Schemers, "Unified Login with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)", Oct 1995]. (1997-07-18)

Practically all philosophers of religion (to name in addition to thoce above only Schleiermacher, Lotze, Pfleiderer, Hoffding, Siebeck, Galloway, Ladd, Wundt, Josiah Royce, W. E. Hocking, Barth, and Hauer) are carried by an ethical idealism, being interested in the good life as the right relation between God and man, conforming by and large to the ethical citegories of determinism, indeterminism, mechanism, rationalism, etc. Buddhists, though not believing in God, profess an ethics religiously motivated and supported philosophically.

Price mechanism - The system in a market economy whereby changes in price in response to changes in demand and supply have the effect of making demand equal to supply.

Project Guardian "project, security" A project which grew out of the {ARPA} support for {Multics} and the sale of Multics systems to the US Air Force. The USAF wanted a system that could be used to handle more than one security classification of data at a time. They contracted with {Honeywell} and {MITRE Corporation} to figure out how to do this. Project Guardian led to the creation of the {Access Isolation Mechanism}, the forerunner of the {B2} labeling and star property support in Multics. The {DoD Orange Book} was influenced by the experience in building secure systems gained in Project Guardian. (1997-01-29)

projection: defence mechanisms whereby which unwanted thoughts are externalised or projected onto someone else.

Projection ::: In Psychoanalytic Theory, the defense mechanism whereby we transfer or project our feelings about one person onto another.

Psychoanalytic Theory ::: Theory developed by Freud consisting of the structural model of personality, topographical model of personality, defense mechanisms, drives, and the psychosexual stages of development. The primary driving force behind the theory is the id, ego and superego and the division of consciousness into the conscious mind, the pre/subconscious, and the unconscious.

qizhongyu. (J. shichishugo; K. ch'ilchongo 七種語). In Chinese, the Buddha's "seven modes of speech." They are (1) yinyu, explanations of how a present cause will induce a specific future effect; (2) guoyu, explanations of how a present effect was a result of a specific past cause; (3) yinguo yu, explanations of the comprehensive principles and mechanisms of the operation of cause and effect; (4) yuyu, explanations through the use of parables, analogies, and illustrations; (5) buying [shuo] yu, a mode of speech that has been variously interpreted as either "enigmatic speech" ("buying" in this case is understood as "not connected with [logic or common sense or traditional tenets])" or "spontaneous speech" ("buying" in this case is understood as "[to speak] without responding [to specific questions]" and therefore is a "self-induced, spontaneous speech"); (6) shi liubu yu, explanations aimed at conforming and catering to worldly concerns, customs, or world views; in other words, these are mundane, provisional explanations not necessarily aimed at transmitting the highest truths; (7) ruyi yu, a mode of speech interpreted as either explanations made according to the likings and predilections of the audience ("ruyi" in this case means "conforming to the wishes" [of the audience]) or explanations that come from the Buddha's ultimate intent-i.e., these are the ultimate, "definitive" explanations ("ruyi" in this case means "conforming to [the Buddha's original] wish").

quine ::: (programming) /kwi:n/ (After the logician Willard V. Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter) A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement.In most interpreted languages, any constant, e.g. 42, is a quine because it evaluates to itself. In certain Lisp dialects (e.g. Emacs Lisp), the symbols is self-quoting so that, when applied to some arguments, it returns itself applied to those arguments. Here is a quine in Lisp using this idea: ((lambda (x) (list x x)) (lambda (x) (list x x))) Compare this to the lambda expression: (\ x . x x) (\ x . x x) considered as a fixed point of the language's evaluation mechanism.We can write this in Lisp: ((lambda (x) (funcall x x)) (lambda (x) (funcall x x))) but evaluation of this expression will never terminate so it cannot be called a quine.Here is a more complex version of the above Lisp quine, which will work in Scheme and other Lisps where lambda is not self-quoting: ((lambda (x)(list x (list (quote quote) x))) which do not. Here is a classic C quine for ASCII machines: char*f=char*f=%c%s%c;main() {printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);} infamous Obfuscated C Contest entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways.Ken Thompson's back door involved an interesting variant of a quine - a compiler which reproduced part of itself when compiling (a version of) itself.[Jargon File] (1995-04-25)

quine "programming" /kwi:n/ (After the logician Willard V. Quine, via Douglas Hofstadter) A program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given programming language is a common hackish amusement. In most interpreted languages, any constant, e.g. 42, is a quine because it "evaluates to itself". In certain {Lisp} dialects (e.g. {Emacs Lisp}), the symbols "nil" and "t" are "self-quoting", i.e. they are both a symbol and also the value of that symbol. In some dialects, the function-forming function symbol, "lambda" is self-quoting so that, when applied to some arguments, it returns itself applied to those arguments. Here is a quine in {Lisp} using this idea: ((lambda (x) (list x x)) (lambda (x) (list x x))) Compare this to the {lambda expression}: (\ x . x x) (\ x . x x) which reproduces itself after one step of {beta reduction}. This is simply the result of applying the {combinator} {fix} to the {identity function}. In fact any quine can be considered as a {fixed point} of the language's evaluation mechanism. We can write this in {Lisp}: ((lambda (x) (funcall x x)) (lambda (x) (funcall x x))) where "funcall" applies its first argument to the rest of its arguments, but evaluation of this expression will never terminate so it cannot be called a quine. Here is a more complex version of the above Lisp quine, which will work in Scheme and other Lisps where "lambda" is not self-quoting: ((lambda (x)  (list x (list (quote quote) x))) (quote   (lambda (x)    (list x (list (quote quote) x))))) It's relatively easy to write quines in other languages such as {PostScript} which readily handle programs as data; much harder (and thus more challenging!) in languages like {C} which do not. Here is a classic {C} quine for {ASCII} machines: char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main() {printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c"; main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);} For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line break. Some infamous {Obfuscated C Contest} entries have been quines that reproduced in exotic ways. {Ken Thompson}'s {back door} involved an interesting variant of a quine - a compiler which reproduced part of itself when compiling (a version of) itself. [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-25)

QWERTY "hardware" /kwer'tee/ (From the top left row of letter keys of most keyboards) Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to {Dvorak} or foreign-language layouts (e.g. "keyboard AZERTY" in french-speaking countries) or a {space-cadet keyboard} or {APL keyboard}. The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a {fossil}. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow *faster* typing - under a constraint now long obsolete. In early typewriters, fast typing using nearby type-bars jammed the mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect job, though; "th", "tr", "ed", and "er", for example, each use two nearby keys). Also, putting the letters of "typewriter" on one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for {demos}. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on. [{Jargon File}] (1998-01-15)

racktail ::: n. --> An arm attached to a swinging notched arc or rack, to let off the striking mechanism of a repeating clock.

rackwork ::: n. --> Any mechanism having a rack, as a rack and pinion.

ratchet ::: n. --> A pawl, click, or detent, for holding or propelling a ratchet wheel, or ratch, etc.
A mechanism composed of a ratchet wheel, or ratch, and pawl. See Ratchet wheel, below, and 2d Ratch.


rationalisation: a defence mechanism whereby behaviour is explained and justified by offering a reason acceptable to the ego in place of the true reason.

Rationalization ::: A defense mechanism where one believes or states an acceptable explanation for a behavior as opposed to the real explanation.

RC4 "cryptography" A {cipher} designed by {RSA Data Security, Inc.} which can accept {keys} of arbitrary length, and is essentially a {pseudo random number generator} with the output of the generator being {XOR}ed with the data stream to produce the encrypted data. For this reason, it is very important that the same RC4 key never be used to encrypt two different data streams. The encryption mechanism used to be a trade secret, until someone posted source code for an {algorithm} onto {Usenet News}, claiming it to be equivalent to RC4. The algorithm is very fast, its security is unknown, but breaking it does not seem trivial either. There is very strong evidence that the posted algorithm is indeed equivalent to RC4. The United States government routinely approves RC4 with 40-bit keys for export. Keys this small can be easily broken by governments, criminals, and amateurs. The exportable version of {Netscape}'s {Secure Socket Layer}, which uses RC4-40, was broken by at least two independent groups. Breaking it took about eight days; in many universities or companies the same computing power is available to any computer science student. See also {Damien Doligez's SSL cracking page (http://pauillac.inria.fr/~doligez/ssl/)}, {RC4 Source and Information (http://cs.hut.fi/crypto/rc4)}, {SSLeay (http://cs.hut.fi/crypto/software.html

reaction formation: a defence mechanism whereby a person a behaviour is displayed that is the opposite of a forbidden impulse. An example would be a man who deals with his homosexual feelings by displaying external resentment towardshomosexuals.

Reaction Formation ::: A defense mechanism where unacceptable impulses are converted to their opposite.

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal "humour" Back in the good old days - the "Golden Era" of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that didn't. A real computer programmer said things like "DO 10 I=1,10" and "ABEND" (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like "computers are too complicated for me" and "I can't relate to computers - they're so impersonal". (A previous work [1] points out that Real Men don't "relate" to anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.) But, as usual, times change. We are faced today with a world in which little old ladies can get computers in their microwave ovens, 12-year-old kids can blow Real Men out of the water playing Asteroids and Pac-Man, and anyone can buy and even understand their very own Personal Computer. The Real Programmer is in danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with {TRASH-80s}. There is a clear need to point out the differences between the typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer. If this difference is made clear, it will give these kids something to aspire to -- a role model, a Father Figure. It will also help explain to the employers of Real Programmers why it would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their staff with 12-year-old Pac-Man players (at a considerable salary savings). LANGUAGES The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use {Fortran}. Quiche Eaters use {Pascal}. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked how to pronounce his name. He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the {IBM 370} {Fortran-G} and H compilers. Real programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done - they are perfectly happy with a {keypunch}, a {Fortran IV} {compiler}, and a beer. Real Programmers do List Processing in Fortran. Real Programmers do String Manipulation in Fortran. Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in Fortran. Real Programmers do {Artificial Intelligence} programs in Fortran. If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in {assembly language}. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing. STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING The academics in computer science have gotten into the "structured programming" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the examples they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another - clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000-line programs that WORKED. (Really!) Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000-line Fortran program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won't help you solve a problem like that - it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming: Real Programmers aren't afraid to use {GOTOs}. Real Programmers can write five-page-long DO loops without getting confused. Real Programmers like Arithmetic IF statements - they make the code more interesting. Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they can save 20 {nanoseconds} in the middle of a tight loop. Real Programmers don't need comments - the code is obvious. Since Fortran doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using {assigned GOTOs}. Data Structures have also gotten a lot of press lately. Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings have become popular in certain circles. Wirth (the above-mentioned Quiche Eater) actually wrote an entire book [2] contending that you could write a program based on data structures, instead of the other way around. As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the Array. Strings, lists, structures, sets - these are all special cases of arrays and can be treated that way just as easily without messing up your programing language with all sorts of complications. The worst thing about fancy data types is that you have to declare them, and Real Programming Languages, as we all know, have implicit typing based on the first letter of the (six character) variable name. OPERATING SYSTEMS What kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M? God forbid - CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and use CP/M. Unix is a lot more complicated of course - the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week - but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on {UUCP}-net and write adventure games and research papers. No, your Real Programmer uses OS 370. A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual. A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the manual at all. A truly outstanding programmer can find bugs buried in a 6 megabyte {core dump} without using a hex calculator. (I have actually seen this done.) OS is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS 370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they were mistaken. PROGRAMMING TOOLS What kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was memory - it didn't go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don't want it to, or remembers things long after they're better forgotten.) Legend has it that {Seymore Cray}, inventor of the Cray I supercomputer and most of Control Data's computers, actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Seymore, needless to say, is a Real Programmer. One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. The moral of this story: while a Real Programmer usually includes a keypunch and lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front panel and a telephone in emergencies. In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work in doesn't contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this situation has to do his work with a "text editor" program. Most systems supply several text editors to select from, and the Real Programmer must be careful to pick one that reflects his personal style. Many people believe that the best text editors in the world were written at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for use on their Alto and Dorado computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse. Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems - {Emacs} and {VI} being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor - complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise. It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine. For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary {object code} directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original Fortran code. In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job - no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called "job security". Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers: Fortran preprocessors like {MORTRAN} and {RATFOR}. The Cuisinarts of programming - great for making Quiche. See comments above on structured programming. Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps. Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient. Source code maintenance systems. A Real Programmer keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it implies that its owner cannot leave his important programs unguarded [5]. THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK Where does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no Real Programmer would be caught dead writing accounts-receivable programs in {COBOL}, or sorting {mailing lists} for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!). Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers. Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions. It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies. Real Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operating systems for cruise missiles. Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based Fortran programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation - hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter. The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a Pascal program (or a Pascal programmer) for navigation to these tolerances. As you can tell, many of the world's Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government - mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be. Recently, however, a black cloud has formed on the Real Programmer horizon. It seems that some highly placed Quiche Eaters at the Defense Department decided that all Defense programs should be written in some grand unified language called "ADA" ((C), DoD). For a while, it seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against all the precepts of Real Programming - a language with structure, a language with data types, {strong typing}, and semicolons. In short, a language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real Programmer. Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD has enough interesting features to make it approachable -- it's incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn't like it [6]. (Dijkstra, as I'm sure you know, was the author of "GoTos Considered Harmful" - a landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by Pascal programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language. The Real Programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it, providing there's enough money in it. There are several Real Programmers building video games at Atari, for example. (But not playing them - a Real Programmer knows how to beat the machine every time: no challenge in that.) Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of fifty million Star Trek fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because nobody has found a use for computer graphics yet. On the other hand, all computer graphics is done in Fortran, so there are a fair number of people doing graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs. THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works - with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway (although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud). Occasionally, the Real Programmer does step out of the office for a breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips on recognizing Real Programmers away from the computer room: At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it. At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the plays against his simulations printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper. At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand. At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying "Poor George, he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary." In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself, because he never could trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time. THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITAT What sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best in? This is an important question for the managers of Real Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep one on the staff, it's best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his work done. The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are: Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office. Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee. Occasionally, there will be cigarette butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush. Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open to some particularly interesting pages. Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calendar for the year 1969. Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for peanut butter filled cheese bars - the type that are made pre-stale at the bakery so they can't get any worse while waiting in the vending machine. Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a stash of double-stuff Oreos for special occasions. Underneath the Oreos is a flowcharting template, left there by the previous occupant of the office. (Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintenance people.) The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way. Bad response time doesn't bother the Real Programmer - it gives him a chance to catch a little sleep between compiles. If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only impresses the hell out of his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In general: No Real Programmer works 9 to 5 (unless it's the ones at night). Real Programmers don't wear neckties. Real Programmers don't wear high-heeled shoes. Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch [9]. A Real Programmer might or might not know his wife's name. He does, however, know the entire {ASCII} (or EBCDIC) code table. Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't open at three in the morning. Real Programmers survive on Twinkies and coffee. THE FUTURE What of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers are not being brought up with the same outlook on life as their elders. Many of them have never seen a computer with a front panel. Hardly anyone graduating from school these days can do hex arithmetic without a calculator. College graduates these days are soft - protected from the realities of programming by source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses, and "user friendly" operating systems. Worst of all, some of these alleged "computer scientists" manage to get degrees without ever learning Fortran! Are we destined to become an industry of Unix hackers and Pascal programmers? From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS 370 nor Fortran show any signs of dying out, despite all the efforts of Pascal programmers the world over. Even more subtle tricks, like adding structured coding constructs to Fortran have failed. Oh sure, some computer vendors have come out with Fortran 77 compilers, but every one of them has a way of converting itself back into a Fortran 66 compiler at the drop of an option card - to compile DO loops like God meant them to be. Even Unix might not be as bad on Real Programmers as it once was. The latest release of Unix has the potential of an operating system worthy of any Real Programmer - two different and subtly incompatible user interfaces, an arcane and complicated teletype driver, virtual memory. If you ignore the fact that it's "structured", even 'C' programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: after all, there's no type checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in - like having the best parts of Fortran and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for

Real-Time Transport Protocol "protocol" (RTP) An {Internet} {protocol} for transmitting {real-time} data such as {audio} and {video}. RTP itself does not guarantee real-time delivery of data, but it does provide mechanisms for the sending and receiving applications to support {streaming} data. Typically, RTP runs on top of the {UDP} protocol, although the specification is general enough to support other {transport protocols}. RTP has received wide industry support. {Netscape} intends to base its {LiveMedia} technology on RTP, and {Microsoft} claims that its {NetMeeting} product supports RTP. (2003-07-06)

Receptor: The organ of sense considered as part of the total response mechanism of a human or animal organism. Receptors are classified as a) exteroceptars or receptors at the surface of the body, and b) propioceptors or receptors embedded in the muscles and bodily tissues themselves. The term interoceptors is sometimes applied to receptors embedded in the vital organs especially those of the digestive tract. -- L.W.

Regression ::: A defense mechanism where one reverts to an earlier stage of development.

regression: in Freudian theory, a defence mechanism whereby a individual reverts to a behaviour of an earlier developmental period to prevent anxiety and satisfy current needs.

repression: defence mechanism whereby memories, feelings or ideas associated with pain or guilt are blocked from conscious awareness.

Repression ::: In Psychoanalytic Theory, the defense mechanism whereby our thoughts are pulled out of our consciousness and into our unconscious.

reservoir computing ::: A framework for computation that may be viewed as an extension of neural networks.[277] Typically an input signal is fed into a fixed (random) dynamical system called a reservoir and the dynamics of the reservoir map the input to a higher dimension. Then a simple readout mechanism is trained to read the state of the reservoir and map it to the desired output. The main benefit is that training is performed only at the readout stage and the reservoir is fixed. Liquid-state machines[278] and echo state networks[279] are two major types of reservoir computing.[280]

resolution 1. "hardware" the maximum number of {pixels} that can be displayed on a {monitor}, expressed as (number of horizontal pixels) x (number of vertical pixels), i.e., 1024x768. The ratio of horizontal to vertical resolution is usually 4:3, the same as that of conventional television sets. 2. "logic" A mechanical method for proving statements of {first order logic}, introduced by J. A. Robinson in 1965. Resolution is applied to two {clauses} in a {sentence}. It eliminates, by {unification}, a {literal} that occurs "positive" in one and "negative" in the other to produce a new clause, the {resolvent}. For example, given the sentence: (man(X) =" mortal(X)) AND man(socrates). The literal "man(X)" is "negative". The literal "man(socrates)" could be considered to be on the right hand side of the degenerate implication True =" man(socrates) and is therefore "positive". The two literals can be unified by the binding X = socrates. The {truth table} for the implication function is A | B | A =" B --+---+------- F | F | T F | T | T T | F | F T | T | T (The implication only fails if its premise is true but its conclusion is false). From this we can see that A =" B == (NOT A) OR B Which is why the left hand side of the implication is said to be negative and the right positive. The sentence above could thus be written ((NOT man(socrates)) OR mortal(socrates)) AND man(socrates) Distributing the AND over the OR gives ((NOT man(socrates)) AND man(socrates)) OR mortal(socrates) AND man(socrates) And since (NOT A) AND A == False, and False OR A == A we can simplify to just mortal(socrates) AND man(socrates) So we have proved the new literal, mortal(socrates). Resolution with {backtracking} is the basic control mechanism of {Prolog}. See also {modus ponens}, {SLD Resolution}. 3. "networking" {address resolution}. (1996-02-09)

resolution ::: 1. (hardware) the maximum number of pixels that can be displayed on a monitor, expressed as (number of horizontal pixels) x (number of vertical pixels), i.e., 1024x768. The ratio of horizontal to vertical resolution is usually 4:3, the same as that of conventional television sets.2. (logic) A mechanical method for proving statements of first order logic, introduced by J. A. Robinson in 1965. Resolution is applied to two positive in one and negative in the other to produce a new clause, the resolvent.For example, given the sentence: (man(X) => mortal(X)) AND man(socrates). considered to be on the right hand side of the degenerate implication True => man(socrates) and is therefore positive. The two literals can be unified by the binding X = socrates.The truth table for the implication function is A | B | A => B--+---+------- (The implication only fails if its premise is true but its conclusion is false). From this we can see that A => B == (NOT A) OR B and the right positive. The sentence above could thus be written ((NOT man(socrates)) OR mortal(socrates))AND Distributing the AND over the OR gives ((NOT man(socrates)) AND man(socrates))OR And since (NOT A) AND A == False, and False OR A == A we can simplify to just mortal(socrates) AND man(socrates) So we have proved the new literal, mortal(socrates).Resolution with backtracking is the basic control mechanism of Prolog.See also modus ponens, SLD Resolution.3. (networking) address resolution. (1996-02-09)

Resource Description Framework "web, specification, data" (RDF) A specification being developed in 2000 by the {W3C} as a foundation for processing {metadata} regarding resources on the {Internet}, including the {web}. Resource Description Framework data consists of resources ({nodes}), and property/value pairs describing the resource. A node is any object which can be pointed to by a {URI}, properties are attributes of the node, and values can be either atomic values for the attribute, or other nodes. For example, information about a particular {web page} (a node), might include the property "Author". The value for the Author property could be either a string giving the name of the author, or a {link} to a resource describing the author. Resource Description Framework only specifies a mechanism for encoding and transferring metadata. It does not specify what that metadata should, or can be. RDF does not, for example, define an "Author" attribute. Sets of properties are defined within RDF Vocabularies (or Schemas). Anynone can create an RDF schema, describing a specialized set of properties, by creating a resource, referenced by the Schema URI, which provides a human- and machine-understandable definition of the schema's properties. The description of a node may include properties defined in different schemas. The properties within a resource description are associated with a certain schema definition using the {XML} {namespace} mechanism. Schemas currently being developed include a content screening system modeled after {PICS}, and a bibliographic vocabulary, such as the {Dublin Core Initiative}. {(http://w3c.org/RDF/)}. {W3C Resource Description Framework-RDF Model and Syntax Specification (http://w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/)}. (2000-03-25)

Resource Description Framework ::: (World-Wide Web, specification, data) (RDF) A specification being developed in 2000 by the W3C as a foundation for processing meta-data regarding resources on the Internet, including the World-Wide Web.Resource Description Framework data consists of resources (nodes), and property/value pairs describing the resource. A node is any object which can be value for the Author property could be either a string giving the name of the author, or a link to a resource describing the author.Resource Description Framework only specifies a mechanism for encoding and transferring meta-data. It does not specify what that meta-data should, or can screening system modeled after PICS, and a bibliographic vocabulary, such as the Dublin Core Initiative. . .(2000-03-25)

response ::: 1. A reply or an answer. 2. Fig. A reaction, as that of an organism or a mechanism, to a specific stimulus. responses.

RFC 1825 ::: (networking, standard) The RFC describing security mechanisms for Internet Protocol version 4 and IP version 6 and the services that they provide. . (1997-07-09)

RFC 1825 "networking, standard" The {RFC} describing security mechanisms for {Internet Protocol} version 4 and {IP version 6} and the services that they provide. {(rfc:1825)}. (1997-07-09)

RFC 4213 "networking, standard" The {RFC} defining mechanisms for transitioning to {IPv6}, such as {dual-stack} versus {tunnelling}. {(rfc:4213)}. (2013-11-12)

Romero, Francisco: Born in 1891. Professor of Philosophy at the Universities of Buenos Aires, La Plata, and the National Institute for Teachers. Director of the Philosophical Library of the Losada Publishing House, and distinguished staff member of various cultural magazines and reviews in Latin America. Francisco Romero is one of the most important figures in the philosophical movement of South America. He is the immediate successor of Korn, and as such he follows on the footsteps of his master, doing pioneer work, not only striving towards an Argentinian philosophy, but also campaigning for philosophy in the nations of Latin America through a program of cultural diffusion. Among his most important writings, the following may be mentioned: Vteja y Nueva Concepcion de la Realidad, 1932; Los Problemas de la Filosofia de la Cultura, 1936; Filosofia de la Persona, 1938; Logica (In collaboration with Pucciarelli), 1936; Programa de una Filosofia, 1940; Un Filosofo de la Problematicidad, 1934; Descartes y Husserl, 1938; Contribucion al Estudio de las Relaciones de Comparacion, 1938; Teoria y Practica de la Verdad, 1939. Three characteristic notes may be observed in the philosophy of Romero Aporetics or Problematics, Philosophy of Weltanschauungen, Philosophy of the Person. The first has to do with his criterion of knowledge. Justice to all the facts of experience, over against mere system building, seems to be the watchword. The desirability and gradual imposition of Structuralism as the modern Weltanschauung, over against outworn world conceptions such as Evolution, Mechanism, Rationalism, etc., is the emphasis of the second principle of his philosophy. Personality as a mere function of transcendence, with all that transcendence implies in the realm of value and history, carries the main theme of his thought. See Latin American Philosophy. -- J.A.F.

sadrsam cestate svasyah prakrteh ::: acts according to the mechanism of his Nature. [Gita 3.33]

saltatory conduction ::: Mechanism of action potential propagation in myelinated axons; so named because action potentials “jump” from one node of Ranvier to the next due to generation of action potentials only at these sites.

Sankaracharya, Krishna, Lao-tzu, and Jesus were avataras in differing degrees, of somewhat differing structure. There was a divine ray which came down at the cyclic time of each of these incarnations, and the connecting link or the flame of mind was provided in each case by a member of the Hierarchy of Compassion. Krishna says, “I incarnate in period after period in order to destroy wickedness and reestablish righteousness” (BG ch 4, sl 8). Krishna here represents the Logos or logoic ray which “on our plane would be utterly helpless, inactive, and have no possible means of communication with us and our sphere, because that logoic ray lacks an intermediate and fully conscious vehicle or carrier, i.e., it lacks the intermediate or highly ethereal mechanism, the spiritual-human in us, which in ordinary man is but slightly active. An avatara takes place when a direct ray from the Logos enters into, fully inspires, and illuminates, a human being, through the intermediary of a bodhisattva who has incarnated in that human being, thereby supplying the fit, ready, and fully conscious intermediate vehicle or carrier” (Fund 276).

SCRIPT 1. An early system on the {IBM 702}. [Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959)]. 2. A {real-time} language. ["A Communication Abstraction Mechanism and its Verification", N. Francez et al, Sci Comp Prog 6(1):35-88 (1986)]. (1994-12-01)

SCSI-3 ::: (hardware) An ongoing standardisation effort to extend the capabilities of SCSI-2. SCSI-3's goals are more devices on a bus (up to 32); faster data transfer; greater distances between devices (longer cables); more device classes and command sets; structured documentation; and a structured protocol model.In SCSI-2, data transmission is parallel (8, 16 or 32 bit wide). This gets increasingly difficult with higher data rates and longer cables because of serial data stream signal delay problems are eliminated. Driving a single signal also consumes less driving power and reduces connector cost and size.To allow for backward compatibility and for added flexibility SCSI-3 allows the use of several different transport mechanisms, some serial and some parallel. The software protocol and command set is the same for each transport. This leads to a layered protocol definition similar to definitions found in networking.SCSI-3 is therefore in fact the sum of a number of separate standards which are defined by separate groups. These standards and groups are currently: X3T9.2/91-13R2 SCSI-3 Generic Packetized ProtocolX3T9.2/92-141 SCSI-3 Queuing Model Additional Documents for the Fibre Channel are also meant to be included in the SCSI-3 framework, i.e.: Fibre Channel SCSI MappingFibre Channel Fabric Requirements structure and workgroups may change. No final standard is issued yet.In the meantime a group of manufacturers have proposed an extension of SCSI-2 called Ultra-SCSI which doubles the transfer speed of Fast-SCSI to give 20MByte/s on an 8 bit connection and 40MByte/s on a 16-bit connection.[Hermann Strass: SCSI-Bus erfolgreich anwenden, Franzis-Verlag Muenchen 1993]. (1995-04-19)

SCSI-3 "hardware" An ongoing standardisation effort to extend the capabilities of {SCSI-2}. SCSI-3's goals are more devices on a bus (up to 32); faster data transfer; greater distances between devices (longer cables); more device classes and command sets; structured documentation; and a structured {protocol} model. In SCSI-2, data transmission is parallel (8, 16 or 32 bit wide). This gets increasingly difficult with higher data rates and longer cables because of varying signal delays on different wires. Furthermore, wiring cost and drive power increases with wider data words and higher speed. This has triggered the move to serial interfacing in SCSI-3. By embedding clock information into a serial data stream signal delay problems are eliminated. Driving a single signal also consumes less driving power and reduces connector cost and size. To allow for backward compatibility and for added flexibility SCSI-3 allows the use of several different transport mechanisms, some serial and some parallel. The software {protocol} and command set is the same for each transport. This leads to a layered protocol definition similar to definitions found in networking. SCSI-3 is therefore in fact the sum of a number of separate standards which are defined by separate groups. These standards and groups are currently: X3T9.2/91-13R2 SCSI-3 Generic Packetized Protocol X3T9.2/92-141  SCSI-3 Queuing Model X3T9.2/92-079  SCSI-3 Architecture Model IEEE P1394   High Performance Serial Bus X3T9.2/92-106  SCSI-3 Block Commands X3T9.2/91-189  SCSI-3 Serial Bus Protocol X3T9.2/92-105  SCSI-3 SCSI-3 Core Commands SCSI-3 Common Command Set X3T9.2/92-108  SCSI-3 Graphic Commands X3T9.2/92-109  SCSI-3 Medium Changer Commands X3T9.2/91-11   SCSI-3 Interlocked Protocol X3T9.2/91-10   SCSI-3 Parallel Interface X3T9.2/92-107  SCSI-3 Stream Commands SCSI-3 Scanner Commands Additional Documents for the Fibre Channel are also meant to be included in the SCSI-3 framework, i.e.: Fibre Channel SCSI Mapping Fibre Channel Fabric Requirements Fibre Channel Low Cost Topologies X3T9.3/92-007  Fibre Channel Physical and Signalling Interface Fibre Channel Single Byte Commands Fibre Channel Cross Point Switch Topology X3T9.2/92-103  SCSI-3 Fibre Channel Protocol (GPP & SBP) As all of this is an ongoing effort of considerable complexity, document structure and workgroups may change. No final standard is issued yet. In the meantime a group of manufacturers have proposed an extension of {SCSI-2} called {Ultra-SCSI} which doubles the transfer speed of {Fast-SCSI} to give 20MByte/s on an 8 bit connection and 40MByte/s on a 16-bit connection. [Hermann Strass: "SCSI-Bus erfolgreich anwenden", Franzis-Verlag Muenchen 1993]. (1995-04-19)

self-acting ::: a. --> Acting of or by one&

semantic network "data" A {graph} consisting of {nodes} that represent physical or conceptual objects and arcs that describe the relationship between the nodes, resulting in something like a data flow diagram. Semantic nets are an effective way to represent data as they incorporate the inheritance mechanism that prevents duplication of data. That is, the meaning of a concept comes from its relationship to other concepts and the information is stored by interconnecting nodes with labelled arcs. (1999-01-07)

Silence of the ordinary rmnd-mechanism is necessary in order that the higher meiitahty nray mamifest, descend, occupy by degrees the place of the present im|«rfect mentality and trans- form the activities ot the latter into its own fuller movements.

Siri ::: An object-oriented constraint language using a single abstraction mechanism developed by Bruce Horn of CMU in 1991. Siri is a conceptual blend of BETA and Bertrand. It is similar to Kaleidoscope.[Constraint Patterns as a Basis for Object-Oriented Constraint Programming, B. Horn, OOPSLA '92 (Sept 1992)]. (1994-11-04)

Siri An {object-oriented} {constraint language} using a single abstraction mechanism developed by Bruce Horn of {CMU} in 1991. Siri is a conceptual blend of {BETA} and {Bertrand}. It is similar to {Kaleidoscope}. ["Constraint Patterns as a Basis for Object-Oriented Constraint Programming", B. Horn, OOPSLA '92 (Sept 1992)]. (1994-11-04)

spike "jargon" To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary) device that forces a specific result. The word is used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change, which would be called {hard-coded}). (1999-10-18)

spike ::: (jargon) To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary) device that forces a specific result. The word is used in several it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change, which would be called hard-coded). (1999-10-18)

Spleen One of the abdominal viscera, located on the left side just below the diaphragm. In medicine, it has been variously studied as a blood-making organ, a special lymph gland, etc., but its exact role has always puzzled the physiologist. However, its intimate relations with the fluidic currents of the vascular, lymphatic, and digestive systems hint at its organic astral character, as the mobile watery or fluid element corresponds to the astral phase of matter. Thus, the spleen is an organic medium or channel for the transference of the pranic life-currents throughout the physical body, and the physical seat of the astral model-body or linga-sarira, the vehicle of the life principle; likewise it is the especial organ through which manifests the svadhishshana chakra. It has a physiological place in the vital borderland of metabolic changes where food stuffs and nature forces are transmuted into the regenerating energy and substance of human or animal tissue. This organ has its own rhythmic action which, as reported, “seems to arise from some intrinsic nervous mechanism.”

SR ::: (language) Synchronizing Resources.A language for concurrent programming.Resources encapsulate processes and variables they share. Each Resource can be separately compiled. Operations provide the primary mechanism for process interaction.SR provides a novel integration of the mechanisms for invoking and servicing operations. Consequently, it supports local and remote procedure call, rendezvous, message passing, dynamic process creation, multicast, semaphores and shared memory.Version 2.2 has been ported to Sun-3, Sun-4, Decstation, SGI Iris, HP PA, HP 9000/300, NeXT, Sequent Symmetry, DG AViiON, RS/6000, Multimax, Apollo and others. .E-mail: . Mailing list: [An Overview of the SR Language and Implementation, G. Andrews, ACM TOPLAS 10:51-86 (Jan 1988)].[The SR Programming Language: Concurrency in Practice, G.R. Andrews et al, Benjamin/Cummings 1993, ISBN 0-8053-0088-0]. (1992-09-01)

SR "language" Synchronizing Resources. A language for concurrent programming. "Resources" encapsulate processes and variables they share. Each Resource can be separately compiled. "Operations" provide the primary mechanism for process interaction. SR provides a novel integration of the mechanisms for invoking and servicing operations. Consequently, it supports local and {remote procedure call}, {rendezvous}, {message passing}, {dynamic process creation}, {multicast}, {semaphores} and {shared memory}. Version 2.2 has been ported to {Sun-3}, {Sun-4}, {Decstation}, {SGI Iris}, {HP PA}, {HP 9000/300}, {NeXT}, {Sequent Symmetry}, {DG AViiON}, {RS/6000}, {Multimax}, {Apollo} and others. {(ftp://cs.arizona.edu/sr/sr.tar.Z)}. E-mail: "sr-project@cs.arizona.edu". Mailing list: info-sr-request@cs.arizona.edu. ["An Overview of the SR Language and Implementation", G. Andrews, ACM TOPLAS 10:51-86 (Jan 1988)]. ["The SR Programming Language: Concurrency in Practice", G.R. Andrews et al, Benjamin/Cummings 1993, ISBN 0-8053-0088-0]. (1992-09-01)

stem-winding ::: a. --> Wound by mechanism connected with the stem; as, a stem-winding watch.

stream 1. "communications" An {abstraction} referring to any flow of data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or receiver, consumer). A stream usually flows through a channel of some kind, as opposed to {packets} which may be addressed and routed independently, possibly to multiple recipients. Streams usually require some mechanism for establishing a channel or a "{connection}" between the sender and receiver. 2. "programming" In the {C} language's buffered input/ouput library functions, a stream is associated with a file or device which has been opened using {fopen}. Characters may be read from (written to) a stream without knowing their actual source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently by the library routines. 3. "operating system" Confusingly, {Sun} have called their modular {device driver} mechanism "{STREAMS}". 4. "operating system" In {IBM}'s {AIX} {operating system}, a stream is a {full-duplex} processing and data transfer path between a driver in {kernel space} and a process in {user space}. [IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03]. 5. "communications" {streaming}. 6. "programming" {lazy list}. (1996-11-06)

stream ::: 1. (communications) An abstraction referring to any flow of data from a source (or sender, producer) to a single sink (or receiver, consumer). A stream usually require some mechanism for establishing a channel or a connection between the sender and receiver.2. (programming) In the C language's buffered input/ouput library functions, a stream is associated with a file or device which has been opened their actual source (destination) and buffering is provided transparently by the library routines.3. (operating system) Confusingly, Sun have called their modular device driver mechanism STREAMS.4. (operating system) In IBM's AIX operating system, a stream is a full-duplex processing and data transfer path between a driver in kernel space and a process in user space.[IBM AIX 3.2 Communication Programming Concepts, SC23-2206-03].5. (communications) streaming.6. (programming) lazy list. (1996-11-06)

Sublimation ::: A defense mechanism where undesired or unacceptable impulses are transformed into behaviors which are accepted by society.

sublimation: in Freud's theory, a defence mechanism whereby energy is redirected towards a socially desirable creative activity.

Sublimation: In psychoanalytic terminology, the psychological mechanism which consists in the discovery of a substitute object for the expression of a basic instinct or feeling.

Sublimation: (Lat. sublimatio, from sublimare, to elevete, lift up) The psychological mechanism, described by Freudians, which consists in the discovery of a substitute object for the expression of a basic instinct or feeling, e.g., the sublimation of the sex impulses in aesthetic creation -- L.W.

Suppression ::: The defense mechanism where we push unacceptable thoughts out of consciousness and into our unconscious.

svasaMvedana. (T. rang rig; C. zizheng/zijue; J. jisho/jikaku; K. chajŭng/chagak 自證/自覺). In Sanskrit, lit. "self-knowledge" or "self-awareness," also seen written as svasaMveda, svasaMvit, svasaMvitti. In Buddhist epistemology, svasaMvedana is that part of consciousness which, during a conscious act of seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on, apprehends not the external sensory object but the knowing consciousness itself. For example, when a visual consciousness (CAKsURVIJNĀNA) apprehends a blue color, there is a simultaneous svasaMvedana that apprehends the caksurvijNāna; it is directed at the consciousness, and explains not only how a person knows that he knows, but also how a person can later remember what he saw or heard, and so on. There is disagreement as to whether such a form of consciousness exists, with proponents (usually YOGĀCĀRA) arguing that there must be this consciousness of consciousness in order for there to be memory of past cognitions, and opponents (MADHYAMAKA) propounding a radical form of nonessentialism that explains memory as a mere manipulation of objects with no more than a language-based reality. Beside the basic use of the term svasaMvedana to explain the nature of consciousness and the mechanism of memory, the issue of the necessary existence of svasaMvedana was pressed by the Yogācāra school because of how they understood enlightenment (BODHI). They argued that the liberating vision taught by the Buddha consisted of a self-reflexive act that was utterly free of subject-object distortion (GRĀHYAGRĀHAKAVIKALPA). In ordinary persons, they argued, all conscious acts take place within a bifurcation of subject and object, with a sense of distance between the two, because of the residual impressions or latencies (VĀSANĀ) left by ignorance. Infinite numbers of earlier conscious acts have been informed by that particular deeply ingrained ignorance. These impressions are carried at the foundational level of consciousness (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA). When they are finally removed by the process of BHĀVANĀ, knowledge (JNĀNA) purified of distortion emerges in a fundamental transformation (ĀsRAYAPARĀVṚTTI), thus knowing itself in a nondual vision. Such a vision presupposes self-knowledge. In tantric literature, svasaMvedana has a less technical sense of a profound and innate knowledge or awareness. See also RIG PA.

Syntax/Semantic Language ::: (language) (S/SL) A high level specification language for recursive descent parsers developed by J.R. Cordy at the University of Toronto in 1980.S/SL is a small language that supports cheap recursion and defines input, output, and error token names (& values), semantic mechanisms (class interfaces accepts. Alternation, control flow and one-symbol look-ahead constructs are part of the language.The S/SL processor compiles this pseudo-code into a table (byte-codes) that is interpreted by the S/SL table-walker (interpreter). The pseudo-code language excellent syntax error recovery and repair. It is more powerful and transparent than yacc but slower.S/SL has been used to implement production commercial compilers for languages such as PL/I, Euclid, Turing, Ada, and COBOL, as well as interpreters, command processors, and domain specific languages of many kinds. .[Specification of S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language, J.R. Cordy and R.C. Holt, Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, 1980].[An Introduction to S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language, R.C. Holt, J.R. Cordy, and D.B. Wortman; ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Vol 4, No. 2, April 1982, pp 149-178].[Hierarchic Syntax Error Repair, D.T. Barnard and R.C. Holt, International Journal of Computing and Information Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 4, August 1982, Pages 231-258.](2003-10-30)

Syntax/Semantic Language "language" (S/SL) A high level {specification language} for {recursive descent parsers} developed by J.R. Cordy "cordy@cs.queensu.ca" and R.C. Holt "holt@uwaterloo.ca" at the University of Toronto in 1980. S/SL is a small language that supports cheap recursion and defines input, output, and error token names (& values), semantic mechanisms (class interfaces whose methods are really escapes to routines in a host programming language but allow good abstraction in the pseudo-code) and a pseudo-code program that defines the syntax of the input language by the token stream the program accepts. Alternation, control flow and one-symbol look-ahead constructs are part of the language. The S/SL processor compiles this pseudo-code into a table (byte-codes) that is interpreted by the S/SL table-walker (interpreter). The pseudo-code language processes the input language in recursive descent LL1 style but extensions allow it to process any LRk language relatively easily. S/SL is designed to provide excellent syntax error recovery and repair. It is more powerful and transparent than yacc but slower. S/SL has been used to implement production commercial compilers for languages such as {PL/I}, {Euclid}, {Turing}, {Ada}, and {COBOL}, as well as {interpreters}, {command processors}, and domain specific languages of many kinds. {(ftp://ftp.cs.queensu.ca/pub/cordy/ssl)}. ["Specification of S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language", J.R. Cordy and R.C. Holt, Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, 1980]. ["An Introduction to S/SL: Syntax/Semantic Language", R.C. Holt, J.R. Cordy, and D.B. Wortman; ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Vol 4, No. 2, April 1982, pp 149-178]. ["Hierarchic Syntax Error Repair", D.T. Barnard and R.C. Holt, International Journal of Computing and Information Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 4, August 1982, Pages 231-258.] (2003-10-30)

system call ::: (operating system, programming) The mechanism used by an application program to request service from the operating system. System calls often use a restricted actions such as accessing hardware devices or the memory management unit. (1995-03-01)

system call "operating system, programming" The mechanism used by an {application program} to request service from the {operating system}. System calls often use a special {machine code} instruction which causes the processor to change mode (e.g. to "supervisor mode" or "{protected mode}"). This allows the OS to perform restricted actions such as accessing hardware devices or the {memory management unit}. (1995-03-01)

Table-turning The spiritualistic or astral phenomenon of motion produced in a table when the sitters at a seance hold their hands over or on it, and varying from risings into the air and movings around the room, to giving tilts in answer to code-questions. Ordinary Occidental intelligence seems incapable of imagining anything between a purely mechanical action and a full-blown human intelligence. The phenomena are usually supposed to be either due to tricks or some kind of unconscious muscular action on the part of the sitters, or to be spirits of the departed. But there are a variety of degrees between physical mechanism and self-conscious volition, just as there are multitudes of living beings in widely differing states of materiality filling the gap between physical organisms and the spirits of the departed. The astral light is filled with an enormous variety of beings, mostly of a low type, not using physical bodies, not human in their nature, but having a sort of consciousness of their own; and the conditions provided by the vitality of the medium and sitters may vitalize, stimulate, and to a certain extent direct, these beings and thus at times cause them to become active in the production of physical phenomena. Again, the human organism in all its ranges itself is composed of a vast number of elements, physical, astral, etc., which in normal life are held together in a unit and in subordination to the general life of the person. Some of these elements may become temporarily extruded, especially in natural mediums or those who have cultivated mediumship; and thus the phenomena may be caused unintelligently or ignorantly by the sitters themselves — and just here is the instrumental cause of nearly all the physical phenomena produced by mediums, or mediums and sitters together.

TABLOG "language" A programming language based on {first order predicate logic} with equality that combines {relational programming} and {functional programming}. It has functional notation and {unification} as its binding mechanism. TABLOG supports a more general subset of standard {first order logic} than {Prolog}. It employs the Manna-Waldinger '{deductive-tableau}' proof system as an {interpreter} instead of {resolution}. (1997-06-19)

tagged types "programming" {Ada}'s type mechanism in which types can be extended via {single inheritance}. (2000-02-21)

tagged types ::: (programming) Ada's type mechanism in which types can be extended via single inheritance.(2000-02-21)

Teleology: (Gr. telos, end, completion) The theory of purpose, ends, goals, final causes, values, the Good (s.). The opposite of Mechanism. As opposed to mechanism, which explains the present and the future in terms of the past, teleology explains the past and the present in terms of the future. Teleology as such does not imply personal consciousness, volition, or intended purpose (q.v.). Physics, Biology: See Vitalism. Psychology: See Hormic, Instinct, Hedonism, Voluntarism. Epistemology: the view that mind is guided or governed by purposes, values, interests, "instinct", as well as by "factual", "objective" or logical evidence in its pursuit of truth (see Fideism, Voluntarism, Pragmatism, Will-to-believe, Value judgment). Metaphysics: The doctrine that reality is ordered by goals, ends, purposes, values, formal or final causes (q.v.). Ethics: The view that the standard of human life is value, the Good, rather than duty, law, or formal decorum.

The Mendelian principle of heredity and the combining of the genes in the germ-cells have been found so important in determining variations that the old “natural selection of chance variations” plays a far smaller part in thought concerning evolution than formerly. But the old question still stands: what brings about the combination of genes, or other outward mechanism, that results in the building of the ladder of life from the lowest known to the highest known manifestations of consciousness? Many modern biologists are looking upon evolution as the interaction of life and environment; but life is far more than the physicochemical properties of the genes, the supposed units of heredity. Natural selection, then, is inadequate to yield the results demanded of it; and it still remains to show how any evolution, any response or adaptation to environment, can take place without a pre-formed plan or an innate vital urge within the organism.

The_poverty_trap ::: is a mechanism, which makes it very difficult for people to escape poverty. A poverty trap is created when an economic system requires a significant amount of various forms of capital in order to earn enough to escape poverty. When individuals lack this capital, they may also find it difficult to acquire it, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of poverty.

There are two major points of reference for tracing1 the path that Soviet philosophy has taken -- the successive controversies around the issues of mechanism and of idealism. The first began in the early twenties as a discussion centering on the philosophy of science, and eventually spread to all phases of philosophy. The central issue was whether materialism could be identified with mechanism. Those who answered in the affirmative, among them Timiriazev, Timinski, Axelrod and Stepanov, were called mechanistic materialists. Their position tended to an extreme empiricism which was suspicious of generalization and theory, saw little if any value in Hegel's philosophy, or in dialectical as distinguished from formal logic, and even went so far, in some cases, as to deny the necessity of philosophy in general, resting content with the findings of the specific sciences. It was considered that they tended to deny the reality of quality, attempting to reduce it mechanically to quantity, and to interpret evolution as a mere quantitative increase or decrease of limited factors, neglecting the significance of leaps, breaks and the precipitation of new qualities. In opposition to their views, a group of thinkers, led by Deborin, asserted the necessity of philosophic generalizition and the value of the dialectical method in Hegel as a necessary element in Marxian materialism. In 1929, at a conference of scientific institutions attended by 229 delegates from all parts of the country, the issues were discussed by both sides. A general lack of satisfaction with the mechanist position was expressed in the form of a resolution at the close of the conference. However, the Deborin group was also criticized, not only by the mechanists, but by many who were opposed to the mechanists as well. It was felt by Mitin, Yudin and a group of predominantly younger thinkers that neither camp was really meeting the obligations of philosophy. While they felt there was much that was valuable in Deborin's criticism of mechanism, it seemed to them that he had carried it too far and had fallen over backward into the camp of the idealists. They called his group menshevizing idealists, that is to say, people who talked like the Mensheviks, a pre-revolutionary faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. By this was meant that they were unduly abstract, vague and tended to divorce theory from practice. In particular, they seemed to accept Hegelian dialectics as such, overlooking the deeper implications of the materialist reconstruction of it which Marx insisted upon. Moreover, they had neglected the field of social problems, and consequently made no significant philosophic contribution to momentous social issues of the times such as collectivization of the land, abandonment of NEP, the possibility of a Five Year Plan. At a three day conference in 1930, the situation was discussed at length by all interested parties. Deborin, Karev and Sten leading the discussion on one side, Mitin and Yudin on the other. The sense of the meetings was that the criticisms made of the Deborin group were valid.

The term dialectical expresses the dynamic interconnectedness of things, the universality of change and its radical character everything possessing any sort of reality is in process of self-transformation, owing to the fact that its content is made up of opposing factors or forces the internal movement of which interconnects everything, changes each thing into something else. Mechanism in the sense of non-dialectical materialism as well as metaphysics in the sense of idealistic ontology are thus rejected.

Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist.   Bibliography:   B. Geyer,   Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano,   Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody,   The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle,   Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter,   Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922).     --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B.   In logic, see Operationism.   In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations.   1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events.   2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance.   Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning).   Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class.   The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined.   In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations.   For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.)   For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation.   Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes.   Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion.   For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R.   The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .).   The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C.   G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M.   In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established.   Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset:     Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914;   El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935;   El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921;   España Invertebrada, 1922;   Kant, 1924;   La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925;   Espiritu de la Letra, 1927;   La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929;   Goethe desde Adentio, 1934;   Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939;   Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939;   El Libro de las Misiones, 1940;   Ideas y Creencias, 1940;     and others.   Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P

tick ::: 1. A jiffy (sense 1). 2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount events with long, independent chains of causes is handwaved. 3. In the FORTH language, a single quote character.[Jargon File]

tick 1. A {jiffy} (sense 1). 2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is the ordering of events. This sort of AI simulation is often pejoratively referred to as "tick-tick-tick" simulation, especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long, independent chains of causes is {handwave}d. 3. In the FORTH language, a single quote character. [{Jargon File}]

toggle To change a {bit} from whatever state it is in to the other state; to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. This comes from "toggle switches", such as standard light switches, though the word "toggle" actually refers to the mechanism that keeps the switch in the position to which it is flipped rather than to the fact that the switch has two positions. There are four things you can do to a bit: set it (force it to be 1), clear (or zero) it, leave it alone, or toggle it. [{Jargon File}] (1994-12-12)

To summarize: what modern usage calls heredity, the transmission of characteristics from parents to children, is not a merely physiologic or biologic mechanism acting automatically or fortuitously; but actually is brought about because of the attraction to certain families, or certain parents, of reimbodying egos possessing in greater or larger degree the same characteristics which the parents themselves have. On identic lines is to be explained the reason why races and even nations continue with their respective characteristics; egos are drawn to similar fields for incarnation. Thus it is that the transmission of type and characteristics continues both racially and individually from generation to generation, always modified by the individualities of the reimbodying egos.

Transmission mechanism - The channels by which a change in the demand or supply of money leads to a shift of the aggregate demand curve.

Transport Layer Interface ::: (networking, programming) (TLI, or Transport Level Interface) A protocol-independent interface for accessing network facilities, modelled after the ISO transport layer (level 4), that first appeared in Unix SVR3.TLI is defined by SVID as transport mechanism for networking interfaces, in preference to sockets, which are biased toward IP and friends. A disavantage is library, libnsl_s.a. The major functions are t_open, t_bind, t_connect, t_listen, t_accept, t_snd, t_rcv, read, write.According to the Solaris t_open man page, XTI (X/OPEN Transport Interface) evolved from TLI, and supports the TLI API for compatibility, with some variations on semantics. (1999-06-10)

Transport Layer Interface "networking, programming" (TLI, or "Transport Level Interface") A {protocol}-independent interface for accessing network facilities, modelled after the {ISO} {transport layer} (level 4), that first appeared in {Unix SVR3}. TLI is defined by {SVID} as transport mechanism for networking interfaces, in preference to {sockets}, which are biased toward {IP} and friends. A disavantage is that a process cannot use read/write directly, but has to use backends using {stdin} and {stdout} to communicate with the network connection. TLI is implemented in SVR4 using the {STREAMS} interface. It adds no new {system calls}, just a library, libnsl_s.a. The major functions are t_open, t_bind, t_connect, t_listen, t_accept, t_snd, t_rcv, read, write. According to the {Solaris} t_open {man page}, XTI (X/OPEN Transport Interface) evolved from TLI, and supports the TLI {API} for compatibility, with some variations on semantics. (1999-06-10)

unconscious motive: a term used to describe that much of (motivated) behaviour is a result of influences outside our conscious awareness, and manifests in defence mechanisms or other symbolic ways.

universal thunk ::: (programming, operating system) A software mechanism allowing a Windows 3.1 application to call a 32-bit dynamically linked library (DLL) under Win32s.The Windows 3.1 application which wants to call an entry in a 32-bit DLL instead calls a corresponding entry in a 16-bit DLL. The programmer must also include code to detect whether the 32-bit DLL is loaded. A 32-bit EXE loads the 32-bit DLL.See also Generic Thunk, Flat Thunk.[Calling a Win32 DLL from a Windows 3.1 Application, Win32 SDK Knowledge Base, Article ID Q97785].[Better explanation?] (1997-10-11)

universal thunk "programming, operating system" A software mechanism allowing a {Windows 3.1} {application} to call a {32-bit} {dynamically linked library} (DLL) under {Win32s}. The {Windows 3.1} {application} which wants to call an entry in a 32-bit DLL instead calls a corresponding entry in a {16-bit} DLL. The programmer must also include {code} to detect whether the {32-bit} DLL is loaded. A {32-bit} {EXE} loads the {32-bit} DLL. See also {Generic Thunk}, {Flat Thunk}. ["Calling a Win32 DLL from a Windows 3.1 Application", Win32 SDK Knowledge Base, Article ID Q97785]. [Better explanation?] (1997-10-11)

unmechanize ::: v. t. --> To undo the mechanism of; to unmake; as, to unmechanize a structure.

Uranus ::: Hideyuki Nakashima , 1993. A logic-based knowledge representation language. An extension of Prolog written in Common Lisp, with Lisp-like syntax. Extends Prolog with a multiple world mechanism, plus term descriptions to provide functional programming. .

Uranus Hideyuki Nakashima "nakashim@el.go.jp", 1993. A logic-based knowledge representation language. An extension of Prolog written in Common Lisp, with Lisp-like syntax. Extends Prolog with a multiple world mechanism, plus term descriptions to provide functional programming. {(ftp://etlport.etl.go.jp/pub/uranus/ftp)}.

user interface (UI) The aspects of a computer system or program which can be seen (or heard or otherwise perceived) by the human user, and the commands and mechanisms the user uses to control its operation and input data. A {graphical user interface} emphasises the use of pictures for output and a pointing device such as a {mouse} for input and control whereas a {command line interface} requires the user to type textual commands and input at a keyboard and produces a single stream of text as output. A user interface contrasts with, but is typically built on top of, an {Application Program Interface} (API). See also {user interface copyright}. (1995-02-20)

user interface ::: (UI) The aspects of a computer system or program which can be seen (or heard or otherwise perceived) by the human user, and the commands and mechanisms the user uses to control its operation and input data.A graphical user interface emphasises the use of pictures for output and a pointing device such as a mouse for input and control whereas a command line interface requires the user to type textual commands and input at a keyboard and produces a single stream of text as output.A user interface contrasts with, but is typically built on top of, an Application Program Interface (API).See also user interface copyright. (1995-02-20)

vaccine ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to cows; pertaining to, derived from, or caused by, vaccinia; as, vaccine virus; the vaccine disease. ::: n. --> The virus of vaccinia used in vaccination.

any preparation used to render an organism immune to some disease, by inducing or increasing the natural immunity mechanisms.


vasomotor ::: a. --> Causing movement in the walls of vessels; as, the vasomotor mechanisms; the vasomotor nerves, a system of nerves distributed over the muscular coats of the blood vessels.

Vitalism: (Lat. vita, life) The doctrine that phenomena of life possess a character sui generis by virtue of which they differ radically from physico-chemical phenomena. The vitalist ascribes the activities of living organisms to the operation of a "vital force" such as Driesch's "entelechy" or Bergson's elan vital. (See H. Driesch, Der Vttalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre (1905); The Science and Philosophy of Organism, 2 Vols. (1908); The Problem of Individuality (1914); H. Bergson, Creative Evolution.) Opposed to Vitalism is biological mechanism (see Mechanism) which asserts that living phenomena can be explained exclusively in physico-chemical terms. (See J. Loeb, The Organism as a Whole from a Physico-Chemical View-Point, 1919; The Dynamics of Living Matter, 1910. See also C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, ch. II.) -- L.W.

vitalism ::: The doctrine that so-called "vital forces" are active in living organisms, so that life cannot be explained solely by mechanism. That element is often referred to as the vital spark or energy, which some equate with the soul.

WaZOO ::: (protocol) Warp-zillion Opus-to-Opus. Fidonet's session layer protocol. Although it mentions Opus (a specific BBS from the 1980s), WaZOO is the session other mechanisms (e.g., FTP), it is sometimes used for automated or batch communications in other parts of the Internet. . (1995-11-16)

WaZOO "protocol" Warp-zillion Opus-to-Opus. {Fidonet}'s {session layer} {protocol}. Although it mentions {Opus} (a specific {BBS} from the 1980s), WaZOO is the session protocol used for the Fidonet network. Because WaZOO is much more efficient than other mechanisms (e.g., {FTP}), it is sometimes used for automated or batch communications in other parts of the {Internet}. {(ftp://ftp.psg.com/pub/fidonet/stds/fts-0006.txt)}. (1995-11-16)

weak typing ::: (programming) Strict enforcement of type rules but with well-defined exceptions or an explicit type-violation mechanism.Weak typing is friendlier to the programmer than strong typing, but catches fewer errors at compile time.C and C++ are weakly typed, as they automatically coerce many types e.g. ints and floats. E.g. int a = 5;float b = a; example the following is allowed, which would probably be disallowed in a strongly typed language: typedef int Date; /* Type to represent a date */Date a = 12345; C++ is stricter than C in its handling of enumerated types: enum animal {CAT=0,DOG=2,ANT=3};enum animal a = CAT; /* NB The enum is optional in C++ */ (2000-07-04)

weak typing "programming" Strict enforcement of {type} rules but with well-defined exceptions or an explicit type-violation mechanism. Weak typing is "friendlier" to the programmer than {strong typing}, but catches fewer errors at compile time. {C} and {C++} are weakly typed, as they automatically {coerce} many types e.g. {ints} and {floats}. E.g. int a = 5; float b = a; They also allow ignore {typedefs} for the purposes of type comparison; for example the following is allowed, which would probably be disallowed in a strongly typed language: typedef int Date;  /* Type to represent a date */ Date a = 12345; int b = a;   /* What does the coder intend? */ C++ is stricter than C in its handling of enumerated types: enum animal {CAT=0,DOG=2,ANT=3}; enum animal a = CAT; /* NB The enum is optional in C++ */ enum animal b = 1;  /* This is a warning or error in C++ */ (2000-07-04)

wheelwork ::: n. --> A combination of wheels, and their connection, in a machine or mechanism.

Wide Area Information Servers "networking, information science" (WAIS) A distributed information retrieval system. WAIS is supported by {Apple Computer}, {Thinking Machines} and Dow Jones. {Clients} are able to retrieve documents using keywords. The search returns a list of documents, ranked according to the frequency of occurrence of the keyword(s) used in the search. The client can retrieve text or {multimedia} documents stored on the {server}. WAIS offers simple {natural language} input, indexed searching for fast retrieval, and a "relevance feedback" mechanism which allows the results of initial searches to influence future searches. It uses the {ANSI Z39.50} service. {Public domain} implementations are available. Other information retrieval systems include {archie}, {Gopher}, {Prospero}, and {web}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.infosystems.wais}. {Telnet (telnet://sunsite.unc.edu)}. (1995-03-13)

Will, Divine ::: The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother, one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience. But this vision of what is to be and th
   refore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 218


Windows 2000 "operating system" (Win2k, W2k, NT5, Windows NT 5.0) An {operating system} developed by {Microsoft Corporation} for {PCs} and {servers}, as the successor to {Windows NT 4}.0. Early {beta} versions were referred to as "Windows NT 5.0". Windows 2000 was officially released on 2000-02-17. Windows 2000 is most commonly used on {Intel} {x86} and {Pentium} processors, with a {DEC Alpha} version rumoured. Unlike Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 is not available for {PowerPC} or {MIPS}. Windows 2000's {user interface} is very similar to {Windows 95} or Windows NT 4.0 with integrated {Internet Explorer}, or to {Windows 98}. It is available in four flavours: - Professional: the {client} version, meant for desktop {workstations}, successor to Windows NT Workstation. - Server: "entry-level" server, designed for small deployments, and departmental file, print, or {intranet} servers. - Advanced Server: high throughput, larger scale servers and applications, and small to medium scale {websites}. - Data Center Server: software for large-scale server {clusters} (in development as of 2000-03-14). New features in Windows 2000 include: - {Active Directory}. - Greatly improved built-in security mechanisms, including {Kerberos}-based {authentication}, {public key} support, an {encrypting} {file system}, and {IPsec} support. - Integrated {web browser} - {Internet Explorer} 5.0. - Integrated {web server} - {IIS} 5.0 - Terminal services for displaying application interfaces on remote computers (similar to {X-Windows}). - File protection that prevents user programs from accidentally deleting or overwriting critical system files. - Improved hardware support, including {Plug-and-Play}, {DVD}, {IEEE-1394} (FireWire), {USB}, {infra-red}, {PCMCIA}, {ACPI}, {laptop computers}. - Improved user interface, including a single point to control the entire system. - Improved management tools, including remote administration. Minimum system requirements, according to Microsoft, are {Pentium}-133 {MHz} {CPU}, 64 {MB} {RAM}, 650 {MB} of {hard disk} space. These are for W2K Professional, others require more. Many {operating systems} compete with Windows 2000, including the {Apple} {MacOS}, {Linux}, {FreeBSD}, {OpenBSD}, {NetBSD}, {Sun} {Solaris}, {IBM} {AIX}, {Hewlett-Packard} {HP-UX}, {SGI} {Irix}. Novell's NDS also provides a service similar to Active Directory. Windows 2000 will be followed by {Windows XP} Professional and {Windows 2002}. {(http://microsoft.com/windows2000/)}. (2002-01-28)

Windows 2000 ::: (operating system) (Win2k, W2k, NT5, Windows NT 5.0) An operating system developed by Microsoft Corporation for PCs and servers, as the successor to Windows NT 4.0. Early beta versions were referred to as Windows NT 5.0. Windows 2000 was officially released on 2000-02-17.Windows 2000 is most commonly used on Intel x86 and Pentium processors, with a DEC Alpha version rumoured. Unlike Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 is not available for PowerPC or MIPS.Windows 2000's user interface is very similar to Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 with integrated Internet Explorer, or to Windows 98.It is available in four flavours:- Professional: the client version, meant for desktop workstations, successor to Windows NT Workstation.- Server: entry-level server, designed for small deployments, and departmental file, print, or intranet servers.- Advanced Server: high throughput, larger scale servers and applications, and small to medium scale websites.- Data Center Server: software for large-scale server clusters (in development as of 2000-03-14).New features in Windows 2000 include:- Active Directory.- Greatly improved built-in security mechanisms, including Kerberos-based authentication, public key support, an encrypting file system, and IPsec support.- Integrated web browser - Internet Explorer 5.0.- Integrated web server - IIS 5.0- Terminal services for displaying application interfaces on remote computers (similar to X-Windows).- File protection that prevents user programs from accidentally deleting or overwriting critical system files.- Improved hardware support, including Plug-and-Play, DVD, IEEE-1394 (FireWire), USB, infra-red, PCMCIA, ACPI, laptop computers.- Improved user interface, including a single point to control the entire system.- Improved management tools, including remote administration.Minimum system requirements, according to Microsoft, are Pentium-133 MHz CPU, 64 MB RAM, 650 MB of hard disk space. These are for W2K Professional, others require more.Many operating systems compete with Windows 2000, including the Apple MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, SGI Irix. Novell's NDS also provides a service similar to Active Directory.Windows 2000 will be followed by Windows XP Professional and Windows 2002. .Usenet newsgroups: , .(2002-01-28)

Windows sockets "networking, standard" (Winsock) A specification for {Microsoft Windows} network software, describing how applications can access network services, especially {TCP/IP}. Winsock is intended to provide a single {API} to which application developers should program and to which multiple network software vendors should conform. For any particular version of {Microsoft Windows}, it defines a binary interface ({ABI}) such that an application written to the Windows Sockets API can work with a conformant {protocol} implementation from any network software vendor. Winsock was conceived at Fall Interop '91 during a {Birds of a Feather} session. Windows Sockets is supported by {Microsoft Windows}, {Windows for Workgroups}, {Win32s}, {Windows 95} and {Windows NT}. It will support protocols other than {TCP/IP}. Under {Windows NT}, {Microsoft} will provide Windows Sockets support over {TCP/IP} and {IPX}/{SPX}. {DEC} will be implementing {DECNet}. {Windows NT} will include mechanisms for multiple {protocol} support in Windows Sockets, both 32-bit and 16 bit. Mark Towfiq said, "The next rev. of Winsock will not be until toward the end of 1993. We need 1.1 of the {API} to become firmly settled and implemented first." {Windows Sockets API (ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/micro/pc-stuff/ms-windows/winsock)}. or {(ftp://microdyne.com/pub/winsock)} or send a message "help" to either "ftpmail@SunSite.UNC.Edu" or "ftpmail@DECWRL.DEC.Com". {Windows Sockets specification (ftp://rhino.microsoft.com)}. Currently NetManage (NEWT), Distinct, FTP and Frontier are shipping Winsock {TCP/IP} stacks, as is {Microsoft} (Windows NT and {TCP/IP} for WFW), Beame & Whiteside Software (v1.1 compliant), and Sun PC-NFS. Windows 95 has "dial-up networking" which supports Winsock and TCP/IP. winsock.dll is available from some {TCP/IP} stack vendors. {Novell} has one in beta for their {Lan Workplace} for {DOS}. Peter Tattam "peter@psychnet.psychol.utas.edu.au" is alpha-testing a shareware Windows Sockets compliant {TCP/IP} stack {(ftp://ftp.utas.edu.au/pc/trumpet/winsock/winsock.zip)}. and {(ftp://ftp.utas.edu.au/pc/trumpet/winsock/winpkt.com)}. {The Consummate Winsock App List (http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~Neuroses/cwsapps.html)}. [Adapted from: Aboba, Bernard D., comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc Frequently Asked Questions, 1993 {Usenet}: {news:news.answers}, {(ftp://netcom1.netcom.com/pub/mailcom/IBMTCP/)}]. [Current status?] (1996-06-20)

Windows sockets ::: (networking, standard) (Winsock) A specification for Microsoft Windows network software, describing how applications can access network services, Sockets API can work with a conformant protocol implementation from any network software vendor.Winsock was conceived at Fall Interop '91 during a Birds of a Feather session.Windows Sockets is supported by Microsoft Windows, Windows for Workgroups, Win32s, Windows 95 and Windows NT. It will support protocols other than TCP/IP. IPX/SPX. DEC will be implementing DECNet. Windows NT will include mechanisms for multiple protocol support in Windows Sockets, both 32-bit and 16 bit.Mark Towfiq said, The next rev. of Winsock will not be until toward the end of 1993. We need 1.1 of the API to become firmly settled and implemented first. or . .Currently NetManage (NEWT), Distinct, FTP and Frontier are shipping Winsock TCP/IP stacks, as is Microsoft (Windows NT and TCP/IP for WFW), Beame & Whiteside Software (v1.1 compliant), and Sun PC-NFS. Windows 95 has dial-up networking which supports Winsock and TCP/IP.winsock.dll is available from some TCP/IP stack vendors. Novell has one in beta for their Lan Workplace for DOS.Peter Tattam . .[Adapted from: Aboba, Bernard D., comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc Frequently Asked Questions, 1993 Usenet: news.answers, ].[Current status?] (1996-06-20)



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   7 Chuck Palahniuk
   6 Viktor E Frankl
   6 Neil deGrasse Tyson
   6 Colson Whitehead
   5 Terry Pratchett
   5 Stephen Jay Gould
   5 Siddhartha Mukherjee
   5 Kate Morton
   5 Isaac Asimov

1:The ego is in fact driven by the mechanism of Nature of which it is a part and the ego-will is not and cannot be a free will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Shakti,
2:The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images. ~ Albert Einstein,
3:The universe was not now this senseless whirl
Borne round inert on an immense machine;
It cast away its grandiose lifeless front,
A mechanism no more or work of Chance,
But a living movement of the body of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,
4:Christianity has a built-in defense system: anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it -- and believe me, I was raised Southern Baptist -- is to take massive amounts of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, "Show me.". ~ Bill Hicks,
5:The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix-through identity-of the Divine Grace, with a perfect knowledge-through identity-of the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.
   ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,
6:The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother, one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience.
   But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the original Shakti, the transcendent Mother, the supreme Will can then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping and inhabiting Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 218,
7:Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensation s and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs.
Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,
8:Ishwara-Shakti is not quite the same as Purusha-Prakriti; for Purusha and Prakriti are separate powers, but Ishwara and Shakti contain each other. Ishwara is Purusha who contains Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara which is her own will and whose presence in her movement she carries always with her. The Purusha-Prakriti realisation is of the first utility to the seeker on the Way of Works; for it is the separation of the conscient being and the Energy and the subjection of the being to the mechanism of the Energy that are the efficient cause of our ignorance and imperfection; by this realisation the being can liberate himself from the mechanical action of the nature and become free and arrive at a first spiritual control over the nature. Ishwara-Shakti stands behind the relation of Purusha-Prakriti and its ignorant action and turns it to an evolutionary purpose. The Ishwara-Shakti realisation can bring participation in a higher dynamism and a divine working and a total unity and harmony of the being in a spiritual nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216,
9:For this is the other face of the psychic: not only is it joy and sweetness, but also quiet strength, as if it were forever above every possible tragedy - an invulnerable master. In this case, too, the details of a scene can be indelibly engraved. But what passes on to the next life is not so much the details as the essence of the scene: we will be struck by certain repetitive patterns of events or deadlocked situations that have an air of déjà vu and seem surrounded by an aura of fatality - for what has not been overcome in the past returns again and again, each time with a slightly different appearance, but basically always identical, until we confront the old knot and untie it. Such is the law of inner progress. Generally, however, the memory of actual physical circumstances does not remain, because, although our small surface consciousness makes much of them, they are, after all, of little significance. There is even a spontaneous mechanism that erases the profusion of useless past memories, just as those of the present life soon become eradicated. If we glance behind us, without thinking, what is actually left of our present life? A nebulous mass with perhaps two or three outstanding images; all the rest is blotted out. This is likewise the case for the soul and its past lives.
   ~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,
10:In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected.

It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism.

The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
~ Slavoj Žižek,
11:...that personality, like consciousness, life, soul is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their sorce. A multiple innumberable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice, 127,
12:30. Take the same position as heretofore and visualize a Battleship; see the grim monster floating on the surface of the water; there appears to be no life anywhere about; all is silence; you know that by far the largest part of the vessel is under water; out of sight; you know that the ship is as large and as heavy as a twenty-story skyscraper; you know that there are hundreds of men ready to spring to their appointed task instantly; you know that every department is in charge of able, trained, skilled officials who have proven themselves competent to take charge of this marvelous piece of mechanism; you know that although it lies apparently oblivious to everything else, it has eyes which see everything for miles around, and nothing is permitted to escape its watchful vision; you know that while it appears quiet, submissive and innocent, it is prepared to hurl a steel projectile weighing thousands of pounds at an enemy many miles away; this and much more you can bring to mind with comparatively no effort whateveR But how did the battleship come to be where it is; how did it come into existence in the first place? All of this you want to know if you are a careful observer.
   31. Follow the great steel plates through the foundries, see the thousands of men employed in their production; go still further back, and see the ore as it comes from the mine, see it loaded on barges or cars, see it melted and properly treated; go back still further and see the architect and engineers who planned the vessel; let the thought carry you back still further in order to determine why they planned the vessel; you will see that you are now so far back that the vessel is something intangible, it no longer exists, it is now only a thought existing in the brain of the architect; but from where did the order come to plan the vessel? Probably from the Secretary of Defense; but probably this vessel was planned long before the war was thought of, and that Congress had to pass a bill appropriating the money; possibly there was opposition, and speeches for or against the bill. Whom do these Congressmen represent? They represent you and me, so that our line of thought begins with the Battleship and ends with ourselves, and we find in the last analysis that our own thought is responsible for this and many other things, of which we seldom think, and a little further reflection will develop the most important fact of all and that is, if someone had not discovered the law by which this tremendous mass of steel and iron could be made to float upon the water, instead of immediately going to the bottom, the battleship could not have come into existence at all. ~ Charles F Haanel, The Master Key System,
13:The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental fictions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the first instruments in the creation of poetic style. The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.

   This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the first of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufficient language of no very high quality. But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other "problems", or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.

   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,
14:SLEIGHT OF MIND IN ILLUMINATION
Only those forms of illumination which lead to useful behaviour changes deserve to be known as such. When I hear the word "spirituality", I tend to reach for a loaded wand. Most professionally spiritual people are vile and untrustworthy when off duty, simply because their beliefs conflict with basic drives and only manage to distort their natural behaviour temporarily. The demons then come screaming up out of the cellar at unexpected moments.

When selecting objectives for illumination, the magician should choose forms of self improvement which can be precisely specified and measured and which effect changes of behaviour in his entire existence. Invocation is the main tool in illumination, although enchantment where spells are cast upon oneselves and divination to seek objectives for illumination may also find some application.

Evocation can sometimes be used with care, but there is no point in simply creating an entity that is the repository of what one wishes were true for oneself in general. This is a frequent mistake in religion. Forms of worship which create only entities in the subconscious are inferior to more wholehearted worship, which, at its best, is pure invocation. The Jesuits "Imitation of Christ" is more effective than merely praying to Jesus for example.

Illumination proceeds in the same general manner as invocation, except that the magician is striving to effect specific changes to his everyday behaviour, rather than to create enhanced facilities that can be drawn upon for particular purposes. The basic technique remains the same, the required beliefs are identified and then implanted in the subconscious by ritual or other acts. Such acts force the subconscious acquisition of the beliefs they imply.

Modest and realistic objectives are preferable to grandiose schemes in illumination.

One modifies the behaviour and beliefs of others by beginning with only the most trivial demands. The same applies to oneselves. The magician should beware of implanting beliefs whose expression cannot be sustained by the human body or the environment. For example it is possible to implant the belief that flight can be achieved without an aircraft. However it has rarely proved possible to implant this belief deeply enough to ensure that such flights were not of exceedingly short duration. Nevertheless such feats as fire-walking and obliviousness to extreme pain are sometimes achieved by this mechanism.

The sleight of mind which implants belief through ritual action is more powerful than any other weapon that humanity possesses, yet its influence is so pervasive that we seldom notice it. It makes religions, wars, cults and cultures possible. It has killed countless millions and created our personal and social realities. Those who understand how to use it on others can be messiahs or dictators, depending on their degree of personal myopia. Those who understand how to apply it to themselves have a jewel beyond price if they use it wisely; otherwise they tend to rapidly invoke their own Nemesis with it. ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Kaos,
15:THE WAND
   THE Magical Will is in its essence twofold, for it presupposes a beginning and an end; to will to be a thing is to admit that you are not that thing.
   Hence to will anything but the supreme thing, is to wander still further from it - any will but that to give up the self to the Beloved is Black Magick - yet this surrender is so simple an act that to our complex minds it is the most difficult of all acts; and hence training is necessary. Further, the Self surrendered must not be less than the All-Self; one must not come before the altar of the Most High with an impure or an imperfect offering. As it is written in Liber LXV, "To await Thee is the end, not the beginning."
   This training may lead through all sorts of complications, varying according to the nature of the student, and hence it may be necessary for him at any moment to will all sorts of things which to others might seem unconnected with the goal. Thus it is not "a priori" obvious why a billiard player should need a file.
   Since, then, we may want "anything," let us see to it that our will is strong enough to obtain anything we want without loss of time.
   It is therefore necessary to develop the will to its highest point, even though the last task but one is the total surrender of this will. Partial surrender of an imperfect will is of no account in Magick.
   The will being a lever, a fulcrum is necessary; this fulcrum is the main aspiration of the student to attain. All wills which are not dependent upon this principal will are so many leakages; they are like fat to the athlete.
   The majority of the people in this world are ataxic; they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have no real will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others. The victim wobbles from one to the other (and it is no less wobbling because the movements may occasionally be very violent) and at the end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been achieved; except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious: the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision. Such an one is torn limb from limb by Choronzon.
   How then is the will to be trained? All these wishes, whims, caprices, inclinations, tendencies, appetites, must be detected, examined, judged by the standard of whether they help or hinder the main purpose, and treated accordingly.
   Vigilance and courage are obviously required. I was about to add self-denial, in deference to conventional speech; but how could I call that self-denial which is merely denial of those things which hamper the self? It is not suicide to kill the germs of malaria in one's blood.
   Now there are very great difficulties to be overcome in the training of the mind. Perhaps the greatest is forgetfulness, which is probably the worst form of what the Buddhists call ignorance. Special practices for training the memory may be of some use as a preliminary for persons whose memory is naturally poor. In any case the Magical Record prescribed for Probationers of the A.'.A.'. is useful and necessary.
   Above all the practices of Liber III must be done again and again, for these practices develop not only vigilance but those inhibiting centres in the brain which are, according to some psychologists, the mainspring of the mechanism by which civilized man has raised himself above the savage.
   So far it has been spoken, as it were, in the negative. Aaron's rod has become a serpent, and swallowed the serpents of the other Magicians; it is now necessary to turn it once more into a rod.
   ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, The Wand,
16: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,
17:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:The laws of physics must provide a mechanism for the universe to come into being. ~ john-wheeler, @wisdomtrove
2:Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove
3:The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove
4:For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove
5:That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove
6:Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove
7:The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove
8:We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove
9:Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove
10:In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove
11:Military arrangement, and movements in consequence, like the mechanism of a clock, will be imperfectand disordered by the want of a part. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove
12:I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove
13:It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove
14:Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove
15:As we become multi sensory, we move beyond the limitations of the five senses and we now are evolving to a different mechanism in the exploration of physical reality. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove
16:Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove
17:Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove
18:We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove
19:Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove
20:Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove
21:Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? ~ john-wheeler, @wisdomtrove
22:The body is our primary feedback mechanism which can show us what is and isn't working about our ways of thinking, expressing, and living. As we live our truth more fully and freely, our body grows healthier, stronger, and more beautiful. ~ shakti-gawain, @wisdomtrove
23:That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove
24:Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge, it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No- mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove
25:The scenery of mountains painted on the ever-changing azure canvas of the sky, the mysterious mechanism of the human body, the rose, the green grass carpet, the magnanimity of souls, the loftiness of minds, the depth of love - all these things remind us of a God who is beautiful and noble. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove
26:This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove
27:One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works&
28:The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove
29:To me, it appears no unjust simile to compare the affairs of this great Continent to the mechanism of a clock, each state representing some one or other of the smaller parts of it which they are endeavoring to put in fine order without considering how useless & unavailing their labor is unless the great Wheel or Spring which is to set the whole in motion is also well attended to & kept in good order. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove
30:The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words &
31:I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove
32:With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant&
33:Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove
34:A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel&
35:I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters &
36:I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew - the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. - Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove
37:For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:All I was was a mechanism. ~ Edward Snowden,
2:Money is a mechanism for control. ~ David Korten,
3:Truth is an all-freeing mechanism. ~ L Ron Hubbard,
4:Snark is a fabulous defense mechanism. ~ Betsy Schow,
5:People use irony as a defense mechanism. ~ David Byrne,
6:Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism. ~ James Elkins,
7:Fashion has always been my defense mechanism. ~ Rihanna,
8:Avoidance, my coping mechanism of choice. ~ Kate Canterbary,
9:Love is the best survival mechanism there is, ~ Sue Johnson,
10:My coping mechanism is denial. We'll be fine. ~ Dannika Dark,
11:Swearing makes an excellent relief mechanism ~ David Crystal,
12:decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism and ~ Anonymous,
13:As D. H. Lawrence said, “I am not a mechanism. ~ John Eldredge,
14:One mechanism of repression is the grand jury. ~ Michael Parenti,
15:them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead,
16:Doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
17:Your feelings are your frequency feedback mechanism! ~ Rhonda Byrne,
18:Laughter is Humanity's mechanism to escape suffering. ~ Deepak Chopra,
19:Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. ~ Honor de Balzac,
20:Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. ~ Honore de Balzac,
21:Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
22:Humour has always been a self-defence mechanism for me. ~ Brooke Shields,
23:Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
24:Cake is merely a frosting delivery mechanism. Unfortunately, ~ Jean M Twenge,
25:Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism? ~ Maria Semple,
26:The ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
27:SPECIFYING GOALS, NOT METHODS is a mechanism for COMPETENCE. ~ L David Marquet,
28:Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction. ~ Simon Blackburn,
29:The hatred of money is almost always a defense mechanism. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana,
30:Denial is a defense mechanism, all about self-preservation. ~ Eric Jerome Dickey,
31:Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities. ~ Gene Wolfe,
32:I was the fat kid, so as a defense mechanism, I was the jokester. ~ Peter DeLuise,
33:Nature has certain mechanism to record all memories of every life being. ~ Toba Beta,
34:We have evidence that autistic people’s mirror mechanism is impaired. ~ Stefan Klein,
35:Guilt is a mechanism to control you, not to make you a better person. ~ Chris Dietzel,
36:Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
37:That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter ~ Henri Bergson,
38:Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive. ~ Garry Shandling,
39:I don't have a shred of regret about entering the exchange-rate mechanism. ~ John Major,
40:Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured. ~ Rafael Sabatini,
41:Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both. ~ Jane Fonda,
42:Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism. ~ Donella H Meadows,
43:BUILDING TRUST AND TAKING CARE OF YOUR PEOPLE is a mechanism for CLARITY. ~ L David Marquet,
44:I think Easter is most profoundly about meaning, not mechanism. ~ Katharine Jefferts Schori,
45:The system has already anticipated the freedom seeking mechanism in humans. ~ Bryant McGill,
46:We don’t use the word crazy around here. We prefer coping mechanism. ~ Jordan Castillo Price,
47:The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos. ~ Ilya Prigogine,
48:theory, in which gradual, cumulative exposure is the predicted mechanism of effect ~ Anonymous,
49:Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things. ~ John Updike,
50:With comedy, a lot of people develop their sense of humor as a defense mechanism. ~ Judd Apatow,
51:Music for me is not just being on a stage and singing. It's my coping mechanism. ~ Tessanne Chin,
52:Music was my coping mechanism. I could place myself outside my body. It humbles you. ~ Kelly Price,
53:The podcast movement was really a creative survival mechanism for standup comics. ~ Chris Hardwick,
54:Procrastination is not a form of laziness at all. It’s a coping mechanism for stress. ~ Mel Robbins,
55:The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners. ~ Lou Gerstner,
56:Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent. ~ Robert Redford,
57:Honesty is the best protection. ~ ~ The MotherHoneybee defense mechanism wave.OMG its unbelievable 😱😱,
58:The oversight mechanism in the US may have been broken, but in Russia it didn’t exist. ~ Luke Harding,
59:Time was the lubricant that allowed the mechanism of the universe to function smoothly. ~ Dean Koontz,
60:Where health care has failed is in designing a cost containment mechanism that works. ~ Peter Shumlin,
61:It's amazing how effective simple disorientation is as a mechanism for controlling people. ~ Mira Grant,
62:Some kind of a mechanism to burn off the panic she was feeling. On Friday she’d been a rich ~ Lee Child,
63:By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the “cause”—actually, ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
64:I exposed every part of myself to him, keeping no secrets, no defense mechanism in place. ~ Emily Giffin,
65:Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life. ~ Richard Paul Evans,
66:The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
67:Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life. ~ Richard Paul Evans,
68:I make terrible jokes every time I go into a hospital. I think it's a defence mechanism. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar,
69:Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,
70:The British civil service ... is a beautifully designed and effective braking mechanism. ~ Shirley Williams,
71:The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism. ~ Pat Conroy,
72:Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ~ Ronald Fisher,
73:Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism ~ John Searle,
74:Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him. ~ John Steinbeck,
75:Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it's also a coping mechanism and a survival technique. ~ Monica Raymund,
76:Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ~ Ronald A Fisher,
77:There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
78:Death is the force that will create your new life. It is a mechanism of transformation. Welcome it. ~ Lisa Cach,
79:an elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space. ~ Sean Carroll,
80:integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being. ~ Anonymous,
81:Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant. ~ Peter H Diamandis,
82:If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. ~ Aldo Leopold,
83:There are no two countries with the same style of economic mechanism, with the same capitalism. ~ Anatoly Chubais,
84:A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein,
85:Dissociation appears to be... the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced. ~ Judith Lewis Herman,
86:Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead? ~ Galway Kinnell,
87:The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. ~ Frank Herbert,
88:Prices are supposed to transmit information in a market economy; inflation obscures that mechanism. ~ Charles Wheelan,
89:The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. — ~ Frank Herbert,
90:The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism. ~ Tom Stoppard,
91:During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism. ~ Maureen Corrigan,
92:Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering. ~ Paul Kalanithi,
93:Food is a coping mechanism; people are afraid of giving it up because then they'll feel confused and lost. ~ Phil McGraw,
94:most of us can literally “choose” to be happy, if we understand the mind’s thought–emotion mechanism. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon,
95:Universal love is the standard-sized socket that everyone can plug into. No adapting mechanism required. ~ Allison Mackie,
96:[F]or any group determined to maintain a set of communal standards some mechanism of enforcement must exist. ~ Clay Shirky,
97:Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. ~ John Battelle,
98:For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
99:If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar. ~ Kenneth Lee Pike,
100:That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
101:The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
102:The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
103:It does not seem possible to explain these facts by a purely physical mechanism without any intervention of mind. ~ Anonymous,
104:Popular religion is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment. ~ Gregory S Paul,
105:Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets... ~ Will Self,
106:Whatever mechanism passes on speech patterns probably passes on behavioral and emotional patterns as well. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,
107:And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals ~ Kate Morton,
108:How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life. ~ Richard Powers,
109:I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism. ~ Julia Gillard,
110:The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism. ~ Rose Wilder Lane,
111:And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals. ~ Kate Morton,
112:I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
113:Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe. ~ Isaac Asimov,
114:Actions have consequences. The consequences of wealth confiscation by the Federal-Reserve mechanism are now upon us. ~ Anonymous,
115:Nine times out of 10, criticism is a defense mechanism. We criticize in others what we don't like in ourselves. ~ Mark Batterson,
116:The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege. ~ Fareed Zakaria,
117:I pushed the door inward. It moved as smoothly, as silently as the mechanism of a well-crafted, spring-loaded trap. ~ Dean Koontz,
118:The aim of Wikileaks is to achieve just reform around the world and do it through the mechanism of transparency. ~ Julian Assange,
119:The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient. ~ Warren Buffett,
120:We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. ~ Haruki Murakami,
121:We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. ~ Haruki Murakami,
122:...and just like a person, it's face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals. ~ Kate Morton,
123:I’ve come to believe that creativity is the mechanism that allows learning to seep into our being and become practice. ~ Bren Brown,
124:No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism. ~ Emily St John Mandel,
125:The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought ~ Albert Einstein,
126:an elevator. The doors of the elevator were gone, as were the cab and the lift mechanism, sold for reuse or for scrap. ~ Dean Koontz,
127:Give me violent revenge fantasies as a copying mechanism.
Flash.
Just give me my first oportunity.
Flash. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
128:It's not the job of government to help the poor. The church is the mechanism that God put on earth to help the poor. ~ Rich Mullins,
129:She was one of those animals who, it seems, do not talk only because the mechanism of their mouths does not permit it. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
130:The market is a mechanism for sorting the efficient from the inefficient, it is not a substitute for responsibility. ~ Charles Handy,
131:It's an expansion. And it's a stealth mechanism to put the tentacles of socialized medicine even deeper into society. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
132:Acting is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival. . . . It isn't 'second nature,' it is 'first nature.' ~ Declan Donnellan,
133:Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),
134:Our feelings are a feedback mechanism to us about whether we’re on track or not, whether we’re on course or off course. ~ Rhonda Byrne,
135:Radical feminists didn’t need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way. ~ Susie Bright,
136:She was one of those creatures which seem only not to speak because the mechanism of their mouth does not allow them to. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
137:So what are you calling this mechanism of yours?” Elezar asked. “The Fiery Wind of Our Savior’s Flaming Ass,” Javier said. ~ Ginn Hale,
138:Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform. ~ Julian Assange,
139:Our feelings are a feedback mechanism to us about whether we're on track or not, whether we're on course or off course. ~ Jack Canfield,
140:From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material. ~ Bill Bryson,
141:Humor was also a defense mechanism from getting picked on at school. If I could be funny maybe people wouldn't bother me. ~ Pandora Boxx,
142:The Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures...as a survival mechanism...the only Nazi country in the world is Israel. ~ David Duke,
143:There is a wheel on the affairs of men revolve and its mechanism is such that it prevents any man from being always fortunate. ~ Croesus,
144:Business s humanity's most resilient, iterative and productive mechanism for creating change in the world. - John Batelle ~ Satya Nadella,
145:The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place. ~ Eve Ensler,
146:This doesn't mean you're damaged. It just means your mind has adapted to feelings of being unsafe. It's a coping mechanism ~ Sara Shepard,
147:final phase of Fink’s plan—a mechanism to deliver their ideas to the street and to mobilize the public’s support behind them. ~ Jane Mayer,
148:Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody. ~ Lawrence Wright,
149:Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a "nervous system", to coordinate its actions. ~ Bill Gates,
150:strong social ties create the conditions in which peer pressure is the most effective mechanism for promoting cooperation. ~ Alex Pentland,
151:That's what Buddhism has been trying to unravel - the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind. ~ Matthieu Ricard,
152:The mechanism which we don't understand is not anything in our soul, but rather that of the life of this expression. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein,
153:The principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. ~ Thomas Piketty,
154:the principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. ~ Thomas Piketty,
155:I don't think of myself as a terribly confident person. But I have a survival mechanism that was instilled in me by my mother. ~ Naomi Watts,
156:The second noble truth says that this resistance is the...mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering. ~ Pema Chodron,
157:Humor is his defense mechanism, so that would allow me to talk about some serious subjects, but get a lot of hilarious jokes in. ~ Judd Apatow,
158:I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow. ~ Dean Koontz,
159:There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution ~ John Gray,
160:Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. ~ Randall Robinson,
161:Inheritance is, at its core, a mechanism for automatic message delegation. It defines a forwarding path for not-understood messages. ~ Anonymous,
162:Mechanism! Everywhere -- mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from. ~ John Galsworthy,
163:My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity. ~ Fernando J Corbato,
164:Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it. ~ D H Lawrence,
165:Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead,
166:All you need to know how to perform
what you perceive as miracle is to understand
the true working mechanism of mother nature. ~ Toba Beta,
167:Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
168:Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves. ~ Dorothy L Sayers,
169:With wives, men hide behind the air of bravado, which is basically a defence mechanism, I think. Clever creatures, women. Very clever. ~ Les Dawson,
170:The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race. ~ Wilder Penfield,
171:I could always make people around me laugh. It was more of a defense mechanism more than anything else, because I was a pretty shy guy. ~ Tim Hawkins,
172:In expecting to grow “old” at a given age we may unconsciously set up a negative goal image for our Creative Mechanism to accomplish. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
173:The self-regulating mechanism of the market place cannot always be depended upon to produce adequate results in scientific research. ~ James R Newman,
174:Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for the re-creating the past, for dealing with the future. ~ Charles Yu,
175:I became a control freak as a defense mechanism. The more control I had in my life, the less chance of being surprised, of getting hurt. ~ J A Konrath,
176:Impulsivity is commonly misdiagnosed as AD/HD, but it is actually an exaggerated response to stress that serves as a survival mechanism: ~ Eric Jensen,
177:The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. ~ Julian Barnes,
178:The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices. ~ Cornel West,
179:Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
180:I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it. ~ Ella Maillart,
181:In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man. ~ Andrew Carnegie,
182:Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. After ~ Colson Whitehead,
183:Every sort of economic organization needs not only a mechanism for production but also a mechanism for distributing what is produced. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
184:For most people, blaming others is a subconscious mechanism for avoiding accountability. In reality, the only thing in your way is YOU. ~ Steve Maraboli,
185:I especially like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him. ~ Lena Dunham,
186:It is possible for every human being to be blissful, if you are willing to pay a little attention to how this human mechanism functions. ~ Jaggi Vasudev,
187:The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate. Fourth ~ Frederick P Brooks Jr,
188:Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
189:Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this. ~ Cecil Day Lewis,
190:He said cynicism’s self-protection, a defense mechanism used by cowards who give up on love because they’re afraid love’s given up on them. ~ Linda Yellin,
191:I think I came to see Islam, or at least one part of Islam, as an important defense mechanism against the commercialization of the world. ~ Peter Jennings,
192:God is merely a part of the human brain, an evolutionary coping mechanism that developed to make bearable our awareness of our own deaths. When ~ Greg Iles,
193:How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them. ~ Abdul Kalam,
194:If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back. ~ Hilary Mantel,
195:The second noble truth says that resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering. ~ Pema Ch dr n,
196:I'm sure drugs and alcohol perhaps would inspire new thoughts, but it's certainly not something that I use as a tool or a mechanism to create. ~ Heath Ledger,
197:Military arrangement, and movements in consequence, like the mechanism of a clock, will be imperfectand disordered by the want of a part. ~ George Washington,
198:On balance I think the microfiche was a very happy mechanism, and I would recommend it over a paper workbook for very large projects. ~ Frederick P Brooks Jr,
199:This appears to be a mechanism of dissociation, and in this instance, it rendered my client amnesiac of my high regard for our work together. I ~ Pete Walker,
200:Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
201:I don't think that nature envisaged an insurmountable mechanism that would hinder any country from taking the path of democratic development. ~ Garry Kasparov,
202:I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism. ~ Charles Bukowski,
203:A need is what you believe your customers require to solve a problem, and the product or business becomes the mechanism to fulfill that requirement. ~ Pat Flynn,
204:The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest. Story helps because it is a sense-making mechanism. ~ Donald Miller,
205:Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions. ~ Lauren Oliver,
206:Mechanism and function are the eternal yin and yang of biology: they interact and intertwine, yet there is no greater sin than confusing the two. ~ Frans de Waal,
207:We don’t carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing. ~ Charles Petzold,
208:Our bodies are designed to remain in balance, and when they go out of balance, a natural mechanism has been interfered with.” —DEEPAK CHOPRA Not ~ Russell Simmons,
209:Tyrannosaurus is the most superb carnivorous mechanism among the terrestrial Vertebrata, in which raptorial power and speed are combined. ~ Henry Fairfield Osborn,
210:Instead of seeing bad in yourself, you perceive it in others. It’s a defense mechanism. One that allows people to go on believing they’re perfect. ~ Koren Zailckas,
211:I've never known a Philadelphian who wasn't a downright 'character'; possibly a defense mechanism resulting from the dullness of their native habitat. ~ Anita Loos,
212:Mobile isn’t just another content-delivery mechanism. Don’t try to be mobile first. Be user first. Context over content, that’s the lesson of mobile. ~ Jeff Jarvis,
213:The stories understandably frightened the public, and those fears encouraged more media coverage, the basic mechanism of an availability cascade. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
214:Time, that dull mechanism that usually reliably stamped out one second after another, like parts on a conveyor belt, erupted into a glorious melody. ~ Lev Grossman,
215:Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. ~ Robert A Heinlein,
216:The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called Denial. ~ Dan Brown,
217:To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader. ~ Howard Schultz,
218:Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. ~ Roland Barthes,
219:Experience is generated by any mechanism that has a cause-effect repertoire in a particular state. ~ Christof Koch, The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness,
220:I know I’ve been laughing and making jokes and whatever, so you probably think I’m a heartless bitch, but it’s like a defense mechanism or something. ~ Liane Moriarty,
221:It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. ~ Francis Crick,
222:When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge. ~ Gene Kim,
223:Because I was a shy and awkward child, I used humour to deflect attention. It was a controlling mechanism. Because I could use it to control my image. ~ Catherine Tate,
224:Surely, Alan Guth argued, there must be some mechanism that caused our Universe to have exactly the right density required for extreme flatness early on. ~ Max Tegmark,
225:Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environments and social degradation. ~ Paul Hawken,
226:Governments often keep their populace in permanent states of vigilance or anxiety against foreign enemies as a control mechanism—the politics of fear. ~ Graham E Fuller,
227:I think that's part of the whole denial and suicidal mechanism [ of the human's race] right "Oh my God, the house is on fire." You sleep through the smoke. ~ Eve Ensler,
228:It's very tough to get yourself around the idea that there could be a mechanism being used or abused to restrict and alter the society in which we live. ~ Keith Olbermann,
229:Each clock is unique,’ he used to tell me. ‘And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals. ~ Kate Morton,
230:Each clock is unique,” he used to tell me. “And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals. ~ Kate Morton,
231:Behind every rational and irrational force in human society there is a social mechanism which determines where it is to appear and what forms it is to take. ~ Karl Mannheim,
232:To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment....would result in the demolition of society. ~ Karl Polanyi,
233:Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. ~ Samuel R Delany,
234:I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it's our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics. ~ David E Kelley,
235:Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
236:It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. ~ Thomas Nagel,
237:funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that’s a survival mechanism. We’re not here to be happy; we’re just here to be here. ~ Hugh Howey,
238:I spent years trying to find some use for inheritance and virtuals, before I understood why that mechanism was fundamentally flawed and should not be used. ~ Alexander Stepanov,
239:Mechanism as a philosophic doctrine might be defined as the belief that the last machine which human ingenuity has created gives us the final form of reality. ~ William Barrett,
240:People see themselves as 'succeeding' because they are individually exceptional -- they don't see that there is a mechanism that has made it possible for them. ~ Sarah Schulman,
241:Self-percepts foster actions that generate information, as well as serve as a filtering mechanism for self-referent information in the self-maintaining process ~ Albert Bandura,
242:DEPRESSION IS THE flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. ~ Andrew Solomon,
243:Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. ~ Andrew Solomon,
244:die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. ~ Haruki Murakami,
245:I am interested in the study of music and the discipline of music and the experience of music and music as a esoteric mechanism to continue my real intentions. ~ Anthony Braxton,
246:The avoidance of pain - physical or psychic - is a dangerous mechanism, which can cause us to lose touch not just with our painful sensations but with ourselves. ~ Adrienne Rich,
247:The transcendent function is the psychological mechanism that unites the opposites and helps bring the self to manifestation. ~ Jeffrey Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination,
248:You must keep in mind that all of the world’s religions are man-made, often as a mechanism to control and intimidate the masses into following the bidding of a few. ~ Elle Casey,
249:funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that’s a survival mechanism. We’re not here to be happy; we’re just here to be here. I ~ Hugh Howey,
250:She saw now that he was like an illusionist who captivated women with a little sleight of hand and once she had seen the mechanism it had lost all power for her. ~ Anna Godbersen,
251:Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
252:A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life. ~ August Strindberg,
253:a system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
254:If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it. ~ Edward Bernays,
255:I want to argue with her, tell her that "sins of the flesh" is just a control mechanism-if you demonize a person's pleasure, then you can control his or her life. ~ David Levithan,
256:They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants. ~ Charles Stross,
257:From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that [seven million New Yorkers are fed each day] without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism. ~ John Henry Holland,
258:Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. ~ Stanley Milgram,
259: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,
260:Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival. ~ David Perlmutter,
261:by a new burlesque trick: fish swivels affixed to her pasties. The mechanism allowed Finnell to pinwheel her tassels in any direction, from any position, at any speed, ~ Karen Abbott,
262:Him yelling, Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash. ~ Anonymous,
263:I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism. ~ Andy Dick,
264:learned to keep my distance at an early age. A survival mechanism, you might say. I’m working on it, though. Another thirty years and I should about have it mastered. ~ Barbara Davis,
265:Oh God, if the mechanism of the consciousness itself was going to go wrong, then what was one to do? Hang it all, one did one's bit! Was one to be let down absolutely? ~ D H Lawrence,
266:One of the confusions surrounding the Intelligent Design movement’s propaganda is a failure to distinguish between the fact of evolution and the mechanism of evolution. ~ Paul Davies,
267:This variable, how a parent responds to a child’s vocalizations—right in the moment—seems to be the most powerful mechanism pulling a child from babble to fluent speech. ~ Po Bronson,
268:When you revolutionize education, you're taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you're priming the pump for so many incredible things. ~ Bill Gates,
269:Half of Wisconsinites are considered alcoholics. It's part of the culture of Wisconsin... if self-deprecation is their survival instinct, alcohol is their coping mechanism. ~ Amy Pietz,
270:Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match. ~ Isaac Asimov,
271:The ego is in fact driven by the mechanism of Nature of which it is a part and the ego-will is not and cannot be a free will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Shakti,
272:Through constant creation of dissatisfaction, the consumer society is in fact a highly sophisticated mechanism for the production and distribution of unhappiness. That ~ Jonathan Sacks,
273:We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. ~ Haruki Murakami,
274:He never created a finish product. Finished products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism and the Second Foundation was the instrument of that evolution. ~ Isaac Asimov,
275:Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. ~ Louis Schwartzberg,
276:Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism. ~ Claude Bernard,
277:Oh, can these men love, my Clodius? Scarcely even with the senses. How rarely a Roman has a heart! He is but the mechanism of genius—he wants its bones and flesh. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton,
278:Pain is not weakness leaving the body. It’s a protective mechanism that, when ignored, will simply turn up the volume until you have to pay attention. Good luck with that. ~ Lou Schuler,
279:To sum up, historical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. ~ Thomas Piketty,
280:Can you give me a simple version?
I am sorry Mr Teague, but no. This maybe difficult to believe, but the mechanism of traveling through history defy simple explanation. ~ Peter Clines,
281:life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you.It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
282:As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible. ~ Steven Weinberg,
283:Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency. ~ Colin Wilson,
284:The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails. ~ Boris Pasternak,
285:the history of Medicine is replete with examples of cures obtained years, decades, and even centuries before the mechanism of action was understood for these cures. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
286:An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery. ~ Karl Marx,
287:Him yelling, Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
288:The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism become a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern. ~ Imogen Binnie,
289:Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices. ~ Benjamin Graham,
290:Life, the relentless mechanism of existing – isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
291:The mechanism thus created periodically acts out post-modern notions of cosmology and then deconstructs itself. It has met with great admiration and no little puzzlement. ~ Michael Swanwick,
292:The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy. ~ Benjamin Graham,
293:What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow. ~ Aldo Leopold,
294:Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't. ~ Marc Maron,
295:Your very success is what's going to destroy you. The survival mechanism that you've developed is the very thing which will cause the downfall of your subtle physical body. ~ Frederick Lenz,
296:The sensus divinitatis is a belief-producing faculty (or power, or mechanism) that under the right conditions produces belief that isn’t evidentially based on other beliefs. ~ Alvin Plantinga,
297:You and your brain are two things. The brain is your machinery just like everything else is your machinery. This hand is my mechanism; I use it. My brain is my mechanism; I use it. ~ Rajneesh,
298:Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring. ~ Frans de Waal,
299:Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it. ~ Jim Butcher,
300:I personally think that we should be extremely reluctant to use a recall mechanism for an unpopular decision simply because of the message it sends about judicial independence. ~ Deborah Rhode,
301:I've always been a student of different ways of looking at the world, different religions. That's been part of my survival mechanism, and also part of my curiosity as a person. ~ Assata Shakur,
302:Until I was about 14, I was a fat boy, or at least I looked like a fat boy. I think that being funny was a bit of a defence mechanism for me, so I ended up being a bit of a joker. ~ Pippa Evans,
303:As a journalist, it is so easy to get hardened when you see so many stories that are disturbing. Sometimes it's just your survival mechanism that makes you hardened to some of it. ~ Linda Vester,
304:For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
305:A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box. ~ Edsger Dijkstra,
306:Give me lust, baby.
Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
307:Only then, by a ricochet mechanism that totally surprised me, did it hit me. Had Oliver been doing the same with me? Intentionally ignoring me all the time, the better to draw me in? ~ Andr Aciman,
308:We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same basic mechanism used in producing those striking structures that are crystals, with their beautiful plane faces. ~ Linus Pauling,
309:You will do something and you will believe in the very contrary. That will create guilt. Everyone feels guilty. Not that everyone is guilty, everyone feels guilty because of this mechanism. ~ Osho,
310:Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. ~ D H Lawrence,
311:In fact, without any exaggeration, the current mechanism of money creation through credit is certainly the "cancer" that's irretrievably eroding market economies of private property. ~ Maurice Allais,
312:Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer. ~ John Constable,
313:When you go on an extreme diet, your body's self-preservation mechanism responds by burning calories as slowly as possible. Of course, that makes it much more difficult to lose weight. ~ Tony Robbins,
314:When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative "success mechanism" within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or "willpower. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
315:Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify. ~ David Byrne,
316:When you do see a thing clearly in your mind, the creative Success Mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort, or “willpower. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
317:People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children. ~ Dean Koontz,
318:What women have done is developed a survival mechanism, and it's a fascinating one and it's been effective and justified, in my opinion. That is the ability to manipulate men sexually. ~ Frederick Lenz,
319:The CIA uses its intelligence role as a cover mechanism for its operational activities. Furthermore it uses its own secret intelligence as an initiator for its own secret operations. ~ L Fletcher Prouty,
320:David used to tell me that not believing in God was a defense mechanism against human suffering. It’s easier to say nothing exists than to say something exists and He just lets us suffer. ~ Tarryn Fisher,
321:Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
322:You may study the bodies of the living and the dead for clues about the mechanism of the muscles, the bones, and even the brain, but you can never unravel the mystery of the human heart. . . ~ Fiona Paul,
323:Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less. ~ Francis Collins,
324:..but maybe this was a defense mechanism. Maybe my mind was making me see things I refused to accept were gone forever. It was filling the void, because that was easier than letting go. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,
325:Cursing, Scarlet pressed the unlock mechanism again. Nothing. Then the control panel pinged, startling her, and a message scrolled across the top. BE CAREFUL, SCARLET. Her jaw fell. “What—? ~ Marissa Meyer,
326:When the pain that the little me creates for itself becomes intense enough, the ego will self-destruct. It has a self-destruct mechanism built in, fortunately, so eventually every ego dies. ~ Eckhart Tolle,
327:When you observe yourself reacting to what are minor things in your life, you will find that the mechanism is the same as when major things seem to go wrong in your life and there is upset. ~ Eckhart Tolle,
328:Order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order. ~ Rudolf Arnheim,
329:What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing. ~ Jay Inslee,
330:I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life. ~ Toru Takemitsu,
331:The SSRC committee turned attention from team research for building a model of the United States to doing one for world trade in order to investigate the international transmission mechanism. ~ Lawrence Klein,
332:If life is really as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable...,then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative... That search is a survival mechanism. ~ Amanda Ripley,
333:I'm sure we've all experienced really malevolent feelings once or twice in our lives, the desire to kill somebody,say.but there's always a braking mechanism somewhere along the line that stop us. ~ Ry Murakami,
334:Too bad I didn't have on my engagement ring; maybe I could get him to peck at the lock mechanism and open it. Yeah, right, and while I'm hallucinating, maybe get him to bring me a nice cold Pepsi. ~ R P Dahlke,
335:Governance as strategy . For some researchers, the central purpose of governance is strategic. It is a mechanism for ensuring that the goals and objectives of the board of directors are implemented. ~ Anonymous,
336:She and I, we were girls who never said anything. Never wanted to assume anything. It was a coping mechanism, saving our faces for when guys like Quin came along and acted all nice towards us. ~ Mina V Esguerra,
337:The internet connects us all and provides this fabulous fact-checking mechanism, and yet at the same time, the power of lies is conveyed much more efficiently now because they're accepted so fast. ~ Alex Gibney,
338:The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics. ~ Gideon Haigh,
339:We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
340:Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
341:Mechanism rapidly overflowing the limits of the individual, provincial and national work, to rise to the dimensions of a planetary operation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phyletic Structure of the Human Group,
342:All handling by IPCC of the Sea Level questions have been done in a way that cannot be accepted and that certainly not concur with modern knowledge of the mode and mechanism of sea level changes. ~ Nils Axel Morner,
343:Rather than trust her reflexes, she programmed for auto. And hoped the jokers down in Maintenance hadn’t played any pranks with the mechanism. Still, she was too tired to care if she ended up in Hoboken. ~ J D Robb,
344:The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place. ~ David R Brower,
345:The purpose of the UN mechanism, this inspection mechanism, is not to engage in a cat and mouse game with Saddam Hussein and try to find weapons that the Iraqi government is working on concealing. ~ Douglas J Feith,
346:Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application. ~ Samuel Beckett,
347:Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
348:God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering. ~ William Nicholson,
349:If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es Muss sein! ~ Milan Kundera,
350:What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
351:Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favourable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit. ~ William Ralph Inge,
352:A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disparagement ~ Alain de Botton,
353:An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky,
354:With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results. ~ Paul R Ehrlich,
355:Not impossible, Robert, just unthinkable. The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It’s called denial.” ========== ~ Anonymous,
356:Dr. A.Q. Khan's part is only enriching the uranium to weapons grade, ... He does not know about making the bomb, he does not know about the trigger mechanism, he does not know about the delivery system ~ Pervez Musharraf,
357:Furthermore, order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order. ~ Rudolf Arnheim,
358:I don't know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion. ~ Eric Whitacre,
359:The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. ~ Raymond Chandler,
360:The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. ~ Raymond Chandler,
361:Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith - and that nothing has to be proven. ~ Joe Rogan,
362:The body with its perfect mechanism loses power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness, when the soul departs from the body. This shows that the power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness belong to the soul. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan,
363:The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons - and are also lucky - justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. ~ Raymond Chandler,
364:Among the most important things to remember about evolution—and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn’t have purposes. It only has results. To ~ David Quammen,
365:It was a pleasure to open that door and turn the lock, hearing the solid thunk and clang as the mechanism slid into place. I had done this so many times to my own heart; it was a pleasure to do it to the world. ~ S Jae Jones,
366:There is a reason behind life. There is some connectivity between living beings. Whether you want to call that 'God' or 'The Force' or whatever word you use for it, I do believe in a spiritualized mechanism. ~ Damon Lindelof,
367:The sheer volatility of people’s judgment of the odds—their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater—told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds. ~ Michael Lewis,
368:When there is integrity, an entirety, a wholeness, in what you say and do, you are consciously resurrecting the incredibly powerful success mechanism you used instinctively from the time you first came to be. ~ Mike Hernacki,
369:In fiscal policy as in monetary policy, all political considerations aside, we simply do not know enough to be able to use deliberate changes in taxation or expenditures as a sensitive stabilizing mechanism. ~ Milton Friedman,
370:It appears that there are two different ‘mechanisms’ by which orderly events can be produced: the ‘statistical mechanism’ which produces ‘order from disorder’ and the new one, producing ‘order from order’. ~ Erwin Schr dinger,
371:I didn't do drugs. It wasn't my thing. But the drink was terrible. Today when I look back, it's like I was another person. You could call it a coping mechanism, but that would be an excuse. I just drank too much. ~ Gary Oldman,
372:It's very complicated. There's been this broader mechanism, an industry, which wants people to use free services, from the old days of advertising-supported papers and magazines, to ad-supported free television. ~ Astra Taylor,
373:That’s when you realize the most of it—life, the relentless mechanism of existing—isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
374:The trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has been set. No amount of bleating or praying or wailing of cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back. ~ Nicola Barker,
375:They use a variety of mechanisms to develop this trust, including training, hunting, high-risk sports, competition, visualization, etc. Regardless of the particular mechanism(s) used, the results are undeniable. ~ Massad Ayoob,
376:I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism. ~ Ransom Riggs,
377:Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. ~ Isaac Asimov,
378:That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
379:The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up. ~ Nora Ephron,
380:They use a variety of mechanisms to develop this trust, including training, hunting, high-risk sports, competition, visualization, etc. Regardless of the particular mechanism( s) used, the results are undeniable. ~ Massad Ayoob,
381:It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management. ~ Peter Schiff,
382:I think that people who believe in limited government would benefit greatly by studying the logic in government itself and the role of power as a corruptive mechanism in leading finally to unlimited government. ~ Murray Bookchin,
383:Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market. ~ Ron Chernow,
384:Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. ~ Alan Greenspan,
385:When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. ~ Richard Dawkins,
386:Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn. All ~ Hope Jahren,
387:When I was younger, I was reticent to be vulnerable on camera and everything I was doing was just a really finely honed defense mechanism from when I was a kid, and I was now using this to make a living on camera. ~ Ryan Reynolds,
388:Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors. ~ Sam Harris,
389:She looked around at the four crew members. “So, are you nervous?” “It would be stupid not to be,” Wilson said. “The fear factor is a significant part of our racial survival mechanism. Evolution doesn’t like arrogance. ~ Anonymous,
390:The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree. ~ Neill Blomkamp,
391:We have no reason for assuming the form of such a thing to be still partly dependent on blind mechanism, for with such confusion of heterogeneous principles every reliable rule for estimating things would disappear. ~ Immanuel Kant,
392:We all deal with a certain amount of stress, on a day-to-day basis. I probably smoke too many cigarettes, which isn't a very good thing. I don't have any extraordinary coping mechanism. I certainly don't talk to a dog. ~ Elijah Wood,
393:If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation? ~ Richard Dawkins,
394:I don't know if power seduces less or more. I think power is a constant evolving mechanism that, since the dawn of time, on one level corrupts and on another level does not. But I think, no matter what, mutates. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn,
395:In the few short decades since King’s death, a new regime of racially disparate mass incarceration has emerged in Chicago and become the primary mechanism for racial oppression and the denial of equal opportunity. ~ Michelle Alexander,
396:Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine? ~ Mark S Fowler,
397:Some... understand that the correct choice is indeed the more frightening one. In order to avoid this fear, they create a complex mechanism of self-deception that leads them to both fear the incorrect choice and choose it. ~ Yoav Blum,
398:the market is the benign mechanism that Hayek and others describe only when it is constrained by an impartial rule of law, and only when all participants bear the costs of their actions as well as reaping the benefits. ~ Roger Scruton,
399:The internet, whether involving people or things, is simply a mechanism for transmitting information. What makes smart, connected products fundamentally different is not the internet, but the changing nature of the “things. ~ Anonymous,
400:I've decided it's not about me at all. It's a protective mechanism for them, a way of buffering themselves against my future death, like when teenagers distance themselves from their parents in preparation for leaving home. ~ Sara Gruen,
401:Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear. ~ Anne Enright,
402:The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man. ~ Henry Adams,
403:The genius of inflation's pioneers was to provide an answer. They showed that the negative pressure required for an antigravity burst naturally emerges from a novel mechanism involving ingredients known as quantum fields. ~ Brian Greene,
404:We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character. ~ Oliver Lodge,
405:Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow. ~ Viktor E Frankl,
406:Why is it so important to make a difference? You’re human. You eat, shit, fuck, reproduce, and you die. Your essential mechanism is to perpetuate the human race as a collective. Individual significance doesn’t figure into it. ~ Kirk Jones,
407:According to his controversial theory, we notice the tops of the waves, but beneath the surface some kind of synchronistic mechanism may exist that mysteriously connects events in our world and causes them to cluster. ~ Clifford A Pickover,
408:Adams’s proclivity for truculence and curtness probably emerged early. Uncertain of his abilities and laboring under an exaggerated sense of inadequacy, he probably fashioned such an aggressive manner as a defense mechanism. ~ John Ferling,
409:Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless. ~ Jacques Lacan,
410:The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. ~ Carl Schmitt,
411:criminal record represents a unique mechanism of state-sponsored stratification. As Pager puts it, “it is the state that certifies particular individuals in ways that qualify them for discrimination or social exclusion. ~ Michelle Alexander,
412:I hold that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the works of nature till we view them as works of God,— not only as works of mechanism, but works of intelligence, not only as under laws, but under a Lawgiver, wise and good. ~ James McCosh,
413:There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the laws which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man. ~ Nikola Tesla,
414:The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanism that ensures that it really is a pudding we are eating and not a poached baby elephant, though we think we are eating our daily pudding! ~ Louis Althusser,
415:I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel. ~ Ian Bogost,
416:Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
417:The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images. ~ Albert Einstein,
418:Watson, ... if I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech. ~ Alexander Graham Bell,
419:Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart. ~ Michio Kaku,
420:In a world in which technology is changing at such a fast pace, where demand conditions change very fast, we need to look at a more innovative mechanism to cut down on this rigmarole of many tiers of decision-making processes. ~ Manmohan Singh,
421:That was my earliest maladaptive coping mechanism I forged when I was a kid. I found that my fists weren't going to do any significant protective work for me, so my mouth was it. Making my father laugh was a way to control him. ~ Ryan Reynolds,
422:Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. ~ Jonah Goldberg,
423:Everything you stand for, believe in, experience and aspire to is the result of thought. And thought is destructive because it is nothing more than a protective mechanism, programmed to protect its own interests at all costs. ~ U G Krishnamurti,
424:Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money. ~ Doris Lessing,
425:Probably all of us have random rogue cancer cells floating around in our bodies but by and large, in the majority of cases, our immune system circulates and acts as a surveillance mechanism and kills off those few tumor cells. ~ Laurie Glimcher,
426:Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
427:It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape. ~ K ji Suzuki,
428:Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
429:That lack of insight is called “anosognosia,” a condition in which the person suffering the disability is unaware of the existence of it. Unlike denial, which is a defense mechanism, anosognosia has physiological roots in the brain. ~ Ken Dickson,
430:I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
431:The experience of making a movie, you start to see it everywhere. It's just this amazing mechanism that your brain does because it just so badly wants to be helpful and keep all the information that you need as accessible as possible. ~ Brie Larson,
432:Actually, when a tree falls, it creates shock waves. And when the shock waves reach an ear or an artificial mechanism like a microphone, they’re transmitted into what we call sound,” you said. “The shock waves themselves are not sound. ~ Jan Ellison,
433:I feel bad about my deeper, underlying reasons for judging people with children. I judge them as a defense mechanism, because I am sad about my motivations for not having kids. I am self-centered and dysmorphic with low self-esteem. ~ Melissa Broder,
434:There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself. ~ Daniel Inouye,
435:There is one thing that destroys anyone's ability to advance spiritually: the inability to control the mind and emotions. In order to free the mechanism for spiritual growth, this control is the first step in beginning a spiritual life. ~ Rudrananda,
436:I had retained little of what is generally called religion, except for a visceral conviction that our lives are controlled by some universal mechanism that is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that was what others called God. Perhaps not. ~ Michael Cox,
437:The Europeans governments have massively changed the landscape in Europe. There is no doubt about it. They have put together the European Financial Stability Fund. They have discussed and approved the European Stability Mechanism. ~ Christine Lagarde,
438:There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” — ~ Steve Alten,
439:teach the controversy,” a framing mechanism that suggests there is a legitimate scientific controversy over whether evolution is true. For the record: There simply isn’t. Evolution is the most well-supported knowledge in science. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,
440:The interpretive mechanism of the left celebral hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reason, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes. ~ Michael Gazzaniga,
441:The very idea of militia comprises a far greater danger to society than any single criminal or gang. It paves the way for lynch mentality and arbitrary administration of justice. It throws the protective mechanism of society out of gear. ~ Maj Sj wall,
442:If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success. ~ Max Born,
443:Life Events and Emotions The rationalizing mind prefers to keep the true causes of emotion out of awareness and utilizes the mechanism of projection to do this. It blames events or other people for “causing” a feeling and views itself ~ David R Hawkins,
444:Make no mistake about it: When drug dealers compete, everyone loses. In a completely deregulated market, violence is the only control mechanism, so while you’re having fun “rolling,” various innocent people are becoming the victims of crime. ~ Anonymous,
445:Butters," I said, "Don't give me statistics on heart failure. Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it. ~ Jim Butcher,
446:The body is our primary feedback mechanism which can show us what is and isn't working about our ways of thinking, expressing, and living. As we live our truth more fully and freely, our body grows healthier, stronger, and more beautiful. ~ Shakti Gawain,
447:The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
448:Children, if they haven't been introduced to foods by the time they're 3 years old, are afraid of it, as if it would hurt them. They don't really get out of that until they're 6 or 7 - it's a safety mechanism, and you're not going to win. ~ Tyler Florence,
449:It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy. ~ Michal Kalecki,
450:...quantum problems unseat many classical ideas about matter, causality, and change that biologists use, and that disruption in turn entails radical revisions to the ideas about the mechanism in evolution, in ways we don't yet acknowledge. ~ Ashish Dalela,
451:I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations. ~ Leonard Cohen,
452:In my work, there's mechanism that is "real," which is formed from the historical concepts of the images that I'm working with. That doesn't fall completely into a cliché. There are elements about it that carry historical context and edges. ~ Lorna Simpson,
453:Plan all you want for the future. Prepare for it. But don't worry about how you will react tomorrow, or even five minutes from now. Your creative mechanism will react appropriately in the 'now' if you pay attention to what is happening now. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
454:I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world. ~ Ted Allen,
455:That was a coping mechanism that psychopaths often used. They didn’t feel the way normal individuals did, so they just mimicked the behavior. They acted as if they got angry, as if they were hurt, as if they loved. But it was all just acting. ~ Cynthia Eden,
456:When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else's expertise through practice. ~ Gene Kim,
457:You're talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face. ~ Erik Qualman,
458:Having an aspiration goal, a point of view, and a design philosophy means you have a mechanism for filtering ideas—a principle to build a process around. Less isn’t always more, but “less is more” is an effective Modernist design philosophy. ~ Golden Krishna,
459:It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life , and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs. ~ Bertrand Russell,
460:So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible. ~ James K A Smith,
461:All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
462:Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears. ~ Albert Bandura,
463:he connected the mechanism for the clock to a mechanical ballerina,and the toy danced uninterruptedly to the rhythm of her own music for three days.That discovery excited him so much more than any of his other hair-brained undertakings ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,
464:I had an image of myself and tried to live up to it. One way or another. Whenever there was a clash with reality, it was reality that had to adapt. But that’s a mechanism that can’t last forever. Gradually, you lose your sense of balance. ~ Gianrico Carofiglio,
465:Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead,
466:All the watchmaker needs is a mechanism to count the back-and-forth oscillations—and counting is one of the simple tasks that binary logic gates can perform. In the digital watch a logic gate called a JK flip-flop counts the vibrations of the crystal. ~ T R Reid,
467:anyone who writes about "Darwin's theory of evolutionin the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently. ~ Ernst Mayr,
468:Are you always this flippant?” I asked her. She looked back at me. Smile gone. Eyes frozen. “It’s a coping mechanism,” she said, her voice flat, “for spending a career wading through the worst shit the human mind can come up with, and then some. ~ Craig Schaefer,
469:The automatic mechanism then duplicates this successful response on future trials. It has “learned” how to respond successfully. It forgets its failures, and repeats the successful action without any further conscious thought—that is, as a habit. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
470:In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism. ~ John Bolton,
471:The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That's what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always. ~ Svetlana Alexievich,
472:Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers. ~ Brian Solis,
473:Rising wage inequality is a by-product of this mechanism and plays a key role in raising the supply of skills. So while the inequality is not particularly welcome in its own right, it is part of a system that is raising living standards for everyone. ~ Angus Deaton,
474:She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say "Ma-ma" or "Pa-pa": though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that required for the mechanism to produce these syllables. ~ Anthony Powell,
475:The work of art is a revelation of the innate goodness of matter. Matter narcissistically mirrors itself in art, with the artist's hidden hand that holds the mirror up, the impersonal mechanism by means of which matter makes its perfection manifest. ~ Donald Kuspit,
476:He recalled a movie he had seen in his youth, in which the characters lived in a Rubik’s Cube world made up of countless identical cubic rooms, each of which contained a different sort of death mechanism. They passed from one room to the next, endlessly.… ~ Liu Cixin,
477:We will have a mechanism for dealing with people in this country that - you heard the word humanely again. It is going to be fair. It is going to be tough. But there will be no path to legalization, no path to citizenship unless people leave the country. ~ Mike Pence,
478:Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does! ~ Moss Hart,
479:A little more grace, a motive made pure, a few truths tenderly told, a heart softened, a character subdued, a life consecrated, would restore the right action of the mental mechanism, and make manifest the movement of body and soul in accord with God. ~ Mary Baker Eddy,
480:It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that. ~ Bassem Youssef,
481:One of the big things coming out of healthcare reform is a thing called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS) which is a mechanism to reimburse people staying at home for technology and services that allow them to stay at home. ~ Colin Angle,
482:In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. ~ Ada Lovelace,
483:When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
484:It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone, Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism. If so, the only exit strategy is victory, this is our common mission and the world's cause. ~ John F Kerry,
485:There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour responses to surface viewed singly. ~ David Papineau,
486:Laughter would appear to be a physical reflex, although even if it is, this still leaves unanswered the question of why the human response to humor is a convulsive spasm of the respiratory mechanism rather than a crossing of the eyes or a waving of the arms. ~ Steve Allen,
487:Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings. ~ Albert Hofmann,
488:As a coping mechanism, or as a way to make a little hard count by shilling demons in the shadows, I try not to belittle the thought process of the conspiracy theorists. As a cocktail waitress in Vegas once schooled me: never get down on anybody else's hustle. ~ John Ridley,
489:In man, and starting with man, we have a folding back and a general convergence upon itself (both in its mechanism and in its products) of evolution’s most axial nucleus. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
490:negativistic thinking. A necessary survival mechanism from when we were running from the tigers and bears. Keeping a lookout for the next potential threat. Now we’ve killed most those lions and bears and put the rest in zoos. But we still have that wariness. ~ T J Brearton,
491:You must come out into the real world and face these problems sensibly and maturely. These lavatories are just an adolescent escape-mechanism, like going to the pictures; they're a dream world. You must come to terms with things, and not expect too much. ~ Malcolm Bradbury,
492:Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. ~ Stephen Jay Gould,
493:I hear somebody saying we should carpet bomb Iraq or Syria. Not only is that inhumane, not only is that contrary to our values, but that would likely be an extraordinary mechanism for ISIL to recruit more people willing to die and explode bombs in an airport. ~ Donald Trump,
494:I see affect or feeling as the primary innate biological motivating mechanism, more urgent than drive deprivation and pleasure and more urgent than physical pain. He goes on to say that without feeling, nothing matters, and with feeling, anything can matter. ~ John Bradshaw,
495:A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. ~ Raymond Chandler,
496:I don’t get to treat many lightsaber wounds. It’s such an old weapon. People today prefer to fight with rifles and blasters, from long range.” She shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Death is death, no matter the mechanism that is employed to beget it. ~ Alan Dean Foster,
497:Some experimenters have reported that an angry face “pops out” of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
498:The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the maintenance, with the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements. ~ Claude Bernard,
499:Freud (1921), without referring to the general systems implications of his assertion, spelled out this mechanism clearly: “. . . the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal embodied in the leader” (page 78, Group Psychology). ~ Stanley Milgram,
500:If you look at the RNC, we had a very strong - at my suggestion and I give Reince Priebus credit for this - at my suggestion, because I know something about this world, I said I want a very strong defensive mechanism, I don't want to be hacked, and we did that. ~ Donald Trump,
501:Much if not all we know about the complex mechanism responsible for the development (and stagnation) of productive forces, and for the rise and decay of social organizations, is the result of the analytical work undertaken by Marx and by those whom he inspired. ~ Paul A Baran,
502:The breathing mechanism of Man is so constructed that he may breathe either through the mouth or nasal tubes, but it is a matter of vital importance to him which method he follows, as one brings health and strength and the other disease and weakness. ~ William Walker Atkinson,
503:The cochlear implant is really a holding mechanism for a larger debate about assimilation versus alienation, about the extent to which standardizing human populations is a laudable mark of progress and the extent to which it is a poorly white-washed eugenics. ~ Andrew Solomon,
504:Isn't it curious how completely ignorant we all are of the most important part of our bodily mechanism. It is really criminal. Yet there is no nation in the world that doesnt surround sex with fantastic walls. Of course ours are sillier than any-but not much. ~ John Dos Passos,
505:Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive. ~ Matt Ridley,
506:Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction. ~ Havelock Ellis,
507:Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings. ~ Terry Pratchett,
508:Repetition acts as an enforcement mechanism: It makes cooperation achievable when it is not achievable in the one-shot game, even when one replaces strategic equilibrium as the criterion for achievability by the more stringent requirement of perfect equilibrium. ~ Robert Aumann,
509:I think there is a good deal of promise in those discussions as well. I think there is a range of matters that might be discussed between NATO and Russia that can provide a mechanism for talking through these issues, a way to give reassurance on these issues. ~ Warren Christopher,
510:the breakthrough researcher first discovers the fundamental causal mechanism behind the phenomena of success. This allows those who are looking for “an answer” to get beyond the wings-and-feathers mind-set of copying the attributes of successful companies. ~ Clayton M Christensen,
511:All the energy in the universe is evenly present in all places at the same time. We don't get energy, we release energy. And the triggering mechanism to release energy is desire. When you have a strong desire to do something, you will always have the energy to do it. ~ Bob Proctor,
512:In a city a man may feel second to none. But alone in the immensity of the universe, among all the creatures that preceded man and built up the human species, even a most fervent atheist will wonder if Darwin found the visible road but not the invisible mechanism. ~ Thor Heyerdahl,
513:Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
514:Since the introduction of inanimate mechanism into British manufactories, man, with few exceptions, has been treated as a secondary and inferior machine; and far more attention has been given to perfect the raw materials of wood and metals than those of body and mind. ~ Robert Owen,
515:To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent, all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast, organized mechanism. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere,
516:As a kid I was short and only weighed 95 pounds. And though I was active in a lot of Sports and got along with most of the guys, I think I used comedy as a defense mechanism. You know making someone laugh is a much better way to solve a problem than by using your fists. ~ Tim Conway,
517:I actually try not to go on my phone too much. That's something that's been a huge self-care move for me. I got rid of my iPhone, and so I'm actively working toward trying to be more present and not feeling uncomfortable when I don't have it as a coping mechanism. ~ Amandla Stenberg,
518:I think of depression as the mechanism that pushes down the pain of that loss. It tries to distance us from the loss but it lowers our whole energy level. I think that's a pervasive way we end up responding to loss or the anticipation of loss. Natural but not necessary. ~ Tara Brach,
519:There is a powerful case for the market mechanism, but it is not that markets are perfect; it is that in a world dominated by imperfect understanding, markets provide an efficient feedback mechanism for evaluating the results of one's decisions and correcting mistakes. ~ George Soros,
520:When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions. ~ Ana Castillo,
521:There is a safety mechanism in place [to ensure the perambulator doesn't turn back into a purse with a baby in it] : if anything weighing more than a pound and a half-about the weight of a three-volume novel-is in the carriage of the perambulator, it will not transform. ~ Lev A C Rosen,
522:Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead,
523:You must understand that the workout does not actually produce muscular growth. The workout is merely a trigger that sets the body's growth mechanism into motion. It is the body itself, of course, that produces growth; but it does so only during a sufficient rest period. ~ Mike Mentzer,
524:Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can’t function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations. ~ Joseph Stiglitz,
525:In the silence that followed, the boy's voice could be clearly heard, I want my mummy, but the words were articulated without expression, like some automatic and repeater mechanism that had previously left a phrase suspended and was blurting it out now, at the wrong time. ~ Jos Saramago,
526:Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism. ~ Dan Ariely,
527:Disassociation. It is a word I have heard before but never in reference to that mind trick I had used to cope. That trick isn't a figment of my imagination. It was real. It had a name. And if the coping mechanism was real, it means what I have experienced was real too. ~ Elizabeth Esther,
528:If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust? ~ Timothy Keller,
529:He grabbed me in a tight hug. “Hey now, is that a rolling pin in your front pocket, or are you happy to see me?” He had obviously recovered fast, as his lame baker joke mechanism was intact.

“Offset spatula, actually.” I thumped on his back. “Good to see you, man. ~ Jessica Topper,
530:It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. ~ Alan Cumming,
531:willfully blind: denying truths that were too painful, too frightening to confront. It’s something we all do, even when we have grown up. The problem arises when we use the same mechanism to deny uncomfortable truths that cry out for acknowledgment, debate, action, and change. ~ Anonymous,
532:For Sun Tzu, the fundamental mechanism to ending conflict is to achieve a massive imbalance of power and resources over your opponent, and then to leverage that imbalance so skillfully and decisively that your foe is utterly overwhelmed and chooses to surrender rather than fight. ~ Sun Tzu,
533:If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust? ~ Timothy J Keller,
534:I see nothing wrong with the human trait to desire. In fact, I consider it integral to our success mechanism. Becoming attached to what we desire is what causes the trouble. If you must have it in order to be happy, then you are denying the happiness of the here and now. ~ Peter McWilliams,
535:I think a lot of things do influence me, but the influence mechanism is as such that these things dive into your brain and bury themselves into your subconscious and you're never quite sure where and how they're going to emerge. I don't think I really take direct influence. ~ David Gilmour,
536:But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. ~ Ed Catmull,
537:But the problem is that the fundamental structure of scapegoating is not broken in the acceptance of the latest “other.” If the underlying scapegoat mechanism is not decommissioned, then new “others” will always arise to protect the group from its own internal conflicts. For ~ Peter Rollins,
538:Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be. ~ Aristotle,
539:To ensure that they had a working mechanism by which to resist the expansion of federal power, the architects of our Constitution hard-wired the state legislatures into its structure; with the 17th Amendment, progressives pulled out that wiring like punch-drunk Jacobins. ~ Charles C W Cooke,
540:Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian. ~ Robert E Howard,
541:Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict. ~ Jasper Fforde,
542:I avoid the mysticism of my culture. My people know there is a true mechanism that runs through us. Stars were people in our continuum. Mountains were stories before they were mountains. Things were created by story. The words were conjurers, and ideas were our mothers. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot,
543:The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ~ Edward Bernays,
544:Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly, and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict. ~ Jasper Fforde,
545:As Gazzaniga put it, "these findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reasons, even when there is none - which leads it continually to make mistakes. ~ David Eagleman,
546:Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves. ~ Dan Ariely,
547:[W]hen the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions. ~ Karl Mannheim,
548:I understand exactly what individuals and couples go through when they sit in my office. I understand the pain and humiliation. The devastation. The animosity and bitterness. The mechanism behind it all, and from both sides of the experience. I understand the anatomy of cheating. ~ Nesly Clerge,
549:Scientists call this default mechanism a “negativity bias,” and it makes perfect sense. Our very survival depends on being able to screen out potential attacks. “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences,” says neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, “and Teflon for positive ones.”4 ~ Mark Wolynn,
550:The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ~ Edward L Bernays,
551:The nightmares were so devastating that as a self-defense mechanism his brain did all it could to keep him awake at night. Instead of falling asleep, Hunter read ferociously. Books became his refuge, his castle. A safe place where the ghastly nightmares couldn't breach the gates. ~ Chris Carter,
552:Addiction is craving fulfillment from something that cannot provide fulfillment. In this sense it is not different than the basic mechanism of ignorance that keeps everyone in bondage. With substance addiction the mind/body sets up a vicious cycle that perpetuates the dependence. ~ Deepak Chopra,
553:Management has to provide the coordinating mechanism between what the supplier provides and what the user needs in not-good-enough situations where product architecture is consequently interdependent. Management always beats markets when there is not sufficient information. ~ Clayton Christensen,
554:Throughout the history of game development, the game control mechanism has become more and more sophisticated, ... Perhaps those who have quit gaming or who have never played games look at the game controller and think it's too difficult to play, even before they dare to touch it. ~ Satoru Iwata,
555:Denial is a critical part of the human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds block out our existential fears by focusing on stresses we can handle—like getting to work on time or paying our taxes. ~ Dan Brown,
556:Faffing is good. It is an important part of life. Faffing is when we disconnect from the matrix and idle for a while, like a car. Our body and spirit know deep down that human beings were not made for constant toil so subconsciously creates space through the mechanism of faffing. ~ Tom Hodgkinson,
557:The ESM, the European Stability Mechanism, is not funded by Germany alone. Twenty-seven percent of the bailout package comes from Germany. Italy and France together cover a total of 38 percent. That's reality. It makes no sense to say that everyone wants to get at Germany's money. ~ Martin Schulz,
558:The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto,
559:Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world would give me time. But not now. ~ David Hewson,
560:And it (the left brain) has a massive role within this reality, yes. It is basically the point where infinite consciousness joins this reality. It’s that conduit. But if you get trapped in it, and imprisoned by it, you become the decoding mechanism itself and it becomes your awareness. ~ David Icke,
561:If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. ~ Dean Koontz,
562:My mind felt numb, like I couldn't really grasp the hurtful things that I had just recently learned. I was well aware that it was my body's defense mechanism. Shock always did that to a person...enveloped them in a cocoon of decreased sensitivity to allow them to process their hurt. ~ Courtney Cole,
563:the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was. ~ William Gibson,
564:Using both experiments and field data, a recent study found that economic insecurity was associated with increased consumption of painkillers and produced actual physical pain and reduced pain tolerance, with the absence of control providing one mechanism explaining these results. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer,
565:The Aryan identity of the Roman Judeo-Christian is ancient Egyptian in origin; to which the Hindu nation also belongs. The Aryan theology is based on the begotten god, and the mere archetypal name of 'Hathor' demonstrates the mechanism of that theology as the 'house of the son god'. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
566:What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work! ~ Albert Einstein,
567:The universe was not now this senseless whirl
Borne round inert on an immense machine;
It cast away its grandiose lifeless front,
A mechanism no more or work of Chance,
But a living movement of the body of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul’s Release,
568:Possibly this is some demonstration of how amazing the human brain is, adjusting and readjusting reality, plugging up potential crazy with a handy coping mechanism. As for myself, I think it demonstrates that the human brain is made of recycled monkey bits and pure, unadulterated stupid. ~ Rachel Sharp,
569:Smoke-filled back rooms therefore served as a screening mechanism, helping to keep out the kind of demagogues and extremists who derailed democracy elsewhere in the world. American party gatekeeping was so effective that outsiders simply couldn’t win. As a result, most didn’t even try. ~ Steven Levitsky,
570:Unions have been the best anti-poverty program that actually worked and did not cost the government a dime. But as unions grow smaller- not stronger- our ability to act as an economic mechanism to distribute the gains of our work and raise all workers' wages and benefits up is disappearing. ~ Andy Stern,
571:In the spiritual lore, the human body is considered supremely sacred, as this is the only mechanism that can take a being from the limited identification of the self to the unlimited, from a bounded existence to the realm of the unbounded, to the final plunge into the vastness of the Infinite. ~ Sadhguru,
572:I scrutinized the lyrics to every worship song, debated the content of every sermon. I rendered verdicts regarding the frequency of communion and the method of baptism. I checked the bulletins for typos. In some religious traditions, this particular coping mechanism is known as pride. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
573:mechanism. In their slow evolutionary ascent, proto-humans ‘found’ in this mechanism a ‘tool’ for controlling the mimetic escalations of interspecific violence, when imitation (stronger in humans than in animals) diffuses dynamics of reciprocal contention and revenge in a given social group. ~ Ren Girard,
574:But what death is not stupid? asked Arseny. Is it not stupid that coarse iron enters the flesh, violating its perfection? He who is not capable of creating even a fingernail on a little finger is destroying a most complex mechanism, something inaccessible to human comprehension (264). ~ Evgenij Vodolazkin,
575:However, with the advent of the printing press, more people could read the Bible for themselves and a more sophisticated understanding grew in the public while religious control waned, especially in highly developed nations. Today, the favored control mechanism is through the lending of money. ~ Jim Marrs,
576:That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong. ~ Carl Sagan,
577:Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism. ~ Aldo Leopold,
578:What is it? Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness, with an increased happiness and freedom. It is an actual mechanism of the mind, and everyone has experienced it on occasion. ~ David R Hawkins,
579:If what we took to be objective reality was so fragile that it could be swept away by 400 milligrams of mescaline, then perhaps the vitalists who had argued that the brain was merely a mechanism to stabilize an anarchic world were correct. Perhaps the notion of objective reality was a paradox. ~ Jay Stevens,
580:My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it.That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive. ~ Judd Apatow,
581:The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory]. ~ Edgar Mitchell,
582:Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I. ~ Jonah Goldberg,
583:Hope was a pathological part of puberty, like acne and surging hormones. You might sound cynical to the world, but that was just a defense mechanism, cover up coating a zit, because it was too embarrassing to admit that in spite of the bum deals you kept getting you hadn't completely given up. ~ Jodi Picoult,
584:I used self-injury as a coping mechanism to help me overcome the emotional stress that I was incapable of dealing with in any other way. Self-injury was a means of escape, a way to relieve the numbness, and an expression of the pain within me. Something that the police wouldn’t care about. ~ Stephen Richards,
585:Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge, it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be. ~ Rajneesh,
586:Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces. ~ John Ruskin,
587:Worry was my mother's mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future. ~ Charles Yu,
588:Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each. Time and action are the teachers. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
589:I think one big thing about the United States is that the American population, they may be excited about Iraq or one thing or another, but basically has had a great deal of interest in humanitarian causes both within the country and abroad. Even when they criticize the mechanism to which it flows. ~ Amartya Sen,
590:Only when Stephen Strange has his accident and everything that he's ever had in his life falls apart that he becomes pretty monstrous. It's the self-loathing rage of a wounded animal and he doesn't have a coping mechanism at all. It ties in with the discipline and the magic of this world. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch,
591:That’s where people get it wrong. Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are … well … human beings. ~ Terry Pratchett,
592:The entire cerebral mechanism can be reproduced mechanically. So much the better, as this will show the most obtuse of us where the error lies. But when we want to go beyond academic know-how—that sclerosis of the spirit—to fertile thought, the cerebral mechanism is no longer adequate. ~ R A Schwaller de Lubicz,
593:Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion? ~ Oliver Heaviside,
594:It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spending out of control. ~ Joseph J Ellis,
595:The scenery of mountains painted on the ever-changing azure canvas of the sky, the mysterious mechanism of the human body, the rose, the green grass carpet, the magnanimity of souls, the loftiness of minds, the depth of love - all these things remind us of a God who is beautiful and noble. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,
596:Guilt?” he remarked in prison. “It’s this mechanism we use to control people. It’s an illusion. It’s a kind of social control mechanism—and it’s very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our bodies. And there are much better ways to control our behavior than that rather extraordinary use of guilt. ~ Robert D Hare,
597:Nice pistol,” Paul said as I was looking it over, trying to figure out the cocking mechanism, safety and every other moving part. “You should give it to Deneaux.” I looked at him like he had just snorted some weed. “No, man, I’m not kidding. The lady can shoot the balls off a gnat from across the room, ~ Mark Tufo,
598:Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience. ~ Roger Scruton,
599:Predictive model—A mechanism that predicts a behavior of an individual, such as click, buy, lie, or die. It takes characteristics of the individual as input, and provides a predictive score as output. The higher the score, the more likely it is that the individual will exhibit the predicted behavior. ~ Eric Siegel,
600:Alvin Toffler, writing in the book Future Shock in 1970, predicted some of the consequences of what he called “information overload.” He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.42 ~ Nate Silver,
601:At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca,
602:The idea of a “free market” separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They have had the most influence over it and would rather keep it that way. The mythology is useful precisely because it hides their power. ~ Robert B Reich,
603:A lot of the turning points happen in high school and in college, and it defines a lot of how you see the world and how you decide to defend yourself from the world. Some people - their defense mechanism is, I'm really smart or I'm sexy or I'm the leader. And other people - they hide or they make jokes. ~ Judd Apatow,
604:Catholic theology accounts for the fact that there's evil in the world. People say, well, how could God let this happen. Well, what God did was set the mechanism in motion and then allow people to do the best they can under the circumstances that they're dealt in order to gain grace and get into heaven. ~ Roger Ebert,
605:Fear is a healthy instinct, not a sign of weakness. It is a natural self-defense mechanism that is common to felines, wolves, hyenas, and most humans. Even fruit bats know fear, and I salute them for it. If you think the world is weird now, imagine how weird it would be if wild beasts had no fear. ~ Hunter S Thompson,
606:I saw- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together... Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
607:When not subject to this localization and modulation mechanism, mind is unbound: it entails consciousness of all there is across space, time, and perhaps beyond. Therefore, by localizing mind, the brain also ‘filters out’ of consciousness anything that is not correlated with the body’s perspective. ~ Bernardo Kastrup,
608:If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism. ~ Chester Himes,
609:One of the few graces of getting old - and God knows there are few graces - is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me. ~ Maurice Sendak,
610:This, we must never forget, is the dynamic condition essential to survival for a biogenesis that has definitively passed in us from the state of passively experienced evolution to the state of auto- or self-evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
611:The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety of topics before you open up the section that most closely matches your existing passions and knowledge. ~ Steven Johnson,
612:The Government have consistently made it clear that the mechanism in the United Kingdom whereby the European draft constitutional treaty could be implemented is approval by the House of Commons followed by a referendum of the people of Britain. There is no question of implementing it by the back door. ~ Douglas Alexander,
613:There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna. ~ Anna Kavan,
614:This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
615:We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial. ~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
616:To promote the process of European integration, we must improve an institutional mechanism already existing in the European Union, reinforced co-operation, by making it more flexible and effective. This approach allows a few states to move faster and further... We are all aware that this mechanism is vital. ~ Lionel Jospin,
617:When my wife and I met, I couldn't talk to her - and my defense mechanism is sarcasm. I belittle someone with verbal pokes and prods. I did it to her out of complete awe. When friends introduced us, I said 'Hi' - and turned my back. Later, I called my mom and best friend and said, 'I think I just met my wife.' ~ Mike Vogel,
618:It is natural that our minds replay old stories, because that is our own mechanism for trying to work out unresolved problems. Yet rerunning those stories will be a fruitless looping until we learn how to move from the story into our body. This is why therapy alone often doesn't bring full healing and awakening. ~ Tara Brach,
619:The main Business of Natural Philosophy is to argue from Phænomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like Questions. ~ Isaac Newton,
620:The stress and sadness of it all had been tough to handle, but there had also been a simmering, irrational resentment on his side. So yes, he had embraced a coping mechanism that he’d known Qhuinn hadn’t approved of or liked. It had been a subversive, petty payback for sins the male wasn’t actually committing. But ~ J R Ward,
621:Since the striosomes receive projections primarily from the emotional centers of the limbic system and the matrisomes receive projections from the higher cognitive centers of the prefrontal cortex, together they provide the perfect mechanism of integrating the messages of the heart with those of the mind. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
622:Sometimes, it is easier for people to believe lies then deal with the uncomfortableness of their own fear of action. These type of people feel uncomfortable unless everyone is the same or God presents them with what is easy and obvious. It is a life long coping mechanism for the greatest fear of all--regret. ~ Shannon L Alder,
623:The phenomena of asexual propagation and of parthenogenesis appear to be neither more nor less fundamental than those of sexual reproduction. I have said that the latter has no claim a priori to be considered basic; but neither does any fact indicate that it is reducible to any more fundamental mechanism. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
624:Physical relaxation, when practiced daily, brings about an accompanying mental relaxation and a relaxed attitude that enables us to better consciously control our automatic mechanism. Physical relaxation also, in itself, has a powerful influence in dehypnotizing us from negative attitudes and reaction patterns. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
625:He started to touch the mechanism under the keyboard,
then pulled his hand back with a snap.
"Ah," he said. "Must deactivate the security....Turn around, please."
"What?"
"Turn around, Claire. It's a secure password!"
"You have GOT to be kidding."
"Why ever would I joke about that? Please turn. ~ Rachel Caine,
626:A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...For imagination sets the goal ‘picture’ which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of ‘will,’ as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
627:I have a lot of friends who are trying to clean up their act, or that are still making trouble for themselves, so I’m definitely well-versed on what goes on in the mind and the heart of a person who self-destructs as their coping mechanism, and also what they’re like when you take their preferred substance away. ~ Natasha Lyonne,
628:Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It's basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it's wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore. ~ Bill Gates,
629:It is important to recognize that the mechanism of projection does not just apply to our shadow side. We also project onto other people the things we like about ourselves yet have a hard time acknowledging. Thus we see in those people our own inner beauty, our own creative talent, our own intelligence, and so on. ~ Colin C Tipping,
630:Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive life form – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection. ~ Jerry A Coyne,
631:The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn’t mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend (IYI-style) to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
632:What counts is not the pen used for writing but the poetry that is written. The reason we take interest in an automobile engine is not because it makes wheels turn; it is because it takes us places that we could not reach by foot. The turning wheels are just the mechanism of an instrument that allows us to journey. ~ Carlo Rovelli,
633:Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life. Dominant in this primordial soup were simple anaerobic bacteria—life that thrives in oxygen-empty environments but excretes chemically potent oxygen as one of its by-products. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
634:I am convinced that if the market system were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aims, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek,
635:Indeed, as a mechanism for finding knowledge, weak-link networks occupy a cognitive role usefully different from, say, search engines. While Google is useful at quickly answering a specific factual question, networks of people are better at fuzzy, “any-idea-how-to-deal-with-this?” dilemmas that occupy everyday life. ~ Clive Thompson,
636:Let me guess,” Thorne said. “Breaking and entering?” After a long silence of examining the retracting mechanism, the girl wrinkled her nose. “Two counts of treason, if you must know. And resisting arrest, and unlawful use of bioelectricity. Oh, and illegal immigration, but honestly, I think that’s a little excessive. ~ Marissa Meyer,
637:One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis. ~ Douglas Adams,
638:Women suppress a lot of their sides. It's a form of "code-switching"--a term to describe how one speaks and behaves differently in order to match an intended audience. Code switching is, at heart, a survival mechanism: a way of showing, at any particular moment, that you fit in, you're not a threat, you belong. ~ Anne Helen Petersen,
639:Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
640:He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth. ~ Colson Whitehead,
641:Isn’t it easy to see that this line is imaginary, and that it, and the witness behind it, are the same old faking process automatically learned in childhood? The same old cleft between the knower and the known? The same old split between the organism/environment and the organism’s feedback, or self-conscious mechanism? ~ Alan W Watts,
642:I wish I could tell you how sorry I am,” Elizabeth says, “but you’ve already told me to stop apologizing.”
“It’s just an awful thing to do.”
“I don’t think I’m an awful person,” Elizabeth says.
“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism. ~ Emily St John Mandel,
643:The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth. ~ Slavoj i ek,
644:A little difficult to know where you were with Elinor. She didn't reveal much of what she thought and felt about things. He liked that about her. He hated people who reeled off their thoughts and feelings to you, who took it for granted that you wanted to know all their mechanism. Reserve was always more interesting. ~ Agatha Christie,
645:A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart. ~ Lewis Thomas,
646:The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth. ~ Slavoj Zizek,
647:Another force motivates us, and it is more primitive and more powerful than the urge to create: the force of entropy. This too is a survival mechanism built into our genes by evolution. It gives us pleasure when we are comfortable, when we relax, when we can get away with feeling good without expending energy. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
648:Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides - that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist - but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development. ~ Edwin Conklin,
649:Let me guess,” Thorne said. “Breaking and entering?”
After a long silence of examining the retracting mechanism, the girl wrinkled her nose. “Two counts of treason, if you must know. And resisting arrest, and unlawful use of bioelectricity. Oh, and illegal immigration, but honestly, I think that's a little excessive. ~ Marissa Meyer,
650:The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be. ~ Ian Bogost,
651:And in my moments of greatest fear I feel, physically feel, as if tiny trains were travelling through my soul, pulled along on a string, and that my guts had become a complex system of glass and ivory wheels, tiny multicoloured discs, rusty clock hands – everything spins madly, like some aimless clockwork mechanism. ~ M rio de S Carneiro,
652:A nuclear bomb would have to detonate inside my chest cavity to stir even the faintest of responses from the lump of flesh that pumps my blood around my body.” “I sure that’s an intentional def—” “Do not say defense mechanism. I’m done defending myself from things. I decided assault was the only way forward a long time ago. ~ Callie Hart,
653:For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion. ~ Anne Conway Viscountess Conway,
654:Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own ~ Rollo May,
655:What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a natural mechanism, a force no different in origin from gravity or magnetism? ~ Dean Koontz,
656:I’m instantly mortified by my fat, uncontrollable mouth, but that’s when it occurs to me that my humor is a self-defense mechanism. Even though I may come off like a stark raving asshat, being funny is the most important tool I have to stay sane. The ability to say what I think is the key to allowing me to feel in control. ~ Jen Lancaster,
657:As Stone says, “This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?” Despite ~ David Rock,
658:In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the nicest artifice to the ends which they are intended to produce; and in the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire how every thing is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support of the individual, and the propagation of the species. ~ Adam Smith,
659:Just think of the trust that often exists in soldiers. Within their own unit, you could say they have to trust each other. A spirit of camaraderie builds up and, in the end, they will risk their lives for each other. They may even go so far as to dehumanise the other, enemy group - a mechanism you can also observe in chimps. ~ Jane Goodall,
660:Going to religious places gives me clarity. When I am sitting there, I am in a state of gratitude with my defence mechanism down and am open to receiving that energy, that gives me clarity as at that time, you are listening to your heart. The heart shows you the direction in life. The mind exists only to execute your emotion. ~ Arjun Rampal,
661:The downside of shuffle soon revealed itself, though. I became fascinated with the mechanism itself, and soon was always wanting to know what was coming up next. It was irresistible to click onto the next random selection. Even if it was something great, there was the possibility something greater still would flash up next. ~ Simon Reynolds,
662:Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition. ~ Sunil Yapa,
663:Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privilege, wasn’t it? To think blindness a preferable condition. ~ Sunil Yapa,
664:People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all. ~ Lauren Oliver,
665:We need to articulate a different view of economic, political, and spiritual affairs—a view that is not primarily Left or Right, that is not wrapped around the primacy of this mechanism or that one, that doesn’t believe that the solution to our problems lies with Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Money, or Big Ideology. ~ C Otto Scharmer,
666:[For men] to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure. ~ John Ruskin,
667:People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. Your could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all. ~ Lauren Oliver,
668:And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life. ~ Peter Straub,
669:The evolution of social media into a robust mechanism for social transformation is already visible. Despite many adamant critics who insist that tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are little more than faddish distractions useful only to exchange trivial information, these critics are being proven wrong time and again. ~ Simon Mainwaring,
670:The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I personally am sick and tired of hearing people talk like that: I want to see it myself! ~ Burt Rutan,
671:The scientific argument [...] is that the attribution of agency to the natural world was a mistake, although a useful one in an evolutionary sense. [...]
[T]o the contrary, [...] it was the notion of nature as a passive, ultimately inert mechanism that was the mistake, and perhaps the biggest one that humans ever made. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich,
672:To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God’s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ’s corpus verum, they resist the state’s ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture.22 ~ Walter Brueggemann,
673:Motherhood often feels like a game of guilt management; sometimes the guilt is overwhelming and debilitating, sometimes just a low simmer, but it always feels right there. There is never any shortage of fuel to feed the beast, so the whole mechanism is constantly nourished to administer shame and a general feeling of incompetency. ~ Jen Hatmaker,
674:Self-harm is not a grab for attention. It doesn’t mean you are suicidal. It means you are struggling to get out of a very dangerous mess in your mind and heart and this is your coping mechanism. It means that you occupy a small space in the very real and very large canyon of people who suffer from depression or mental illness. ~ Kathleen Glasgow,
675:Those physicians who believed, as Louis Newburgh did without reservation, that obesity was an eating disorder, rejected the idea that insulin could fatten humans, if for no other reason than that this suggested the existence of a defective hormonal mechanism that could lead to obesity. The evidence, however, suggested exactly that. ~ Gary Taubes,
676:If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis. ~ Tyler Cowen,
677:I set off. What a gait. Stiffness of the lower limbs, as if nature had denied me knees, extraordinary splaying of the feet to the right and left of the line of march. The trunk, on the contrary, as if by the effect of a compensatory mechanism, was as flabby as an old ragbag, tossing wildly to the unpredictable jolts of the pelvis. ~ Samuel Beckett,
678:Self-defeating behavior occurs when we fail to learn the lessons that life tries to teach us. It represents the victory of impulse over awareness, immediate gratification over lasting satisfaction, relief over resolution. Self-defeating behavior invariably begins as an attempt to make ourselves feel better. It is a coping mechanism. ~ Mark Goulston,
679:Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert’s conscience—that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn’t sounded or that he hadn’t heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism. ~ P D James,
680:She would like to drink in their innocence, their excitement, until she is intoxicated. She would like to see through their eyes when they look at something for the first time, when they understand the logic of a mechanism, expecting it to repeat itself infinitely without ever thinking of the weariness that will one day slow it down. ~ Le la Slimani,
681:Some anthropologists divide cultures into shame cultures and guilt cultures. According to this perspective, shame is an outward mechanism, and guilt is an inward one which alludes to a human mechanism that produces strong feelings of remorse when someone has done something wrong, to the point that he or she needs to rectify the matter. ~ Hamza Yusuf,
682:The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated. But ~ M R Carey,
683:This is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you've got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class. ~ Barack Obama,
684:Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience--that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn't sounded or that he hadn't heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism. ~ P D James,
685:The masks we wear are simply veils that we have chosen to hide behind in order to get our way, or to demonstrate how we are reacting to the powers and forces that seem to influence us from the external world. They are part of our self image, and in some cases the mask is nothing more than a protective device, a defense mechanism. ~ John Randolph Price,
686:By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few. ~ Nicholas G Carr,
687:My plea to educators and parents is that they should give some thought to the nature of the brain of a child, for the brain is a living mechanism, not a machine. In case of breakdown, it can substitute one of its parts for the function of another. But it has its limitations. It is subject to inexorable change with the passage of time. ~ Wilder Penfield,
688:When a guitar string is plucked or when children jiggle a jump rope, the shape that appears is a sine wave. The ripples on a pond, the ridges of sand dunes, the stripes of a zebra—all are manifestations of nature’s most basic mechanism of pattern formation: the emergence of sinusoidal structure from a background of bland uniformity. ~ Steven H Strogatz,
689:You will have to go deep into man. From where comes this violence? From where comes this exploitation? From where come all these ego-trips? From where? They all come from unconsciousness. Man lives asleep, man lives mechanically. That mechanism has to be broken, man has to be re-done. That is the religious revolution that has not been tried. ~ Rajneesh,
690:Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived
his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was
explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel
like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply:

“It’s like an earthquake. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,
691:Deeply buried in the mind, there lies a mechanism that accepts what the mind experiences as beautiful and pleasant and rejects those experiences that are perceived as ugly and painful. This mechanism gives rise to those states of mind that we are training ourselves to avoid-- things like greed, lust, hatred, aversion, and jealousy. ~ Henepola Gunaratana,
692:Oh, hey, he’d figured out how to work the stupid ramp mechanism. It’d have been nice to have done that before he was forced to steal some guy’s tow truck, but that was how every single possible thing had gone so far in this situation. Just a little bit behind the curve, a little slow to figure out the right thing. Story of his fucking life. ~ David Wong,
693:[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair. ~ Ben Ehrenreich,
694:And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
695:I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No. ~ Ani DiFranco,
696:Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that. ~ Richard Ford,
697:‎And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
698:He knew by experience that he absorbed everything, that every event was imprinted in his memory, but that sometimes months or years passed before he realized how deeply an episode had marked him. It was as if memory congealed somewhere, then suddenly, through some mechanism of association, appeared before his eyes with blinding intensity. ~ Isabel Allende,
699:What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned. ~ Osamu Dazai,
700:I like to think that people can see that and appreciate that idea and then, by some mechanism of wearing the fragrance, sort of carry that idea with them in their own life. Whether it's a weekend in Louisiana or in New York City or in Venice, Italy, or wherever they may be. I think there's something kind of fascinating and powerful about that. ~ Jared Leto,
701:The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? ~ Stanis aw Lem,
702:A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity, documentary ability, continuity, discretion, unity, rigid subordination, reduction of friction and material and personal expenses are unique to bureaucratic organization. ~ Max Weber,
703:..The truly fraudulent claims must be discarded. But novel methods of therapy should not be rejected because they are novel, or because they run counter to some generally accepted belief ("which may just be biased"), or because we do not understand the mechanism of the proposed treatment, or because it has come from an unconventional source. ~ Linus Pauling,
704:What does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?
I think it means that you have said the word “democracy,” so the audience is supposed to cheer. It’s not so much a propositional statement, as the equivalent of the “Applause” light that tells a studio audience when to clap. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky,
705:For too long a time--for half a century, in fact--psychiatry tried to interpret the human mind merely as a mechanism, and consequently the therapy of mental disease merely in terms of technique. I believe this dream has been dreamt out. What now begins to loom on the horizon is not psychologized medicine but rather those of human psychiatry. ~ Viktor E Frankl,
706:In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship or beauty depend on and encourage our differences. Ultimately, friendship is essential to our fashioning ourselves in ways that don't simply repeat the fashions of our surroundings: it is a mechanism of individuality. ~ Alexander Nehamas,
707:limited by what is commonly referred to as dualism—the idea of a distinct and inherently real “self” that is separate from an apparently distinct and inherently real “other.” As we’ll explore later, dualism is not a “character flaw” or defect. It’s a complex survival mechanism deeply rooted in the structure and function of the brain— ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche,
708:They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion; to come to terms with themselves and with one another; to know where they were going and why. ~ Wade Davis,
709:We support any deal that denies Iran nuclear weapons, that has a continuous and robust inspection mechanism and that has snap-back provisions in case Iran violates the agreement. Our concern is that Iran will use the income it receives as a result of the lifting of the nuclear sanctions in order to fund its nefarious activities in the region. ~ Adel al Jubeir,
710:For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. ~ Roland Barthes,
711:You don't need the painful memories, because either you've resolved them. Denying always makes them want to come back. Denial is a mechanism that doesn't work. But allowing them to come back in little by little, those memories, you can begin to be quite comfortable with them, and it's even nice to have that as part of the map of your life. ~ Charlotte Rampling,
712:He delayed entry for a brief period, pressing the edge of the door against his head, the other side of which touched the wall: rigid, as if imprisoned in a cruel trap specially designed to catch him and his like: some ingenious snare, savage in mechanism, though at the same time calculated to preserve from injury the skin of such rare creatures. ~ Anthony Powell,
713:In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion. ~ Benjamin Graham,
714:It was surely well for man that he came late in the order of creation. There were powers abroad in earlier days which no courage and no mechanism of his could have met. What could his sling, his throwing-stick, or his arrow avail him against such forces as have been loose tonight? Even with a modern rifle it would be all odds on the monster. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,
715:It is not only that in man, as Julian Huxley has said, evolution becomes conscious (that is, reflectively inventive); what is more, by the gathering together and concentration of all its forces and all its strands, from being divergent it is becoming convergent. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
716:The higher the daily swearing frequency, the less was the benefit for pain tolerance when swearing, compared with when not swearing. This paper shows apparent habituation related to daily swearing frequency, consistent with our theory that the underlying mechanism by which swearing increases pain tolerance is the provocation of an emotional response.[ ~ Anonymous,
717:The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband’s testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,
718:Why do you vomit when you see and smell somebody else vomit?” “I don’t know.” “It’s a biological survival mechanism. Primitive humans existed in family groups. They slept in the same place and they ate the same things.” Pieces clicked together in my head. “So, if one person vomited, they likely got poisoned, so everyone needed to vomit to not die. ~ Ilona Andrews,
719:After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds. ~ Michael Lewis,
720:Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race? ~ Georges Cuvier,
721:It’s for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn’t smell a predator. That’s why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It’s literally a matter of survival. ~ Maria Semple,
722:And how easy this mechanism is to see in others! Can we see it in ourselves? That is the question. Who are your scapegoats? What do you reject in others that you secretly reject in yourself? Weakness? Failure? Fear? Homosexuality? Violence? What thoughts and feelings do you not admit in yourself, in order to hold up to the world an image of who you are? ~ Jeff Foster,
723:It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life. ~ Alfred Korzybski,
724:Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too. ~ Robert A Heinlein,
725:There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative. Another is to work through some of life’s hardest knocks—loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure—and to find understanding and solace. ~ William Zinsser,
726:When confronted with inner conflicts, we are tempted to obscure them by externalizing the antagonisms—something that is done through the hatred of others and/or the hatred of the self (a method in which the scapegoat mechanism is turned inward). The more difficult, courageous, and ethical path involves attempting to face and tarry with the antagonisms. ~ Peter Rollins,
727:There is a built-in mechanism by which we respond fairly strongly and fairly negatively to somebody who is being negative or to somebody who is simply disagreeing with us, in which case it's a very unhappy position for our brain to be in. Our brain does not want us to be wrong. Because that has very dire consequences in terms of our overall survival. ~ Andrew B Newberg,
728:It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really. ~ Azar Nafisi,
729:Living things all react to what is life-supportive and what is not; this is the fundamental mechanism of survival. Inherent in all life forms is the capacity to detect change and react correctively—thus, trees become smaller at higher elevations as the oxygen in the atmosphere becomes scarcer. Human protoplasm is far more sensitive than that of a tree. ~ David R Hawkins,
730:Scientists divide. We discriminate. It is the inevitable occupational hazard of our profession that we must break the world into its constituent parts -- genes, atoms, bytes -- before making it whole again. We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of its parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
731:[T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things. ~ John Michael Greer,
732:To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels. ~ Horst Faas,
733:Although Outlander authors kill, maim, disfigure and eviscerate bookpeople on a regular basis, no author has ever been held to account, although lawyers are working on a test case to deal with serial offenders. The mechanism for transfictional jurisdiction has yet to be finalized, but when it is, some authors may have cause to regret their worst excesses. ~ Jasper Fforde,
734:an economic operating system designed by thirteenth-century Moorish accountants looking for a way to preserve the aristocracy of Europe has worked as promised. It turned the marketplace into one giant debtors’ prison. It is not only unfit for the needs of a twenty-first-century digital society; central currency is the core mechanism of the growth trap. ~ Douglas Rushkoff,
735:What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. ~ Jaron Lanier,
736:Instead of merely documenting the specifications of the production environment in a document or on a wiki page, we create a common build mechanism that creates all of our environments, such as for development, test, and production. By doing this, anyone can get production-like environments in minutes, without opening up a ticket, let alone having to wait week.s ~ Gene Kim,
737:Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others. ~ Ben Carson,
738:If I didn't know better, I'd think I suffer from some sort of Tourette's-autism hybrid, but Dr. Pat insists I can control the impulse to say whatever pops into my head. That it's, like, a defensive mechanism, not a biological imperative. Therapists think everything is a defense mechanism. Just my thinking that in my head, right now, is a defense mechanism. ~ Corey Ann Haydu,
739:It is for this reason that many of the most influential development campaigners argue that the most important issue when it comes to charitable giving is not just raising more money, but conducting tests, understanding what is working and what isn’t, and learning. Instead of trusting in narrative, we should be wielding the power of the evolutionary mechanism. ~ Matthew Syed,
740:There are no such men today. We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time. ~ Erwin Chargaff,
741:To allow the fear to come on you and then pass through. If you keep cutting the fear off by intervening - let's say, taking a Xanax to try to cure it - you'll never understand what fear is really for. Fear is part of a survival mechanism. The way you conquer fear is to feel it all the way, and then you'll find out that there's nothing there - it's just emotion. ~ Nick Nolte,
742:A body is a living entity. It represents life, freedom, sensuality, and it is a mechanism to carry out our thoughts. A body is always beautiful to me. It depends on the individual work and what I do with it and what kind of idea lies behind it - if age matters or not. But in my group works, the only difference is how far people can go if it rains, snows etc. ~ Spencer Tunick,
743:It is therefore scientifically correct to say that 'natural selection has been proved to be an agent of evolutionary change' - we can, in fact, prove it by doing. But it is totally illegitimate to claim that the discovery of this mechanism - natural selection - proves that the cause of evolution 'was automatic with no room for divine guidance or design'. ~ Ernst F Schumacher,
744:The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic. ~ Mark Twain,
745:seen Sitterson knew what was happening: in the mechanism older than Man, a small metal hammer struck a glass vial, cracking it from top to bottom and releasing the blood retained inside. The blood ran into a brass funnel that extended into a long, long pipe, running even deeper through rock and dark spaces, emerging eventually into a place deeper still. Here, the ~ Tim Lebbon,
746:Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can. ~ U G Krishnamurti,
747:Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others. ~ Benjamin Carson,
748:Romeo laughed harder. "Lady doctors?"

"Wyatt calls 'em that." Jules giggled. "Poor fella, stuck with me for a twin. He's been hearing 'bout hormones and period problems since he was fourteen. He's got to have some defense mechanism against all of it."

"I think he has hormone problems," Romeo said with a frown. "He was definitely menstruating yesterday. ~ Kele Moon,
749:The nice girl loses an important protective mechanism when she assumes that life is fair, or that Prince Charming will always protect her. The smart fox is not governed by wishful thinking or the hope of a fantasy outcome, like Cinderella. Despite appearances, she trusts herself to watch her OWN back instead of giving a man the responsibility of doing it for her. ~ Sherry Argov,
750:Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms. ~ Dan Ariely,
751:The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design. ~ Michael Behe,
752:If an organism (whether natural or artificial) is to be perfect, it must combine with the plurality and differentiation of its parts, a maximum of lightness and simplicity. Side by side with the complication which makes a thing unwieldy, there is useful (or centered) complexity. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
753:It didn’t take long to write up our reports, since they mostly consisted of variations on “Rapunzel confirmed downtown, field team dispatched to resolve the incursion; incursion resolved when Agent Winters shouted at it until it agreed to go away. Resolution mechanism not recommended for future incursions.” Demi’s was even shorter: “Barely made it out of the car. ~ Seanan McGuire,
754:. . ideology. . . is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criteria of success and failure. —Jean-François Revel1 ~ Thomas Sowell,
755:It’s for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn’t smell a predator. That’s why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It’s literally a matter of survival.” “That’s cool. ~ Maria Semple,
756:Being trained as an efficient killer wasn't enough. You also had to learn to control your stress and your fear, becoming so used to violence that you could detach yourself from the trauma of it and assess the level of violence necessary to respond. When the fight-or-flight response kicked in, Mother Nature shut off our brains. It was a biological survival mechanism. ~ Ilona Andrews,
757:By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap - imageless gap of the screen - you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world. ~ Rajneesh,
758:[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together. ~ Kenneth E Boulding,
759:Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back. ~ Ian McEwan,
760:Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back. ~ Ian Mcewan,
761:Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. ~ Anthony Powell,
762:The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation. ~ Criss Jami,
763:To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces...but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate - and expected - action. ~ Jacques Ellul,
764:Beautiful, seamless upgrade from Twitter today, making functionality smoother and cooler. We didn't have to lobby, didn't have to beg, didn't have to elect a new leader, didn't have to push or protest. Progress is built in to the structure of the mechanism itself: this company exists to please you and me. This is a far better system than any political system on earth. ~ Jeffrey Tucker,
765:The Declaration does what it does, then—bravely giving birth to a new political entity—in four concrete steps: declaring reasons, presenting facts to witnesses, declaring independence, and making pledges. These are the parts that, taken together, assembled into a word machine of sorts—into a “piece of mechanism,” to quote John Adams’s opponent—make something happen. ~ Danielle S Allen,
766:Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas. ~ Victor Davis Hanson,
767:One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and dark and to movement. The rabbi speculated that if emotions are similar to eyesight and other senses, then perhaps emotions were developed by nature as a survival mechanism. ~ Alan Lightman,
768:The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself - not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly. ~ Edward Abbey,
769:When you see through a defense mechanism, you don’t stop at the intimidating behavior but go right on into the underlying misperception about life and through that to the path back to harmony. When you see through people’s fear-based actions, motives, and secrets, you’re really aiming for their sweet vulnerability, inner beauty, and magnificence—and you find their soul. ~ Penney Peirce,
770:You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person.
There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more. ~ Jake Wood,
771:It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world. ~ Jim Holt,
772:know a lot of people who hide out in fantasy because reality is too hard to cope with [...] Fantasy isn't about escape; it's a survival mechanism. It's a way to deal with things that are so much bigger than you are. So I think fantasy is special, something to be cherished and protected because it's a very fragile thing and without it, we're so defenseless, we're paralyzed ~ David Gerrold,
773:Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say "My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery. ~ William James,
774:all of whom had questioned their fat patients extensively about their diets. Their common finding was an excessive consumption of starches and sweets. Rony reported that the craving for sweets and starches among his patients was so common that it suggested an underlying physiological mechanism at work, possibly related to a greater need for or reduced availability of glucose. ~ Gary Taubes,
775:I hope that George doesn't internalize her scare tactics. I want to argue with her, tell her that "sins of the flesh" is just a control mechanism -- if you demonize a person's pleasure, then you can control his or her life. I can't say how many times this tool has been wielded against me, in a variety of forms. But I see no sin in a kiss. I only see sin in the condemnation. ~ David Levithan,
776:Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable trauma). ~ Simon Reynolds,
777:You wash your hands, don't you?"

Bayley's eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. "Yes," he said.

"All right. I suppose it's a measure of instability to feel such revulsion at dirty hands as to be unable to clean an oily mechanism by hand even in a emergency. Still, in the ordinary course of living, the revulsion keeps you clean, which is good. ~ Isaac Asimov,
778:Should we die, the mechanics of life would go on without us, and that is what people feel most terribly disturbed by,' Korin interrupted himself, bowed his head, thought for a while, then pulled an agonized expression and started slowly swiveling his head, 'though it is only the very fact that it goes on that enables us properly to understand that there is no mechanism. ~ L szl Krasznahorkai,
779:Such were the professor's words - rather let me say such the words of the fate - enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
780:And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. ~ Seth Dickinson,
781:In order to destroy the scapegoat mechanism, a different strategy must be adopted. Instead of trying to create a community where there is no outsider, the real answer lies in understanding that there is a sense in which we are all outsiders. In concrete terms, this means that a community faces its own lack, rather than ignoring it and thus creating a scapegoat who must carry it. ~ Peter Rollins,
782:In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful. ~ Clive Barker,
783:Our only hope to speak with kindness, to lead with patience, and to not threaten our children with homicide is to ensure our spiritual reserves are not bone-dry. Moms are the middle of the flow chart; the arrows of exertion flow constantly out from us, but when no arrows of strength, grace, and peace are flowing in, the whole mechanism is in danger. Goodness in equals goodness out. ~ Jen Hatmaker,
784:And there in the next room by the sofa sat a familiar suitcase, that of his psychiatrist Dr. Smile.

Barefoot, he padded into the living room, and seated himself by the suitcase; he opened it, clicked switches, and turned on Dr. Smile. Meters began to register and the mechanism hummed. "Where am I?" Barney asked it. "And how far am I from New York?" That was the main point... ~ Philip K Dick,
785:The high priest Caiaphas alludes to this mechanism when he says, "It is better that one man die and that the whole nation not perish." The four accounts of the Crucifix-ion thus enable us to witness the unfolding of the working of the single victim mechanism. The sequence of events, as I have already said, resembles numerous analogous phenomena whose director and producer is Satan. The ~ Ren Girard,
786:There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is that it allows you to come to terms with your life narrative. It also allows you to work through some of life's hardest knocks - loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure - and to find understanding and solace. ~ William Zinsser,
787:Ignorance is not about the amount of knowledge. It is about the mechanism of choosing actions. If one chooses actions based upon that which is known to be true - and tries hard to make that domain grow, the domain of knowledge, then he will be rational. Meanwhile, someone else who has much more knowledge might make decisions without paying any attention to truth. That person is ignorant. ~ Jesse Ball,
788:All drunks, particularly those who grew up in alcoholic homes, have that same sense of angst and trepidation, one that has no explainable origins. The fear is not necessarily self-centered, either. It’s like watching someone point a revolver at his temple while he cocks and dry-fires the mechanism, over and over again, until the cylinder rotates a loaded chamber into firing position. ~ James Lee Burke,
789:Mack once told me that he used to speak his mind more freely in his younger years, but he admitted that most of such talk was a survival mechanism to cover his hurts; he often ended up spewing his pain on everyone around him. He says that he had a way of pointing out people’s faults and humiliating them while maintaining his own sense of false power and control. Not too endearing. ~ William Paul Young,
790:On the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in is most charming and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a somber picture of degradation, in which passion was extinct and nothing was left but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism. ~ Honor de Balzac,
791:Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money is this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. ~ Michael Barone,
792:If you look at a farmer and his daily expenditure on existing energy services, it is much higher on an incremental delta basis. And then there is an emotional cost of not providing their kids with the right to educate. If you calculate these costs in economic terms and create a financing mechanism for them to buy it, the emotional delta cost is much higher compared to their household. ~ Ramon Magsaysay,
793:Your prospect was going about her morning happily when her phone rang, interrupting her day. Then she realized her mistake as soon as you said “How are you doing?” Suddenly her get-away-from-this-salesperson-fast mechanism kicked in. As soon as you paused, she hit you with an objection and a stern tone of voice. That's how your prospect is doing and that's how you lose control of the call. ~ Jeb Blount,
794:Jupiter’s moon Europa has enough H2O that its heating mechanism—the same one at work on Io—has melted the subsurface ice, leaving a warmed ocean below. If ever there was a next-best place to look for life, it’s here. (An artist coworker of mine once asked whether alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans. The absence of any other plausible answer forced me to say yes.) ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
795:Maybe convincing yourself that you could never transition is a defense mechanism that enabled you to survive high school, family, work—but like most defense mechanisms, it wasn’t conscious, and like most defense mechanisms, it became a pattern you weren’t aware of, and then, like most defense mechanisms, at some point it stopped making your life easier and started making your life harder. ~ Imogen Binnie,
796:I learnt, in those first few days, how numerous and devastating were the errors that it was possible to commit in carrying out the most ordinary functions of everyday life. To me, for whom meals had hitherto appeared as though by clockwork and the routine of a house had seemed to be worked by some invisible mechanism, the complications of sheer existence were nothing short of a revelation. ~ Vera Brittain,
797:The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool. “The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,” he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. “It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation. ~ Michael Lewis,
798:The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them. ~ David Icke,
799:Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow. It was typical to hear the prisoners, while they were being herded back to camp from their work sites in the evening, sigh with relief and say, “Well, another day is over. ~ Viktor E Frankl,
800:Christianity has a built-in defense system: anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it -- and believe me, I was raised Southern Baptist -- is to take massive amounts of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, "Show me.". ~ Bill Hicks,
801:And luckily, for whatever reason, I've found people who are interested in living with and owning and existing around the DNA of my mind, which is my visual work. I've found collectors who are willing to put money down to live with my work. So I can't criticize the whole mechanism. But I can criticize it as an artist, in spite of the fact that I benefit from it. And there are problems with it. ~ Wangechi Mutu,
802:Christianity has a built-in defense system: anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it -- and believe me, I was raised Southern Baptist -- is to take massive amounts of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, "Show me.". ~ Bill Hicks,
803:Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant—so that he constantly called different things by that name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of ‘pain’—in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein,
804:Try to find your individuality, your integrity, and make the effort of not compromising. Because the more you compromise, the less you are an individual. You are only a cog in the wheel, just a part in the vast mechanism, just a small part of the mob - not an individual in your own beauty, in your own right. I am absolutely against compromise. Death is far more beautiful than a life of compromise. ~ Rajneesh,
805:'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein,
806:It's less so now, but sometimes, when I had a serious thought, I would almost say it in a goofy way--like, I'd take on a weird voice so I'd be like (in a weird voice), 'You know, I think women have to be able to get access to free abortions!' It was this strange defense mechanism. But as I've become more confident, I'm more comfortable having a serious thought and owning it as a serious thought. ~ Lena Dunham,
807:With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. ~ Marshall McLuhan,
808:With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. ~ Marshall McLuhan,
809:With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. ~ Marshall McLuhan,
810:Political parties are a marvellous mechanism which, on the national scale, ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just, what is true. As a result – except for a very small number of fortuitous coincidences – nothing is decided, nothing is executed, but measures that run contrary to the public interest, to justice and to truth. ~ Simone Weil,
811:Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
812:In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new. But this is another reason why incentive prizes are such effective change agents: by their very nature, they are nothing more than a focusing mechanism and a list of constraints. ~ Peter H Diamandis,
813:Instead of man being the aim of production, production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production, instead of tools and the productive mechanism in general liberating man from the slavery of toil, man has become the slave of tools and the industry has become synonymous with business and people have been duped into asking, “what’s good for business?” instead of, “what is business good for? ~ Michael Taussig,
814:The key to the power of the biblical message is the conviction that it is actually true—objectively, universally, cosmically true. It is not merely a psychological coping mechanism. It is not a sociological product of Western culture. It is truth about the universe itself. This conviction is what sets orthodox Christianity off from Christianity Lite. And it is the source of genuine church growth. ~ Nancy R Pearcey,
815:The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual. ~ Dion Fortune,
816:I know this disbelief I feel, the disbelief on the others’ faces, is a survival mechanism. You draw a line in the sand and say you won’t cross it, you won’t believe or do a particular thing. But once you’ve grown accustomed to the unbelievable, or you’ve done what you’ve sworn you’d never do, you redraw the line a little farther back. You let the waves wash the first away like it never existed. ~ Sarah Lyons Fleming,
817:Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
818:By creating a prosecutor who is overseen over by a court, they are melding executive and judicial power in a way that can lead to terrible abuses - as the founders of America understood full well. It's why they created a system of separated powers - to set up a constitutional mechanism that would enhance freedom, by making sure that no one's accumulation of power could predominate over [that of] others. ~ John Bolton,
819:Putting his lips together David whistled a few soft, carefully modulated notes. Head cocked to one side, the alien watched and listened. Then it exhaled softly, trying to duplicate the sounds. Since it possessed a very different respiratory mechanism, it failed in the attempt.
That did not matter to David. What was important and what prompted him to tears was the fact that the creature *tried*. ~ Alan Dean Foster,
820:It seems that the very wise have neglected to take notice of one rather important goddess... Pipina, the lady with the apple of Discord. She knows that the universe, while it requires rules and stability, also needs just a tincture of chaos, the unexpected, the surprising. Otherwiseit would just be a mechanism -- a wonderful mechanism, ticking away the centuries, but with nothing different happening. ~ Terry Pratchett,
821:The situation is clarified and can be seen with accuracy if we envisage, as the basis of cosmic physics, the existence of a sort of second entropy (or anti-entropy) which, as an effect of chances that are seized, draws a portion of matter in the direction of continually higher forms of structurization and centration. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
822:The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires. ~ Nick Bostrom,
823:The profit-oriented print and electronic media have made news itself a commodity which is sold on the basis of demand and supply. They sell what people want. The government can ban drugs and intoxicants which are harmful to society, but there is no such mechanism to ban media from selling harmful news. People have become so addicted to negative news nowadays that they don’t want to see good news at all. ~ Awdhesh Singh,
824:At the moment, he is in shock," said Magnus. "He has believed one thing for five years, and now he has realized that all this time he has been looking at the world through a faulty mechanism - that all the things he sacrificed in the name of what he thought was good and noble have been a waste, and that he has only hurt what he he loved." "Good God," said Woolsey. "Are you quite sure you've helped him? ~ Cassandra Clare,
825:To me, it appears no unjust simile to compare the affairs of this great Continent to the mechanism of a clock, each state representing some one or other of the smaller parts of it which they are endeavoring to put in fine order without considering how useless & unavailing their labor is unless the great Wheel or Spring which is to set the whole in motion is also well attended to & kept in good order. ~ George Washington,
826:This Creative Mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending upon the goals which you yourself set for it. Present it with success goals and it functions as a Success Mechanism. Present it with negative goals, and it operates just as impersonally, and just as faithfully as a Failure Mechanism. ~ Maxwell Maltz,
827:What's happening is that the will of the people, the declared opinion of the people, who want more agendas, more ideas, more sensible redirections reforms in our country, are being thwarted by the mechanism of keeping third-party candidates, who are on more than enough States theoretically to get an electoral vote majority, to keep them off the mass media, the commercial media, to keep them off the debates. ~ Ralph Nader,
828:In this rumble example, the leader is not oversharing or disclosing inappropriately as a mechanism for hotwiring connection or trust with other people. There’s also no fake vulnerability. Fake vulnerability can look like a leader telling us that we can ask questions but not taking the time to create the psychological safety to do it, or not offering a pause in the conversation for anyone else to speak at all. ~ Bren Brown,
829:At the moment, he is in shock," said Magnus. "He has believed one thing for five years, and now he has realized that all this time he has been looking at the world through a faulty mechanism - that all the things he sacrificed in the name of what he thought was good and noble have been a waste, and that he has only hurt what he he loved."
"Good God," said Woolsey. "Are you quite sure you've helped him? ~ Cassandra Clare,
830:His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock's hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
831:I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers. “There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you’ve changed the mechanism ~ Kelly Link,
832:In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac. ~ Victor Hugo,
833:Cass sighed. She set the letter aside too. She'd never be able to send it anyway. Falco was gone. She might never see him again. Cass dipped her quill into the ink and touched it to her first page of the journal. She wrote:
You may study the bodies of the living and the dead for clues about the mechanism of the muscles, the bones, and even the brain, but you can never unravel the mystery of the human heart... ~ Fiona Paul,
834:In truth, one cannot, it seems, oppose mechanism and finalism, one cannot oppose mechanism and anthropomorphism, for if the functioning of a machine is explained by relations of pure causality, the construction of a machine can be understood neither without purpose nor without man. A machine is made by man and for man, with a view toward certain ends to be obtained, in the form of effects to be produced. ~ Georges Canguilhem,
835:The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires. Turing ~ Nick Bostrom,
836:The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. ~ Aldo Leopold,
837:His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the the river of time flowing that moved the clock's hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
838:A minimum of three and a half hours. Probably closer to five.” The vent’s valve mechanism was meant to be serviced from the other side. It took half an hour of fighting to find a decent angle with the wrench and remove the bolts. She finally managed to tug it loose, at which point she had to spend another twenty minutes using her torch to cut the damned thing into smaller pieces so she could get it out of her way. ~ Jim C Hines,
839:Excuses are like assholes. Everyone has one, and they all stink.” I don’t know who came up with this quotation, but I have a feeling I would really like the guy. Excuses are a great mechanism to apply logic to our fears. They are simply the machinations we go through to defend our inner fears. I have heard and experienced them all. And they are all BS. All, that is, except one, but I’ll save that one for last. ~ Mike Michalowicz,
840:It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice. ~ Edward L Bernays,
841:Sleep, mental health, healthy relationships, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness—we saw in our patients that these six things were critical for healing. As important, the literature provided evidence of why these things were effective. Fundamentally, they all targeted the underlying biological mechanism—a dysregulated stress-response system and the neurologic, endocrine, and immune disruptions that ensued. ~ Nadine Burke Harris,
842:All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism. ~ Owen Barfield,
843:The multiverse as a real physical construct within physics overlapping with a more mystical understanding of many possible worlds - the notion of there being a root down at the quantum level between intention and reality, between consciousness and existence - it's not a matter of trying to explain the mystery of magic away with a pat mechanism of a pseudoscience, it's just a matter of trying to ground it in a domain. ~ Jon Spaihts,
844:The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.) ~ Milan Kundera,
845:Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neither who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for (if they understood that they were whistled for at all). They were simply compelled to come together. Sophia was the question, and Blip was the answer. And vice versa. ~ Tony Vigorito,
846:We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck,
847:As for the simplification team, Gilfoy’s goal was very clear: she wanted it to fade away over time. If the initiative succeeded, simplicity would be spliced so seamlessly into the company’s DNA that the facilitation the team provided would no longer be necessary. The team was just a triggering mechanism. The heart and soul of simplification was the process that the team helped teach, as well as the accompanying mindset. ~ Lisa Bodell,
848:We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism. ~ John Brunner,
849:All of the sex on planet Earth is biologically designed to serve one evolutionary purpose: to mix the genes of two separate individuals and then produce a new individual sporting genes identical to neither parent. Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn. ~ Hope Jahren,
850:A long time ago he believed that he was above the men chasing him; capitulating to their secret desires and dark fears was what he did to survive, nothing more and nothing less. But now he understood that all that reasoning was nothing more than a self-assessing loop which he had used as a survival mechanism. It had run constantly but never actually went anywhere; like a rat on a flywheel, all action, no forward motion. ~ Brandon Shire,
851:It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin,
852:Sitting quietly, doing nothing, not knowing what is next and not concerned with what was or what may be next, a new mind is operating that is not connected with the conditioned past and yet perceives and understands the whole mechanism of conditioning. It is the unmasking of the self that is nothing but masks - images, memories of past experiences, fears, hopes, and the ceaseless demand to be something or become somebody. ~ Toni Packer,
853:Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand. Later they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat. ~ Anthony Powell,
854:As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs'
'There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution'
'Human knowledge is one thing, human well-being is another.There is no predetermined harmony between the two'
'In the struggle for life, the taste for truth is a luxury-or else a disability ~ John Gray,
855:Of all the systems of the body - neurological, cognitive, special, sensory - the cardiological system is the most sensitive and easily disturbed. The role of society must be to shelter these systems from infection and decay, or else the future of the human race is at stake. Like a summer fruit that is protected from insect invasion, bruising, and rot by the whole mechanism of modern farming; so must we protect the heart. ~ Lauren Oliver,
856:Everything in life is on some unseen, coordinated timing mechanism. Everything is circling, staying in perfect harmony every day despite what humankind wants or needs or thinks. The Earth circles the Sun, the Moon circles the Earth, even our heartbeats are timed. As you go through life, remember that. Nothing is random and nothing is coincidence. Everything is running on a schedule, a pattern that we don't see or control. ~ Adriana Locke,
857:It were much to be desired, that when mathematical processes pass through the human brain instead of through the medium of inanimate mechanism, it were equally a necessity of things that the reasonings connected with operations should hold the same just place as a clear and well-defined branch of the subject of analysis, a fundamental but yet independent ingredient in the science, which they must do in studying the engine. ~ Ada Lovelace,
858:The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed. ~ Marquis de Sade,
859:Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea. ~ Daniel Dennett,
860:Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process we have created [a] privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of the income inequality. ~ Alan Greenspan,
861:Sweezy argued on the basis of Marx and Keynes that “accumulation is the primary factor” in capitalist development, yet noted that its influence was waning. “There is no mechanism in the system,” he explained, “for adjusting investment opportunities to the way capitalists want to accumulate and no reason to suppose that if investment opportunities are inadequate capitalists will turn to consumption—quite the contrary. ~ John Bellamy Foster,
862:The world is not as it was when it came from its Maker's hands. It has been modified by many great revolutions, brought about by an inner mechanism of which we very imperfectly comprehend the movements; but of which we gain a glimpse by studying their effects: and their many causes still acting on the surface of our globe with undiminished power, which are changing, and will continue to change it, as long as it shall last. ~ Adam Sedgwick,
863:critical point analysis.11 (Critical point analysis is a technique derived from the fact that in any highly complex system there is a specific, critical point at which the smallest input will result in the greatest change. For instance, the great gears of a windmill can be halted by lightly touching the right escape mechanism, and it is possible to paralyze a giant locomotive if you know exactly where to put your finger.) ~ David R Hawkins,
864:It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers. ~ H G Wells,
865:We can go on for years arguing about the way in which the enormous organism could have come into being. As we look closer at the bewildering complexity of the mechanism, our brains begin to reel. How are we to reconcile this persistent growth with the determinism of the molecules, the blind play of the chromosomes, the apparent incapacity to transmit individual acquisitions by generation? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
866:Much as she needed him to play those self-wounding games with her, she needed even more the solitude necessary for complete self-destruction. Isolation was more than a simple defence mechanism; it also served to prepare one for more severe punishments, possibly culminating in suicide. On another level, she would view her desire to drive him off as an act of mercy on her part. But that was a most irritating form of self-pity. ~ Steven Erikson,
867:The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism - for that is what the words 'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a fact - just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. ~ C S Lewis,
868:This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me: 'There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?' You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life. ~ U G Krishnamurti,
869:It may be that I am no longer able to joke--that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny, and some are not. I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not any more. There may have been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no longer works. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter. ~ Kurt Vonnegut,
870:The shell was there, waiting for her, and part of her wanted to crawl into it. She didn't fault herself for that part of her, though, because she finally understood the shell wasn't necessarily a horrible thing. It was a protective mechanism, that was all. It had kept her alive and functioning when the world wanted to poke and hurt her. It was a part of her, and maybe not a part of herself that she needed to find disgusting or bad. ~ Alisha Rai,
871:By mastering both aspects of our being we remember not only how to think, but what to think. What I'm clear about now is that the mind is a tool, a mechanism, and the soul provides the fuel for that machine. The less fuel you use, the more inefficiently the engine will operate. On the other hand, if your soul fills your mind with spiritual energy, you will be Mind-Full - and the workings of this engine can produce miracles. ~ Neale Donald Walsch,
872:As populations grow beyond Dunbar’s number, face-to-face contact no longer suffices to maintain political control. At this point, writing supplies the best mechanism for communicating among large numbers of people, and power naturally accrues to the literate. Consequently, societies with high rates of literacy, such as Athens, tend to have more smoothly running republics than those with low rates, such as the late Roman one. ~ William J Bernstein,
873:I try to explain how people react when overwhelmed by confusion and negative emotions. Some drink too much. Others overeat or beat their wives or kick the cat. And a surprising number hold their hands against a hot plate or slice open their skin with a razor blade. It's an extreme coping mechanism. They talk about their inner pain being turned outward. By giving it a physical manifestation they find it easier to deal with. (35) ~ Michael Robotham,
874:Let me guess,” Thorne said. “Breaking and entering?”
After a long silence of examining the retracting mechanism, the girl wrinkled her nose. “Two counts of treason, if you must know. And resisting arrest, and unlawful use of bioelectricity. Oh, and illegal immigration, but honestly, I think that’s a little excessive.”
He squinted at the back of her head, a twitch developing in his left eye. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen. ~ Marissa Meyer,
875:The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix-through identity-of the Divine Grace, with a perfect knowledge-through identity-of the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.
   ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,
876:It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers. ~ H G Wells,
877:The mechanism of primary emotions does not describe the full range of emotional behaviors. They are, to be sure, the basic mechanism. However, I believe that in terms of an individual's development they are followed by mechanisms of secondary emotions, which occur once we begin experiencing feelings and forming systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, and primary emotions, on the other. ~ Antonio Damasio,
878:I had found myself thinking of time—time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion—whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless “moments” which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain. ~ Oliver Sacks,
879:Japanese often use the expression shikata-ga-nai (there is nothing you can do) as a fatalistic response to a given circumstance. They assume that circumstance is all there is; they face that shikata-ga-nai with stoic resignation. But the Christian God offers a reality far greater, a possibility of the infinite breaking through, even though the fallen world is cursed and operates within the limitations of a natural, closed mechanism. ~ Makoto Fujimura,
880:Whatever the internal mechanism that moderated the human capacity for joy, mine had long been broken beyond repair. And I knew this was a poor substitute, a base shadow cast on the cave wall, a reflection in a tarnished mirror of ordinary things like happiness, love, and hope. But there were moments, fleeting moments, lost in the responses of my body to his, when it was almost enough. And, God, I wanted, I wanted. These crumbs of bliss. ~ Alexis Hall,
881:I don't really know. I think the first test is when you're very little and you fart, and you laugh at it and so do your friends and family. I knew before I was funny I was very annoying so I have that covered. I think it was because I was not very good in school I used humor as a defense mechanism. When I started doing plays and stuff at school I decided that I was going to keep doing it until someone tells me to stop and get a real job. ~ Joel McHale,
882:If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or simply not care. ~ Lisa Randall,
883:It is impossible indeed not to look with considerable uneasiness at the type of the "modern economist" as he developed after Keynes' revolutionary book, whom Keynes himself regarded with alarm at the end of his days. It is the type of man who is obsessed by one thing, i.e. "effective demand," which he thinks must be kept up at whatever cost,
while he forgets the working of the mechanism of prices, wages, interest and exchange rates. ~ Wilhelm R pke,
884:The mind is a mechanism. It has no intelligence. The mind is a bio-computer. How can it have any intelligence? It has skill, but it has no intelligence; it has a functional utility, but it has no awareness. It is a robot; it works well but don`t listen to it too much because then you will lose your inner intelligence. Then it is as if you are asking a machine to guide you, lead you. You are asking a machine which has nothing original in it. ~ Rajneesh,
885:Time . . . strange stuff,” mused Thomas. “Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways. We are obedient to its inexorable mechanism throughout our lives, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Why does it flow in only one direction? What is it made of ? How is it regulated? Is it everywhere the same for everyone? Or might its substance or speed be altered by mechanisms as yet undiscovered? ~ Stephen R Lawhead,
886:No one believed the mindless cuts, which were called a “sequester,” would ever get enacted. But in fact, when no other resolution could be reached, they were. The mechanism placed Obama in a fiscal straitjacket indefinitely. The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Emanuel Cleaver, denounced the deal as “a sugarcoated Satan sandwich,” which the House minority leader, Pelosi, amended to “a Satan sandwich with Satan fries on the side. ~ Jane Mayer,
887:There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable. ~ John Wyndham,
888:It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time. ~ Lewis Thomas,
889:It is hardly remarkable that we sicken and die; what is truly remarkable is that we don’t usually sicken very often and we don’t die very quickly. We can therefore say the same thing about physical disorders that we said about mental disorders: There is a force, the mechanism of which we do not fully understand, that seems to operate routinely in most people to protect and encourage their physical health even under the most adverse conditions. ~ M Scott Peck,
890:We`re heartened that Donald Trump wants to spend more money. I think the mayors of America would agree that we have a massive deficit in the infrastructure plan in America and we need more, but more particularly because they actually get it done. We need to know what the mechanism is going to be, how it`s gonna get to the mayors directly, so how we can get it in the ground more quickly, and we`re hoping to hear from both candidates tomorrow. ~ Mitch Landrieu,
891:When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham's Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
892:I remain unenthusiastic about actors. They still couple the producer with the consumer. Yes, one can emulate or implement certain kinds of queues with actors (and, notably, people often do), but since any actor mechanism already incorporates a queue, it seems evident that queues are more primitive. It should be noted that Clojure's mechanisms for concurrent use of state remain viable, and channels are oriented towards the flow aspects of a system. ~ Anonymous,
893:in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use; it is not enough that a dictionary delights the critick, unless, at the same time, it instructs the learner; as it is to little purpose that an engine amuses the philosopher by the subtilty of its mechanism, if it requires so much knowledge in its application as to be of no advantage to the common workman. ~ Samuel Johnson,
894:We love dogs, but what do they think of us? Even with just two dogs, a picture was beginning to emerge. The pattern of activations in the cortex suggested that they concocted mental models of our behavior, which might be due to mirror neuron activity. But regardless of the mechanism, the smell data showed that their mental models included the identity of important people in their lives that persists even when the people aren’t physically present ~ Gregory Berns,
895:Think of the G3 as the central brain trust of a talent-first organization. (You might want to keep the general counsel or chief risk officer close on big decisions if that suits your business, but it’s the ongoing CEO-CFO-CHRO linkage that’s crucial.) Effectively deployed, the G3 is the mechanism that will create the future of your organization. It can be the multiplier of your capacity, time, and capability, as illustrated in the following example. ~ Ram Charan,
896:Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable. ~ Robert Harris,
897:Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we’re to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forgetting. ~ Michael Pollan,
898:A keen observation shows that the whole universe is a single mechanism working by the law of rhythm; the rise and fall of the waves, the ebb and flow of the tide, the waxing and waning of the moon, the sunrise and the sunset, the change of the seasons, the moving of the earth and of the planets, the whole cosmic system and the constitution of the entire universe are working under the law of rhythm. Cycles of rhythm, with major and minor cycles ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan,
899:How on earth could he not see it? It stood on the wooden floor behind him, in the corner just inside the door, where the light from the hallway poorly fell: an old-fashioned alarm clock with three blunt stumps for legs and a bell like a Prussian helmet. Its face, a faithful little moon, was turned up to her, its hands were spread to plead innocence, and its inner mechanism emitted without ceasing the rapid ribbon of blows called the passing of time. ~ Helen Garner,
900:People know that both my parents were shrinks so I was sort of raised in an atmosphere where there was that interest in the human mechanism and the human psyche and what makes people tick. And yes, I think I'm particularly creative and adventurous and improvisational and spontaneous in my inner impulses and patterns and deeply curious and appetized in the unfathomably mysterious and delicious phenomena that is the human being and who we really are. ~ Jeff Goldblum,
901:Since the war I have stressed altogether five main objectives. The true union of Europe; the union of government with science; the power of government to act rapidly and decisively, subject to parliamentary control; the effective leadership of government to solve the economic problem by use of the wage-price mechanism at the two key-points of the modern industrial world; and a clearly defined purpose for a movement of humanity to ever higher forms. ~ Oswald Mosley,
902:Evolution, from being initially selective, cannot but make itself elective in higher living beings, as a direct effect of complexity: until the time comes when, with the appearance of the faculty of thought, it reflects definitively upon itself and so ‘takes off’ and suddenly opens out into planned invention (technology) and higher co-consciousness (civilization). ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
903:once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity. ~ V S Ramachandran,
904:Why? Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing
thought, Mocky. But language is thought. Thought is information given form.
The form is language. The form of this language is … amazing.”
“What amazes you?”
“Mocky, when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people
see the world, the universe.”
He nodded.
“And as I see into this language, I begin to see … too much.”
“It sounds very poetical. ~ Samuel R Delany,
905:Endorphin elevation appears to be an innate physiological mechanism to protect mammals and perhaps other animals against the emotional and physical dangers or terror and pain. It is a survival device, and because it has evolutionary value it probably appeared during the savage period of our prehistory when sudden life-threatening events occurred with frequency. Many a life has no doubt been saved by the absence of panicky response to sudden danger. ~ Sherwin B Nuland,
906:In the half-century 1879–1929, Western societies developed into close-knit units, in which powerful disruptive strains were latent. The more immediate source of this development was the impaired self-regulation of market economy. Since society was made to conform to the needs of the market mechanism, imperfections in the functioning of that mechanism created cumulative strains in the body social. Impaired self-regulation was an effect of protectionism. ~ Karl Polanyi,
907:A capitalist economy cannot be maintained, however, if it oscillates between threats of an imminent collapse of asset values and employment and threats of accelerating inflation and rampant speculation, especially if the threats are sometimes realized. If the market mechanism is to function well, we must arrange to constrain the uncertainty due to business cycles so that the expectations that guide investment can reflect a vision of tranquil progress. ~ Hyman P Minsky,
908:The first law of the multitude is conformity. Civilization is the mechanism of controlling and maintaining that multitude. The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization’s last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny. ~ Steven Erikson,
909:real power is the ability to create the results you desire while simultaneously adding value to the lives of others. Ultimate power is the ability to shape and control your own life. It’s the ability to define human needs and fulfill them—both your needs and the needs of people you care about. It’s the ability to direct your own thought processes, your own behavior, so you take hold of the steering mechanism of your life and determine your own destiny. ~ Anthony Robbins,
910:All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it. ~ Rajneesh,
911:It is far more than the discovery of life without a self. The immediate, inevitable result is an emergence into a new dimension of knowing and being that entails a difficult and prolonged readjustment. the reflexive mechanism of the mind -or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious - is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown ~ Bernadette Roberts,
912:Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies. ~ Clive Barker,
913:The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering. ~ Olga Tokarczuk,
914:In Buddhism, we say reincarnation is the conscious taking of rebirth by a Bodhisattva, or by a high being, whereas rebirth, is what most people do. Rebirth is an involuntary process where they seek traction by finding a new body after their subtle mind loses the old one. There are two things commonly said about this. One- there is no evidence for it and two- if there is evidence, what's the mechanism which carries the consciousness from one life to another. ~ Robert Thurman,
915:The marginal gains approach is not just about mechanistic iteration. You need judgment and creativity to determine how to find solutions to what the data is telling you, but those judgments, in turn, are tested as part of the next optimization loop. Creativity not guided by a feedback mechanism is little more than white noise. Success is a complex interplay between creativity and measurement, the two operating together, the two sides of the optimization loop. ~ Matthew Syed,
916:If I had the good fortune of having the ability to influence people all over the world every time I spoke, I would do my best to make sure people understood why the United States of America is special, and then I would suggest that everybody who wants to come here, "I don't blame you, fine and dandy, there's a legal mechanism for this. We're not denying people the right to come to our country. There's a legal way to do it." That's another thing people forget. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
917:Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought. ~ William Irwin Thompson,
918:my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering. ~ Olga Tokarczuk,
919:Re-enactments may be played out in intimate relationships, work situations, repetitive accidents or mishaps, and in other seemingly random events. They may also appear in the form of bodily symptoms or psychosomatic diseases. Children who have had a traumatic experience will often repeatedly recreate it in their play. As adults, we are often compelled to re-enact our early traumas in our daily lives. The mechanism is similar regardless of the individual’s age. ~ Peter A Levine,
920:The primary vice of a bad person is precisely that he is more preoccupied with others than himself. Rousseau is describing a precise libidinal mechanism: the inversion which generates the shift of the libidinal investment from the object to the obstacle itself. This could well be applied to fundamentalist violence - be it Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Twin Towers - was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society. ~ Slavoj i ek,
921:Compassion. Love. It was not civilization that birthed these gentle gifts - though its followers might claim otherwise. Nor was civilization the sweetest garden for such things to blossom in - though those trapped within it might imagine it so. No, as far as [Karsa] could see, civilization was a madman's mechanism that, for all its good intentions, ended up ensnaring the gentle gifts, stifling them, leaving them to wander mazes only to die alone and in the dark. ~ Steven Erikson,
922:One of a line of self-declared motor chauvinists, he boasts a lineage that includes the Nobel laureates Sir Charles Sherrington, who wrote, “Life’s aim is an act, not a thought,” and Roger Sperry, who encouraged us “to view the brain objectively for what it is, namely, a mechanism for governing motor activity.”32 After all, it is action, not cogitation, that puts food on the table and a bun in the oven. Action allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
923:Reimbursement has become the primary mechanism through which the regulation of doctors occurs in the United States.2 To the extent that doctors cannot afford to do things they are not paid to do, and will gladly do more of those things they are paid handsomely to do, the decisions about whether, when, and how much to pay doctors for the various things they do has unwittingly become one of the most pervasive and powerful regulatory mechanisms ever devised. ~ Clayton M Christensen,
924:Our fingertips met in the middle of the table. It was the briefest moment of connection, but at the same time, the most intimate of touches. A bond seemed to form between us in that instant. I almost heard something snap into place. It was as if I’d been trapped in a vault for a year and Aubrey had her ear pressed against the unlocking mechanism. Somehow only she could spin the lock and find that magical series of numbers which would allow the tumbler to click. ~ Georgina Guthrie,
925:The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things. ~ Clayton Christensen,
926:There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses. ~ J D Salinger,
927:Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of the world after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television, and Norbert Wiener and his colleagues found some evidence that there is a similar process in the brain. ~ Alan W Watts,
928:For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world. ~ Jim Baggott,
929:Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the moment back as its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
930:What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work! ~ Albert Einstein,
931:To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism. Unequal exchange is an ancient practice. What was remarkable about capitalism as a historical system was the way in which this unequal exchange could be hidden; indeed, hidden so well that it is only after five hundred years of the operation of this mechanism that even the avowed opponents of the system have begun to unveil it systematically. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein,
932:In 2013 a fifth of Ferguson’s general revenues—some $2.6m, in a city of 21,000 people—were derived from fines and asset confiscation. That is equivalent to $124 a year for every man, woman and child in the city. Paying fines, even for minor traffic offences, can involve queuing for hours. Those who miss court dates can be jailed until they pay, accumulating more fines along the way. Slowly but surely, the justice system has become an elaborate mechanism for criminalising poverty. ~ Anonymous,
933:It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ~ Edward Bernays,
934:I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. ~ D H Lawrence,
935:It was a gross, tasteless thing to say – my brain had been burping up such inappropriate thoughts at inopportune moments. Mental gas I couldn’t control. Like, I’d started internally singing the lyrics to ‘Bony Moronie’ whenever I saw my cop friend. She’s as skinny as a stick of macaroni, my brain would bebop as Detective Rhonda Boney was telling me about dragging the river for my missing wife. Defense mechanism, I told myself, just a weird defense mechanism. I’d like it to stop. ~ Gillian Flynn,
936:civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society. It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions, that offer that say in equal measure to every citizen, that allow some kind of access to your deliberations or at least provide a meaningful feedback mechanism to tell you it isn’t working. It is not reimagining the world at conferences. ~ Anand Giridharadas,
937:From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defense mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. ~ Gabor Mat,
938:Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, unprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
939:Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
940:the hypothesis simply failed to explain how the brain manages to monitor our fat stores, and then raise or lower food intake and energy expenditure in response. Saying that we’re all endowed with a lipostat that monitors our adiposity and then regulates hunger appropriately is just another way of saying that our weight remains remarkably stable, whether we’re lean or obese, and then assigning the cause to a mysterious mechanism in the brain whose function is to achieve this stability. ~ Gary Taubes,
941:The human machine is the only medium by which the soul and the mind connect with the material world, and this marvelous mechanism, this temple Beautiful, should be kept in the superbest condition, for whatever mars it mars the soul's expression. M In our present system of education we are taught nearly everything except the very thing that we ought to know most about—the art of living. The schools and colleges teach scores of things that we never use directly in practical life, ~ Orison Swett Marden,
942:Remember that your thoughts are the primary cause of everything. So when you think a sustained thought it is immediately sent out into the Universe. That thought magnetically attaches itself to the like frequency, and then within seconds sends the reading of that frequency back to you through your feelings. Put another way, your feelings are communicated back to you from the Universe, telling you what frequency you are currently on. Your feelings are your frequency feedback mechanism! ~ Jack Canfield,
943:It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. ~ Thomas Nagel,
944:I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it). ~ Nora Ephron,
945:Armament should be an illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world. Partial armament is one of those absurdities dear to moderate-minded 'reasonable' men. Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun, and firing it are all acts of the same order. It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men. When you see a gun it is reasonable to ask: 'Whom is that intended to kill?' ~ H G Wells,
946:With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant--the little spitfires! ~ Thomas Carlyle,
947:With our knowledge of hormones we appear to be on the eve of having a hand in the development of our bodies and even of our brains. With the discovery of genes it appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
948:I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions— frenulum, otitis, glycolysis— was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge. The profusion of facts obscured a deeper and more significant problem: the reconciliation between knowledge (certain, fixed, perfect, concrete) and clinical wisdom (uncertain, fluid, imperfect, abstract). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
949:When the U.S. asks for the extradition of a terrorist, if Turkey doesn't have that individual on the terror list, what do we say, what do we respond? Now, the individual might not be on your terror list or terrorist list. But if he is on my list, and if we have an agreement on the extradition of criminals, if I make the request, then, well, you should extradite that person. And there has been numerous examples of that mechanism working with many other nations as well, not just the U.S. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
950:I have already indicated to you the meaning of the word religion, as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a Church. It is a State conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism. ~ Muhammad Iqbal,
951:It can be seen, then, that a public debate on the issue of the Nakbah, whether conducted in Israel itself or in the United States, its imperial protector, could open up questions concerning the moral legitimacy of the Zionist project as a whole. The mechanism of denial, therefore, was crucial, not only for defeating the counter-claims made by Palestinians in the peace process, but, far more importantly, for disallowing any significant debate on the very essence and moral foundations of Zionism. ~ Noam Chomsky,
952:I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up....

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it). ~ Nora Ephron,
953:In all of the movie portrayals, a spacewalking suit seems sort of insignificant, like a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. No one thinks much about it. But it's a spaceship, not a spacesuit, an entire life-support mechanism that's incredibly complex and cumbersome. It's very difficult to put on and off. You have to run it the whole time you are wearing it, and it redefines how you move. It's like if you put on a wetsuit and a snowmobile suit and froze yourself solid and then tried to go and do work. ~ Chris Hadfield,
954:The book known as Journey to the West is about the universal Way that has been handed on by word of mouth from sage to sage, and verified by each of them. Qiu Chuji (丘處機), Taoist name Changchun Zi (長春子), the originator of the Journey to the West cycle, dared to say what the ancients did not dare to say, revealing the celestial mechanism. In Journey to the West is to be found the method for transforming life and death, the way to escape nature. This is the most extraordinary Taoist book of all time. ~ Liu Yiming,
955:To receive the universe into oneself, after the manner of some “mystics,” is simply to become inflated with the conceit that one is God and so set up yet another opposition between the mighty whole and the degraded part. To give oneself utterly and slavishly to the world is to become a spiritual nonentity, a mechanism, a shell, a leaf blown by the winds of circumstance. But if the world is received and the self given at the same time, there prevails that union which brings about the Second Birth. ~ Alan W Watts,
956:It is a remarkable leap forward (involving, indeed, a change of order) in arrangement—one that is accompanied by another, no less remarkable, whether it be in the reduction of chance in the world (planned and co-operative invention) or in the biological interiorization of consciousness (all the individual reflective particles of the earth being impelled to associate planetarily in one single reflective system). ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
957:People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is... a primary organizer of all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along. ~ Edward T Hall,
958:he had invented something potentially revolutionary: a real-time neuro-feedback mechanism that allows meditators to see when they’re shutting down the Default Mode Network (DMN) of their brains, the so-called “selfing regions” that are active during most of our waking, mindless hours. From inside the narrow tube of the scanner (which I was too claustrophobic to get inside of, by the way), the meditator can see, via a mirror, a small computer monitor. When the DMN is deactivated, the screen goes blue. ~ Dan Harris,
959:Then he realized that Salander was in costume. Usually her style was sloppy and rather tasteless. Blomkvist had assumed that she was not really interested in fashion, but that she tried instead to accentuate her own individuality. Salander always seemed to mark her private space as hostile territory, and he had thought of the rivets in her leather jacket as a defense mechanism, like the quills of a hedgehog. To everyone around her it was as good a signal as any: Don't try to touch me—it will hurt. ~ Stieg Larsson,
960:1—the existence of politically and legally free men; 2—the fact that free men (workers and employees) sell their labor to the owner of capital on the labor market, by contract; 3—the existence of the commodity market as a mechanism by which prices are determined and the exchange of the social product is regulated; 4—the principle that each individual acts with the aim of seeking a profit for himself, and yet that, by the competitive action of many, the greatest advantage is supposed to accrue for all. ~ Erich Fromm,
961:I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. ~ D H Lawrence,
962:Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime. Author James Rorty noted this during the Great Depression, when he traveled America talking with people forced to seek work on the road. In his 1936 book, Where Life Is Better, he was dismayed that so many of his interview subjects seemed so unshakably cheerful. “I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe,” he wrote. ~ Jessica Bruder,
963:We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices. ~ David Eagleman,
964:Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. ~ Thomas Merton,
965:For the first time there was constructed with this machine [locomotive engine] a self-acting mechanism in which the interplay of forces took shape transparently enough to discern the connection between the heat generated and the motion produced. The great puzzle of the vital force was also immediately solved for the physiologist in that it became evident that it is more than a mere poetic comparison when one conceives of the coal as the food of the locomotive and the combustion as the basis for its life. ~ Carl Ludwig,
966:Girard uses mimétisme here, for which English has no equivalent. In his usage it refers to imitation of others' desires and a complex of rivalries that spread rapidly and increase to the point that scandals begin to accumulate. This is an unconscious process that leads to the "war of all against all" if it were not for a mechanism, an unconscious operation, that avoids chaos by the unanimous resort to expelling or lynching a victim. In subsequent chapters I often translate mimétisme as "violent contagion. ~ Ren Girard,
967:This was Nassrin, or to be honest, this was the two of us together: sharing the most intimate moments with a shrug, pretending they were not intimate. It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really. ~ Azar Nafisi,
968:She rambled on and on about how my attending a new private school was going to be a “stressful time of tremendous personal growth” and how my best “coping mechanism” would be to “communicate” my “thoughts and feelings.” I was absolutely ECSTATIC because you can communicate with a NEW CELL PHONE! Right?! I kind of zoned out on most of what my mom was saying because I was DAYDREAMING about all of the cool ring tones, music, and movies I was going to download. It was going to be LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT! ~ Rachel Ren e Russell,
969:What happens next?” Miranda asks. It’s easier to talk to Elizabeth when they’re sitting side by side,
when she doesn’t have to look at her.
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“I wish I could tell you how sorry I am,” Elizabeth says, “but you’ve already told me to stop
apologizing.”
“It’s just an awful thing to do.”
“I don’t think I’m an awful person,” Elizabeth says.
“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival
mechanism. ~ Emily St John Mandel,
970:Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. ~ Thomas Merton,
971:Nobody had ever suspected her of having a mind. I mean even a little of it, I mean any at all. One was inclined to think of her as an It--an automaton, a very plain dummy, with an arrangement for bowing the head at times and smiling stupidly now and then. Davidson viewed her profile with a flattened nose, a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye. He asked himself: Did that speak just now? Will it speak again? It was as exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a mechanism. ~ Joseph Conrad,
972:There's no automatic mechanism in a market system that reconciles the desire to save and the desire to invest. And therefore, the government has to sort of do something or the Federal Reserve, the Fed, or the Central Bank, or whatever, it has to intervene. It has to create enough investment for the economy not to suffer from a fall in aggregate demand. So, if you don't have a balance within the market system itself, then you need an external balance and that's what I think Keynes believed. ~ Robert Skidelsky Baron Skidelsky,
973:[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins,
974:Isaac's humility did not discriminate between man and man and scarcely between man and watch. In his thought men were much like their watches. The passage of time was marked as clearly upon a man's face as upon that of his watch and the marvelous mechanism of his body could be as cruelly disturbed by evil hazards. The outer case varied, gunmetal or gold, carter's corduroy or bishop's broadcloth, but the tick of the pulse was the same, the beating of life that gave such a heartbreaking illusion of eternity. ~ Elizabeth Goudge,
975:That this seemingly simple mechanism—cell growth without barriers—can lie at the heart of this grotesque and multifaceted illness is a testament to the unfathomable power of cell growth. Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair—to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair—to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells can grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
976:As mankind lives longer, not only does it increase numerically and spread out geographically; but, what is more, economically, politically, and mentally it is daily more thoroughly pounded together and intermixed and more closely bound into one. We can see connexions of all sorts continually—and in geometric progression—multiplying and intensifying between each human individual and all the others on the surface of the globe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
977:helps the reader decide whether the paper is worth reading further. 2. It gives the reader a first idea of the contribution: a new method, chemical, reaction, application, preparation, compound, mechanism, process, algorithm, or system. 3. It provides clues on the type of paper (review paper or introductory paper), its specificity (narrow or broad), its theoretical level, and its nature (simulation or experimental). By the same means, it helps the reader assess the knowledge depth required to benefit from the paper. ~ Anonymous,
978:Thus direct experimental evidence shows that the forces exerted by an electron (or... any charged body) can neither be attributed to any mechanism attached to the body, nor through action transmitted through an ether or any medium surrounding the body. We have a perfect specification of the pattern of events written... in the language of mathematics, but this does not admit of interpretation in mechanical terms, or indeed in any terms other than those of mathematics. ~ Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (1942) pp. 121-122.,
979:Bourne’s ideas about irony and empathy may seem counterintuitive: after all, isn’t the ironist typically detached, sardonic, cynical, quick to ridicule? In “The Life of Irony” Bourne importantly distinguishes these lesser qualities from true irony, which brings us closer to the experience of others—not farther away. The inner mechanism works like this: because ironists readily adopt another’s point of view and make it their own, they come to live the other’s experiences with greater understanding and compassion. ~ Leslie Jamison,
980:We had an electronic head and arm for Threepio, and I manipulated the mechanism with a joystick. But it wasn't working. The propman said, 'Give me fifteen minutes.' We all went to get coffee, and when we came back, Threepio's head turned perfectly and his arm moved naturally. I looked up and realized that the prop man had a fishing pole with a fine nylon string attached to Threepio's arm. He had rigged another string around the head, which Chewbacca was holding. As Chewie moved his hands, Threepio's head turned! ~ Irvin Kershner,
981:Internet becoming accessible everywhere, whether it was Wi-Fi at work, on your cell phone as you traveled. People had it at home with broadband. There was a big change.It used to be people used the Internet primarily at work, because that's where they had a good connection. Now they're using it at home. And the second big change is, they used it not just to get information, but to communicate with one another. And, so, it became not simply an information exchange, but a personal exchange, a communication mechanism. ~ Esther Dyson,
982:A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion. ~ Ayn Rand,
983:A general flat minimum-wage law for all industry is permissible, but I do not think that it is a particularly wise method of achieving the end. I know much better methods of providing a minimum for everybody. But once you turn from laying down a general minimum for all industry to decreeing particular and different minimum for different industries, then, of course, you make the price mechanism inoperative, because it is no longer the price mechanism which will guide people between industries and trades. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek,
984:Achieving this unity with one’s surroundings is not only an important component of enjoyable flow experiences but is also a central mechanism by which adversity is conquered. In the first place, when attention is focused away from the self, frustrations of one’s desires have less of a chance to disrupt consciousness. To experience psychic entropy one must concentrate on the internal disorder; but by paying attention to what is happening around oneself instead, the destructive effects of stress are lessened. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
985:Hominization, instead of spreading out at random (as we had at first thought) would be given a direction; and in consequence we would awake scientifically to the idea that in the form of some critical point of ultra-hominization (or of complete and final reflection), some issue to—that is, some justification of—life may well be waiting for us at the term of existence: because, physically and biologically, the process is convergent! ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
986:You know the Model of your Car. You know just what its powers are. You treat it with a deal of care, Nor tax it more than it will bear. But as to self — that's different. Your mechanism may be bent, Your carbureter gone to grass, Your engine just a rusty mass. Your wheels may wobble and your cogs Be handed over to the dogs, And on you skip, and skid, and slide, Without a thought of things inside. What fools indeed we mortals are To lavish care upon a Car, With ne'er a bit of time to see About our own machinery! ~ John Kendrick Bangs,
987:So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox. ~ Stanislaw Lem,
988:So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ~ Stanis aw Lem,
989:Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic—kindness to animals, for instance—but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition. ~ Doris Lessing,
990:Of course there exists in living organisms a selective mechanism for the play of consciousness. We have merely to look into ourselves to perceive it—the nervous system. We are in a positive way aware of one single ‘interiority’ in the world: our own directly, and at the same time that of other men by immediate equivalence, thanks to language. But we have every reason to think that in animals too a certain inwardness exists, approximately proportional to the development of their brains. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
991:Supernatural hasn't spent a lot of time on relationship stories, and this is a really nice mechanism to do that without imposing that on the forward momentum of these other stories that we're telling. In the writers' room we tend to say, "We're never going to be able to give a hell or Purgatory as good as people's imaginations," so the instinct is normally not to go there. But, we went the other way this year and said, "We are going to go there," because there's a really, really strong character thing going on down there. ~ Jeremy Carver,
992:Whatever has been found—the Higgs boson, the particular implementation of the Higgs mechanism that seems simplest or something more elaborate—it is almost certainly something very new. The interest from the public and press has been very gratifying, indicating a thirst for knowledge and scientific advances that humanity to a large extent shares. After all, this discovery is part of the story of the universe’s evolution as its initial symmetry was broken, particles acquired masses, atoms were formed, structure, and then us. ~ Lisa Randall,
993:For these gave Roman citizenship to vast numbers of the defeated, in numerous towns throughout central Italy, on a scale that went far beyond the precedent set at Veii. Whether this was a gesture of generosity, as many Roman writers interpreted it, or a mechanism of oppression, as it may well have seemed to those who found Roman citizenship imposed upon them, it was a crucial stage in the changing definition of what it meant to be ‘Roman’. And it brought, as we shall soon see, enormous changes to the structure of Roman power. ~ Mary Beard,
994:What a painter inquires into is not the nature of the physical world but the nature of our reactions to it. He is not concerned with causes but with the mechanism of certain effects. His is a psychological problem-that of conjuring up a convincing image despite the fact that not one individual shade corresponds to what we call "reality." In order to understand this puzzle-as far as we can claim to understand it as yet-science had to explore the capacity of our minds to register relationships rather than individual elements. ~ E H Gombrich,
995:Acceptance of climate change is assumed to be transferred, as though through osmosis, by reading a book or watching a documentary. When it is acquired, it is assumed, like the data that it is based on, to be solid and unshakeable. Because there is no recognition of climate change conviction, there is no language of climate change doubt, no one is offering to give us encouragement or to help us to “walk though that together.” There is no defense against backsliding and denial, and there is no mechanism for coping with grief. ~ George Marshall,
996:It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n,
997:Pet Journal If you have a pet, then I highly recommend you keep a pet journal for that pet. I find it best to have a small spiral notebook right by the cage, tank, or other area associated with the pet. That way you can make notes about what they’re eating, how they are doing, and anything else you wish to track. Often pets will hide illnesses as part of their self-defense mechanism. You’ll only notice subtle changes in their eating or movement patterns. The more you make daily notes, the more likely you are to spot those changes. ~ Lisa Shea,
998:This is exactly what Alan concluded: it couldn't just have been a crazy fluke coincidence that infinitely many separate regions of space underwent Big Bang explosions all at once-some physical mechanism must have caused both the exploding and the synchronizing. One unexplained Big Bang is bad enough; an infinite number of unexplained Big Bangs in perfect synchronization strains credulity.

This is know as the horizon problem, because it involves what we see on our cosmic horizon, int he most distant regions we can observe. ~ Max Tegmark,
999:To some degree, the critic arises out of that negativity bias in that our brains are oriented towards threat and toward survival. The critic really started as a survivor mechanism in early infancy and childhood when we were trying to navigate our early family system and culture; when we're learning how to fit in so we could optimize that flow of love and affection. It was an internal voice telling us to shut certain patterns and reactions down, that negativity bias that's always looking for what's wrong, looking for the threat. ~ Mark Coleman,
1000:Facebook’s “Like” button is much more than a way for us to react to other people. It is a social-coordination mechanism that tells us how we can, and should respond. It subtly gives us instructions on what is OK (and not OK) to post and it gently tells us how we can and can’t behave on Facebook. Adding buttons such as “Dislike” or “Hate” would change our mindset when we read different posts; it would prompt us to have more negative reactions and I suspect that very quickly it would destroy this social network’s positive atmosphere. ~ Dan Ariely,
1001:For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. ~ Max Weber,
1002:How we think we feel has a definite effect on how we actually feel physically. If your mind tells you that you are tired, the body mechanism, the nerves, and the muscles accept the fact. If your mind is intensely interested, you can keep on at an activity indefinitely. Religion functions through our thoughts, in fact, it is a system of thought discipline. By supplying attitudes of faith to the mind it can increase energy. It helps you to accomplish prodigious activity by suggesting that you have ample support and resources of power. ~ Anonymous,
1003:The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism. ~ William A Dembski,
1004:Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where “the long term” is measured at least in centuries. ~ Stewart Brand,
1005:Anarchy, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement - at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist. Only, instead of demanding that those social customs should be maintained through the authority of a few, it demands it from the continued action of all. ~ Peter Kropotkin,
1006:In short, evolution is as close to being a scientific fact as is possible for any theory, given that science is open - ended and no one can predict with certainty what may change in the future. The prospect that evolution by natural selection, at least as a broad mechanism, will be overthrown in the future is about as likely as the prospect of finding out some day that the Earth is really flat. Unfortunately, those who regard these scientific facts as a threat to faith have chosen to distort and misrepresent them to the public. ~ Victor J Stenger,
1007:Jupiter’s system of moons is replete with oddballs. Io, Jupiter’s closest moon, is tidally locked and structurally stressed by interactions with Jupiter and with other moons, pumping enough heat into the little orb to render molten its interior rocks; Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Jupiter’s moon Europa has enough H2O that its heating mechanism—the same one at work on Io—has melted the subsurface ice, leaving a warmed ocean below. If ever there was a next-best place to look for life, it’s here. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1008:While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause. ~ Mary Roach,
1009:Why is The Origin of Species such a great book? First of all, because it convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: it provides a vast and well-chosen body of evidence showing that existing animals and plants cannot have been separately created in their present forms, but must have evolved from earlier forms by slow transformation. And secondly, because the theory of natural selection, which the Origin so fully and so lucidly expounds, provides a mechanism by which such transformation could and would automatically be produced. ~ Charles Darwin,
1010:For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where ~ Stephen King,
1011:For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops."

"The clock stops, you mean."

"No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire’s gone out, and the sun’s gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. "Or an opened lock. ~ Neal Stephenson,
1012:It was not woman's fault, nor even love's fault, nor the fault of sex. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattling of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron. ~ D H Lawrence,
1013:These people are not immune from wounds – the children fall down or bash their heads on trees, the women burn their fingers tending the fires, there are cuts and scrapes – but so far the injuries have been minor, and easily cured by purring. Crake had worked for years on the purring. Once he’d discovered that the cat family purred at the same frequency as the ultrasound used on bone fractures and skin lesions and were thus equipped with their own self-healing mechanism, he’d turned himself inside out in the attempt to install that feature. ~ Anonymous,
1014:It is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward. ~ Thomas Pogge,
1015:I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial. ~ William Gibson,
1016:In the Schreber case-history projection has a very different role: it is described as occurring during the period of ‘symptom-formation’*. This approach tends to bring the mechanism of paranoia closer to that of the neuroses: in a first phase, the intolerable feeling (homosexual love) is said to be repressed inwards, into the unconscious, and transformed into its opposite; a subsequent phase sees its projection into the outside world. Projection here is the way in which what has been repressed into the unconscious makes its return. This ~ Jean Laplanche,
1017:It was not woman’s fault, nor even love’s fault, nor the fault of sex. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the blue-bells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron. ~ D H Lawrence,
1018:If he (The New York Taxi Driver) talked to me, he might lose his concentration, which would be very bad because the taxi has some kind of problem with the steering, probably dead pedestrians lodged in the mechanism, the result being that there is a delay of 8 to 10 seconds between the time the driver turns the wheel and the time the taxi actually changes direction, a handicap that the driver is compensating for by going 175 miles per hour, at which velocity we are able to remain airborne almost to the far rim of some of the smaller potholes. ~ Dave Barry,
1019:It is part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to the aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means - be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our own lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our own limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way, and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defence mechanism. It's pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n,
1020:The first rule of tinkering is, of course, ‘save all the parts.’ But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time. Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative action); the essential mechanism of societal preservation is not inspiration, but restraint. ~ David Mamet,
1021:"The ego is created by the rift. When you are fighting, the ego comes in; when you are not fighting, the ego cannot come in. Ego is a tension. If you want the ego, then divide yourself as fully as possible - become two persons. That is what is happening to many people, that is what has happened to whole of humanity. Everybody has become two persons: one voice says "Do this," the other voice says "Don't do that" - then the ego arises. Out of friction ego arises, and ego is very intoxicating; it makes you unconscious. This is the whole mechanism." ~ Rajneesh,
1022:As demographics in America have changed, the big studios have rushed to include actors that reflect those demographics. There is no cultural hegemony emanating from a particular people with a particular identity, merely a profit-driven system of production that responds to changes in the market, with the aim of reaching the most consumers possible. The only culture being imposed through this mechanism is anti-culture — moral and cultural universalism that dissolves social boundaries to make the maximum number of consumers feel included. While ~ Jack Donovan,
1023:But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double. ~ Daniel Suarez,
1024:I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters 'a very good God damn'; that 'an artist, a man, a failure' is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being-a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow. ~ e e cummings,
1025:There are a lot of things that aren’t your fault. Or mine, either. Not the fault of prophecies, or curses, or DNA, or absurdity. Not the fault of Structuralism or the Third Industrial Revolution. We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. Say the wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air. ~ Haruki Murakami,
1026:Is precisely in market dealings that market prices are formed for all kinds of goods and services, which will be taken as the bases of calculation. Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation."
"eben im Marktverkehr für alle Arten von verwendeten Gütern und Arbeiten Marktpreise gebildet werden, die zur Grundlage der Rechnung genommen werden können. Wo der freie Marktverkehr fehlt, gibt es keine Preisbildung; ohne Preisbildung gibt es keine Wirtschaftsrechnung. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
1027:215. As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases suns of different colours shine around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and flood it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing to the complicated mechanism of our "firmament," are determined by DIFFERENT moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colours, and are seldom unequivocal—and there are often cases, also, in which our actions are MOTLEY-COLOURED. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1028:I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all. ~ E E Cummings,
1029:I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all. ~ e e cummings,
1030:So I make no effort to hide my pain. I don’t ever put it all on display like this—but for today and all the rest of the days of the trial, I must. My every flinch, every flicker of pain, will be
magnified a hundred times over, then dissected by the pundits and talking heads. But I’m told it’s necessary; the world needs to see me vulnerable and wounded. I cannot appear not to care or to lack remorse, but that removes a crucial component of my self- defense mechanism and leaves me bleeding for all the world to see. I suppose that’s rather the point. ~ Ann Aguirre,
1031:But there was something in him that didn’t want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires’ kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some reason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.) ~ William Gibson,
1032:Return an error code. You could decide that only certain parts of a system will handle errors. Other parts will not handle errors locally; they will simply report that an error has been detected and trust that some other routine higher up in the calling hierarchy will handle the error. The specific mechanism for notifying the rest of the system that an error has occurred could be any of the following: Set the value of a status variable Return status as the function's return value Throw an exception by using the language's built-in exception mechanism ~ Steve McConnell,
1033:He put his hands on the table. They weren’t shaking. Somehow he understood that these questions came from more than mere curiosity; they were part of the defense mechanism, the internal barbed wire and moat he’d lavishly built to keep Emily’s revelation from reaching him. He knew that what she was telling him was life altering in a way nothing he’d ever heard before was. The words my son kept floating through his subconscious. But they were just words right now. They’d get through eventually, he guessed, but for now the barbed wire and moat were holding. ~ Harlan Coben,
1034:Totalitarianism extends to whatever touches it...psychological technique, as it operates in the army or in a great industrial plant, entails a direct action on the family. It involves a psychological adaptation of family life to military or industrial methods, supervision of family life, and training family life for military or industrial service. Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern. Technique, which is destroying all other civilizations, is more than a simple mechanism: it's a whole civilization in itself. ~ Jacques Ellul,
1035:How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself...and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Esther now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body - and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her. ~ Rachel Kadish,
1036:Whenever learners or those beyond learning awaken the mind, for the first time they plant one buddha-nature. Working with the four elements and five clusters, if they practice sincerely they attain enlightenment. Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment. This is because the four elements and five clusters and plants, trees, fences and walls are fellow students; because they are of the same essence, because they are the same mind and the same life, because they are the same body and the same mechanism. ~ Dogen,
1037:Jesper and Kaz swung around, crashed into the mechanism of the clock, righted themselves. It wasn’t a fight, it was a brawl—graceless, a tangle of elbows and fists.
“Ghezen and his works, someone stop them!” Wylan said desperately.
“Jesper hasn’t shot him,” Nina said.
“Kaz isn’t using his cane,” said Inej.
“You think they can’t kill each other with their bare hands?”
They were both bleeding—Jesper from a cut on his lip and Kaz from somewhere near his brow. Jesper’s shirt was halfway over his head and Kaz’s sleeve was tearing at the seam. ~ Leigh Bardugo,
1038:This private association of mine is a precious possession I would not willingly give up. But the fact that two sensual experiences leap up every time I think, ‘spring is coming’—that fact is my own personal affair. It can be communicated, certainly, as I have communicated it to you just now. But it cannot be transmitted. I can make you understand my association, but I cannot so affect a single one of you that my private association will become a valid symbol for you in your turn, a mechanism which infallibly reacts on call and always follows the same course. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1039:Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board. ~ Randall Robinson,
1040:When I first started comedy, before I kind of gained any national prominence, I - in a weird way - went back to that. Marc Maron had me on WTF making fun of me about that when I first opened for him. I had this very kind of hip-hop bravado to me, and I realized that now I've let some of that go in my stage presence, that maybe that was because I had dropped that completely from my life, and when I got onstage I sort of rekindled it. And I think now that it was perhaps a defense mechanism that was left over from those days, which I think is kind of interesting. ~ Moshe Kasher,
1041:the feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,

and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,

of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set

stripped of position stripped of true function

and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection

where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing,

out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day. ~ Jorie Graham,
1042:And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the resumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst. ~ D H Lawrence,
1043:Our currently accepted conceptions of the beginning of the universe postulate much more uniformity than exists now. One way entropy could increase in the universe is by the process of reduction of its state function by some other system. Since the universe, by definition, cannot have any other matter in it, it becomes essential to postulate a mechanism other than that of physical laws, which permits the state function to reduce. This other mechanism may be the working of the “consciousness principle” which can just by the process of “observation” increase entropy ~ Subhash Kak,
1044:How easy it would have been to take control, to treat the body like a cart or chariot—a humble vehicle to be ridden where I pleased! The faintest of temptations ran through me … Without a second’s pause, I could have closed in upon the brain and damped down its little energies, set myself to pull the levers to keep the mechanism going…. No doubt Nouda and Faquarl and Naeryan and all the rest had been pleased to do this. It was their revenge in microcosm, their triumph over humanity carried out in miniature. But that was not for me. Not that it wasn’t tempting, mind. ~ Anonymous,
1045:Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data. ~ Jerry Fodor,
1046:The difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur thinks the camera does the work. And they treat the camera with a certain amount of reverence. It is all about the kind of lens you choose, the kind of film stock you use… exactly the sort of perfection of the camera. Whereas, the professional the real professional – treats the camera with unutterable disdain. They pick up the camera and sling it aside. Because they know it’s the eye and the brain that count, not the mechanism that gets between them and the subject that counts. ~ David Hemmings,
1047:We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach’s help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd. ~ Judith Curry,
1048:When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,
1049:Some men don't want their women to speak up, and then other men are attracted to that very thing. But as a woman, you don't want to be just window dressing. I've probably been unattractive to some men because I do say what I feel and what I think. You can be political about it, but I don't have a red flag. I don't have a mechanism in my head that prevents me from saying what I think, or if something upsets me or if I feel like I'm being degraded. I come from a family of very outspoken women. I can't imagine living in a time when you couldn't express what you felt. ~ January Jones,
1050:The question whether atoms exist or not... belongs rather to metaphysics. In chemistry we have only to decide whether the assumption of atoms is an hypothesis adapted to the explanation of chemical phenomena... whether a further development of the atomic hypothesis promises to advance our knowledge of the mechanism of chemical phenomena... I rather expect that we shall some day find, for what we now call atoms, a mathematico-mechanical explanation, which will render an account of atomic weight, of atomicity, and of numerous other properties of the so-called atoms. ~ August Kekule,
1051:Passion for science derives from an aesthetic sensibility, not a practical one. We discover something new about the world, and that lets us better appreciate its beauty. On the surface, the weak interactions are a mess: The force-carrying bosons have different masses and charges, and different interaction strengths for different particles. Then we dig deeper, and an elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space. It’s like being able to read poetry in the original language, instead of being stuck with mediocre translations. ~ Sean Carroll,
1052:The mechanism by which quantum mechanics injects an element of chance into the operation of the universe is called “decoherence” (Gell-Mann and Hartle, 1994). Decoherence effectively creates new bits of information, bits which previously did not exist. In other words, quantum mechanics, via decoherence, is constantly injecting new bits of information into the world. Every detail that we see around us, every vein on a leaf, every whorl on a fingerprint, every star in the sky, can be traced back to some bit that quantum mechanics created. Quantum bits program the universe. ~ Paul Davies,
1053:You’re allowed to have fun. You’re allowed to have a fling with an old boyfriend and not feel like it’s some big life decision or an unhealthy coping mechanism. Be smart about it, but don’t deny yourself some simple life pleasures. Taking your photos. Hanging out with your awesome, amazing, super-wise friends. And hot cop penis.”

A real laugh burst out of Liv this time, and she quickly pressed her hand over her mouth to staunch it. “He’s FBI, for the record.”

Federal cop penis,” Kincaid corrected. “That’s top shelf. It has authority across state lines. ~ Roni Loren,
1054:"Abductees," Eva said, "are souls that have, for their individual purposes and reasons, chosen the probability of physical form." But through their experiences they are "regaining their memory of source . . . The process of abduction is one form of such, of regaining memory." The abduction "experience itself," Eva said, "is a mechanism to remove" the "structures that impede the reconnection with source," and to purify the physical vehicle in such a way to serve to regain better memory and to bring knowledge to others." ~ John E. Mack in Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, pp. 258-259,
1055:For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ Stephen King,
1056:For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ Stephen King,
1057:For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chimney beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ Stephen King,
1058:Yet wrapped in this sort of adaptation for change is the mechanism for growth, and it, too, is rooted in what we might call stress. This is the process at work in every long run uphill or in every set of bench presses that reaches for a new personal record. We build muscles by tearing them down, stressing them beyond their limits. The body reads this as a need for more muscle to meet these new conditions of your life, and so the body builds it. And this works the same way in the brain: brain-building chemicals build new cells and make existing cells stronger. Yet Sterling’s ~ John J Ratey,
1059:Then again, given that human history appears to be defined by a succession of more or less corrupt ruling elites, and if we are to assume that such corruption (and its spread throughout society) is the mechanism by which a civilization attracts cosmic catastrophe, blaming and deposing the elite is a good solution. The problem, however, is that the underlying mechanism is not understood by the people, which means that they lack the knowledge that, if they are to prevent further destruction, they must, at all costs, prevent the establishment of any future corrupt elite. ~ Laura Knight Jadczyk,
1060:For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens, you see that the world is barley there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes, pretending to be wheels and cogs. A dream clock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate, and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ Stephen King,
1061:Jesper swung first. Kaz dodged right and then they were grappling. They slammed into the wall, knocked heads, drew apart in a flurry of punches and grabs. Wylan turned to Inej, expecting her to object, for Matthias to separate them, for someone to do something, but the others just backed up, making room. Only Kuwei showed any kind of distress.
Jesper and Kaz swung around, crashed into the mechanism of the clock, righted themselves. It wasn't a fight, it was a brawl--graceless, a tangle of elbows and fists.
"Ghezen and his works, someone stop them!" Wylan said desperately. ~ Leigh Bardugo,
1062:In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world. ~ William Gay,
1063:she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This fact was not merely true about the lives of human beings; it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest. It was even true of mosses. This fact was the very mechanism of nature—the driving force behind all existence, behind all transmutation, behind all variation—and it was the explanation for the entire world. It was the explanation Alma had been seeking forever. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
1064:You will come to see that the mind talks all the time because you gave it a job to do. You use it as a protection mechanism, a form of defense. Ultimately, it makes you feel more secure. As long as that’s what you want, you will be forced to constantly use your mind to buffer yourself from life, instead of living it. This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave. In the name of attempting to hold the world together, you’re really just trying to hold yourself together. ~ Michael A Singer,
1065:The way to become that exciting person whom people want to know is very easy. We simply picture the kind of person we want to be and surrender all the negative feelings and blocks that prevent us from being that. What happens, then, is that all we need to have and to do will automatically fall into place. This is because, in contrast to having and doing, the level of being has the most power and energy. When it is given priority, it automatically integrates and organizes one’s activities. This mechanism is evidenced in the common experience, “What we hold in mind tends to manifest. ~ David R Hawkins,
1066:The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. ~ Ada Lovelace,
1067:Nesse’s research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it’s stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism—and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It’s to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can’t realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy... ~ Jane McGonigal,
1068:You can think of the Health Impact Fund as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor. This sounds like magic. But it really works because the current system is not Pareto efficient. It's a system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in litigation costs and deadweight losses that HIF-registered medicines would sidestep. By avoiding these losses, the HIF reform can bring improvements all around - including for pharmaceutical innovators. ~ Thomas Pogge,
1069:Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. ~ Jacques Ellul,
1070:Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems. ~ Michael Huemer,
1071:What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming! ~ Evelyn Waugh,
1072:Our appetite for the secret, thought Arendt, is dangerously political. Totalitarianism removes the difference between private and public not just to make individuals unfree, but also to draw the whole society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories. Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything. As we learned from these email bombs, this mechanism works even when what is revealed is of no interest. The revelation of what was once confidential becomes the story itself. ~ Timothy Snyder,
1073:No matter how many calories you are ingesting, if you aren’t getting what you need nutritionally, your body sends you out for more in the form of cravings or a yearning to eat something else. It’s a primal urge, and hard to ignore. It’s literally a survival mechanism that kicks in. The body is saying (sometimes rather urgently), “I haven’t gotten enough nutrients, go get more food!” The problem is that meat, cheese, and refined carbs don’t have what it takes to satisfy the body’s needs, so the body is never satiated on a diet that is made up mostly of animal protein and junky processed food. ~ Kathy Freston,
1074:Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is "no exit"; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. . . . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. ~ Jacques Ellul,
1075:Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. [...] Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. [...] Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of the mechanism. ~ Donna J Haraway,
1076:Why do we separate the scientific, which is just a way of searching for the truth, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe? Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth. What could be more profoundly sacred than that? I'm sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment, will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality. So here's this process, this way, this mechanism for finding bits of reality. No single bit is sacred. But the search is. ~ Ann Druyan,
1077:the body is equipped with what Cannon named the stress response, also known as the fight-or-flight response, a survival mechanism that gets flipped on when your brain perceives a threat. When this hormonal cascade is triggered by a thought or emotion in the mind, such as fear, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis activates, thereby stimulating the sympathetic nervous system to race into overdrive, pumping up the body’s cortisol and adrenaline levels. Over time, filling the body with these stress hormones can manifest as physical symptoms, predisposing the body to disease over time. ~ Lissa Rankin,
1078:Use-induced cortical reorganization, says Taub, "involves alterations different from mere learning and memory. Rather than producing just increased synaptic strength at certain junctions, which is believed to underlie learning, some unknown mechanism is instead producing wholesale topographic reorganization." And more: we are seeing evidence of the brain's ability to remake itself throughout adult life, not only in response to outside stimuli but even in response to directed mental effort. We are seeing, in short, the brain's potential to correct its own flaws and enhance its own capacities. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1079:Use-induced cortical reorganization, says Taub, “involves alterations different from mere learning and memory. Rather than producing just increased synaptic strength at certain junctions, which is believed to underlie learning, some unknown mechanism is instead producing wholesale topographic reorganization.” And more: we are seeing evidence of the brain’s ability to remake itself throughout adult life, not only in response to outside stimuli but even in response to directed mental effort. We are seeing, in short, the brain’s potential to correct its own flaws and enhance its own capacities. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1080:For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
1081:The amygdala is the driving force (accelerator) of defensive responses and supporting physiological responses in the brain and body. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFCVM) regulates (applies the brake to) the amygdala, thus adjusting the occurrence and intensity of defensive reactions as situations change. This mechanism is often impaired in people who suffer from problems with fear and anxiety (not because the amygdala is the source of feelings of fear or anxiety but because amygdala-dependent brain and body responses contribute ingredients that are assembled into a feeling of fear or anxiety). ~ Joseph E LeDoux,
1082:And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. She saw this not merely in the shape of his eyes and the flatness of his regard, but in what they recalled—things he had said and done suddenly understood. And she knew that Farrier had let her see this, as a warning, as a promise. ~ Seth Dickinson,
1083:My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature. ~ Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell,
1084:Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we’ve become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together. ~ John Bradshaw,
1085:In summary, both Ford and Ohno followed four concepts (from now on we’ll refer to them as the concepts of flow): Improving flow (or equivalently lead time) is a primary objective of operations. This primary objective should be translated into a practical mechanism that guides the operation when not to produce (preventsoverproduction). Ford used space; Ohno used inventory. Local efficiencies must be abolished. A focusing process to balance flow must be in place. Ford used direct observation. Ohno used the gradual reduction of the number of containers and then gradual reduction of parts per container. The ~ Eliyahu M Goldratt,
1086:Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.... The same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions – for Mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
1087:There are a lot of things that aren't your fault. Or mine, either. Not the fault of prophecies, or curses, or DNA, or absurdity. Not the fault of Structuralism or the Third Industrial Revolution. We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. Say the wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn't have form. It's just a movement of air. You should listen carefully, and then you'll understand the metaphor. ~ Haruki Murakami,
1088:There are a lot of things that aren’t your fault. Or mine, either. Not the fault of prophecies, or curses, or DNA, or absurdity. Not the fault of Structuralism or the Third Industrial Revolution. We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle. Say the wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air. You should listen carefully, and then you’ll understand the metaphor. ~ Haruki Murakami,
1089:The view taken of the interaction between emotions and imagination changed with shifts in how the faculty of the imagination – and the relation between mind and body in general –were understood. Hume, for instance, considered the imagination to be the faculty of composing, decomposing, and associating ideas, in contrast to the impressions among which passions were numbered. Nonetheless, there is still some role for the imagination in producing and manipulating affects, and vice-versa. The imagination is also a crucial mechanism in the social communication of the passions, a topic considered by both Malebranche and Hume. ~ Anonymous,
1090:Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that “plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given subject.” In addition to being “the mechanism for development and learning,” plasticity can be “a cause of pathology.”35 It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick. ~ Nicholas Carr,
1091:Except for practices that incorporate design as the way they practice—for example, architecture and engineering—the art of design is not incorporated into students’ experiences in schools, despite its superiority in many situations, even to such analytical problem solving as scientists employ. The power of design as an instrument of learning is almost completely overlooked by the educational system. For example, the best way to learn how an automobile (or any other mechanism) works and to gain understanding of why it works the way it does is to design one. Moreover, it is in design that people learn what they want. ~ Russell L Ackoff,
1092:His gaze moved from her face to the gun, then back to her face, an annoyingly smug expression creeping across his features. “I don’t think so. You ain’t got the first notion how to shoot that thing. Can’t even find the trigger, can you.” He took a menacing step toward her. Nicole raised her left brow. “You mean this trigger?” She cocked the hammer of the Colt Paterson revolver and released the folding trigger mechanism. Will stopped. “You forget, Will Jenkins—I’m a Renard. Daughter of Anton Renard and granddaughter to Henri Renard, privateer and compatriot of Jean Lafitte himself. I know a thing or two about weapons. ~ Karen Witemeyer,
1093:Segways are a classic example of this phenomenon. You've seen them on occasion in malls or in airports, looking something like an old-fashioned lawn mower gone vertical, ridden around by someone in a security professional's uniform. Kind of dorky looking, but don't kid yourself. The gyroscopic balance control is fabulous, and the control movements once mastered are graceful. The hope was these devices would become a universal transport mechanism. Why didn't that happen? In a word: stairs. Stairs are pesky little devils that crop up everywhere, and Segways do not handle them well at all. That's what we call a showstopper. ~ Geoffrey A Moore,
1094:The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and untruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it. ~ Alan W Watts,
1095:However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring. For it must not be believed that the driving mechanism really does away with the statistical nature of the process. The true physical picture includes the possibility that even a regularly going clock should all at once invert its motion and, working backward, rewind its own spring – at the expense of the heat of the environment. ~ Erwin Schr dinger,
1096:Planning can’t save you from everything. Change is inevitable and uncertainty is a given. And if you plan so much that you can’t function without one, life’s no fun. All the calendars, journals, and lists in the world won’t save you when the sky falls. And maybe, just maybe, I’ve been using planning less as a coping mechanism and more as an excuse to avoid anything I couldn’t control. But that doesn’t mean preparation is altogether bad. Planning can be useful when you’ve come out on the wrong side of a cave and need to figure out a new way to get back on route. When all you can do is put one foot in front of the other and push forward. ~ Jenn Bennett,
1097:Without this faculty of man and beast alike to recognize identities across the variations of difference, to make allowance for changed conditions, and to preserve the framework of a stable world, art could not exist. When we open our eyes under water we recognize objects, shapes, and colors although through an unfamiliar medium. When we first see pictures we see them in an unfamiliar medium. This is more than a mere pun. The two capacities are interrelated. Every time we meet with an unfamiliar type of transposition, there is a brief moment of shock and a period of adjustment-but it is an adjustment for which the mechanism exists in us. ~ E H Gombrich,
1098:In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is.If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves. ~ Dorothy L Sayers,
1099:By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life,—produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy,—recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion? ~ Voltaire,
1100:Planning can't save you from everything. Change is inevitable and uncertainty is a given. And if you plan so much that you can't function without one, life's no fun. All the calendars, journals, and lists in the world won't save you when the sky falls. And maybe, just maybe, I've been using planning less as a coping mechanism and more as an excuse to avoid anything I couldn't control.
But that doesn't mean preparation is altogether bad. Planning can be useful when you've come out on the wrong side of a cave and need to figure out a new way to get back on route.
When all you can do is put one foot in front of the other and push forward. ~ Jenn Bennett,
1101:Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of “grow or die,” is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame technology as such or population growth as such for environmental problems. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of “progress” with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative. ~ Murray Bookchin,
1102:The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment. ~ Arthur Koestler,
1103:In spite of all of this, we have not forgotten how to laugh. Why? You don’t have to look far for the answer. It’s a defence mechanism against all the hardship and frustration we have to endure. A safety valve, if you like. The late Father Charles Simons of the Church of the Ressurection in Bonteheuwel used to say “Instead of smiling, our people must learn to say: For God’s sake stop this – it hurts.” But Father Simons was wasting his breath on the people he loved so much. He knew it was of no use. As one resident of Bonteheuwel said to him one day: “But Father, if I didn’t find time to laugh and make jokes about my lot, I would break down and cry. ~ Al J Venter,
1104:The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined....From a psychological viewpoint this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought....The...elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. ~ Albert Einstein,
1105:With respect to Duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things, in this so surprising world, strike me with more surprise. Two little visual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon,—make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl round; and, simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant! Deuce on it (verdammt), the little spitfires!—Nay, I think with old Hugo von Trimberg: 'God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see his wondrous Manikins here below. ~ Thomas Carlyle,
1106:By its very nature, as the cosmic stuff’s power of self-arrangement is realized more fully, so there tends to be a gradual interiorization of its driving force and the methods it uses. As a universal experience of things teaches us, the increasing complexification of matter, while in its origins principally the effect of chance, is gradually shot through and loaded with ‘choice.’ When the process first appears, in monocellular beings, it is forcibly imposed or automatic; but among highly cerebralized beings it tends irreversibly to become one of active preference. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Transformation and Continuation in Man of the Mechanism of Evolution,
1107:If one of these baby stick insects is removed as soon as it is born, and kept in a tank on its own, then it too will lay eggs which will hatch into little stick insects in their turn. This is despite the fact that it has never mated. Stick insects frequently reproduce this way. They are using a mechanism known as parthenogenesis, from the Greek for ‘virgin birth’. Females lay fertile eggs without ever mating with a male, and perfectly healthy little stick insects emerge from these eggs. These insects have evolved with special mechanisms to ensure that the offspring have the correct number of chromosomes. But these chromosomes all came from the mother. ~ Nessa Carey,
1108:Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends. How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. ~ Hilary Mantel,
1109:As the concept of ideology is a socio-historical one that bears the features of social and political developments, it would be strange, by then, that transcendence is seen as a mechanism of producing ideology in Islam, while it seems to untie its connections with socio-historical reality. This is related to the fact that any attempt to untie the connection of an epistemological system with its socio-historical reality aims at fixing its absolute dominance on the one hand, and marginalizing the opponent systems on the other. Needless to say that transcendence, by then, performs the same tasks of ideology (like dominance, exclusion, marginalization and absolutization) ~,
1110:CONTRARY TO THE COMMON ASSUMPTION , Charles Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mere fact of evolution had been around for a long time, and most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary change didn’t trouble them, wasn’t experienced as a pressure, as it was by Darwin. He knew there had to be some intelligible mechanism or dynamic that would account for it, and this is what he went looking for—with well-known results. In his Origin of Species, he wasn’t announcing the fact of evolution, he was trying to make sense of that fact. ~ Daniel Quinn,
1111:Revolution is only possible now, not in the future; regeneration is today, not tomorrow. If you will experiment with what I have been saying, you will find that there is immediate regeneration, a newness, a quality of freshness; because the mind is always still when it is interested, when it desires or has the intention to understand. The difficulty with most of us is that we have not the intention to understand, because we are afraid that, if we understood, it might bring about a revolutionary action in our life and, therefore, we resist. It is the defense mechanism that is at work when we use time or an ideal as a means of gradual transformation. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
1112:The scientific creation story has majesty, power and beauty. and is infused with a powerful message capable of lifting our spirits in a way that its multitudinous supernatural counterparts are incapable of matching. It teaches us that we are the products of 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution and the mechanism by which meaning entered the universe, if only for a fleeting moment in time. Because the universe means something to me, and the fact that we are all agglomerations of quarks and electrons in a complex and fragile pattern that can perceive the beauty of the universe with visceral wonder, is, I think, a thought worth raising a glass to this Christmas. ~ Brian Cox,
1113:It’s difficult to get our heads around the idea that each bubble has its own capacity to evoke that feeling of being conscious; it rubs up against our own intuitions about the holistic nature of our personal consciousness. What are we and our intuitions missing? We are missing the illusion part, the part we humans (with our powerful left hemisphere inference mechanism) are so good at missing. We aren’t actually missing the illusion; rather, we are missing the fact that our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion. In reality it is made up of cognitive bubbles linked with subcortical “feeling” bubbles, stitched together by our brain in time. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
1114:Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends."
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. ~ Hilary Mantel,
1115:Nnu Ego was like those not-so well-informed Christians who,promised the Kingdom of Heaven,believed that it was literally just round the corner and that Jesus Christ was coming on the very morrow. Many of them would hardly contribute anything ton this world,reasoning, "What is the use? Christ will come soon" They became so insulated in their beliefs that not only would they have little to do with ordinary sinners,people going about their daily work, they even pitied them and in many cases looked down on them because the Kingdom of God was not for the likes of them. Maybe this was a protective mechanism devised to save them from realities too painful to accept. ~ Buchi Emecheta,
1116:In addition to X inactivation, long ncRNAs also appear to play a critical role in imprinting. Many imprinted regions contain a section that encodes a long ncRNA, which silences the expression of surrounding genes. This is similar to the effect of Xist. The protein-coding mRNAs are silenced on the copy of the chromosome which expresses the long ncRNA. For example, there is an ncRNA called Air, expressed in the placenta, exclusively from the paternally inherited mouse chromosome 11. Expression of Air ncRNA represses the nearby Igf2r gene, but only on the same chromosome12. This mechanism ensures that Igf2r is only expressed from the maternally inherited chromosome. ~ Nessa Carey,
1117:All types of societies are limited by economic factors. Nineteenth century civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself in a motive rarely acknowledged as valid in history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain. The self-regulating market system was uniquely derived from this principle. The mechanism which the motive gain set in motion was comparable in effectiveness only to the most violent outburst of religious fervor in history. Within a generation the whole human world was subjected to its undiluted influence. ~ Karl Polanyi,
1118:It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.

The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this very effort establishes its own uniqueness. Name another entity in the Cosmos which tries to prove it is not unique.

The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry. ~ Walker Percy,
1119:One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead. ~ Lauren Oliver,
1120:It seemed very strange to me that this fiction, which took the name of political ideology, was a major source of violence and brutality in Latin America; that these sometimes elaborate and complex ideological constructions in which one society was described and then another ideal society was also described as a goal to be reached through revolution, as well as a methodology of the way this revolution could be achieved, were, in fact, a mechanism that was destroying our societies and creating major obstacles to real progress and the battle against the things the revolution opposes-social injustice, economic inequalities, lack of integration of the different cultures. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa,
1121:Human beings have an enormous desire not to know. It is very painful to know. If we did a popularity contest among all the defense mechanisms, the defense mechanism of denial would win hands down. It is the most popular one. Unconsciousness is difficult to deal with, and it takes a heroic struggle in the psyche to develop a strong ego. Certainly anything like an adequate ego function is not automatic. If you have evaluated your own ego function lately, you know that even after much therapy and struggle it is difficult to get yourself conscious and stay awake. This is the primal deep reality in this whole issue of spiritual warfare. It is a struggle against unconsciousness. ~ Robert L Moore,
1122:Infectious diseases cause a rise in oxidative stress, which is largely responsible for coordinating our genetic response to the infection. As we age, mitochondrial respiration also causes a rise in oxidative stress, which activates essentially the same genes through a common mechanism that involves transcription factors like NFΚB. Unlike infections, however, ageing is not easily reversed: mitochondrial damage accumulates continuously. The stress response and inflammation therefore persist, and this creates a harsh environment for the expression of ‘normal’ genes. The expression of normal genes in an oxidized environment is the basis of their negative pleiotropic effects in old age ~ Nick Lane,
1123:Many scientists and psychologists had been presenting depression as an irrational malfunction in your brain or in your genes, but he learned that Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University, had said that depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences. “I think that’s a very important idea,” Vincent told me. “It takes you beyond the comforting, limited idea that the reason I’m depressed is I have a serotonin imbalance, or a dopamine imbalance, or what have you.” It is true that something is happening in your brain when you become depressed, he says, but that “is not a causal explanation”; it is “a necessary intermediary mechanism. ~ Johann Hari,
1124:States relied as well upon another mechanism of insidious discrimination to silence blacks and ensure that the rule of a few would shape the course of the South and the nation for years to come: Legislative apportionment gave overwhelming and disproportionate power to rural counties, especially those that held the most ardent white segregationists and the largest black populations outside the urban areas. For example, Alabama, up to the 1960s, used the census from 1900, when the state was overwhelmingly rural, to determine the number of representatives each county sent to the state legislature. The result was that growing urban centers like Birmingham were underrepresented while ~ Carol Anderson,
1125:Volume II: Chapter V
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I—I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
1126:She walked Toby to Victoria Station and left him at the barrier. On her way into the underground she thought he’d followed her, but there was nobody to be seen behind her on the escalator that sailed downwards with a faint inconsolable squeal. She sat on a bench on the empty platform, the breaths of oncoming trains stirring the hairs on the back of her neck. She leafed through Graham’s notebook, but couldn’t concentrate; she found she had to keep glancing along the platform towards the tunnel. Some fault in the mechanism made the train doors reopen after she boarded, as if someone had leapt on at the last moment. The galloping rush of the wheels made her think of a hunt in the dark. ~ Ramsey Campbell,
1127:It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I’m sad to say that this method works. If you don’t give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. ~ Alan Cumming,
1128:When fructose is metabolized in the liver, for instance, it accelerates the breakdown of a molecule called ATP, which is the primary source of energy for cellular reactions and is loaded with purines. (“ATP” stands for “adenosine triphosphate”; adenosine is a form of adenine, a purine.) This in turn increases the formation of uric acid. Alcohol raises uric acid levels through the same mechanism (although beer also has purines in it). The effect of fructose on ATP also works to stimulate the synthesis of purines, and the metabolism of fructose leads to the production of lactic acid, which reduces the excretion of uric acid by the kidney and thereby raises uric acid concentrations indirectly. ~ Gary Taubes,
1129:We now have a theory of effective collective action with decentralized authority. The theory is based on a conception of human nature as at once social, interdependent, justice-seeking, self-interested, and strategic. That conception is consistent with contemporary social science and with ancient Greek thought. The theory explains (through a mix of ideology, federalism, “altruistic” punishment, and existential threats) individual motivation to cooperate in the absence of a unitary sovereign as third-party enforcer. It provides (through information exchange) a mechanism that enables many individuals to accomplish common goals and to produce public goods without requiring orders from a master. ~ Josiah Ober,
1130:For octopi, ink is a defense mechanism, a means of escape. It is for me as well. Octopi surround themselves with clouds of ink in order to disappear before the clouds dissipate. Sometimes they also create hovering blots of ink that mimic their own shape, so predators will attack the ink and not them. Every time I write about my family, I instinctively obscure the truth with a cloud of self-protection, and invent versions of my life that give me a chance to evade the attacks I dread. The only way I know to get past the sense of threat is to go ahead and release the ink and then slowly wait for the cloud to clear. That might be revision. It might mean time. It might mean a lifetime of time. ~ Briallen Hopper,
1131:I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature. I have gotten people into tongue-tied snits unable to name for me one scene in which Yoda is ever helpful to anybody, or says anything that’s genuinely wise. 'Do or do not, there is no try.' Up yours, you horrible little oven mitt! 'Try' is how human beings get better. That’s how people learn, they try some of their muscles, or their Force mechanism heads in the right direction, that part gets reinforced and rewarded with positive feedback, which you never give. And parts of it get repressed by saying, 'No, that you will not do!' It is abhorrent, junior high school Zen. It’s cartoon crap. ~ David Brin,
1132:Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-colored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. ~ Albert Camus,
1133:The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making; the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpful child's prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ~ Gabor Mat,
1134:The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future. ~ William Gibson,
1135:Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate the non-intuitive nature of the quantum world, Schrödinger offered a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat was placed in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the particle degraded within an hour, it would trigger a mechanism that would break the vial and poison the cat. If not, the cat would live. But we could not know which was the case, so there was no choice, scientifically, but to regard the cat as 100 per cent alive and 100 per cent dead at the same time. ~ Bill Bryson,
1136:special ease, and so be disproportionately weighted in any judgment. Danny and Amos had noticed how oddly, and often unreliably, their own minds recalculated the odds, in light of some recent or memorable experience. For instance, after they drove past a gruesome car crash on the highway, they slowed down: Their sense of the odds of being in a crash had changed. After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people’s judgment of the odds—their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater—told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds. ~ Michael Lewis,
1137:Aw, angel," he said, shaking his head as he looked around. "I get you now."

He got me? What the heck was that supposed to mean? "What?"

"You know, my grandmother is a big gardener," he said, tucking the flat of cat food under one arm and running his hand over the back of my sofa.

"That's wonderful. Now get out of my apartment."

"She's won awards 'round here for her roses," he went on his weird speech. His attention suddenly turned back toward me, pinning me into place. "She used to tell me that the prettiest roses have the biggest thorns. It's a defense mechanism. So," he said, coming closer toward me and running his finger across the side of my jaw, "I get you, Amelia Alvarado. ~ Jessica Gadziala,
1138:The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.…In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.4 ~ Eldon Taylor,
1139:Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to understand. The problem is that our brains aren’t wired to think about it. Instead, we are built to look for patterns in sights, sounds, interactions, and events in the world. This mechanism is so ingrained that we see patterns even when they aren’t there. There is a subtle reason for this: We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can’t completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure, and categorize. ~ Ed Catmull,
1140:Recently, evolutionary psychologist have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn´t take long to notice that when people fall in love, there´s period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal signals in the body and breain are literally a love drug. And then it beginds to decline. From this perspective, we are preprogramed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about 4 years. In psychologist Helen Fisher´s view, the internally generated love drug love drug is simply an efficient mechanism to get men and women to stick together long enough to increase the survival likehood of their young. ~ David Eagleman,
1141:She knew now why mercenaries unnerved her, not only because they were dangerous in themselves but because they were outside the only system on which her society, real society, was built, whereby everybody owed duty to somebody under feudal law, just as her tenants, free and unfree; her knights; and her manor holders had to pay her in various taxes and service, just as she, their tenant in chief, had to render taxes and service to the ultimate earthly authority, the king. Mercenaries were unattached from the only mechanism that gave order to the world; they floated free of all responsibility except to those who paid them, like disgusting flies sucking at a sweetness to which they had not contributed. That was why ~ Ariana Franklin,
1142:time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
1143:India has not been able to keep track of its own citizen. The faulty system allows unhindered entry of alien nationals from the neighbouring countries. Periodically some Indian politicians wake up and raise slogans for comprehensive documentation of the citizens of the country. Vote-bank beggars in the right, left and centre of the political spectrum oppose them, because they depend a lot on illegal migrant voters from the neighbouring countries. They also shed crocodile tears in the name of ‘secularism’—an apartheid mechanism devised by the Indian democracy. Once in a while the intelligence and police agencies are whipped up to trace out the illegal settlers. They even violate the rights of the natural citizens. ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar,
1144:At the grosser level, life keeps changing and things cease to exist, including us. At the more subtle level, in every single moment everything is changing, something science is able to show us happening, even at the atomic and subatomic level. Our body is constantly changing, as is our mind. Everything is in a constant state of change—nothing remains static, and nothing remains permanent. In fact, as the Buddha reminds us, the very causes that have given rise to something, such as our life, have created the mechanism, or the seed, for that thing’s eventual end. Recognizing this truth is an important part of the contemplation on impermanence. “Then I ask why impermanence happens. The answer is because of interdependence— ~ Dalai Lama XIV,
1145:Modern technology easily becomes the servant of this or that want and need. In modern economy, a completely irrational consumption conforms to a totally rationalized production. A marvelously rational mechanism serves one or another demand, always with the same earnestness and precision, be it for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever. Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can "satisfy." In the modern metropolis, it has erected an edifice wherein everything runs strictly according to plan— everything is calculable. A devout Catholic, precisely following his own rationality, might well be horrified by this system of irresistible materiality. ~ Carl Schmitt,
1146:a man glided out of the limo. He was tall, pale as a statue. Sable hair fell in tousled curls to his shoulders. He was dressed in a pair of opalescent butterfly wings that rose from his shoulders, fastened to him by some mysterious mechanism. He wore white leather gloves, their gauntlet cuffs decorated in winding silver designs, and similar designs were set around his calves, down to his sandals. At his side hung a sword, delicately made, the handle wrought as though out of glass. The only other thing he had on was a loincloth of some soft, white cloth. He had the body for it. Muscle, but not too much of it, good set of shoulders, and the pale skin wasn’t darkened anywhere by hair. Hell’s bells, I noticed how good he looked. ~ Jim Butcher,
1147:It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.
For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. ~ Stephen King,
1148:Since, as I’ve indicated, we don’t fully understand the mechanism by which the orbital Milanković forcing causes large climate swings, there is a lot of uncertainty here. The last warm interglacial before the one we’re in now, the Eemian, about one hundred twenty-five thousand years ago, lasted for about ten thousand years. This length is typical. Most of these warm periods persist for roughly the length that ours has already lasted. Yet the one we’re in now seems to be weird, and not just because of us. Some models predict that, without human interference, the ice would return within fifteen thousand or twenty thousand years. Others suggest that, due to Earth’s orbit currently being in a phase of low eccentricity—meaning ~ David Grinspoon,
1149:It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning. For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark. Mike ~ Stephen King,
1150:A mechanism in the box opens the small window on the right for an instant, allowing a photon to escape at some precise time. By weighing the box, it is possible to deduce the energy of the released photon. Einstein hoped that thus would create difficulties for quantum mechanics, which predicts that time and energy cannot both be precisely determined. Bohr replied, mistakenly, that the way out of the difficulty required Einstein's general relativity, and Einstein, mistakenly, accepted Bohr's reply. The correct response to Einstein, that Bohr was unable to find but is clear today, is that the position of the escaping photon and the weight of the box remain tied to each other ("correlated") even if the photon is already far away. ~ Carlo Rovelli,
1151:In the 1980s, Lewis Landsberg, a Harvard endocrinologist who would later become dean of the Northwestern University School of Medicine, discovered yet another mechanism by which insulin works to increase blood pressure and perhaps induce hypertension—in this case, by stimulating the central nervous system. Landsberg’s revelation has since been integrated into established thinking as an explanation for why the obese are hypertensive: they’re insulin-resistant, with chronically elevated levels of insulin, which in turn stimulates the nervous system, increasing heart rate, constricting blood vessels, and chronically elevating blood pressure. Since the obese seem to have increased sympathetic nervous activity, it makes perfect sense. ~ Gary Taubes,
1152:But thought is a very protective mechanism and is interested in its own survival. At the same time thought is opposed fundamentally to the functioning of this living organism. We are made to believe that there is such a thing as mind. But there is no such thing as your mind or my mind. Society or culture, or whatever you want to call it, has created us solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its own continuity and status quo. At the same time, it has also created the idea that there is such a thing as individual. But actually, there is a conflict between the two – the idea of the individual and the impossibility of functioning as an individual separate and distinct from the totality of man’s thoughts and experiences. ~ U G Krishnamurti,
1153:As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

The Thinker can think about virtually anything.
(...) The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it. It will find evidence that the poorest Jew in the most run-down ghetto has hidden money somewhere. Similarly, Feminists are able to believe that all men, including the starving wretches who live and sleep on the streets, are exploiting all women, including the Queen of England. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,
1154:By running on two feet and bereft of the body hair typical of other primates, our species gained a massive advantage over larger mammals. Our ability to maintain steady pursuit gave us the capacity to hunt large prehistoric game. But persistence hunting was not only made possible because of our bodies; changes in our brains also played a significant role. During the chase, the runner is driven by the pursuit itself; and this same mental hardwiring also provides clues into the source of our insatiable desires today. The dogged determination that keeps San hunters chasing kudu is the same mechanism that keeps us wanting and buying. Although it is a long way from bushmen to businessmen, the mental processes of the hunt remain largely the same. ~ Nir Eyal,
1155:There was little precedent in other diseases for such an astonishing diversity of causes. Diabetes, a complex illness with complex manifestations, is still fundamentally a disease of abnormal insulin signaling. Coronary heart disease occurs when a clot, arising from a ruptured and inflamed atherosclerotic plaque, occludes a blood vessel of the heart. But the search for a unifying mechanistic description of cancer seemed to be sorely missing. What, beyond abnormal, dysregulated cell division, was the common pathophysiological mechanism underlying cancer? To answer this question, cancer biologists would need to return to the birth of cancer, to the very first steps of a cell’s journey toward malignant transformation—to carcinogenesis. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
1156:But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works. ~ John Darnielle,
1157:Unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
1158:The 9/11 attacks activated several of these group-related adaptations in my mind. The attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and, yes, supporting the leader.31 And my response was tepid compared to the hundreds of Americans who got in their cars that afternoon and drove great distances to New York in the vain hope that they could help to dig survivors out of the wreckage, or the thousands of young people who volunteered for military service in the following weeks. Were these people acting on selfish motives, or groupish motives? The rally-round-the-flag reflex is just one example of a groupish mechanism. ~ Jonathan Haidt,
1159:The rationalizing mind prefers to keep the true causes of emotion out of awareness and utilizes the mechanism of projection to do this. It blames events or other people for “causing” a feeling and views itself as the helpless innocent victim of external causes. “They made me angry.” “He got me upset.” “It scared me.” “World events are the cause of my anxiety.” Actually, it’s the exact opposite. The suppressed and repressed feelings seek an outlet and utilize the events as triggers and excuses to vent themselves. We are like pressure-cookers ready to release steam when the opportunity arises. Our triggers are set and ready to go off. In psychiatry, this mechanism is called displacement. It is because we are angry that events “make” us angry. ~ David R Hawkins,
1160:They returned to the gallery and circled its rim, then went down a short hall. Scrap's tail twitched angrily when they reached Tristan's door: it was shut. Daine grabbed the knob. It stung her hand, making her yelp. "Kit? This ones magicked. Can you do anything?"

Kitten stood on her hind feet and peered into the lock, then whistled two cheerful notes. Nothing happened. She scowled and whistled again, less cheerfully, more as a demand. Nothing happened.

Daine was trying to decide what to do now when the dragon moved back and croaked. The lock popped from the wood to land at Daine's feet, smoking, and the door swung open. Kitten muttered darkly and kicked the lock mechanism aside as she went in. Daine followed, trying not to laugh. ~ Tamora Pierce,
1161:...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
1162:In our plan, the state has only to pass labor laws (nothing else?) by means of which industrial progress can and must proceed in complete liberty. The state merely places society on an incline (that is all?). Then society will slide down this incline by the mere force of things, and by the natural workings of the established mechanism." But what is this incline that is indicated by Mr. Louis Blanc? Does it not lead to an abyss? (No, it leads to happiness.) If this is true, then why does not society go there of its own choice? (Because society does not know what it wants; it must be propelled.) What is to propel it? (Power.) And who is to supply the impulse for this power? (Why, the inventor of the machine -- in this instance, Mr. Louis Blanc.) ~ Fr d ric Bastiat,
1163:Recognition for us is about presence, about profound listening, and about recognizing and affirming the light in each other as a mechanism for nurturing and strengthening internal relationships to our Nishnaabeg worlds. It is a core part of our political systems because they are rooted in our bodies and our bodies are not just informed by but created and maintained by relationships of deep reciprocity. Our bodies exist only in relation to Indigenous complex, nonlinear constructions of time, space, and place that are continually rebirthed through the practice and often coded recognition of obligations and responsibilities within a nest of diversity, freedom, consent, noninterference, and a generated, proportional, emergent reciprocity. ~ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson,
1164:For a while, indeed, Stalin through sheer terrorism almost succeeded in turning himself into a Divine King in the image of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. he could be addressed, Russians have pointed out, only in the form that was used exclusively in the past in addressing a Czar. Stalin's solemn pronouncement on every subject from the mechanism of genetic inheritance to the origins of language were fatuously hailed as the voice of omniscience. So they became the ultimate guides to scholars and scientists who had spent their lifetime on research without ever reaching such ultimate and irrefragable truths. The same tendency later became magnified even to the point of gross caricature-if that were possible-in the pronouncements of Mao Tse-tung. ~ Lewis Mumford,
1165:You Americans are a very singular people," he later recalled to one of his friends. "I went with my automaton all over my own country—the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France they exclaimed, Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe! The English set themselves to prove—one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to see me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another thing like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one already made for you. ~ Tom Standage,
1166:patch, and cobble a complicated machine, the principles of which are above thy comprehension, and its simplest operations too subtle for thy understanding, when thou canst not correct a trifling error in a common piece of mechanism, the whole mystery of which is open to thy inspection?—Hence with thee to the leather and stone, which are emblems of thy head; cobble thy shoes, and confine thyself to the vocation for which Heaven has fitted thee; but," elevating his voice until it made the welkin ring, "if ever I catch thee, or any of thy tribe, meddling again with affairs of government, by St. Nicholas, but I'll have every mother's bastard of ye flayed alive, and your hides stretched for drumheads, that ye may thenceforth make a noise to some purpose! ~ Washington Irving,
1167:Why is this? What is the mechanism that drives this overproduction, this carry-on-regardless approach to resource use? The degrowthists will tell you that it is capitalism’s requirement for growth. But this is far too crude a description of what occurs. What is fundamental is not growth per se, but capital’s need for self-valorisation, or put another way, for self-expansion. A firm cannot receive back in value precisely what it has put in, otherwise it would go bankrupt. It must receive more value than it put in. Like a bicycle wheel, capital must keep on keepin’ on or it will fall over. Superficially, this appears to be the same thing as growth, but it is not. And the distinction is not a philosophical trick, but a difference of profound significance. ~ Leigh Phillips,
1168:1. Resolve today to “switch on” your success mechanism and unlock your goal-achieving mechanism by deciding exactly what you really want in life. 2. Make a list of ten goals that you want to achieve in the foreseeable future. Write them down in the present tense, as if you have already achieved them. 3. Select the one goal that could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it, and write it down at the top of another piece of paper. 4. Make a list of everything you could do to achieve this goal, organize it by sequence and priority, and then take action on it immediately. 5. Practice mindstorming by writing out twenty ideas that could help you achieve your most important goal, and then take action on at least one of those ideas. ~ Brian Tracy,
1169:I'm not sure when it happened, but sometime in my late teens or early twenties, it was as if Jesus packed his bags and moved from my heart into my head. He became an idea, a sort of theological mechanism by which salvation was attained. I described him in terms of atonement, logos, the object of my faith, and absolute truth. He was something I agreed to, not someone I followed. . . . This radial Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands, as i fed the hungry, reached out to my enemies, healed the sick, and comforted the lonely. Being a Christian, it seemed, isn't about agreeing to a certain way. It is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1170:I used to be endlessly troubled by meat-eating people who were uneasy with hunters and hunting. ... How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one's food into one's own hands? ... Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegations of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd. ~ Steven Rinella,
1171:In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
1172:When a body succeeds in emitting or in reflecting luminous vibrations in a distinct and recognizable order--I thought--what does it do with these vibrations? Put them in its pocket? No, it releases them on the first passer-by. And how will the latter behave in the face of vibrations he can't utilize and which, taken in this way, might even be annoying? Hide his head in a hole? No, he'll thrust it out in that direction until the point most exposed to the optic vibrations becomes sensitized and develops the mechanism for exploiting them in the form of images. In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image. ~ Italo Calvino,
1173:Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem. ~ Sadhguru,
1174:The roar resolved into a great, hushing thud of wings, and the shadow resolved into an enormous bird in flight. It flapped close enough that Beatriz’s hair moved against her cheek: an owl. Beatriz knew many things about owls. Owls have enormous and powerful eyes, but these remarkable eyeballs are fixed in place by bony protuberances called sclerotic rings. This is why owls must move their heads in all directions in lieu of flicking their eyes from side to side. Several owl species have asymmetrical ears, which allows them to accurately pinpoint the origin of a sound. Many people do not realize that, in addition to possessing powerful vision and hearing, owls are very attracted to miracles, though the mechanism that draws the birds to them is poorly understood. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
1175:Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization. ~ David J Anderson,
1176:This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle,
1177:Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem. How ~ Sadhguru,
1178:At least the awkwardness between her and Driggs had dissipated. This was no more evident than the afternoon Lex caught Driggs lying face-down on the ground of the Lair, allowing scores of black widow spiders to crawl over his body. “Again?” Lex said, exasperated. “Really?”

“You gotta try it,” he said contentedly into the floor.

“No way. They don’t like me the way they like you.”

“Probably because you don’t cry yourself to sleep in their presence,” he said, quoting her taunt from their big fight. The whole thing had turned into something of a running joke between them. Often, when bored or uncomfortable, they repeated the insults they had hurled at each other that night, loudly guffawing at each reiteration. This is what is known as a defense mechanism ~ Gina Damico,
1179:We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence. This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive. ~ Sue Johnson,
1180:We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence.
This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive. ~ Sue Johnson,
1181:Freeman's theory helps to explain how love and plasticity affect each other. Plasticity allows us to develop brains so unique in response to our individual life experiences - that it is often hard to see the world as others do, to want what they want, or to cooperate. But the successful reproduction of our species requires cooperation. What nature provides, in a neuromodulator like oxytocin, is the ability for two brains in love to go through a period of heightened plasticity, allowing them to mold to each other and shape each other's intentions and perceptions. The brain for Freeman is fundamentally an organ of socialization, and so there must be a mechanism that, from time to time, undoes our tendency to become overly individualized, overly self-involved, and too self-centered. ~ Norman Doidge,
1182:1. Decrease current human population below five hundred million and keep it in perpetual balance with nature. 2. Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. 3. Unite humanity with a “living” new language. 4. Redistribute global wealth under the more acceptable term “global public goods.” 5. Rebalance personal rights with “social duties.” 6. Replace passion, faith, and tradition with reason. 7. Make clever use of new technologies to go around national governments and establish direct ties with citizens. 8. Rebrand global governance as equitable, efficient, and the logical next step in human evolution. 9. Discredit, delegitimize, and dismantle the idea of the nation state/national sovereignty. 10. Prepare a mechanism to neutralize any challenges to United Nations’ authority. ~ Brad Thor,
1183:She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison. ~ Michael Cunningham,
1184:One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively. We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking. ~ David Bentley Hart,
1185:The key question for scientists to unravel now is why these transposons get the urge to jump. McClintock believed that the jumps are a genomic response to internal or environmental stress that cells can’t handle under their existing setup. Essentially, a challenge to survival triggers the organism to throw the mutation dice, hoping it will land on a change that will help. That’s what she thought was going on with the corn plants she was studying—too much heat or too little water triggered the corn to gamble its survival on finding a mutation that could help it survive. When that happens, the proofreading mechanism is suppressed and mutations are allowed to blossom. Then natural selection kicks in to select the adaptive mutations over the maladaptive mutations in future generations and presto, evolution! ~ Sharon Moalem,
1186:but on Hegel, his "idealist" predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man—"man as man"— that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
1187:He’s gone,” Devon said in a few moments. After taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, he reached around the edge of the door to tamper with the latch mechanism, bending the thumb-lift bar so it wouldn’t close. “Although no one has asked my opinion about the pig,” he said, “I’m against any house pet that will eventually outweigh me.”
Having braced herself for attack, Kathleen blinked uncertainly. He was behaving so unlike a lust-crazed beast that it gave her pause.
In response to her frozen silence, Devon lifted a hand to her jaw and nudged her to look at him. Unable to avoid his calm, appraising glance, she realized there was no immediate danger of him forcing himself on her.
“You’d best look away,” he advised, “unless you want a big eyeful of Ravenel. I’m going to fetch the towels. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
1188:It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking. ~ Terri Cheney,
1189:It is taken for granted too easily that passion befogs the mind : in fact, it baffles only that vulgar aspect of the mind, diligence. The amusements of lovers and the bemusements of savants remain equally diverting : they represent an identical process of adaptation to a very great objective. I discovered in love, through the very mechanism of love, what the absence of love had prevented me from perceiving. An emanation from this woman, beyond her image, re-formed itself into that same image which then blossomed into a particular world, that taste, that divine taste that I know so well in every vertigo, forewarning me yet again that I was entering this concrete universe which is closed to passers-by. For me, the metaphysical spirit was reborn from love. Love was its source, and I hope never to leave this enchanted forest. ~ Louis Aragon,
1190:I don't miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism of something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter. ~ Charles Yu,
1191:Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth- and to be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals. (...) There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution.(...) Among humans, the best deceivers are those who deceive themselves: 'we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better'. A lover who promises eternal fidelity s more likely to be believed if he believes his promise himself; he is no more likely to keep his promise.(...) In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage. ~ John Gray,
1192:The popular antidepressant Prozac, which acts by blocking the reuptake of serotonin and probably increasing its availability, has received wide attention; the notion that low serotonin levels might be correlated with a tendency towards violence has surfaced in the popular press. The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that "causes" a certain manifestation. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. A satisfactory explanation can arise only from a more comprehensive view of the entire process, in which the relevant variables of a specific problem, such as depression or social adaptability, are analyzed in detail. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,
1193:There is a Zen story (very funny — ha-ha) about a monk who, having failed to achieve “enlightenment” (brain-change) through the normal Zen methods, was told by his teacher to think of nothing but an ox. Day after day after day, the monk thought of the ox, visualized the ox, meditated on the ox. Finally, one day, the teacher came to the monk’s cell and said, “Come out here — I want to talk to you.” “I can’t get out,” the monk said. “My horns won’t fit through the door.” I can’t get out . . . At these words, the monk was “enlightened.” Never mind what “enlightenment” means, right now. The monk went through some species of brain change, obviously. He had developed the delusion that he was an ox, and awakening from that hypnoidal state he saw through the mechanism of all other delusions and how they robotize us. EXERCIZES ~ Robert Anton Wilson,
1194:Markets can govern behavior through the use of mechanism design and various incentives—not money alone, but the trifecta of human motivations that may be summarized as fun, fame, and fortune. In fact, on many platforms, money is far less important than the more intangible, subjective form of value known as social currency. The idea behind social currency is to give something in order to get something. If you give fun in a photo, you can get people to share it. Social currency, measured as the economic value of a relationship, includes favorites and shares.39 It also includes the reputation a person builds up for good interactions on eBay, good news posts on Reddit, or good answers on Stack Overflow. It includes the number of followers a user attracts on Twitter and the number of skill endorsements she garners on LinkedIn. ~ Geoffrey G Parker,
1195:The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. The scaffold is an image. It is not merely a framework, a machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though it were a being having its own dark purpose, as though the framework saw, the machine listened, and the mechanism understood; as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals. ~ Victor Hugo,
1196:We know that the world operates on a whim, a system of coincidences. There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after lost, building a structured life ... in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst ... This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comfort of battle - the human heart is content when distracted by war. The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us ... This is the way to survive in this world, to walk up in the morning ... and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerk that pump blood through our emaciated veins. ~ Jaroslav Kalfar,
1197:Further evidence for the pathogenic role of dissociation has come from a largescale clinical and community study of traumatized people conducted by a task force of the American Psychiatric Association. In this study, people who reported having dissociative symptoms were also quite likely to develop persistent somatic symptoms for which no physical cause could be found. They also frequently engaged in self-destructive attacks on their own bodies. The results of these investigations validate the century-old insight that traumatized people relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they can not describe in words. Dissociation appears to be the mechanism by which intense sensory and emotional experiences are disconnected from the social domain of language and memory, the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced. ~ Judith Lewis Herman,
1198:Dear Supreme Altruist-

I hope you are in a receptive mood.

Thanks very much for placing wihin me the bomb that never stops exploding. Though the benefits have been intangible and in fact I feel that this terrifying mechanism has generally made my life intolerable, I shall never ask you to reverse the situation. I feel I have done everything that may be reasonably expected of me in the way of self-abnegation. However, I now find to my dismay that my lifelong fear of death is beginning to desert me. I believe that this may mean that the bomb's continual explosions may be causing the growth of new slabs of man-bark instead of blasting the loathesome stuff away as it has been doing.

I therefore humbly request that the explosive power of the bomb be increased. Please do not make me weaker; make the bomb stronger.

Amen. ~ Jim Woodring,
1199:There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. ~ Aleksandar Hemon,
1200:Smith's labour theory of value led to Marxism and all the horrors to which that creed has given rise; and his exclusive emphasis on long-run equilibrium has led to formalistic neoclassicism, which dominates today's economic theory, and to its exclusion frolll consideration of entrepreneurship and uncertainty. Smith's stress on the economy-in-perpetual-equilibrium also led him to discard his old friend David Hume's important insight (even if inferior to Cantillon's) into the international specie-flow-price mechanism, and to the important business cycle analysis that lies clearly implicit in that doctrine. For if the world economy is always in equilibrium, then there is no need to consider or worry about increases in money supply causing price rises and outflows of gold or silver abroad, or to consider the subsequent contraction of money and prices. ~ Anonymous,
1201:The Reticular Activating System The May 1957 issue of Scientific American magazine contains an article describing the discovery of the reticular formation at the base of the brain. The reticular formation is basically the gateway to your conscious awareness; it’s the switch that turns on your perception of ideas and data, the thing that keeps you asleep even when music’s playing but wakes you if a special little baby cries in another room. Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than “you” ever could by conscious thought. “You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby. —Maxwell Maltz ~ David Allen,
1202:no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative. The Ptolemaic system (with the Earth in the center, orbited by the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars) represented the state of the art in astronomy for over a thousand years, and its predictive accuracy was improved over the centuries by progressively complicating the model: adding epicycles upon epicycles to the postulated celestial motions. Then the entire system was overthrown by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, which was simpler and—though only after further elaboration by Kepler—more predictively accurate.63 Artificial intelligence methods are now used in more areas than it would make sense to review here, but mentioning a sampling of them will give an idea of the breadth of applications. Aside from the game AIs ~ Nick Bostrom,
1203:The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, “How unlikely! Yet here we are,” and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins. ~ Jaroslav Kalfar,
1204:How can you love someone when you know they will never truly love you back because they can’t ever love you back? Your brain should stop you from loving them. There should be a defense mechanism embedded deep within you to stop your soul from allowing you to give your heart to someone who doesn’t deserve it, who doesn’t even want it, someone who couldn’t have it even if they did want it. Unfortunately, there’s no fail-safe for love, no brake to stop you from throwing your life―and the lives of those around you―completely out of balance. There are no warning lights or flashing danger signs. There’s nothing to stop the planted seeds from growing and taking root. And once they grow, there’s nothing you can do about it. Your desire to water those wretched seeds only increases. Once you realize those seeds weren’t supposed to grow, it’s already too late. ~ Portia Moore,
1205:The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath.

The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience. ~ George Lakoff,
1206:At any rate - science and the schools will be just as carefully separated as religion and the schools are separated today. Scientists will of course participate in governmental decisions, for everyone participates in such decisions. But they will not be given overriding authority. It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues such as the teaching methods used, or the truth of basic beliefs such as the theory of evolution, or the quantum theory, and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. There is no need to fear that such a way of arranging society will lead to undesirable results. Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way. But the rationality of our beliefs will certainly be considerably increased. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend,
1207:What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there—a “highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,” as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed. Like ~ Sebastian Junger,
1208:Modern science is only partially wrong on the plane of physical facts; on the other hand it is totally wrong on higher planes and in its principles. It is wrong in its negations and in the false principles derived from them, then in the erroneous hypotheses deduced from these principles, and finally in the monstrous effects this science produces as a result of its initial Prometheanism. But it is right about many physical data and even about some psychological facts, and indeed it is impossible for this not to be so, given the law of compensations; in other words it is impossible for modern men not to be right on certain points where ancient men were wrong; this is even part of the mechanism of degeneration. What is decisive in favor of the ancients or traditional men in general, however, is that they are right about all the spiritually essential points. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1209:In a broad sense, this book, from its first edition in 2000, has been about trying to understand the change in thinking of the people whose actions ultimately drive the markets. It is about the psychology of speculation, about the feedback mechanism that intensifies this psychology, about herd behavior that can spread through millions or even billions of people, and about the implications of such behavior for the economy and for our lives. Although the book originally focused directly on current economic events, it was, and is, about how errors of human judgment can infect even the smartest people, thanks to overconfidence, lack of attention to details, and excessive trust in the judgments of others, stemming from a failure to understand that others are not making independent judgments but are themselves following still others—the blind leading the blind. ~ Robert J Shiller,
1210:MSB: What difference, if any, do you think there is between a power such as katéchon, which postpones the end of time, and the scapegoat mechanism by which Satan casts out Satan? RG: Whereas the Satan who casts out Satan well and truly represents order, katéchon is situated in a Christian world, in a world freed from Satan's rule, a world that wants no part of it. At the same time, katéchon still retains a little of the old order, without which nothing would stand in the way of absolute violence. Katéchon holds back violence, which is to say what is left once Satan has been cheated, duped. It must be admitted that, in order to prevent violence, we cannot do without a certain amount of violence. We are therefore obliged to think in terms of least possible violence. But, as a practical matter, it's difficult to say how little the least violence would have to be. MSB ~ Ren Girard,
1211:We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1212:Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound. For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens. ~ Nick Bostrom,
1213:If we think about emotion this way-as outside-in, not inside-out-it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings,which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people "senders." Senders have special personalities. They are also physiologically different. Scientists who have studied faces, for example, report that there are huge differences among people in the location of facial muscles, in their form, and also-surprisingly-even in their prevalence. "It is a situation not unlike in medicine," says Cacioppo. "There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible. It's not that emotional contagion is a disease. But the mechanism is the same. ~ Malcolm Gladwell,
1214:Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness... focusing the consciousness... aortal dilation... avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness... to be conscious by choice... blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions... one does not obtain food-safety freedom by instinct alone... animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct... the animal destroys and does not produce... animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual... the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe... focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid... bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs... all things/cells/beings are impermanent... strive for flow-permanence within... ~ Frank Herbert,
1215:Barbieri chides that “natural selection is the long-term result of molecular copying and would be the sole mechanism of evolution if copying were the sole basic mechanism of life.”15 But it isn’t. While genes can be their own template and copy themselves, proteins cannot. Proteins cannot be made by copying other proteins. The tricky thing is that only molecules that can copy can be inherited, so the information about how to make the proteins had to come from the genes. Barbieri notes that the outstanding feature of the very early protein makers “was the ability to ensure a specific correspondence between genes and proteins, because without it there would be no biological specificity, and without specificity there would be no heredity and no reproduction. Life, as we know it, simply would not exist without a specific correspondence between genes and proteins.”16 ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
1216:Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,
and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance
of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes
suddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shape
of money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can no
longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes
valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with
the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,
declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
money. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is a
commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul
after money, the only wealth. ~ Karl Marx,
1217:In the eight months he had been away, he had almost forgotten the gaze he found there, the gaze which came in moments like this, for it was not one of the looks that New Englanders use or have ever used to express a turn of mind or heart; it was a gaze more cold, more mean, more cruel even than the gaze a Vermont farmer gives a stranger asking directions; more cold, more mean, more cruel because it was completely blank, that very blankness a sign of the renunciation of alternatives, of tenderness or brutality, of pleasure or pain, of understanding or ignorance, of belief or disbelief, of compassion or intolerance, of reason or unswerving fanaticism; it was a gaze which signals the flicking off of the switch which controls the mechanism making man a human being; it said: Now we must fight. There is no time or need for talking; violence is already with us, part of us. ~ William Melvin Kelley,
1218:Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested...Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification. ~ Michel Foucault,
1219:How and why is this happening? Let’s break it down. In the world of platforms, the Internet no longer acts merely as a distribution channel (a pipeline). It also acts as a creation infrastructure and a coordination mechanism. Platforms are leveraging this new capability to create entirely new business models. In addition, the physical and the digital are rapidly converging, enabling the Internet to connect and coordinate objects in the real world—for example, through smartphone apps that allow you to control your home appliances at long distance. Simultaneously, organizational boundaries are being redefined as platform companies leverage external ecosystems to create value in new ways.7 In this new stage of disruption, platforms enjoy two significant economic advantages over pipelines. One of these advantages is superior marginal economics of production and distribution. ~ Geoffrey G Parker,
1220:The possibility of an ideal society became impossible from the moment of creation, the moment of the "humanization of man." From that moment on, man has been faced with eternal conflict, disquiet, dissatisfaction, drama. "Get you down, all (you people) with enmity between yourselves" (Quran, 2:36). The ideal society is a monotonous and infinite succession of depersonalized generations which bring forth, produce, consume, and die, and so on to the "wrong" eternity. The fact of creation and of God's interference in the human existence made this "mechanism" impossible and illusory; hence, the fanatic opposition of all utopias to God and religion. So, while prophets of utopia proclaimed society and its interests to be the supreme value, God wanted that role to be man's. He gave freedom in order to make this world a temptation and to affirm man and his soul as the highest value. ~ Alija Izetbegovi,
1221:It is more than probable that there are factors of evolution still unknown. We can but seek for them. Nothing is more certain than that life and the evolution of life are natural phenomena. We must approach them, and as far as I can see must attempt to analyze them, by the same methods that are employed in the study of other natural phenomena. The student of nature can do no more than strive towards the truth. When he does not find the whole truth there is but one gospel for his salvation--still to strive towards the truth. He knows that each forward step on the highway of discovery will bring to view a new horizon of regions still unknown. It will be an ill day for science when it can find no more fields to conquer. And so, if you ask whether I look to a day when we shall know the whole truth in regard to organic mechanism and organic evolution, I answer: No! But let us go forward. ~ Anonymous,
1222:Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. ~ Edward L Bernays,
1223:These examples do not show that theoretical knowledge is worthless. Quite the reverse. A conceptual framework is vital even for the most practical men going about their business. In many circumstances, new theories have led to direct technological breakthroughs (such as the atom bomb emerging from the Theory of Relativity). The real issue here is speed. Theoretical change is itself driven by a feedback mechanism, as we noted in chapter 3: science learns from failure. But when a theory fails, like say when the Unilever mathematicians failed in their attempt to create an efficient nozzle design, it takes time to come up with a new, all-encompassing theory. To gain practical knowledge, however, you just need to try a different-sized aperture. Tinkering, tweaking, learning from practical mistakes: all have speed on their side. Theoretical leaps, while prodigious, are far less frequent. ~ Matthew Syed,
1224:Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules. ~ Michel Foucault,
1225:And then, Joyce's experiments with language in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. And Korzybski's Science and Sanity, which encouraged me in my Joycean tendency to suspect that language is full of traps and it's the job of the writer to find his way around the traps in language and not just fall into them. I think there are two types of writers--those who are aware of the traps in language and try to avoid them--not always successfully. We're not all geniuses, we make mistakes. And the second type is those who aren't aware of the traps and fall into them on one page after another. Tucker was aware of that too--the traps in language. So Nietzsche, Tucker, Joyce, and Korzybski have all influenced me to look at language in a peculiar way. I see language as a means of human liberation, potentially--and the main mechanism of human slavery most of the time. It depends on how you use language. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,
1226:[I]n so far as postmodern politics involves a '[t]heoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism,' it is here, in this silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exemplary case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is suspended, 'other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized marking.' In other words, this displacement accounts for the somewhat 'excessive' way the discourse of postmodern identity politics insists on the horrors of sexism, racism, and so on - this 'excess' comes from the fact that these other '-isms' have to bear the surplus-investment from the class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged. ~ Slavoj i ek,
1227:Self-organizing Systems Biologists have long given up the idea that living organisms are just like machines. Medical practitioners today recognize the ineffectiveness of treating the human body as a separate mechanism. They speak about holistic healing, treating the whole person, and including the person’s social and physical environment. Today living organisms are described as self-regulating systems. They organize themselves, nourish themselves, heal themselves, propagate themselves, protect themselves, and interact creatively with other systems. We used to call this instinct—in animals if not in plants. Today we talk about genes that have coded messages or instructions that connect with one another in a DNA spiral in the nucleus of every living cell. If we were to write out the instructions contained in any one tiny DNA spiral we would fill about a thousand books of six hundred pages each. ~ Albert Nolan,
1228:I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes – to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. ‘It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. ~ H G Wells,
1229:If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing. This method of translating speech into graphic record not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written orders were not carried out. Accountability and the written word both went along historically with the control of large numbers; and it is no accident that the earliest uses of writing were not to convey ideas, religious or otherwise, but to keep temple records of grain, cattle, pottery, fabricated goods, stored and disbursed. This happened early, for a pre-dynastic Narmer mace in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford records the taking of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The arithmetical reckoning was an even greater feat than the capture. ~ Lewis Mumford,
1230:There are, in addition, some other aspects of human culture that will prove to be important. One of these is the social performance of music. To be sure, many other species can be said to produce music, including songbirds and whales, to name but the best known. But only humans seem to engage in music as a social activity. For birds, music seems to be mainly a mate advertising display. Humans use music as a mechanism for community bonding in a way that seems to be quite unique. In modern societies, we may often sit listening politely to music in concert halls, but in traditional societies music-making, song and dance are almost indistinguishable and play a crucially important role. This is something we will also need to account for. What underpins all this cultural activity is, of course, our big brains, and this might ultimately be said to be what distinguishes us from the other great apes. ~ Robin I M Dunbar,
1231:This finding means that while the neurons themselves work to convey peripheral signals to the central nervous system, they do not do so alone. On the contrary, they are assisted; they are modulated directly by molecules circulating in the blood. The signals that, for example, help generate the pain from a wound are conveyed to precisely such dorsal root ganglia.20 Given the arrangement I just described, the signals are thus not “purely” neural. The body has its say on the process, directly, via influential chemical molecules circulating in the blood. The same influence can be exerted higher up in the system, at the level of the brain stem and the cerebral cortices. The denuding of the blood-brain barrier is one mechanism for blending body and brain. In fact, permeability may turn out to be a fairly general feature of peripheral ganglia.21 These facts need to be factored in the scholarship of feelings. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,
1232:Ariadna exuded the perfume of broken souls who have become lost along the way, though they think they're moving forward. He had always been fascinated by the idea that if one knew how to read the language of looks and of time, one could guess, just by gazing at a face, what that face had looked like as a child, and relish the moment when the world had stuck its poison dart in it, and its spirit had begun to grow old. People were like puppets or clockwork toys. They all had a hidden mechanism that allowed one to pull their strings and make them run in whatever direction one wished them to run. The satisfaction he felt, or perhaps it was only a sustenance, came from that surrender, that confused desire to which sooner or later they succumbed to give themselves over to his wishes, to receive his blessing and offer him their soul and exchange for a smile of approval and a look that would make them believe. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n,
1233:Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1234:Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.” The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes, which may not be far enough. No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record, and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean acidification played a role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous). There’s strong evidence for ocean acidification during an extinction event known as the Toarcian Turnover, which occurred 183 million years ago, in the early Jurassic, and similar evidence at the end of the Paleocene, 55 million years ago, when several forms of marine life suffered a major crisis. “Oh, ocean acidification,” Zalasiewicz had told me at Dob’s Linn. “That’s the big nasty one that’s coming down. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,
1235:So far, we’ve described imprinting in mainly phenomenological terms. Imprinted regions are stretches of the genome where we can detect parent-of-origin effects in offspring. But how do these regions carry this effect? In imprinted regions, certain genes are switched on or switched off, depending on how they were inherited. In the chromosome 11 example above, genes associated with placental growth are switched on and are very active in the copy of the chromosome inherited from the father. This carries risks of nutrient depletion for the mother who is carrying the foetus, and a compensatory mechanism has evolved. The copies of these same genes on the maternal chromosome tend to be switched off, and this limits the placental growth. Alternatively, there may be other genes that counterbalance the effects of the paternal genes, and these counter-balancing genes may be expressed mainly from the maternal chromosome. ~ Nessa Carey,
1236:Our essential difficulty is that we are seeking in a mechanism, which is necessary, qualities it simply does not possess. The market does not lead, balance or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business.
It cannot give leadership even on straight economic issues. The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today (1995). No one thought about the long- or even medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn't their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests.
(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth) ~ John Ralston Saul,
1237:It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1238:And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play. ~ mile Zola,
1239:Motherhood often feels like a game of guilt management. Sometimes the guilt is overwhelming and debilitating. Sometimes just a low simmer, but it always feels right there. There is never any shortage of fuel to feed the beast, so the whole mechanism is constantly nourished to administer shame and a general feeling of incompetency. Add our carefully curated social media world, which not only affects our sense of success and failure, but also furnishes our children with an unprecedented brand of expectations, and BOOM – we’re the generation that does more for our kids than ever in history, yet feels the guiltiest. Virtually every one of my friends provides more than they had growing up, and still the mantra we buy into is ‘not enough, not enough, not enough.’ Meanwhile, if we developed the chops to tune out the ordinary complaints of children, we’d see mostly happy kids, loved and nurtured, cared for and treasured. ~ Jen Hatmaker,
1240:And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. ~ Albert Camus,
1241:To be sure, there exists in principle a quite simple economic mechanism that should restore equilibrium to the process: the mechanism of supply and demand. If the supply of any good is insufficient, and its price is too high, then demand for that good should decrease, which should lead to a decline in its price. In other words, if real estate and oil prices rise, then people should move to the country or take to traveling about by bicycle (or both). Never mind that such adjustments might be unpleasant or complicated; they might also take decades, during which landlords and oil well owners might well accumulate claims on the rest of the population so extensive that they could easily come to own everything that can be owned, including rural real estate and bicycles, once and for all.3 As always, the worst is never certain to arrive. It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar. ~ Anonymous,
1242:The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. ~ Edward L Bernays,
1243:TO BE A TOURIST is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walked around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysentric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event. ~ Don DeLillo,
1244:...the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1245:To be sure, there exists in principle a quite simple economic mechanism that should restore equilibrium to the process: the mechanism of supply and demand. If the supply of any good is insufficient, and its price is too high, then demand for that good should decrease, which should lead to a decline in its price. In other words, if real estate and oil prices rise, then people should move to the country or take to traveling about by bicycle (or both). Never mind that such adjustments might be unpleasant or complicated; they might also take decades, during which landlords and oil well owners might well accumulate claims on the rest of the population so extensive that they could easily come to own everything that can be owned, including rural real estate and bicycles, once and for all.3 As always, the worst is never certain to arrive. It is much too soon to warn readers that by 2050 they may be paying rent to the emir of Qatar. ~ Thomas Piketty,
1246:Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates” (p. 695). How do we manage to do it? Or how could we? “Well, one way is that performance of these standards has become part of what we understand as a decent, civilized human life” (p. 696). The mechanism then becomes shame: to not meet these expectations is not only to be abnormal but almost inhuman. One can see this at work in a heightened version of holier-than-Thou: You don’t recycle (gasp)? You use plastic shopping bags (horror)? You don’t drive a Prius (eek!)? “You won’t wear the ribbon?!”44 This has to also be seen in light of Taylor’s earlier analysis of the sociality of mutual display and the self-consciousness it generates (pp. 481-82). So what we get is justice chic. ~ James K A Smith,
1247:In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has something about it which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire it, like de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron and cords. It ~ Victor Hugo,
1248:Nurturing energy, forget words and guard it Conquer your mind do non-doing In activity and stillness Know the Source Progenitor There is no thing Whom else do you seek? In constancy It is essential to respond to people In responding to people It is essential not to be confused If you do not become confused Your nature will naturally stabilize When your nature is naturally stabilized Energy naturally returns When energy naturally returns The elixir crystallizes spontaneously Fire and water Pairing in the pot Yin and Yang arise Alternating over and over again Everywhere producing The sound of thunder White clouds assemble on the summit Sweet dew bathes the polar mountain Having drunk the wine of longevity You wander freely Who can know you? Sit and listen to the stringless tune Clearly understanding the mechanism of creation These twenty verses Are a ladder straight to Heaven

~ Lu Tung Pin, The Hundred Character Tablet (Bai Zi Bei)
,
1249:The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity.
The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things.
The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe.
It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food.
It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses.
It’s about winning; about providing society with superior things; and about proving that you have taste, and good values, and you work hard.
And what a wonderful relief, every so often, to know who the enemy is.
Because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time.
And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth, and growth, and beauty, and danger, and triumph.
And then everything dies anyway, right?
But you just keep doing it. ~ Anne Lamott,
1250:The discipline of AutoQuotery is based on generating axiomatic entries that technically provide a mechanism to serve later on as a network of neural synapses between the very same lexemes it is utilizing. However, those lexical atomic units are signed differently -by the AutoQuoter- from their usages in the dictionary and therefore behave semantically in a wave-like pattern and syntactically in a particle-like pattern within the boundaries of the produced Quotery Lexicon itself. As time passes by, the semantics attain a standing-waves state mimicking thereby the dictionary; and almost ends up putting the synapses in an idle state when no more signals are being transferred between the lexemes. Philosophy would insist that an idle state cannot be reached, while Reason would emphasize -as a response- that such a perception is only pedagogically sensed when engaging (by studying, practicing or teaching) in the AutoQuotery discipline. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
1251:Many systems require slack in order to work well. Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanism to ensure that the tape wouldn’t rip. Your coffee grinder won’t grind if you overstuff it. Roadways operate best below 70 percent capacity; traffic jams are caused by lack of slack. In principle, if a road is 85 percent full and everybody goes at the same speed, all cars can easily fit with some room between them. But if one driver speeds up just a bit and then needs to brake, those behind her must brake as well. Now they’ve slowed down too much, and, as it turns out, it’s easier to reduce a car’s speed than to increase it again. This small shock—someone lightly deviating from the right speed and then touching her brakes—has caused the traffic to slow substantially. A few more shocks, and traffic grinds to a halt. At 85 percent there is enough road but not enough slack to absorb the small shocks. ~ Sendhil Mullainathan,
1252:What are you about?" said the vehicle as a panel popped open to reveal delicate components. "I am not accustomed to such usage."

The little man said nothing, but began to rearrange connections and sever some linkages within the autocab's mechanism. The vehicle lurched and then spiraled down to a meadow bordered by trees.

"I will be compelled to summon assist-" said the car, then broke off as Gaskarth made a final adjustment. The autocab dropped the remaining few inches to the grass, and the dwarf twisted the emergency release handle to open the doors. Filidor followed him out of the autocab.

"Who am I?" inquired the car. "Have I a function?"

"Perhaps you are a type of bird," said Gaskarth. "If so, it is your function to fly."

The autocab digested this information briefly, then lifted slightly. "Experimentation tends to support the hypothesis," it said, and flew in widening circles out of their ken. ~ Matthew Hughes,
1253:Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. ~ Mark Helprin,
1254:Of course, it is not so easy to “falsify,” i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections in your testing method may yield a mistaken “no.” The doctor discovering cancer cells might have faulty equipment causing optical illusions; or he could be a bell-curve-using economist disguised as a doctor. An eyewitness to a crime might be drunk. But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance. Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.* ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
1255:I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It's pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you've come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator's command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn't see it themselves. They didn't see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key--salvation--was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch ("Paradise?"). ~ Jo Nesb,
1256: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,
1257:The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan. ~ Alain de Botton,
1258:...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed... ~ Karl Polanyi,
1259:The foundation of our thinking is the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time. “Theory” may conjure up images of ivory tower musings, but I assure you that it is the most practical and useful business tool we can offer you. Good theory helps us understand “how” and “why.” It helps us make sense of how the world works and predict the consequences of our decisions and our actions. Jobs Theory5, we believe, can move companies beyond hoping that correlation is enough to the causal mechanism of successful innovation. Innovation may never be a perfect science, but that’s not the point. We have the ability to make innovation a reliable engine for growth, an engine based on a clear understanding of causality, rather than simply casting seeds in the hopes of one day harvesting some fruit. ~ Clayton M Christensen,
1260:Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and slimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone-slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so: and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1261:What I have said makes it appear that this process of improvement by internal replacement applies to the technology as a whole. But by our recursion principle, it applies to all constituent parts of the technology as well: a technology improves as better subparts and sub-subparts are swapped into its assemblies and subassemblies. This means we need to think of a technology as an object-more an organism, really-that develops through its constituent parts and subparts improving simultaneously at all levels in its hierarchy.

And there is something else. A technology developls not just by the direct efforts applied to it. Many of a technology's parts are shared by other technologies, so a great deal of development happens automatically as components improve in other uses "outside" that technology. For decades, aircraft instruments and control mechanism benefited from outside progress in electronic components. A technology piggybacks on the external development of its components. ~ W Brian Arthur,
1262:I am embarrassed to admit (don’t tell anybody) that when I first saw the interior doors on the Enterprise slide open automatically as crew members walk up to them, I was certain that such a mechanism would not be invented during my years on Earth. Star Trek was taking place hundreds of years hence, and I was observing future technology. Same goes for those incredible pocket-size data disks they insert into talking computers. And those palm-size devices they use to talk to one another. And that square cavity in the wall that dispenses heated food in seconds. Not in my century, I thought. Not in my lifetime. Today, obviously, we have all those technologies, and we didn’t have to wait till the twenty-third century to get them. But I take pleasure in noting that our twenty-first-century communication and data-storage devices are smaller than those on Star Trek. And unlike their sliding doors, which make primitive whooshing sounds every time they move, our automatic doors are silent. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,
1263:Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness ... focusing the consciousness ... aortal dilation ... avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness ... to be conscious by choice ... blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions ... one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone ... animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct ... the animal destroys and does not produce ... animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual ... the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe ... focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid ... bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs ... all things/cells/beings are impermanent ... strive for flow-permanence within.... ~ Frank Herbert,
1264:As he piled wood on the fire he discovered an appreciation of his own body which he had never felt before. He watched his moving muscles and was interested in the cunning mechanism of his fingers. By the light of the fire he crooked his fingers slowly and repeatedly now one at a time, now all together, spreading them wide or making quick gripping movements. He studied the nail-formation, and prodded the fingertips, now sharply, and again softly, gauging the while the nerve-sensations produced. It fascinated him, and he grew suddenly fond of this subtle flesh of his that worked so beautifully and smoothly and delicately. Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realization would strike him that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been sustenance to him. ~ Jack London,
1265:All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the world, and then back out. Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering. By the same token, the most profound human suffering becomes a mere pedagogical tool. Anatomy professors are perhaps the extreme end of this relationship, yet their kinship to the cadavers remains. Early on, when I made a long, quick cut through my donor’s diaphragm in order to ease finding the splenic artery, our proctor was both livid and horrified. Not because I had destroyed an important structure or misunderstood a key concept or ruined a future dissection but because I had seemed so cavalier about it. The look on his face, his inability to vocalize his sadness, taught me more about medicine than any lecture I would ever attend. ~ Paul Kalanithi,
1266:Narratives of progress, regress, and cycles all assume a mechanism by which historical change happens. It might be the natural laws of the cosmos, the will of God, the dialectical development of the human mind or of economic forces. Once we understand the mechanism, we are assured of understanding what really happened and what is to come. But what if there is no such mechanism? What if history is subject to sudden eruptions that cannot be explained by any science of temporal tectonics? These are the questions that arise in the face of cataclysms for which no rationalization seems adequate and no consolation seems possible. In response an apocalyptic view of history develops that sees a rip in time that widens with each passing year, distancing us from an age that was golden or heroic or simply normal. In this vision there really is only one event in history, the kairos separating the world we were meant for from the world we must live in. That is all we can know, and must know, about the past. ~ Mark Lilla,
1267:In other words people who have this gating channel more open can in fact hear things that most of the rest of us cannot. And the more open the channel is, the more they hear. People with very open P50 channels commonly report being “flooded with sound” or hearing “everything at once.” In other words, the unconscious mechanism that filters sound lets more through, so much so that, in some cases, the people exist in a sea of sounds that tend to overwhelm consciousness. This is often complicated by the fact that, commonly, they also have more open N100 channels. N100 (a.k.a. N1) gating channels are those that trigger increased attention and activation of memory. When this channel is also open not only are there more sounds being consciously perceived but conscious attention is directed to each and every one of those sounds. Further, a rapid cross-correlation of new sensory inputs with previous experiences is generated in order to determine subtle meanings and differentiation within them. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner,
1268:Routine and habit are our everyday life. Some are aware of their habits, others are not. If one becomes aware of habits—the repetitious movement of the hand or of the mind—one can put an end to them with comparative ease. But what is important in all this is to understand, not intellectually, the mechanism of habit-forming which gradually destroys or blunts all feeling.

The fear of change strengthens habit, not only physically but also in the very brain cells themselves. So having once become established in a routine, we keep going, like a tramcar along its rails. We take things for granted in all relationships, and this is one of the major factors of insensitivity. So habit becomes a natural thing. Then we say: why should one pay attention to these things that one does every day? And so inattention cultivates habit; and then we are caught. Then the problem begins of how to be free of habit. And then there is conflict. And thus conflict becomes the way of life we accept naturally! ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
1269:I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes--to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
'It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism.
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers. ~ H G Wells,
1270:The reliable functioning of any mechanism depends on the same result always being produced by a particular cause or set of causes. Many of the body's activities can be classified as chemical, and a salient feature of most chemical reactions is that their rate is affected strongly by the temperature. The hotter, the quicker; even a few degrees sometimes doubling the rate. Since proper working of our nervous system relies largely on the relative speeds of reaction in its various parts, the reliability of our responses is completely at the mercy of our body temperature. Were this not stabilised, we should behave more like insects or reptiles - zipping around feverishly in the summer and scarcely moving, breathing or even thinking, in the winter.(Using summer and winter in their classic senses, of course). We get occasional glimpses of the possibilities when we are either chilled or fevered - and surely there is no need to elaborate the miseries, physical, mental and emotional, which these conditions entail6 ~ Anonymous,
1271:PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS

Columbia law professor David Pozen contends that democracies need to be leaky-leaks and whistleblowing are themselves security mechanisms against an overreaching government. In his view, leaks serve as a counterpoint to the trend of overclassification and, ultimately as a way for governments to win back the trust lost through excessive secrecy.

Ethnographer danah boyd has called whistleblowing the civil disobedience of the information age; it enables individuals to fight back against abuse by the powerful. The NGO Human Rights Watch wrote that "those who disclose official wrongdoing...perform an important service in a democratic society...."

In this way of thinking, whistleblowers provide another oversight mechanism. You can think of them as a random surprise inspection. Just as we have laws to protect corporate whistleblowers, we need laws to protect government whistleblowers. Once they are in place, we could create a framework and rules for whistleblowing legally. ~ Bruce Schneier,
1272:...I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can conceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength of the feeling from which alone such work...can grow. What a deep belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for understanding, even if only of a meagre reflection in the revealed intelligence of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton, enabling them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism of celestial mechanics....Only the man who devotes his life to such goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave them strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A contemporary has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being. ~ Albert Einstein,
1273:I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event. ~ Don DeLillo,
1274:In talking to directors and writers, I’m constantly inspired by the models they keep in their heads—each a unique mechanism they use to keep moving forward, through adversity, in pursuit of their goals. Pete Docter compares directing to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last but trusting that he will eventually come out, intact, at the other end. “There’s a really scary point in the middle where it’s just dark,” he says. “There’s no light from where you came in and there’s no light at the other end; all you can do is keep going. And then you start to see a little light and then a little more light and then, suddenly, you’re out in the bright sun.” For Pete, this metaphor is a way of making that moment—the one in which you can’t see your own hand in front of your face and you aren’t sure you’ll ever find your way out—a bit less frightening. Because your rational mind knows that tunnels have two ends, your emotional mind can be kept in check when pitch blackness descends in the confusing middle. ~ Ed Catmull,
1275:What is human memory?" Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience - as perhaps he was. "It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.

"In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it's true to say that everything I remember is false. ~ Arthur C Clarke,
1276:Karimi ordered that the missiles self-destruct, if the mechanism still functioned on the downed missiles. He knew Israel would strike back, the only question was when? He would stay underground facility until the threat was over. When he was able to leave, he would have all of these engineers executed for failing him. He would not tolerate failure. Messengers relayed the news of what was happening top-side. He read the recent document prepared for him by the Iranian news service, which said, “Israel has officially condemned our attempt at nuking their cities, and has said its own response will be forthcoming soon. The United Nations, as always, has asked our two nations to let cooler heads prevail, and said that if Israel escalates the hostility, war could break out, quite possibly dragging the rest of the world into it. Meanwhile, Iraq has declared Mosul a radioactive wasteland. They’re demanding your head, Supreme Ayatollah, and they are vowing to exact revenge for this insult to all Iraqis. There has been no response from Washington. ~ Cliff Ball,
1277:THE VASTNESS OF OUR MEMORY
Holography also explains how our brains can store so many memories in so little space. The brilliant Hungarian-born physicist and mathematician John von Neumann once calculated that over the course of the average human lifetime, the brain stores something on the order of 2. 8 x 1020 (280, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000) bits of information. This is a staggering amount of information, and brain researchers have long struggled to come up with a mechanism that explains such a vast capability. Interestingly, holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage. By changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by illuminating the film with a laser beam possessing the same angle as the original two beams. By employing this method researchers have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same amount of information contained in fifty Bibles! ~ Michael Talbot,
1278:Human beings have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. To do logical thinking, we need to use the neocortex, which is basically a large pattern recognizer. It is not an ideal mechanism for performing logical transformations, but it is the only facility we have for the job. Compare, for example, how a human plays chess to how a typical computer chess program works. Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov, the human world chess champion, in 1997 was capable of analyzing the logical implications of 200 million board positions (representing different move-countermove sequences) every second. (That can now be done, by the way, on a few personal computers.) Kasparov was asked how many positions he could analyze each second, and he said it was less than one. How is it, then, that he was able to hold up to Deep Blue at all? The answer is the very strong ability humans have to recognize patterns. However, we need to train this facility, which is why not everyone can play master chess. ~ Ray Kurzweil,
1279:With the rise of molecular genetics, it has become possible to search for possible changes (mutations, polymorphisms) in target genes. Much effort has gone into investigating variations in genes that contribute to serotonin transmission, because serotonin-related drugs have antidepressant and anxiolytic properties. This assumes, however, that the treatment mechanism is the same mechanism that gives rise to the disorder.53 Although this is consistent with the old chemical imbalance hypothesis, it is not a conclusion that should simply be accepted without careful assessment. Nevertheless, studies of the genetic control of serotonin have found interesting results. For example, people with a certain variant (polymorphism) of a gene controlling a protein involved in serotonin transmission are more reactive to threatening stimuli, and this hyperreactivity is associated with increased amygdala activity during the threat.54 Further, it has been reported that this variant of the gene can account for 7 percent to 9 percent of the inheritance of anxiety.55 ~ Joseph E LeDoux,
1280:3. Escape. Escape is the avoidance of feelings through diversion. This avoidance is the backbone of the entertainment and liquor industries, and also the route of the workaholic. Escapism and avoidance of inner awareness is a socially condoned mechanism. We can avoid our own inner selves and keep our feelings from emerging by an endless variety of pursuits, many of which eventually become addictions as our dependency upon them grows. People are desperate to stay unconscious. We observe how often people flick on the television set the minute they enter a room and then walk around in a dream-like state, constantly being programmed by the data poured into them. People are terrified of facing themselves. They dread even a moment of aloneness. Thus the constant frantic activities: the endless socializing, talking, texting, reading, music playing, working, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, overeating, gambling, movie-going, pill-taking, drug-using, and cocktail-partying. Many of the foregoing mechanisms of escape are faulty, stressful, and ineffective. ~ David R Hawkins,
1281:AFFIRMATION CREED OF THE ARRIVIST: I am God, and all other gods are my imagery. I gave birth to myself. I am millions of forms excreating; eternal; and nothing exists except through me; yet I am not them—they serve me. I am inconceivable because I make the conceivable as I so will. I am beyond Law, for my casualness rationalizes all things to my pleasure. I am the stranger, ever. We, the new Arrivists have a lusty heritage from the hierocracy of ancient Egypt, and such great familiars as Lao-Tzu, Pythagoras, Sappho, Socrates, Zeno and others who have substantiated their beliefs (and like them we have been spat on by the ugliest denominators): our great copula is the giving. 'Arrivism' formulates from our integrals: our 'thisness' into 'as if becoming 'as now'—the intentional becoming extentional; action by spontaneity conforming everything critical and subvertive to itself, which is the mechanism of evoking our 'thisness'. 'As now' has no pendency: things are, because we are always the potential of what we last were. The gospel of the Arrivist is always his own. ~ Anonymous,
1282:I understood her hrythm. That feeling of everything inside twisting to the point that if you didn't find a release you'd explode. I craved to grant her peace.
I placed my hand over hers. My own heart rested when i rubbed my thumb over her smooth skin. She dropped the pen and grasped hes sleeve in her palm, her constant defense mechanism. No. If she grasped anything, it would me. My thumb worked its way between her fingers and her sleeve and released her death grip on the material. I wrapped my fingers around her fragile hand. Touching Echo felt like home.
Her ring figer slid against mime, causing electricity to move through my bloodstream. She moved it again. Only this time the movement was slow, deliberate and the most seductive touch in the world. Everything inside of me ached to touch her more.
Beth had been both wrong and right. Echo couldn’t hurt anyone, especially when she seemed so breakable herself. But the need I felt to be the one to keep the world from shattering her only confirmed Beth’s theory. I was falling for her and I was fucked. ~ Katie McGarry,
1283:For Dupigny a nation resembled a very primitive human being: this human being consisted of, simply, an appetite and some sort of mechanism for satisfying the appetite. In the case of a nation the appetite was usually, if not quite invariably, economic … (now and again the national vanity which at intervals gripped nations like France and Britain would compel them to some act which made no sense economically: but in this respect, too, they resembled human beings). As for the mechanism for fulfilling the appetite, what was that but a nation’s armed forces? The more powerful the armed forces the better the prospects for satiating the appetite; the more powerful the armed forces the more likely (indeed, inevitable, in Dupigny’s view) that an attempt would be made to satiate it; just as heavyweight boxers are more frequently involved in tavern brawls than, say, dentists, so the very existence of power demands that it should be used. His own failure in Indo-China had merely confirmed him in his cynical views. The League of Nations? Nothing but a pious waste of time! ‘Never ~ J G Farrell,
1284:Hotmail enhanced its spreading rate by eliminating the adoption threshold individuals experience. First, it is free; thus you do not have to think about whether you are making a wise investment. Second, the Hotmail interface makes it very easy to sign up. In two minutes you have an account; thus there is no time investment. Third, once you sign up, every time you send an e-mail, you offer free advertisement for Hot-mail. Combine these three features, and you get a service that has a very high infection rate, a build-in mechanism to spread. Traditional marketing theories will tell you that the combination of free service, low learning path, and rapid reach through consumer marketing has put the product above the threshold, and that is why it reached everybody. Based on our new understanding of diffusion in complex networks, we now know that this is only partially correct. It is true that you have a very high rate of spread. But you have no threshold either. Products and ideas spread by being adapted by hubs, the highly connected nodes of the consumer network. ~ Albert L szl Barab si,
1285:So, here it is,” I say. “This is a real-time view of the sample from the integrated electron microscope.” I step back, and give them a view of the screen. It shows a mass of spheres. They move randomly through the frame, occasionally bouncing off of one another. In among them, though, are other shapes. These are far fewer, larger, and more irregular. “See the balls?” I continue. “Those are what should have been produced. They’re temperature-sensitive cages, with serotonin inside. Those other things, though—they’re not supposed to be there. They look a bit like big viruses, but their mass is much higher than you’d expect from a biological. I’m guessing these are what the crypted code tacked onto the configuration file is producing.” “I thought we’d decided that Hagerstown couldn’t have been a virus,” Gary says. “I didn’t say these are viruses,” I say. “I said the protein coat we can see looks like what you’d see on a virus. That’s just the delivery mechanism. I’d be willing to bet that these things bind to cells like a virus, but what’s inside them is definitely not RNA. ~ Edward Ashton,
1286:[Materialism] seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
1287:Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. Love forsakes us from time to time, and we forsake love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. ~ Andrew Solomon,
1288:This is called creating local star power. This is critically important. With local star power, you’ll be able to succeed in pitching audiences who don’t know you; the ability to create and sustain local star power literally is going to mean the difference between success and failure. The first impression we make on another person is based on that person’s automatic calculation of our social value. As a survival mechanism, the other person’s brain is making it a priority to understand where you fit in the social structure. The person makes a hasty judgment using three measurable criteria: your wealth, your power, and your popularity. Based on some quick mental shorthand, the person is going to assign you a social status level, and from that calculation, a frame will be fixed. The person will not necessarily even consciously think about this. The people jaywalking behind the man in the nice suit did not deliberately pause to consider his status or think about whether it meant he was likely to cross streets safely. They just automatically calculated his likely status and behaved accordingly. ~ Oren Klaff,
1289:However, revolt is the only way out of the colonial situation, and the colonized realizes it sooner or later. His condition is absolute and cries for an absolute solution; a break and not a compromise. He has been torn away from his past and cut off from his future, his traditions are dying and he loses the hope of acquiring a new culture. He has neither language, nor flag, nor technical knowledge, nor national or international existence, nor rights, nor duties. He possesses nothing, is no longer anything and no longer hopes for anything. Moreover, the solution becomes more urgent every day. The mechanism for destroying the colonized cannot but worsen daily. The more oppression increases, the more the colonizer needs justification. The more he must debase the colonized, the more guilty he feels, the more he must justify himself, etc. How can he emerge from this increasingly explosive circle except by rupture, explosion? The colonial situation, by its own internal inevitability, brings on revolt. For the colonial condition cannot be adjusted to; like an iron collar, it can only be broken. ~ Albert Memmi,
1290:You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. ~ Jean Baudrillard,
1291:Bernays’s business partner, Paul Mazur, said, “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture.… People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” As Bernays later wrote, in 1928, the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. ~ Al Gore,
1292:It is, however, admitted that the intelligence organisations of these ‘free countries’ do give wide coverage to the activities of their citizen in almost all sphere of activities. Their systems keep track of the citizen from the Cradle to the Grave. No other country, except, perhaps the former Soviet Union, has documented their citizen in such exhaustive and comprehensive manner. India has not been able to keep track of its own citizen. The faulty system allows unhindered entry of alien nationals from the neighbouring countries. Periodically some Indian politicians wake up and raise slogans for comprehensive documentation of the citizens of the country. Vote-bank beggars in the right, left and centre of the political spectrum oppose them, because they depend a lot on illegal migrant voters from the neighbouring countries. They also shed crocodile tears in the name of ‘secularism’- an apartheid mechanism devised by the Indian democracy. Once in a while the intelligence and police agencies are whipped up to trace out the illegal settlers. They even violate the rights of the natural citizens. ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar,
1293:Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life; he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, a mere pedant absorbed in the dry bones of something which the life has long deserted. A symphony is not explained by a mathematical analysis of its notes; the mystery of a woman’s beauty is not revealed by a postmortem dissection; and no one ever understood the wonder of a bird on the wing by stuffing it and putting it in a glass case. To understand these things, you must live and move with them as they are alive. The same is true of the universe: no amount of intellectual analysis will explain it, for philosophy and science can only reveal its mechanism, never its meaning or, as the Chinese say, its Tao. “What is the Tao?” A Zen master answers, “Usual life is the very Tao.” “How does one bring oneself into accord with it?” “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it.” For to imagine that there is a “you” separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap. ~ Alan W Watts,
1294:There are two answers. One is that all technologies are in a sense simultaneously mechanistic and organic. if you examine a technology from the top down, you see it as an arrangement of connected parts interacting and intermeshing with each other to some purpose. In this sense it becomes a clockwork device-it becomes mechanistic. If you examine it mentally from the bottom up, however, from how these parts are put together, you see these as integral parts-integral organs-forming a higher, functioning, purposed whole. it becomes a functioning body-it becomes organic. Whether a technology is mechanistic or organic therefore depends on your point of view. The other answer is purely biological: technologies are acquiring properties we associate with living organisms. As they sense and react to their environment, as they become self-assembling, self-configuring, self-healing, and "cognitive," they more and more resemble living organisms. The more sophisticated and "high-tech" technologies become, the more they become biological. We are beginning to appreciate that technology is as much metabolism as mechanism. ~ W Brian Arthur,
1295:Honey bees, too, use a highly specialized learning mechanism to help them figure out where they are going: the difference is that their system works based on the trajectory of a single star, our very own sun. Once again, part of the system is prewired, but part of it requires learning. The prewired bit is a mathematical function that relates the sun's position on the horizon to to a bee's orientation-but some of the values of the equation must be set, which is where learning comes in. What the bee learns is a highly specific bit of information about the sun's trajectory at the bee's particular latitude at a particular time of year. A five o'clock winter sun in Boston means something very different from a five o'clock summer sun in California, and a highly focused learning mechanism allows honeybees to take advantage of that information. We know that bees don't simply memorize a correspondence between particular places on the horizon and particular headings, because bees that have been raised in conditions in which they are exposed only to morning light can accurately use the sun as a guide during evening light. ~ Gary F Marcus,
1296:is a type D pencilneck: a sassy wannabe paymaster with vestigial humanity. This makes him vastly less evil than a type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis) and somewhat less evil than a type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf), but unquestionably more evil than pencilneck types M through E (real human screaming to escape a soul-devouring professional persona, varying degrees of desperation). No one I know has ever met the type A pencilneck, in much the same way that no one ever reports their own fatal accident; a type A pencilneck would be a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity. They would be odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that it was his job—or hers—and it seemed the next logical step. ~ Nick Harkaway,
1297:The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: "I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1298:Take, for example, a man who had not spoken to his brother for twenty-three years. Neither of them could remember what the incident was about; it had been long forgotten. But they were in the habit of not speaking, and so for twenty-three years they paid the price of missing each other’s company, affection, togetherness in family matters, and all the shared experiences and love they could have had. When the man learned about the mechanism of surrender, he began to let go of his feelings about his brother. Suddenly, he broke out in tears of grief, realizing all that had been lost over the years. By forgiving his brother, he triggered a similar response in the brother, and the two were reunited. Then, one of the brothers flashed back on the incident. It had been an argument over a pair of tennis shoes. Over one pair of tennis shoes they had paid a price extending over twenty-three years! Had the man not learned the technique of letting go, he might well have gone to his grave with the same resentment. So the question is, “How long do we want to go on suffering? When are we willing to give it up? When is enough enough? ~ David R Hawkins,
1299:If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It's true; I've met children who've been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense – that they don't succumb to despair, that they don't demand a space for their pain – it's very true that children are resilient. But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn't break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn't mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wak of her mother's departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It's efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren't observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works. ~ John Darnielle,
1300:If I am right, then enjoying music involves a kind of outward-going sympathetic movement. In music, as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is a culture of idolatry, in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response. As I argued in the previous chapter, there is every reason to see this result as a “fall,” and the great story told in Genesis reaches forward to incorporate these new and troubling facts. The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means, beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And all those distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an account from them, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature. ~ Roger Scruton,
1301:the end result of the complex organization that was the efficient software of the Great War was the manufacture of corpses. This essentially industrial operation was fantasized by the generals as a “strategy of attrition.” The British tried to kill Germans, the Germans tried to kill British and French and so on, a “strategy” so familiar by now that it almost sounds normal. It was not normal in Europe before 1914 and no one in authority expected it to evolve, despite the pioneering lessons of the American Civil War. Once the trenches were in place, the long grave already dug (John Masefield’s bitterly ironic phrase), then the war stalemated and death-making overwhelmed any rational response.379 “The war machine,” concludes Elliot, “rooted in law, organization, production, movement, science, technical ingenuity, with its product of six thousand deaths a day over a period of 1,500 days, was the permanent and realistic factor, impervious to fantasy, only slightly altered by human variation.”380 No human institution, Elliot stresses, was sufficiently strong to resist the death machine.381 A new mechanism, the tank, ended the stalemate. ~ Richard Rhodes,
1302:Instead, in our world, nature's contribution to development comes not by providing a finely detailed sketch of a finished product, but by providing a complex system of self-regulating recipes. Those recipes provide for many different things-from the construction of enzymes and structural proteins to the construction of motors, transporters, receptors, and regulatory proteins-and thus there is no single, easily characterizable genetic contribution to the mind. In the ongoing, everyday functioning of the brain, genes supervise the construction of neurotransmitters, the metabolism of glucose, and the maintenance of synapses. In early development, they help to lay down a rough draft, guiding the specialization and migration of cells as well as the initial pattern of wiring. In synaptic strengthening, genes are a vital participant in a mechanism by which experience can alter the wiring of the brain (thereby influencing the way that an organism interprets and responds to the environment). There are at least as many different genetic contributions to the mind and brain as there are genes; each contributes by regulating a different process. ~ Gary F Marcus,
1303:The Quantum Zeno Effect "fit beautifully with what Jeff was trying to do," recalls Henry Stapp. It was clear to Stapp, at least in principle, that Quantum Zeno might allow repeated acts of attention-which are, after all, observations by the mind of one strand of thought among the many competing for prominence in the brain-to affect quantum aspects of the brain. "I saw that if the mind puts to nature, in rapid succession, the same repeated question, 'shall I attend to this idea?' then the brain would tend to keep attention focused on that idea," Stapp says. "This is precisely the Quantum Zeno Effect. The mere mental act of rapidly attending would influence the brain's activity in the way Jeff was suggesting." The power of the mind's questioning ("Shall I pay attention to this idea?") to strengthen one idea rather than another so decisively that the privileged idea silences all the others and emerges as the one we focus on-well, this seemed to be an attractive mechanism that would not only account for my results with OCD patients but also fit with everyone's experience that focusing attention helps prevent the mind from wandering. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1304:Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. In a way it is like having death under control. One begins with the lowest levels: social circumstances, customs and habits; physical surroundings, the posture and the breathing of the body, the senses, their sensation s and perceptions; the mind, its thoughts and feelings; until the entire mechanism of personality is grasped and firmly held. The final stage of meditation is reached when the sense of identity goes beyond the 'I-am-so-and-so', beyond 'so-l-am', beyond 'I-am-the-witness-only', beyond 'there-is', beyond all ideas into the impersonally personal pure being. But you must be energetic when you take to meditation. It is definitely not a part-time occupation. Limit your interests and activities to what is needed for you and your dependents' barest needs.
Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,
1305:The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'super-power'. ~ Michel Foucault,
1306:The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother, one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience.
   But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the original Shakti, the transcendent Mother, the supreme Will can then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping and inhabiting Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 218,
1307:Today’s computers use transistors. When used in computers, transistors basically function the same way relays do, but (as we’ll see) they’re much faster and much smaller and much quieter and use much less power and are much cheaper. Building an 8-Bit Adder still requires 144 transistors (more if you replace the ripple carry with a look-ahead carry), but the circuit is microscopic. Chapter 13. But What About Subtraction? After you’ve convinced yourself that relays can indeed be wired together to add binary numbers, you might ask, “But what about subtraction?” Rest assured that you’re not making a nuisance of yourself by asking questions like this; you’re actually being quite perceptive. Addition and subtraction complement each other in some ways, but the mechanics of the two operations are different. An addition marches consistently from the rightmost column of digits to the leftmost column. Each carry from one column is added to the next column. We don’t carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing. For example, let’s look at a typical borrow-laden subtraction ~ Charles Petzold,
1308:I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, tell they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly. ~ Evelyn Waugh,
1309:I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly. ~ Evelyn Waugh,
1310:Souls,” he said, “like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But when for infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. “For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extent to which they succeed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacrifice. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or a bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.” His expression hardened, and then softened a little. “But so what,” he said, rising. Pointing to the fire, he added, “That’s where I want to go, and I will, and there I’ll find peace—but not yet. ~ Mark Helprin,
1311:it is a sensible suggestion that there might be individual differences in how widely activation spreads in networks of meaning. Moreover, the breadth of spread might plausibly be the cognitive mechanism underlying Openness. There is no direct evidence on this question, but there is an interesting study by Christine Mohr on Unusual Experiences-type schizotypy, and as I have said, I see ‘real’ Openness as quite close to this construct. In Mohr’s experiment, participants saw pairs or triads of words, such as ‘HONEY-BREAD’ or ‘LADDER-BOTTLE-CAT’, and had to rate how close in meaning they felt the different words to be. Scores on the schizotypy measure were a good predictor of how close on average the words were judged to be. The higher the schizotypy score, the closer the meanings seemed. The best explanation for these results is that, for the high-Unusual Experiences scorer, each word activates a broad raft of related associations, and since the second word is either in that raft or related to a word which is, the words seem close in meaning. For the low scorer, the raft of associations is narrower, and so the distance to the second word seems greater on average. ~ Daniel Nettle,
1312:Ishwara-Shakti is not quite the same as Purusha-Prakriti; for Purusha and Prakriti are separate powers, but Ishwara and Shakti contain each other. Ishwara is Purusha who contains Prakriti and rules by the power of the Shakti within him. Shakti is Prakriti ensouled by Purusha and acts by the will of the Ishwara which is her own will and whose presence in her movement she carries always with her. The Purusha-Prakriti realisation is of the first utility to the seeker on the Way of Works; for it is the separation of the conscient being and the Energy and the subjection of the being to the mechanism of the Energy that are the efficient cause of our ignorance and imperfection; by this realisation the being can liberate himself from the mechanical action of the nature and become free and arrive at a first spiritual control over the nature. Ishwara-Shakti stands behind the relation of Purusha-Prakriti and its ignorant action and turns it to an evolutionary purpose. The Ishwara-Shakti realisation can bring participation in a higher dynamism and a divine working and a total unity and harmony of the being in a spiritual nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 216,
1313:The automobile, like the all-important domestic façade, is another mechanism for outdoor class display. Or class lack of display we'd have to say, if we focus on the usages of the upper class, who, on the principle of archaism, affect to regard the automobile as very nouveau and underplay it consistently. Class understatement describes the technique: if your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you're not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem. You have a Chevy, Ford, Plymouth, or Dodge, and in the least interesting style and color. It may be clean, although slightly dirty is best. But it should be boring. The next best thing is to have a "good" car, like a Jaguar or BMW, but to be sure it's old and beat-up. You may not have a Rolls, a Cadillac, or a Mercedes. Especially a Mercedes, a car, Joseph Epstein reports in The American Scholar (Winter 1981-82), which the intelligent young in West Germany regard, quite correctly, as "a sign of vulgarity, a car of the kind owned by Beverly Hills dentists or African cabinet ministers. ~ Paul Fussell,
1314:decorrelate error! To understand how this principle works, imagine that a large number of observers are shown glass jars containing pennies and are challenged to estimate the number of pennies in each jar. As James Surowiecki explained in his best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds, this is the kind of task in which individuals do very poorly, but pools of individual judgments do remarkably well. Some individuals greatly overestimate the true number, others underestimate it, but when many judgments are averaged, the average tends to be quite accurate. The mechanism is straightforward: all individuals look at the same jar, and all their judgments have a common basis. On the other hand, the errors that individuals make are independent of the errors made by others, and (in the absence of a systematic bias) they tend to average to zero. However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate. ~ Daniel Kahneman,
1315:Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea -- the sea -- in the cold air of an afternoon almost past, and blessed by the wind that always blows from the north.

The beach. And the sea.

It could be perfection -- an image for divine eyes -- a world that happens, that's all, the mute existence of land and water, a work perfectly accomplished, truth --truth -- but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise, a bagatelle capable on its own of suspending all that great apparatus of inexorable truth, a mere nothing, but one planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface of that sacred icon, a minuscule exception come to rest on the perfection of that boundless beach. To see him from afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter's easel. The easel is anchored by slender cords to four stones placed on the sand. It sways imperceptibly in the wind that always blows from the north. The man is wearing waders and a large fisherman's jacket. He is standing, facing the sea, twirling a slim paintbrush between his fingers. On the easel, a canvas. ~ Alessandro Baricco,
1316:This is, in general, what iconicity
in language is: a metaphorical image-mapping in which the structure of the mean-
ing is understood in terms of the structure of the form of the language presenting
that meaning. Such mappings are possible because of the existence of image-
schemas, such as schemas characterizing bounded spaces (with interiors and exte-
riors), paths, motions along those paths, forces, parts and wholes, centers and pe-
ripheries, and so on. When we speak of the “form of language,” we are under-
standing that form in terms of such image-schemas. Thus, for example, one aspect of sentence structure is given in terms of parts and wholes, that is, the parts of
speech and the higher-level constituents containing them. Other aspects of a sen-
tence’s structure are given in terms of balance, proximity, subordination, sequence,
and so on. The schematic images that allow us to understand such syntactic no-
tions are also used in conceptual structure. It is for this reason that image-
schematic correspondences between form and meaning are possible. The mech-
anism that relates them is the same mapping mechanism used in metaphor. ~ George Lakoff,
1317:On The Cliff-Top
FACE upward to the sky
Quiet I lie:
Quiet as if the finger of God's will
Had bade this human mechanism 'be still!'
And sent the intangible essence, this strange I,
All wondering forth to His eternity.
Below, the sea's sound, faint
As dying saint
Telling of gone-by sorrows long at rest:
Above, the fearless sea-gull's shimmering breast
Painted a moment on the dark blue skies-A hovering joy, that while I watch it flies.
Alike unheeded now
Old griefs, and thou
Quick-wingèd Joy, that like a bird at play
Pleasest thyself to visit me to-day:
On the cliff-top, earth dim and heaven clear,
My soul lies calmly, above hope--or fear.
But not--(do Thou forbid
Whose stainless lid
Wept tears at Lazarus' grave, and looking down
Afar off, upon Solyma's doomed town.)
Ah, not above love--human yet divine-Which, Thee seen first, in Thee sees all of Thine!
Is't sunset? The keen breeze
Blows from the seas:
And at my side a pleasant vision stands
With her brown eyes and kind extended hands.
Dear, we'll go down together and full fain
From the cliff-top to the busy world again.
~ Dinah Maria Mulock Craik,
1318:When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel—and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The second mechanism at work here is gratitude, because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become. Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being.11 Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups. ~ Shawn Achor,
1319:platforms cannot be entirely planned; they also emerge. Remember that one of the key characteristics that distinguishes a platform from a traditional business is that most of the activity is controlled by users, not by the owners or managers of the platform. It’s inevitable that participants will use the platform in ways you never anticipated or planned. Twitter was never meant to have a discovery mechanism. It originated as simply a reverse-chronological stream of feeds. There was no way to seek out tweets on particular topics other than by scrolling through pages of unrelated and irrelevant content. Chris Messina, an engineer at Google, originally suggested the use of hashtags to annotate and discover similar tweets. Today, the hashtag has become a mainstay of Twitter. Platform designers should always leave room for serendipitous discoveries, as users often lead the way to where the design should evolve. Close monitoring of user behavior on the platform is almost certain to reveal unexpected patterns—some of which may suggest fruitful new areas for value creation. The best platforms allow room for user quirks, and they are open enough to gradually incorporate such quirks into the design of the platform. ~ Geoffrey G Parker,
1320:Perhaps one of the most challenging notions for us to accept at the beginning of transformational work is that the personality—the ego and its structures—is an artificial construct. But it only seems real because up until now it has been our entire reality. Identifying with our personality has been how we have lived and gotten by in life. Insofar as it has enabled us to do so, the personality has been a useful, even highly valuable, friend. As our insights deepen, however, we come to accept the hard truth that our personality is largely a collection of internal defenses and reactions, deeply ingrained beliefs and habits about the self and the world that have come from the past, particularly from our childhood. To put this more simply, our personality is a mechanism from the past, perhaps one that has helped us survive until now, but one whose limitations can now be seen. We all suffer from a case of mistaken identity: we have forgotten our True Nature and have come to believe that we are the personality. The reason we must explore the defenses of the personality and the vulnerabilities it is protecting is so that we can reexperience our Essential nature—our spiritual core—and know directly who we really are. ~ Don Richard Riso,
1321:The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it. It is through empathic projection that we come to know our environment, understand how we are part of it and how it is part of us. This is the bodily mechanism by which we can participate in nature, not just as hikers or climbers or swimmers, but as part of nature itself, part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. A mindful embodied spirituality is thus an ecological spirituality.

An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world. ~ George Lakoff,
1322:As Muller thought about the future of eugenics and the possibility of altering human genomes, he wondered whether Galton and his collaborators had made a fundamental conceptual error. Like Galton and Pearson, Muller sympathized with the desire to use genetics to alleviate suffering. But unlike Galton, Muller began to realize that positive eugenics was achievable only in a society that had already achieved radical equality. Eugenics could not be the prelude to equality. Instead, equality had to be the precondition for eugenics. Without equality, eugenics would inevitably falter on the false premise that social ills, such as vagrancy, pauperism, deviance, alcoholism, and feeblemindedness were genetic ills-while, in fact, they merely reflected inequality. Women such as Carrie Buck weren't genetic imbeciles, they were poor, illiterate, unhealthy, and powerless-victims of their social lot, not of the genetic lottery. The Galtonians had been convinced that eugenics would ultimately generate radical equality-transforming the weak into the powerful. Muller turned that reasoning on its head. Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
1323:Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to a final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement but a neighbouring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever catches it, and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak, and joins in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.

Just as in a clock the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French -- all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm -- was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors -- that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1324:Lamarck’s Impact

So, how could these "favorable variations" occur?
Darwin tried to answer this question from the standpoint of
the primitive understanding of science at that time.
According to the French biologist Chevalier de Lamarck
(1744-1829), who lived before Darwin, living creatures
passed on the traits they acquired during their lifetime to
the next generation. He asserted that these traits, which
accumulated from one generation to another, caused new
species to be formed. For instance, he claimed that
giraffes evolved from antelopes; as they struggled to eat
the leaves of high trees, their necks were extended from
generation to generation.

Darwin also gave similar examples. In his book The
Origin of Species, for instance, he said that some bears
going into water to find food transformed themselves into
whales over time.

However, the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor
Mendel (1822-84) and verified by the science of genetics,
which flourished in the twentieth century, utterly demolished
the legend that acquired traits were passed on to
subsequent generations. Thus, natural selection fell out of
favor as an evolutionary mechanism. ~ Harun Yahya,
1325:Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings. ~ Frans de Waal,
1326:There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple of Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences of procedure and of outlook that were bound to lead to divergent results. Freud's work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle of causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result of those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works if we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view, we live and work, day by day, according to the principle of directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle of causality. We are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and will only be explicable when the final effect of the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process of evolution. ~ Herbert Read,
1327:But even though questions of currency policy are never more than questions of the value of money, they are sometimes disguised so that their true nature is hidden from the uninitiated. Public opinion is dominated by erroneous views on the nature of money and its value, and misunderstood slogans have to take the place of clear and precise ideas. The fine and complicated mechanism of the money and credit system is wrapped in obscurity, the proceedings on the Stock Exchange are a mystery, the function and significance of the banks elude interpretation. So it is not surprising that the arguments brought forward in the conflict of the different interests often missed the point altogether. Counsel was darkened with cryptic phrases whose meaning was probably hidden even from those who uttered them. Americans spoke of 'the dollar of our fathers' and Austrians of 'our dear old gulden note'; silver, the money of the common man, was set up against gold, the money of the aristocracy. Many a tribune of the people, in many a passionate discourse, sounded the loud praises of silver, which, hidden in deep mines, lay awaiting the time when it should come forth into the light of day to ransom miserable humanity, languishing in its wretchedness. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
1328:Evolution in quantum mechanics is deterministic as in classical mechanics except for the difference that as the system interacts with another system, its state function collapses. This dichotomy exists only for separated systems, in which one of them is being observed by the other. Given that the state of the entire universe is defined at the initial point, its evolution must be completely deterministic. Any seeming randomness now should merely be an amplification of the randomness in the initial state and the entropy at the origin should not change as the universe evolves. In other words, the physical universe governed by quantum laws has no place for the emergence of life. Our currently accepted conceptions of the beginning of the universe postulate much more uniformity than exists now. One way entropy could increase in the universe is by the process of reduction of its state function by some other system. Since the universe, by definition, cannot have any other matter in it, it becomes essential to postulate a mechanism other than that of physical laws, which permits the state function to reduce. This other mechanism may be the working of the “consciousness principle” which can just by the process of “observation” increase entropy ~ Subhash Kak,
1329:Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck's Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied--for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught, and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction--but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should. ~ Eleanor Catton,
1330:Historically, the great advances in physics have occurred when scientists united two seemingly disparate entities into a coherent, logical whole. Newton connected celestial motions with terrestrial motion. Maxwell unified light and electromagnetism. Einstein did it for space and time. Quantum theory makes exactly this kind of connection, between the objective physical world and subjective experiences. It thus offers a way out of the morass that the mind brain debate has become, because it departs most profoundly from classical physics at a crucial point: on the nature of the dynamical interplay between minds and physical states, between physical states and consciousness. It ushers the observer into the dynamics of the system in a powerful way. Following quantum theory into the thicket of the mind-matter problem actually leads to a clearing, to a theory of mind and brain that accords quite well with our intuitive sense of how our mind works. In Stapp's formulation, quantum theory creates a causal opening for the mind, a point of entry by which mind can affect matter, a mechanism by which mind can shape brain. That opening arises because quantum theory allows intention, and attention, to exert real, physical effects on the brain, as we will now explore. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1331:They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street—the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question “What you looking at?” and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer —“Nothing”—might be avoided. ~ Zadie Smith,
1332:Intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body (see my reflections on Nietzsche’s illness in The Untouched Key [1990] and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence [1991]). All these defense mechanisms are accompanied by repression of the original situation and the emotions belonging to it. Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the “as-if personality.” This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off. In childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead. A young woman, Lisa, reported a recurrent dream: ~ Alice Miller,
1333:Imaginary Mechanism of Evolution

The second important point that negates Darwin's theory
is that both concepts put forward by the theory as
"evolutionary mechanisms" were understood to have, in
reality, no evolutionary power.

Darwin based his evolution allegation entirely on the
mechanism of "natural selection." The importance he
placed on this mechanism was evident in the name of his
book: The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural
Selection…

Natural selection holds that those living things that are
stronger and more suited to the natural conditions of their
habitats will survive in the struggle for life. For example, in
a deer herd under the threat of attack by wild animals,
those that can run faster will survive. Therefore, the deer
herd will be comprised of faster and stronger individuals.
However, unquestionably, this mechanism will not cause
deer to evolve and transform themselves into another living
species, for instance, horses.

Therefore, the mechanism of natural selection has no
evolutionary power. Darwin was also aware of this fact and
had to state this in his book The Origin of Species:
Natural selection can do nothing until favourable individual
differences or variations occur. ~ Harun Yahya,
1334:As a consequence of natural analgesic actions or as a result of the administration of drugs that interfere with body signaling (painkillers, anesthetics), the brain receives a distorted view of what the body state really is at the moment. We know that in situations of fear in which the brain chooses the running option rather than freezing, the brain stem disengages the part of the pain-transmission circuitry, a bit like pulling the plug. The periqueductal gray, which controls these responses, can also command the secretion of natural opioids and achieve precisely what taking an analgesic would achieve -- elimination of pain signals.
In the strict sense, we are dealing here with a hallucination of the body because what the brain registers in its maps and the conscious mind feels do not correspond to the reality that might be perceived. Whenever we ingest molecules the have the power to modify the transmission or mapping of body signals, we play on this mechanism. Alcohol does it; so do analgesics and anesthetics, as well as countless drugs of abuse. It is patently clear that, other than out of curiousity, humans are drawn to such molecules because of their desire to generate feelings of well-being, feelings in which pain signals are obliterated and pleasure signals induced. ~ Ant nio R Dam sio,
1335:It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. Fig 00346 ~ H G Wells,
1336:The United States government had no mechanism to punish China for forced abortions, so instead it pummeled UNFPA. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan reduced funding for it. Then George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both eliminated U.S. funding for the agency. Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, led the fight against UNFPA. He’s a good man who genuinely cared about Chinese women and was horrified by coerced abortions. He wasn’t trying to score cheap political points in criticizing UNFPA, since most New Jersey voters had never heard of the agency. This was an issue that Smith genuinely cared about.

The reality, though, was that while the Chinese abuses were real, UNFPA was not a party to them. After giving the gold medal to Qian, the UN turned around and became an important brake on Chinese behavior. A State Department fact-finding mission sent to investigate by the George W. Bush administration reported back: “We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People’s Republic of China.” In the thirty-two counties in China where UNFPA operates pilot programs, it has reduced abortion rates by 40 percent, to a rate lower than that in the United States. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,
1337:Consider first the mechanisms pushing toward convergence, that is, toward reduction and compression of inequalities. The main forces for convergence are the diffusion of knowledge and investment in training and skills. The law of supply and demand, as well as the mobility of capital and labor, which is a variant of that law, may always tend toward convergence as well, but the influence of this economic law is less powerful than the diffusion of knowledge and skill and is frequently ambiguous or contradictory in its implications. Knowledge and skill diffusion is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries. We see this at present in the advances made by a number of previously poor countries, led by China. These emergent economies are now in the process of catching up with the advanced ones. By adopting the modes of production of the rich countries and acquiring skills comparable to those found elsewhere, the less developed countries have leapt forward in productivity and increased their national incomes. The technological convergence process may be abetted by open borders for trade, but it is fundamentally a process of the diffusion and sharing of knowledge—the public good par excellence—rather than a market mechanism. ~ Thomas Piketty,
1338:It was a curious contrast to see how the timid country girl shrunk through the crowd that hurried up and down the streets, giving way to the press of people, and clinging closely to Ralph as though she feared to lose him in the throng; and how the stern and hard-featured man of business went doggedly on, elbowing the passengers aside, and now and then exchanging a gruff salutation with some passing acquaintance, who turned to look back upon his pretty charge, with looks expressive of surprise, and seemed to wonder at the ill-assorted companionship. But, it would have been a stranger contrast still, to have read the hearts that were beating side by side; to have laid bare the gentle innocence of the one, and the rugged villainy of the other; to have hung upon the guileless thoughts of the affectionate girl, and been amazed that, among all the wily plots and calculations of the old man, there should not be one word or figure denoting thought of death or of the grave. But so it was; and stranger still—though this is a thing of every day—the warm young heart palpitated with a thousand anxieties and apprehensions, while that of the old worldly man lay rusting in its cell, beating only as a piece of cunning mechanism, and yielding no one throb of hope, or fear, or love, or care, for any living thing. ~ Charles Dickens,
1339:I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts. ~ Ted Chiang,
1340:By [anticipatory anxiety] I mean that the patient reacts to an event with a fearful expectation of its recurrence. However, fear tends to make happen precisely that which one fears, and so does anticipatory anxiety. Thus a vicious circle is established. A symptom evokes a phobia and the phobia provokes the symptom. The recurrence of the symptom then reinforces the phobia. The patient is caught in a cocoon. […] [Obsessive-compulsives] fear the potential effects or the potential cause of the strange thoughts. The phobic pattern of flight from fear is paralleled by the obsessive-compulsive pattern. Obsessive-compulsive neurotics also display fear. But theirs is not 'fear of fear' but rather fear of themselves, and their response is to fight against obsessions and compulsions. But the more the patients fight, the stronger their symptoms become. In other words, alongside the circle formation built up by anticipatory anxiety in phobic cases, there is another feedback mechanism which we encounter in the obsessive-compulsive neurotic. Pressure induces counter-pressure, and counter-pressure, in turn, increases pressure. If one succeeds in making the patient stop fighting his obsessions and compulsions -- and this may well be accomplished by paradoxical intention -- these symptoms soon diminish and finally atrophy. ~ Viktor E Frankl,
1341:For this is the other face of the psychic: not only is it joy and sweetness, but also quiet strength, as if it were forever above every possible tragedy - an invulnerable master. In this case, too, the details of a scene can be indelibly engraved. But what passes on to the next life is not so much the details as the essence of the scene: we will be struck by certain repetitive patterns of events or deadlocked situations that have an air of déjà vu and seem surrounded by an aura of fatality - for what has not been overcome in the past returns again and again, each time with a slightly different appearance, but basically always identical, until we confront the old knot and untie it. Such is the law of inner progress. Generally, however, the memory of actual physical circumstances does not remain, because, although our small surface consciousness makes much of them, they are, after all, of little significance. There is even a spontaneous mechanism that erases the profusion of useless past memories, just as those of the present life soon become eradicated. If we glance behind us, without thinking, what is actually left of our present life? A nebulous mass with perhaps two or three outstanding images; all the rest is blotted out. This is likewise the case for the soul and its past lives.
   ~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,
1342:The clouds had shifted, the moon was almost ripe, and her hair had turned to silver in its glaze.
He'd been glad she hadn't caught him staring. Lucky for Tom, she'd crouched on the ground and started digging about in the rubble. He went nearer, curious as to what had claimed her focus, and saw that somehow, in the jumble of London's broken streets, she'd found a tangle of honeysuckle, fallen to the ground after its fence rattlings were removed but growing still. She picked a sprig and threaded it through her hair, humming a strange and lovely tune as she did so.
When the sun had begun its rise and they'd climbed the stairs to his flat, she'd filled an old jam jar with water and put the sprig in it, on the sill. For nights after, as he lay alone in the warm and the dark, unable to sleep for thoughts of her, he'd smelled its sweetness. And it had seemed to Tom, as it still seemed now, that Juniper was just like that flower. An object of unfathomable perfection in a world that was breaking apart. It wasn't only the way she looked, and it wasn't only the things she said. It was something else, an intangible essence, a confidence, a strength, as if she were connected somehow to the mechanism that drove the world. She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star. ~ Kate Morton,
1343:Humans are cognitive misers because their basic tendency is to default to Type I processing mechanisms of low computational expense. Using less computational capacity for one task means that there is more left over for another task if they both must be completed simultaneously. This would seem to be adaptive. Nevertheless, this strong bias to default to the simplest cognitive mechanism-to be a cognitive miser-means that humans are often less than rational. Increasingly, in the modern world we are presented with decisions and problems that require more accurate responses than those generated by heuristic processing. Type i processes often provide a quick solution that is a first approximation to an optimal response. But modern life often requires more precise thought than this. Modern technological societies are in fact hostile environments for people reliant on only the most easily computed automatic response. Think of the multi-million-dollar advertising industry that has been designed to exploit just this tendency. Modern society keeps proliferating situations where shallow processing is not sufficient for maximizing personal happiness-precisely because many structures of market-based societies have been designed explicitly to exploit such tendencies. Being cognitive misers will seriously impede people from achieving their goals. ~ Keith E Stanovich,
1344:I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be " soul " if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography
of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience. ~ Oswald Spengler,
1345:What is life? Well, what do living things do? One answer is, they reproduce. Life makes more life. However, logic told him that “what goes on is actually one degree better than self-reproduction, for organisms appear to have gotten more elaborate in the course of time.”9 Life did not just make more life. Life could increase in complexity; it could evolve. Von Neumann became increasingly interested in what an evolvable, autonomous, self-replicating machine (“an automaton”) would logically require when placed in an environment with which it could interact. His string of logic led him to the conclusion that the automaton needed a description of how to copy itself and a description of how to copy that description so it could hand it off to the next, freshly minted automaton. The original automaton also needed a mechanism to do the actual construction and copy job. It needed information and construction. However, this would cover only replication. Von Neumann reasoned that he had to add something in order for the automaton to be able to evolve, to increase in complexity. He concluded that it needed a symbolic self-description, a genotype, a physical structure independent of the structure it was describing, the phenotype. Linking the symbolic description with what it refers to would require a code, and now his automatons would be able to evolve. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga,
1346:This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency—given a constant concupiscence coefficient—of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, omnidirectional consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight" flip-flop circuits, since Trurl held here to the position of Dr. Yentzicus, creator of the famous oculo-oscular feel theory.
There were also all sorts of auxiliary components, like a high-frequency titillizer, an alternating tantalator, plus an entire set of lecherons and debaucheraries; on the outside, in a special glass case, were enormous dials, on which one could carefully follow the course of the whole decaptivation process. Statistical analysis revealed that the femfatalatron gave positive, permanent results in ninety-eight cases of unrequited amatorial superfixation out of a hundred. ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1347:It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican. ~ Francis Spufford,
1348:When she was younger, Ellie used to believe that her invisibility was a metaphor for something else, assuming it was her awkwardness, her fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. She had thought as she grew older, more confident, wiser, she would outgrow this not being noticed. But lately, Ellie really felt like a ghost. She would be in a place, but not really there. People looked through her, past her. Her invisibility had taken on a life of its own. It wasn't a metaphor anymore, or a defense mechanism or eccentric little tic. She was actually invisible. At least, that was how it felt to her.
Ellie wondered whether her parents were to blame. They were, after all, children of the sixties who had met at a love-in or lie-down or something of that sort, about which Ellie knew little except that a lot of drugs had been involved. Could Ellie's lack of physical presence be a genetic mutation caused by acid or mushrooms? Ellie grew up on their hippie commune among the highest, densest redwoods, where they dug their hands deep into the soil and grew their own food, made their own clothes. So perhaps it is there that the mystery is solved. Ellie indeed was a child of the earth, a baby of beiges and taupes and browns and muted greens. Nature doesn't scream and shout, demanding constant attention, and neither did Ellie. Maybe her invisibility was just her blending right in. ~ Amy S Foster,
1349:Perhaps things have changed since. So all I know is that it was much the same weather when I left as when I came, so far as I was capable of knowing what the weather was. And I had been under the weather so long, under all weathers, that I could tell quite well between them, my body could tell between them and seemed even to have its likes, its dislikes. I think I stayed in several rooms one after the other, or alternately, I don’t know. In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe. The house was fixed, that is perhaps what I mean by these different rooms. House and garden were fixed, thanks to some unknown mechanism of compensation, and I, when I stayed still, as I did most of the time, was fixed too, and when I moved, from place to place, it was very slowly, as in a cage out of time, as the saying is, in the jargon of the schools, and out of space too to be sure. For to be out of one and not out of the other was for cleverer than me, who was not clever, but foolish. But I may be quite wrong. And these different windows that open in my head, when I grope again among those days, really existed perhaps and perhaps do still, in spite of my being no longer there, I mean there looking at them, opening them and shutting them, or crouched in a corner of the room marvelling at the things they framed. ~ Samuel Beckett,
1350:Old Dudley would get out his gun and take it apart and, as Rabie cleaned the pieces, would explain the mechanism to him. Then he’d put it together again. Rabie always marveled at the way he could put it together again. Old Dudley would have liked to have explained New York to Rabie. If he could have showed it to Rabie, it wouldn’t have been so big—he wouldn’t have felt pressed down every time he went out in it. “It ain’t so big,” he would have said. “Don’t let it get you down, Rabie. It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.” But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he’d been dazed by the building the first week. He’d wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he’d look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he’d be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building—nowhere. ~ Flannery O Connor,
1351:We now have our answer to the key question of how novel technologies arise. The mechanism is certainly not Darwinian; novel species in technology do not arise from the accumulation of small changes. They arise from a process, a human and often lengthy one, of linking a need with a principle (some generic use of an effect) that will satisfy it. This linkage stretches from the need itself to the base phenomenon that will be harnessed to meet it, through supporting solutions and subsolutions. And making it defines a recursive process. The process repeats until each subproblem resolves itself into one that can be physically dealt with. In the end the problem must be solved with pieces-components-that already exist (or pieces that can be created from ones that already exist). To invent something is to find it in what previously exists.

We can now understand why invention varies so much. A particular case can be need-driven or phenomenon-driven; it can have a lone originator or many; its principle may be difficult to conceive of, or may have emerged naturally; translating that principle into physical components may be straightforward or may proceed in steps as crucial subproblems are resolved. But whatever their particular histories, at bottom all inventions share the same mechanism: all link a purpose with a principle that will fulfill it, and all must translate that principle into working parts. ~ W Brian Arthur,
1352:Perhaps things have changed since. So all I know is that it was much the same
weather when I left as when I came, so far as I was capable of knowing what the weather was. And I had been under the weather so long, under all
weathers, that I could tell quite well between them, my body could tell between them and seemed even to have its likes, its dislikes. I think I stayed in
several rooms one after the other, or alternately, I don’t know. In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one,
open variously on the parading universe. The house was fixed, that is perhaps what I mean by these different rooms. House and garden were fixed,
thanks to some unknown mechanism of compensation, and I, when I stayed still, as I did most of the time, was fixed too, and when I moved, from place to
place, it was very slowly, as in a cage out of time, as the saying is, in the jargon of the schools, and out of space too to be sure. For to be out of one and
not out of the other was for cleverer than me, who was not clever, but foolish. But I may be quite wrong. And these different windows that open in my head,
when I grope again among those days, really existed perhaps and perhaps do still, in spite of my being no longer there, I mean there looking at them,
opening them and shutting them, or crouched in a corner of the room marvelling at the things they framed. ~ Samuel Beckett,
1353:Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent. ~ R D Laing,
1354:On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past. ~ Stanis aw Lem,
1355:For before I met my friend there had been a period when I was prey to a morbid melancholy, if not depression, when I really believed I was lost, when for years I did no proper work but spent most of my days in a state of total apathy and often came close to putting an end to my life by my own hand. For years I had taken refuge in a terrible suicidal brooding, which deadened my mind and made everything unendurable, above all myself—brooding on the utter futility all around me, into which I had been plunged by my general weakness, but above all my weakness of character. For a long time I could not imagine being able to go on living, or even existing. I was no longer capable of seizing upon any purpose in life that would have given me control over myself. Every morning on waking I was inevitably caught up in this mechanism of suicidal brooding, and I remained in its grip throughout the day. And I was deserted by everyone because I had deserted everyone—that is the truth—because I no longer wanted anyone. I no longer wanted anything, but I was too much of a coward to make an end of it all. It was probably at the height of my despair—a word that I am not ashamed to use, as I no longer intend to deceive myself or gloss over anything, since nothing can be glossed over in a society and a world that perpetually seeks to gloss over everything in the most sickening manner—that Paul appeared on the scene at Irina’s apartment in the Blumenstockgasse. ~ Thomas Bernhard,
1356:In contrast to classical physics, with its exclusive focus on material causation, quantum physics offers a mechanism that validates the intuitive sense that our conscious thoughts have the power to affect our actions. Quantum theory, in the von Neumann-Wigner formulation as developed by Henry Stapp, offers a mathematically rigorous alternative to the impotence of conscious states: it allows conscious experience to act back on the physical brain by influencing its activities. It describes a way in which our conscious thoughts and volitions enter into the causal structure of nature and focus our thoughts, choose from among competing possible courses of action, and even override the mechanical aspects of cerebral processes. The quantum laws allow mental effort to influence the course of cerebral processes in just the way our subjective feeling tells us it does. How? By keeping in focus a stream of consciousness that would otherwise diffuse like mist at daybreak. Quantum theory demonstrates how mental effort can have, through the process of willfully focusing attention, dynamical consequences that cannot be deduced or predicted from, and that are not the automatic results of, cerebral mechanisms acting alone. In a world described by quantum physics, an insistence on causal closure of the physical world amounts to a quasi-religious faith in the absolute powers of matter, a belief that is no more than a commitment to brute, and outmoded, materialism. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1357:In the pixel promises of satellites it could be the Grand Canyon, its awesome chasms and spires, its photogenic strata, our great empty, where so many of us once stood feeling so compressed against all that vastness, so dense, wondering if there wasn’t a way to breathe some room between the bits of us, where we once stood feeling the expected smallness a little, but also a headache where our eyeballs scraped against the limits of our vision, or rather of our imagination, because it was a painting we were seeing though we stood at the sanctioned rim of the real deal. Instead we saw a photograph, blue mist hanging in the foreground, snow collars around the thick rusty trestles. Motel art, and it made us wonder finally how we could have been so cavalier with photography, how we managed a scoff when warned that the cloaked box would swallow a part of the soul. Although in this instance the trouble was not, strictly speaking, the filching of the subject’s soul, for while our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism’s subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole. ~ Claire Vaye Watkins,
1358:no society before ours has taken aim at sacrificial mechanisms. So, what's revealed by all of this is the tenacity of those mechanisms. If you stamp them out here, they pop up again over there. The value of Foucault's work consists in having shown this. One day, he told me that “we shouldn't invent a philosophy of the victim.” I replied: “No, not a philosophy, I agree—a religion! But it already exists!” Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn't foresee: new forms of “victimization” are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them. It's his pessimism that separates us: unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair. Today, after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion. Of course, even as the victimary mechanism keeps being reborn, Christianity is always there to transform and subvert it, like a leavening agent—in the humanist rationalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, for example. When Voltaire defended Jean Calas, the persecuted Protestant, he was being more Christian than the Catholic priests who were against him. His mistake was to have had too much faith in his own perfection, to imagine that the correctness of his position was due to his own genius. He couldn't see how much he owed to the past that stretched out behind him. I respect tradition, but I'm not justifying History. MT ~ Ren Girard,
1359:Enquirer," Neverfell said slowly, "do you really think I would have walked into this court if I didn’t have a way of getting out again?"

"What? What way?"

"I don’t know." Neverfell gave Enquirer Treble an enormous smile, as bright and mad as a sun souffé. "Do you like surprises, Enquirer? I do. Just as well, really."

It is fair to say that what happened after that was a surprise to everybody in the courtroom, including Neverfell. Somewhere high above in the shadowy, stalagmite-fanged ceiling, a trapdoor flipped open, revealing a darkened hatch. From this darkness a coil of wire whispered down, unravelling and unravelling as it fell, until the bottom end brushed the dais on which Neverfell stood. Then with a singing, metallic whine, a stocky figure in a gleaming metal suit and goggled mask dropped out of the trap and slid down the wire, to land with a jolt beside Neverfell.

"Seize . . ." began Treble. A metal-scaled arm was thrown round Neverfell’s middle. An armoured hand flicked two belt levers.

". . . that . . ." With a lurch, Neverfell was dragged aloft as the armoured figure whizzed back up the wire, carrying her with it, the whine of the mechanism rising to a screech. The dais dropped away, and she was staring down at a receding sea of frozen, upturned faces.

". . . girl!" finished the Enquirer in a deafening yell as both soaring figures disappeared upward through the hatch. The court vanished from Neverfell’s view as the trapdoor flapped shut. ~ Frances Hardinge,
1360:As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave—that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed—yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive. ~ Doris Lessing,
1361:In theory, the fact that the rich countries own part of the capital of poor countries can have virtuous effects by promoting convergence. If the rich countries are so flush with savings and capital that there is little reason to build new housing or add new machinery (in which case economists say that the “marginal productivity of capital,” that is, the additional output due to adding one new unit of capital “at the margin,” is very low), it can be collectively efficient to invest some part of domestic savings in poorer countries abroad. Thus the wealthy countries—or at any rate the residents of wealthy countries with capital to spare—will obtain a better return on their investment by investing abroad, and the poor countries will increase their productivity and thus close the gap between them and the rich countries. According to classical economic theory, this mechanism, based on the free flow of capital and equalization of the marginal productivity of capital at the global level, should lead to convergence of rich and poor countries and an eventual reduction of inequalities through market forces and competition. This optimistic theory has two major defects, however. First, from a strictly logical point of view, the equalization mechanism does not guarantee global convergence of per capita income. At best it can give rise to convergence of per capita output, provided we assume perfect capital mobility and, even more important, total equality of skill levels and human capital across countries—no small assumption. ~ Thomas Piketty,
1362:Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1363:There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war.

“The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins. ~ Jaroslav Kalfar,
1364:What’d you think?” Dan asked as we buckled into the Acclaim after another Sunday under the big top.

“I wonder if they realize their worship songs include both amillennial and premillennial theology,” I said with a sigh. “Also, what’s this business from the preacher about Moses writing Numbers? I mean, everyone knows Moses didn’t actually write the book of Numbers. It originated from a combination of written and oral tradition and was assembled and edited by Jewish priests sometime during the postexilic period as an exercise in national self-definition. You can look that up on Wikipedia. And, while we’re at it, a bit more Christology applied to the Old Testament text would be nice.”

“Um, Rach, the sermon today was about humility.”

Lord, have mercy.

See, I’ve got this coping mechanism thing where, when I’m feeling frightened or vulnerable or over my head, I intellectualize the situation to try and regain a sense of control. . . . In some religious traditions, this particular coping mechanism is known as pride.

I confess I preened it. I scoffed at the idea of being taught or led. Deconstructing was so much safer than trusting, so much easier than letting people in. I knew exactly what type of Christian I didn’t want to be, but I was too frightened, or too rebellious, or too wounded, to imagine what might be next. Like a garish conch shell, my cynicism protected me from disappointment, or so I believed, so I expected the worst and smirked when I found it. So many of our sins begin with fear . . . ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1365:But now, supposing that, instead of confessing the sins of the world which she has taken upon herself, the Church - or a group of Christians who arrogate to themselves the name of “Church” - becomes a social mechanism for self-justification? Supposing this “Church,” which is in reality no church at all, takes to herself the function of declaring that everyone else is guilty and rationalizing the sins of her members as acts of virtue? Suppose that she becomes a perfect and faultless machine for declaring herself not guilty? Suppose that she provides men with a convenient method of deciding when they do or do not need to accuse themselves of anything before God? Supposing that, instead of conscience, she provides men with the support of unanimous group approval or disapproval?

This is what explains the fact that some men can commit murder in the name of Christ and believe themselves guiltless, indeed congratulate themselves on having served Him well. For them, the function of “the Church” is to provide a milieu in which one can decide what is and is not guilty, what is or is not sinful. The “Church” becomes simply a place where men gather to decree that others are guilty and they themselves are innocent. The fact that others then accuse them of hypocrisy and of flagrant infidelity to truth only confirms them in their own self-assured righteousness. The “Church” in such an event becomes a machine for setting the unquiet conscience at rest. It is a perfectly efficient machine for the manufacture of self-complacency and inner peace! ~ Thomas Merton,
1366:Nature of the Desire for Change:

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other. ~ Eric Hoffer,
1367:There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live, as it would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of our existence is a breath away from being the last one. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable moment, so our minds wisely refuse to consider it. Still, as we mature into mortality, we gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes in the void, hoping that the mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture deeper into the darkness of nonbeing.

But how can you possibly ease yourself into the death of your child? For one thing, it is supposed to happen well after your own dissolution into nothingness. Your children are supposed to outlive you by several decades, in the course of which they’ll live their lives, happily devoid of the burden of your presence, eventually completing the same mortal trajectory as their parents: oblivion, denial, fear, the end. They’re supposed to handle their own mortality, and no help in that regard (other than forcing them to confront death by way of your dying) can come from you—death ain’t a science project. And even if you could imagine your child’s death, why would you? ~ Aleksandar Hemon,
1368:It was clear to Stapp, at least in principle, that Quantum Zeno might allow repeated acts of attention—which are, after all, observations by the mind of one strand of thought among the many competing for prominence in the brain—to affect quantum aspects of the brain. “I saw that if the mind puts to nature, in rapid succession, the same repeated question, ‘shall I attend to this idea?’ then the brain would tend to keep attention focused on that idea,” Stapp says. “This is precisely the Quantum Zeno Effect. The mere mental act of rapidly attending would influence the brain’s activity in the way Jeff was suggesting.” The power of the mind’s questioning (“Shall I pay attention to this idea?”) to strengthen one idea rather than another so decisively that the privileged idea silences all the others and emerges as the one we focus on—well, this seemed to be an attractive mechanism that would not only account for my results with OCD patients but also fit with everyone’s experience that focusing attention helps prevent the mind from wandering. Recall that Mike Merzenich had found that only attended stimuli have the power to alter the cortical map, expanding the region that processes the stimuli an animal focuses on. And recall Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s finding that the effort of directed attention alone can produce cortical changes comparable to those generated by physical practice at the piano. It seemed at least possible that it was my OCD patients’ efforts at attention, in the step we called Refocusing, that caused the brain changes we detected on PET scans. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1369:MSB: Isn't there something of this sort in Nietzsche's view of Jesus, who, in The Antichrist, appears as a sort of idiot? RG: Nietzsche wanted to separate Christ from Christianity. He's not the only thinker who's wanted to do this. But against the view of Christ as naïve and unsophisticated, let me put the passage in Matthew I referred to earlier, where Jesus says, “You build the tombs of the prophets…, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets' blood’” (Matthew 23:29–30). Here Christ is denouncing the mimetic repetition of the past—the mimetic mechanism by which sons imagine they are better than their fathers, imagine that they do not traffic in violence. The same mechanism still operates today. It must be true that the Jews built false tombs for the prophets. This passage couldn't have been added to the Gospels. It couldn't have been invented by Matthew. Its psychological power is extraordinary! A naïve person couldn't possibly have said such a thing. Neither Myshkin nor Stavrogin could have said such a thing. MSB: In contrast to the dominant perspective in philosophy and the human sciences today, could your method fairly be characterized as “rational realism”? RG: Perhaps, but I have no certainty on the level of method and I have no philosophy. In a way, I don't understand the imperatives, the prohibitions of philosophy—for example, the rejection of reality we see today. Or, rather, I do understand them, but wanting to jettison emotion and personal involvement I find incomprehensible. ~ Ren Girard,
1370:For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.

What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner. ~ John Holt,
1371:Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate. ~ John Maynard Smith,
1372:So, let's get back to why the roots are the most important part of a tree. Conceivably, this is where the tree equivalent of a brain is located. Brain? you ask. Isn't that a bit farfetched? Possibly, but now we know that trees can learn. This means they must store experiences somewhere, and therefore, there must be some kind of a storage mechanism inside the organism. Just where it is, no one knows, but the roots are the part of the tree best suited to the task. The old spruce in Sweden also shows that what grows underground is the most permanent part of the tree-and where else would it store important information over a long period of time? Moreover, current research shows that a tree's delicate root networks is full of surprises.

It is now an accepted fact that the root network is in charge of all chemical activity in the tree. And there's nothing earth shattering about that. Many of our internal processes are also regulated by chemical messengers. Roots absorb substances and bring them into the tree. In the other direction, they deliver the products of photosynthesis to the tree's fungal partners and even route warning signals to neighboring trees. But a brain? For there to be something we would recognize as a brain, neurological processes must be involved, and for these, in addition to chemical messages, you need electrical impulses. And these are precisely what we can measure in the tree, and we've been able to do so since as far back as the nineteenth century. For some years now, a heated controversy has flared up among scientists. Can plants think? Are they intelligent? ~ Peter Wohlleben,
1373: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,
1374:TRANSFORM LOCAL DISCOVERIES INTO GLOBAL IMPROVEMENTS When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge. In other words, when teams or individuals have experiences that create expertise, our goal is to convert that tacit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing) into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else’s expertise through practice. This ensures that when anyone else does similar work, they do so with the cumulative and collective experience of everyone in the organization who has ever done the same work. A remarkable example of turning local knowledge into global knowledge is the US Navy’s Nuclear Power Propulsion Program (also known as “NR” for “Naval Reactors”), which has over 5,700 reactor-years of operation without a single reactor-related casualty or escape of radiation. The NR is known for their intense commitment to scripted procedures and standardized work and the need for incident reports for any departure from procedure or normal operations to accumulate learnings, no matter how minor the failure signal—they constantly update procedures and system designs based on these learnings. The result is that when a new crew sets out to sea on their first deployment, they and their officers benefit from the collective knowledge of 5,700 accident-free reactor-years. Equally impressive is that their own experiences at sea will be added to this collective knowledge, helping future crews safely achieve their own missions. ~ Gene Kim,
1375:Too often, however, these passing modes of relief proved insufficient. Among the all-too-scanty literary documents as yet unearthed, two dialogues on suicide significantly remain, one Egyptian and one Mesopotamian. In each case a member of the privileged classes, with every luxury and sensual gratification open to him, finds his life intolerable. His facile dreams are unsalted by reality. The Egyptian debate between a man and his soul dates from the period following the disintegration of the Pyramid Age, and betrays the desperation of an upper-class person who had lost faith in the ritualistic exaltation of death as the ultimate fulfillment of life, which rationalized the irrationalities of high Egyptian society. But the Mesopotamian dialogue between a rich master and his slave, dating from the first Millenium B.C., is even more significant: for the principal finds that no piling up of wealth, power, or sexual pleasure produces a meaningful life. Another seventh-century B.C. 'Dialogue About Human Misery' expands the theme: the fact that it has been called a Babylonian Ecclesiastes indicates the depth of its pessimism-the bitterness of power unrelieved by love, the emptiness of wealth condemned to enjoy only the goods that money can buy.

If this is what the favored few could expect, in justification of thousands of years of arduous collective effort and sacrifice, it is obvious that the cult of power, from the beginning, was based upon a gross fallacy. Ultimately the end product proved as life-defeating for the master classes as the mechanism itself was for the disinherited and socially dismembered workers and slaves. ~ Lewis Mumford,
1376:Although Jung's concept of a collective unconscious has had an enormous impact on psychology and is now embraced by untold thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists, our current understanding of the universe provides no mechanism for explaining its existence. The interconnectedness of all things predicted by the holographic model, however, does offer an explanation. In a universe in which all things are infinitely interconnected, all consciousnesses are also interconnected. Despite appearances, we are beings without borders. Or as Bohm puts it, "Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. "1 If each of us has access to the unconscious knowledge of the entire human race, why aren't we all walking encyclopedias? Psychologist Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, believes it is because we are only able to tap into information in the implicate order that is directly relevant to our memories. Anderson calls this selective process personal resonance and likens it to the fact that a vibrating tuning fork will resonate with (or set up a vibration in) another tuning fork only if the second tuning fork possesses a similar structure, shape, and size. "Due to personal resonance, relatively few of the almost infinite variety of 'images' in the implicate holographic structure of the universe are available to an individual's personal consciousness, " says Anderson. "Thus, when enlightened persons glimpsed this unitive consciousness centuries ago, they did not write out relativity theory because they were not studying physics in a context similar to that in which Einstein studied physics. ~ Michael Talbot,
1377:Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule? ~ Steven Johnson,
1378:In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology. ~ Slavoj i ek,
1379:Audrey,” Beatrix implored, “do let me sit next to Lord Annandale.” As if it were some coveted privilege.
“If you insist.” Audrey leaped from the settee as if she had been launched by a spring mechanism.
Before Beatrix took her place, she bent to rummage beneath the settee. Dragging out a drowsing gray cat, she settled it on Annandale’s lap. “Here you are. Nothing warms you faster than a cat in your lap. Her name is Lucky. She’ll purr if you pet her.”
The old man regarded it without expression.
And to Christopher’s astonishment, the old man began to stroke the sleek gray fur.
“This cat is missing a leg,” he remarked to Beatrix.
“Yes, I would have named her Nelson, after the one-armed admiral, but she’s female. She belonged to the cheesemaker until her foot was caught in a trap.”
“Why did you name her Lucky?” Annandale asked.
“I hoped it would change her fortunes.”
“And did it?”
“Well, she’s sitting in the lap of an earl, isn’t she?” Beatrix pointed out, and Annandale laughed outright.
He touched the cat’s remaining paw. “She is fortunate to have been able to adapt.”
“She was determined,” Beatrix said. “You should have seen the poor thing, not long after the amputation. She kept trying to walk on the missing leg, or jump down from a chair, and she would stumble and lose her balance. But one day, she woke up and seemed to have accepted the fact that the leg was gone for good. And she became nearly as agile as before.” She added significantly, “The trick was forgetting about what she had lost…and learning to go on with what she had left.”
Annandale gave her a fascinated stare, his lips curving. “What a clever young woman you are. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
1380:Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechanism for elevating the achievements of Muslims to the level of a civilization rivaling that of Europe rendered it all the more irresistible and gained for it universal acceptance throughout the Muslim world. ~ Sherman A Jackson,
1381:...that personality, like consciousness, life, soul is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their sorce. A multiple innumberable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice, 127,
1382:Of all the animals, the psyche of the cat is most compatible to that of woman, and if she were to metamorphose into any species it would certainly be the cat.
The ways of the feline are similar to those of woman: they can be sensitive, sensual and beguiling, but at the same time often wily and devious. Cats possess the attributes of mystery, beauty and elegance, to which most women aspire, and in an attempt to imbue themselves with the same style and grace women have frequently clothed themselves in the skins of cats large and small. Perhaps reflecting a mutual self-awareness, American writer Lillian Jackson Braun wrote that 'Cats never strike a pose that isn't photogenic'. Woman can also be a warm, affectionate kitten, but hell hath no greater fury than when she is scorned or rejecred — then she can turn into a savage, spiteful fighting cat, red in tooth and claw!
Woman the homemaker offers the family cat an opportunity to bond with her in a positive and fulfilling way. 1 his is often a reciprocal relationship, with woman supplying food, warmth and affection and Cat in turn providing a quiet undemanding companionship. Said to sleep away two-thirds of its life, the cat will come to rest on woman's knee. Grooming, cither subconsciously by stroking or as part of the daily routine, will strengthen the bond, while the soft female voice is soothing to the cat's highly sensitive hearing mechanism.
Less euphemistically, cats naturally gravitate towards places where food and warmth are readily available: the kitchen, traditionally seen as the woman's domain. Rudyard Kipling recognised this in 'The Cat that Walked by Itself, in which the wily cat is drawn towards woman's warm, welcoming cave. ~ Unknown,
1383:In the end, the most disastrous consequence of the building of the nuclear pyramid may turn out to be not nuclear weapons themselves or some irretrievable act of extermination that they may bring about. Something even worse may be in store, and should it go far enough, be equally irretrievable: namely, the universal imposition of the megamachine, in a perfected form, as the ultimate instrument of pure 'intelligence,' whereby every other manifestation of human potentialities will be suppressed or completely eliminated. Already the blueprints for that final structure are available: they have even been advertised as man's highest destiny.

Yet happily for mankind the megamachine itself is in trouble, largely because of its early dependence upon the nuclear bomb. for the very concept of wielding absolute power has set a collective trap, so delicately balanced that its mechanism has more than once been on the point of snapping down on its appointed victims, the inhabitants of the planet. Had that happened, the megamachine would have shattered its own structure as well. Over the entire Pentagon of Power, thanks to the technocratic arrogance and automated intelligence of those who have built this citadel, hovers a nuclear Ragnarok, a Twilight of the Gods, long ago predicted in Norse mythology: a world consumed in flames, when all things human and divine would be overcome by the cunning dwarfs and the brutal giants. After the Sixth Dynasty the Pyramid Age in Egypt came to an end in a violent popular uprising, even without any such cosmic disruption. And something less than the Norse nightmare, though no less ominous to the megamachine, may be in store-or is it now perhaps actually taking place? ~ Lewis Mumford,
1384:In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and
prepared, it has something about it which produces hallucination.
One may feel a certain indifference to the death
penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from
saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine
with one’s own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the
shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for
or against. Some admire it, like de Maistre; others execrate
it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion of the law;
it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does not permit
you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most
mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation
point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a
vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is
not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism
constructed of wood, iron and cords.
It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know
not what sombre initiative; one would say that this piece
of carpenter’s work saw, that this machine heard, that this
mechanism understood, that this wood, this iron, and these
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cords were possessed of will. In the frightful meditation
into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears
in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going
on. The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it
devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of
monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre
which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all
the death which it has inflicted. ~ Victor Hugo,
1385:Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.

In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art:. it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are!

When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry. ~ Randall Jarrell,
1386:To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.

Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted. ~ William A Dembski,
1387:In the mid-1990s, at Duke University, Miguel Nicolelis and John Chapin began a behavioral experiment, with the goal of learning to read an animal’s thoughts. They trained a rat to press a bar, electronically attached to a water-releasing mechanism. Each time the rat pressed the bar, the mechanism released a drop of water for the rat to drink. The rat had a small part of its skull removed, and a small group of microelectrodes were attached to its motor cortex. These electrodes recorded the activity of forty-six neurons in the motor cortex involved in planning and programming movements, neurons that normally send instructions down the spinal cord to the muscles. Since the goal of the experiment was to register thoughts, which are complex, the forty-six neurons had to be measured simultaneously. Each time the rat moved the bar, Nicolelis and Chapin recorded the firing of its forty-six motor-programming neurons, and the signals were sent to a small computer. Soon the computer “recognized” the firing pattern for bar pressing. After the rat became used to pressing the bar, Nicolelis and Chapin disconnected the bar from the water release. Now when the rat pressed the bar, no water came. Frustrated, it pressed the bar a number of times, but to no avail. Next the researchers connected the water release to the computer that was connected to the rat’s neurons. In theory, now, each time the rat had the thought “press the bar,” the computer would recognize the neuronal firing pattern and send a signal to the water release to dispense a drop. After a few hours, the rat realized it didn’t have to touch the bar to get water. All it had to do was to imagine its paw pressing the bar, and water would come! Nicolelis and Chapin trained four rats to perform this task. ~ Anonymous,
1388:Strategic Planning Today: A Six-Step Process  The strategic planning process offers incredible benefits if we pursue it correctly. The following six steps constitute one version of the process: mission, objective, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and control.  The first step in the process is to define your mission; as we saw at the beginning of this lecture, this is the core that guides you. Your mission is what you look to in setting your objectives.  The objectives established in the second step are chosen based on some notion of wanting to fulfill your mission. They should be clear, concise, achievable, and in some sense, measurable.  The third step, the environmental scan, is pivotal for most firms, and it is the most involved. Look at both the external and internal environments in which your firm functions. On a personal level, evaluate the external factors that impinge on you with respect to your objectives.  The fourth step is the actual formulation of strategy. Decide what you will actually do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Allocate resources and connect your management decisions with the people who will implement the plan.  The fifth step is implementation of strategy, and here is where many companies fail because they do not follow the military dictum to “supervise and refine.” This means not to simply issue orders and assume that they’ll be carried out.  The sixth step, control, involves developing a control mechanism to evaluate whether or not the plan is working. When the control or monitoring system tells you that something is amiss in your strategy, you can then circle back to your environmental scan to discover whether the relevant environmental factors have changed. ~ Anonymous,
1389:The system can be paralyzed in yet another way. Every feedback system needs a margin of “lag” or error. If we try to make a thermostat absolutely accurate–that is, if we bring the upper and lower limits of temperature very close together in an attempt to hold the temperature at a constant 70 degrees–the whole system will break down. For to the extent that the upper and lower limits coincide, the signals for switching off and switching on will coincide! If 70 degrees is both the lower and upper limit the “go” sign will also be the “stop” sign; “yes” will imply “no” and “no” will imply “yes.” Whereupon the mechanism will start “trembling,” going on and off, on and off, until it shakes itself to pieces. The system is too sensitive and shows symptoms which are startlingly like human anxiety. For when a human being is so self-conscious, so self-controlled that he cannot let go of himself, he dithers or wobbles between opposites. This is precisely what is meant in Zen by going round and round on “the wheel of birth-and-death,” for the Buddhist samsara is the prototype of all vicious circles. We saw that when the furnace responds too closely to the thermostat, it cannot go ahead without also trying to stop, or stop without also trying to go ahead. This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself. It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. Furthermore, the effort to remain always “good” or “happy” is like trying to hold the thermostat to a constant 70 degrees by making the lower limit the same as the upper. ~ Alan W Watts,
1390:Evolution as a process is powerful because of its cumulative nature. Richard Dawkins offers a neat way to think about cumulative selection in his wonderful book The Blind Watchmaker. He invites us to consider a monkey trying to type a single line from Hamlet: “Methinks it is like a weasel.” The odds are pretty low for the monkey to get it right. If the monkey is typing at random and there are 27 letters (counting the space bar as a letter), it has a 1 in 27 chance to get the first letter right, a 1 in 27 for the next letter, and so on. So just to get the first three in a row correct are 1/27 multiplied by 1/27 multiplied by 1/27. That is one chance in 19,683. To get all 28 in the sequence, the odds are around 1 in 10,000 million, million, million, million, million, million. But now suppose that we provide a selection mechanism (i.e., a failure test) that is cumulative. Dawkins set up a computer program to do just this. Its first few attempts at getting the phrase is random, just like a monkey. But then the computer scans the various nonsense phrases to see which is closest, however slightly, to the target phrase. It rejects all the others. It then randomly varies the winning phrase, and then scans the new generation. And so on. The winning phrase after the first generation of running the experiment on the computer was: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P. After ten generations, by honing in on the phrase closest to the target phrase, and rejecting the others, it was: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P. After twenty generations, it looked like this: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL. After thirty generations, the resemblance is visible to the naked eye: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL. By the forty-third generation, the computer got the right phrase. It took only a few moments to get there. ~ Matthew Syed,
1391:From this perspective of cancer as a metabolic disease, insulin and IGF promote the cancer process through a series of steps. First, insulin resistance and elevated levels of insulin trigger an increased uptake of blood sugar (glucose) as fuel for precancerous cells. These cells then begin producing energy through a mechanism known as aerobic glycolysis that is similar to what bacteria do in oxygen-poor environments. (This phenomenon is known as the Warburg effect and was discovered in the 1920s by the German biochemist and later Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg, although its importance in the cancer process was not embraced until recently.) Once cancer cells make this conversion, they burn enormous amounts of glucose as fuel, providing them, apparently, with the necessary raw materials to proliferate. By metabolizing glucose at such a rapid rate, as Thompson suggests, these cancer cells generate relatively enormous amounts of compounds known technically as “reactive oxygen species” and less technically as “free radicals,” and these, in turn, have the ability to mutate the DNA in the cell nucleus. The more glucose a cell metabolizes and the faster it does so, the more free radicals are generated to damage DNA, explains Thompson. And the more DNA damage, the more mutations are generated, and the more likely it is that one of those mutations will bestow on the cells the ability to proliferate without being held in check by the cellular processes that work to prevent this pathological process in healthy cells. The result is a feed-forward acceleration of tumor growth. While this is happening, the insulin and IGF in the circulation both work to signal the cell to keep proliferating, and to inhibit the mechanism (technically known as apoptosis, or cell suicide) that would otherwise kick in to shut it down. ~ Gary Taubes,
1392:At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I propose that egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul, I mean that unshakable faith that to a being such as 'we are' other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question mark, without a feeling that it might contain hardness, constraint, or caprice, but rather as something that may be founded in the primordial law of things: if it sought a name for this fact it would say ‘it is justice itself.’ Perhaps it admits under certain circumstances, which, at first, make it hesitate, that there are some who have rights equal to its own; as soon as this matter of rank is settled, it moves among these equals, with their equal privileges, showing the same sureness of modesty and delicate reverence that characterize its relations with itself – in accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism, understood by all stars. It is merely another aspect of its egoism, this refinement and self-limitation in its relations with its equals – every star is such an egoist – it honors itself in them, and in the rights it cedes to them; it does not doubt that the exchange of honors and rights is of the nature of all social relations, and thus also belongs to the natural condition of things.

The noble soul gives as it takes from that passionate and irritable instinct of repayment that lies in its depth. The concept of grace has no meaning or good odor inter pares; there may be a sublime way to let presents from above happen to one, as it were, and to drink them up thirstily, like drops, but for this art and gesture the noble soul has no aptitude. Its egoism hinders it: quite generally it does not like to look 'up,' but either ahead , horizontally and slowly, or down: it knows itself to be at a height. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1393:The advice process: From the start, make sure that all members of the organization can make any decision, as long as they consult with the people affected and the people who have expertise on the matter. If a new hire comes to you to approve a decision, refuse to give him the assent he is looking for. Make it clear that nobody, not even the founder, “approves” a decision in a self-managing organization. That said, if you are meaningfully affected by the decision or if you have expertise on the matter, you can of course share your advice. A conflict resolution mechanism: When there is disagreement between two colleagues, they are likely to send it up to you if you are the founder or CEO. Resist the temptation to settle the matter for them. Instead, it’s time to formulate a conflict resolution mechanism that will help them work their way through the conflict. (You might be involved later on if they can’t sort the issue out one-on-one and if they choose you as a mediator or panel member.) Peer-based evaluation and salary processes: Who will decide on the compensation of a new hire, and based on what process? Unless you consciously think about it, you might do it the traditional way: as a founder, you negotiate and settle with the new recruit on a certain package (and then probably keep it confidential). Why not innovate from the start? Give the potential hire information about other people’s salaries and let them peg their own number, to which the group of colleagues can then react with advice to increase or lower the number. Similarly, it makes sense right from the beginning to choose a peer-based mechanism for the appraisal process if you choose to formalize such a process. Otherwise, people will naturally look to you, the founder, to tell them how they are doing, creating a de facto sense of hierarchy within the team. ~ Frederic Laloux,
1394:As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...]

The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint. ~ Timothy Mitchell,
1395:Pardon Index: the more lawless, capricious, and imperious a regime, the greater its propensity to make use of the pardon power.
A pardon is a wonderful thing, particularly if you're the one being pardoned and particularly if, like the Sakharovs…, you are innocent....
But as politics or justice, the pardon is a fraud. "In all supremacy of power," said a 17th century philosopher, "there is inherent a prerogative to pardon." The reverse is equally true: in all prerogative to pardon, there is inherent the supremacy of power. The logic of the pardon is that justice is a gift to be dispensed by power. It makes of freedom a grant, an indulgence, an act of serendipity. What is meant as a show of humanity is often a mere show of cynicism: a display of arbitrary power (why clemency for A and not B?) for political ends....
In democracies, the pardon should be used as sparingly as possible. It is, after all, an admission of failure. It should be used not for dispensing clemency but for righting obvious miscarriages of justice that are otherwise unremediable (e.g., the 1913 Leo Frank case in Georgia). It might even be used, as was the Nixon pardon, to call an arbitrary halt to a national trauma. But only on these rarest of occasions should it supplant the workings of ordinary justice. Free countries have another mechanism for dealing with that. It is called law.
The pardon is for tyrants. They like to declare pardons on holidays, such as the birthday of the dictator, or Christ, or the Revolution (interchangeable concepts in many of these countries). Dictators should be encouraged to keep it up. And we should be encouraged to remember that the promiscuous dispensation of clemency is not a sign of political liberality. It is instead one of those valuable, identifying marks of tyranny. Like winning an election with a perfect score. ~ Charles Krauthammer,
1396:That realization helped Moesta and his team begin to understand the struggle these potential home buyers faced. “I went in thinking we were in the business of new home construction,” recalls Moesta. “But I realized we were instead in the business of moving lives.” With this understanding of the Job to Be Done, dozens of small, but important, changes were made to the offering. For example, the architect managed to create space in the units for a classic dining room table by reducing the size of the second bedroom by 20 percent. The company also focused on helping buyers with the anxiety of the move itself, which included providing moving services, two years of storage, and a sorting room space on the premises where new owners could take their time making decisions about what to keep and what to discard without the pressure of a looming move. Instead of thirty pages of customized choices, which actually overwhelmed buyers, the company offered three variations of finished units—a move that quickly reduced the “cold feet” contract cancellations from five or six a month to one. And so on. Everything was designed to signal to buyers: we get you. We understand the progress you’re trying to make and the struggle to get there. Understanding the job enabled the company to get to the causal mechanism of why its customers might pull this solution into their lives. It was complex, but not complicated. That, in turn, allowed the housing company to differentiate its offering in ways competitors weren’t likely to copy—or even understand. A jobs perspective changed everything. The company actually raised $ 3,500 (profitably), which included covering the cost of moving and storage. By 2007, when sales in the industry were off by 49 percent and the market all around them was plummeting, the developers had actually grown the business 25 percent. ~ Clayton M Christensen,
1397:Origin of the Logical. Where has logic originated in men’s heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally have been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we! Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality. The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal - an illogical inclination, for there is no thing equal in itself - first created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived; the beings not seeing correctly had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination - to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right - had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity. - The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1398:E. coli is a digestive workhorse in humans and can come in many different “flavors” or variants, one of which can’t naturally digest lactose, a sugar derived from milk. Nothing is a bigger threat—or evolutionary pressure—to bacteria than starvation. So Cairns deprived milk-shunning E. coli of any food except lactose. Much more rapidly than chance should have allowed, bacteria developed mutations that allowed them to lose their lactose intolerance. Just as McClintock maintained about her corn plants, Cairns also reported that bacteria appeared to target specific areas of their genome—areas where mutations were most likely to be advantageous. Cairns concluded that the bacteria were “choosing” which mutations to go after and then passing on their acquired ability to digest lactose to successive generations of bacteria. In a statement that amounted to evolutionary heresy, he wrote that E. coli “can choose which mutation they should produce” and may “have a mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” He straight-out raised the possibility of inherited acquired traits; he basically used those words. It was like shouting, “Go Sox” at Yankee Stadium during the ninth inning of the seventh game of the playoff s—with Boston leading by a run. Since then, researchers have plunged into their petri dishes in attempts to prove, disprove, or just explain Cairns’s work. A year after Cairns’s report came out, Barry Hall, a scientist at the University of Rochester, suggested that the bacteria’s ability to happen upon a lactose-processing adaptation rapidly was caused by a massive increase in the mutation rate. Hall called this “hypermutation”—sort of like mutation on steroids—and, according to him, it helped the bacteria to produce the mutations they needed to survive about 100 million times faster than the mutations otherwise would have been produced. ~ Sharon Moalem,
1399:Unlike any other chromosome, the Y is “unpaired”—i.e., it has no sister chromosome and no duplicate copy, leaving every gene on the chromosome to fend for itself. A mutation in any other chromosome can be repaired by copying the intact gene from the other chromosome. But a Y chromosome gene cannot be fixed, repaired, or recopied from another chromosome; it has no backup or guide (there is, however, a unique internal system to repair genes in the Y chromosome). When the Y chromosome is assailed by mutations, it lacks a mechanism to recover information. The Y is thus pockmarked with the potshots and scars of history. It is the most vulnerable spot in the human genome. As a consequence of this constant genetic bombardment, the human Y chromosome began to jettison information millions of years ago. Genes that were truly valuable for survival were likely shuffled to other parts of the genome where they could be stored securely; genes with limited value were made obsolete, retired, or replaced; only the most essential genes were retained (some of these genes were duplicated in the Y chromosome itself—but even this strategy does not solve the problem completely). As information was lost, the Y chromosome itself shrank—whittled down piece by piece by the mirthless cycle of mutation and gene loss. That the Y chromosome is the smallest of all chromosomes is not a coincidence: it is largely a victim of planned obsolescence (in 2014, scientists discovered that a few extremely important genes may be permanently lodged in the Y). In genetic terms, this suggests a peculiar paradox. Sex, one of the most complex of human traits, is unlikely to be encoded by multiple genes. Rather, a single gene, buried rather precariously in the Y chromosome, must be the master regulator of maleness.I Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: we barely made it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
1400:MRI testing again shows what may be the underlying brain mechanism. The amygdalae are two small lobes in the brain associated with fear, arousal, and emotions. When they are active, it is thought to be a sign of vigilance, meaning that the brain is wary and wants more information. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that when subjects looked at photographs of faces—half were white, half were black—MRI scans found high amygdala activity. This was considered to be a normal reaction to unfamiliar faces. When the subjects looked at the photographs a second time the faces were more familiar; only the other-race faces continued to provoke high amygdala activity. This was true for both blacks and whites, suggesting that encounters with people of different races keep the brain at a higher level of watchfulness.
Amygdalae notice race even when a person does not. William A. Cunningham of Ohio State University showed white subjects pictures of faces for only 30 milliseconds—not long enough for the subjects to be conscious of them—but black faces triggered greater amygdala activity than white faces. When he showed faces for a half a second—long enough for people to notice race—he found that black faces prompted greater activity in the pre-frontal areas, a part of the brain associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling conscious behavior. This suggested the subjects were trying to suppress certain feelings about blacks.
Steven Neuberg of Arizona State University attributes instinctive bias to evolution during our hunter-gatherer past. “By nature, people are group-living animals—a strategy that enhances individual survival and leads to what we might call a ‘tribal psychology’, ” he says. “It was adaptive for our ancestors to be attuned to those outside the group who posed threats such as to physical security, health or economic resources. ~ Jared Taylor,
1401:Much, much later. when I am back home and being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will be enabled to see what was going on in my mind immediately after 11 August.

I am still capable of operating mechanically as a soldier in these following days. But operating mechanically as a soldier is now all I am capable of.

Martin says he is worried about me. He says I have the thousand-yard stare'.

Of course, I cannot see this stare. But by now we both have more than an idea what it means.

So, among all the soldiers here, this is nothing to be ashamed of. But as it really does just go with the territory we find ourselves in. it is just as equally not a badge of honour.

Martin is seasoned enough to never even think this. but I know of young men back home, sitting in front of war films and war games, who idolise this condition as some kind of mark of a true warrior. But from where I sit, if indeed I do have this stare, this pathetically naive thinking is a crock of shit. Because only some pathetically naive soul who had never felt this nothingness would say something so fucking dumb.

You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person.
There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.

But when I close my eyes. I see the dead Taliban looking into this blackness. And I see the Afghan soldier's face staring into it, singing gently as he slips into another world. And I see Dave Hicks's face. shaking gently as he tries to stay awake in this one.

With this, I lift myself up, sitting foetal and hugging my knees on my sleeping mat. ~ Jake Wood,
1402:According to the [evolutionist explanation of the instinct of animals], instinct is the expression of the heredity of a species, of an accumulation of analogous experiences down the ages. This is how they explain, for example, the fact that a flock of sheep hastily gathers together around the lambs the moment it perceives the shadow of a bird of prey, or that a kitten while playing already employs all the tricks of a hunter, or that birds know how to build their nests. In fact, it is enough to watch animals to see that their instinct has nothing of an automatism about it. The formation of such a mechanism by a purely cumulative . . . process is highly improbable, to say the least. Instinct is a nonreflective modality of the intelligence; it is determined, not by a series of automatic reflexes, but by the “form”—the qualitative determination—of the species. This form is like a filter through which the universal intelligence is manifested. . . The same is also true for man: his intelligence too is determined by the subtle form of his species. This form, however, includes the reflective faculty, which allows of a singularization of the individual such as does not exist among the animals. Man alone is able to objectivize himself. He can say: “I am this or that.” He alone possesses this two-edged faculty. Man, by virtue of his own central position in the cosmos, is able to transcend his specific norm; he can also betray it, and sink lower; "The corruption of the best is corruption at its worst." A normal animal remains true to the form and genius of its species; if its intelligence is not reflective and objectifying, but in some sort existential, it is nonetheless spontaneous; it is assuredly a form of the universal intelligence even if it is not recognized as such by men who, from prejudice or ignorance, identify intelligence with discursive thought exclusively. ~ Titus Burckhardt,
1403:But how did proteins make physiological reactions possible? Hemoglobin, the oxygen carrier in blood, for instance, performs one of the simplest and yet most vital reactions in physiology. When exposed to high levels of oxygen, hemoglobin binds oxygen. Relocated to a site with low oxygen levels, it willingly releases the bound oxygen. This property allows hemoglobin to shuttle oxygen from the lung to the heart and the brain. But what feature of hemoglobin allows it to act as such an effective molecular shuttle? The answer lies in the structure of the molecule. Hemoglobin A, the most intensively studied version of the molecule, is shaped like a four-leaf clover. Two of its “leaves” are formed by a protein called alpha-globin; the other two are created by a related protein, beta-globin.II Each of these leaves clasps, at its center, an iron-containing chemical named heme that can bind oxygen—a reaction distantly akin to a controlled form of rusting. Once all the oxygen molecules have been loaded onto heme, the four leaves of hemoglobin tighten around the oxygen like a saddle clasp. When unloading oxygen, the same saddle-clasp mechanism loosens. The unbinding of one molecule of oxygen coordinately relaxes all the other clasps, like the crucial pin-piece pulled out from a child’s puzzle. The four leaves of the clover now twist open, and hemoglobin yields its cargo of oxygen. The controlled binding and unbinding of iron and oxygen—the cyclical rusting and unrusting of blood—allows effective oxygen delivery into tissues. Hemoglobin allows blood to carry seventyfold more oxygen than what could be dissolved in liquid blood alone. The body plans of vertebrates depend on this property: if hemoglobin’s capacity to deliver oxygen to distant sites was disrupted, our bodies would be forced to be small and cold. We might wake up and find ourselves transformed into insects. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,
1404:Try not to breathe,” I tell Lira. “It might get stuck halfway out.”
Lira flicks up her hood. “You should try not to talk then,” she retorts. “Nobody wants your words being preserved for eternity.”
“They’re pearls of wisdom, actually.”
I can barely see Lira’s eyes under the mass of dark fur from her coat, but the mirthless curl of her smile is ever-present. It lingers in calculated amusement as she considers what to say next. Readies to ricochet the next blow.
Lira pulls a line of ice from her hair, artfully indifferent. “If that is what pearls are worth these days, I’ll make sure to invest in diamonds.”
“Or gold,” I tell her smugly. “I hear it’s worth its weight.”
Kye shakes the snow from his sword and scoffs. “Anytime you two want to stop making me feel nauseated, go right ahead.”
“Are you jealous because I’m not flirting with you?” Madrid asks him, warming her finger on the trigger mechanism of her gun.
“I don’t need you to flirt with me,” he says. “I already know you find me irresistible.”
Madrid reholsters her gun. “It’s actually quite easy to resist you when you’re dressed like that.”
Kye looks down at the sleek red coat fitted snugly to his lithe frame. The fur collar cuddles against his jaw and obscures the bottoms of his ears, making it seem as though he has no neck at all. He throws Madrid a smile.
“Is it because you think I look sexier wearing nothing?”
Torik lets out a withering sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose. I’m not sure whether it’s from the hours we’ve gone without food or his inability to wear cutoffs in the biting cold, but his patience seems to be wearing thin.
“I could swear that I’m on a life-and-death mission with a bunch of lusty kids,” he says. “Next thing I know, the lot of you will be writing love notes in rum bottles.”
“Okay,” Madrid says. “Now I feel nauseated.”
I laugh. ~ Alexandra Christo,
1405:These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence? ~ James Hollis,
1406:On the other hand, the moral law, although it gives no such prospect, does provide a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and this fact points to a pure intelligible world―indeed, it defines it positively and enable us to know something of it, namely a law.

This law gives to the sensible world, as sensuous nature (as this concerns rational beings), the form of an intelligible world, i.e., the form of supersensuous nature, without interfering with the mechanism of the former. Nature, in the widest sense of the word, is the existence of things under laws. The sensuous nature of rational beings in general is their existence under empirically conditioned laws, and therefore it is, from the point of view of reason, heteronomy. The supersensuous nature of the same beings, on the other hand, is their existence according to laws which are independent of all empirical conditions and which therefore belong to the autonomy of pure reason. And since the laws, according to which the existence of things depends on cognition, are practical, supersensuous nature, so far as we can form a concept of it, is nothing else than nature under the autonomy of the pure practical reason. The law of this autonomy is the moral law, and it, therefore, is the fundamental law of supersensuous nature and of a pure world of the understanding, whose counterpart must exist in the world of sense without interfering with the laws of the latter. The former could be called the archetypal world (*natura archetypa*) which we know only by reason; the latter, on the other hand, could be called the ectypal world (*natura ectypa*), because it contains the possible effect of the idea of the former as the determining ground of the will."

―from Critique of Practical Reason . Translated, with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck, p. 44. ~ Immanuel Kant,
1407:The science of Raja-Yoga, in the first place, proposes to give us such a means of observing the internal states. The instrument is the mind itself. The power of attention, when properly guided, and directed towards the internal world, will analyse the mind, and illumine facts for us. The powers of the mind are like rays of light dissipated; when they are concentrated, they illumine. This is our only means of knowledge. Everyone is using it, both in the external and the internal world; but, for the psychologist, the same minute observation has to be directed to the internal world, which the scientific man directs to the external; and this requires a great deal of practice. From our childhood upwards we have been taught only to pay attention to things external, but never to things internal; hence most of us have nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism. To turn the mind as it were, inside, stop it from going outside, and then to concentrate all its powers, and throw them upon the mind itself, in order that it may know its own nature, analyse itself, is very hard work. Yet that is the only way to anything which will be a scientific approach to the subject. What is the use of such knowledge? In the first place, knowledge itself is the highest reward of knowledge, and secondly, there is also utility in it. It will take away all our misery. When by analysing his own mind, man comes face to face, as it were, with something which is never destroyed, something which is, by its own nature, eternally pure and perfect, he will no more be miserable, no more unhappy. All misery comes from fear, from unsatisfied desire. Man will find that he never dies, and then he will have no more fear of death. When he knows that he is perfect, he will have no more vain desires, and both these causes being absent, there will be no more misery — there will be perfect bliss, even while in this body. There ~ Swami Vivekananda,
1408:Our anger is the energy that gives us strength. The Incredible Hulk becomes the huge, powerful hulk when he needs the energy and power to take care of others. Our sadness is an energy we discharge in order to heal. As we discharge the energy over the losses relating to our basic needs, we can integrate the shock of those losses and adapt to reality. Sadness is painful. We try to avoid it. Discharging sadness releases the energy involved in our emotional pain. To hold it in is to freeze the pain within us. The therapeutic slogan is that grieving is the “healing feeling.” Fear releases an energy that warns us of danger to our basic needs. Fear is an energy leading to our discernment and wisdom. Guilt is our morality shame and guards our conscience. It tells us we have transgressed our values. It moves us to take action and change. Shame warns us not to try to be more or less than human. Shame signals our essential limitations. Shame limits our desire for pleasure and our interest and curiosity. We could not really be free without our shame. There is an anonymous saying, “Of all the masks of freedom, discipline (limits) is the hardest to understand.” We cannot be truly free without having limits. Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well. Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we’ve become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together. ~ John Bradshaw,
1409:To be honest? I'd thought myself above them. What a nasty little counter-culture snob I was. There they were, doing their fucking best, trying to have a life, trying to bring up their children decently, struggling to make the payments on the little house, wondering where their youth had gone, where love had gone, what was to become of them and all I could do was be a snotty, judgmental cow. But it was no good. I couldn't be like them. I'd seen too much, done too much that was outside anything they knew. I wasn't better than them, but I was different. We had no point of contact other than work. Even then, they disapproved of my attitude, my ways of dealing with the clients. Many's the time I'd ground my teeth as Andrea or Fran had taken the piss out of some hapless, useless, illiterate get they were assigned to; being funny at the expense of their stupidity, their complete inability to deal with straight society. Sure, I knew it was partly a defence mechanism; they did it because it was laugh or scream, and we were always told it wasn't good to let the clients get too close. But all too often - not always, but enough times to make me seethe with irritation - there was an ingrained, self-serving elitism in there too. Who'd see it better than me? They sealed themselves up in their white-collar world like chrysalides and waited for some kind of reward for being good girls and boys, for playing the game, being a bit of a cut above the messy rest - a reward that didn't exist, would never come and that they would only realise was a lie when it was far too late.
Now I would be one of the Others, the clients, the ones who stood outside in the cold and, shivering, looked in at the lighted windows of reason and middle-class respectability. I would be another colossal fuck-up, another dinner party story. But my sin was all the greater because I'd wilfully defected from the right side to the hopelessly, eternally wrong side. I was not only a screw-up, I was a traitor. ~ Joolz Denby,
1410:Because Aristotle’s was the accepted lens on the universe, centuries of medieval scientists and thinkers went to great lengths to make epicycles work. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century, with one simple but profound observation, that Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus reframed our view of the universe. The planets revolved not around the earth, but around the sun. Finally, understanding that provided a foundation for some of the most important advances in history and the foundation for modern astronomy and calculus. Of course, it took eighteen centuries for someone like Copernicus to see and articulate the flaws in Aristotle’s logic. And even he died without knowing that the world would accept he was right. Changing a well-established view of the world rarely happens overnight—and even when it happens, it still takes time to refine and perfect the right new perspective. In the world of innovation, many companies are stuck in a world of creating “epicycles”: elaborate approximations, estimations, and extrapolations. Because we gather, fine-tune, and cross-reference all manner of data, it seems like we should be getting better and better at predicting success. But if we fail to understand why customers make the choices they make, we’re just getting better and better at a fundamentally flawed process. Without the right understanding of the causal mechanism at the center of the innovation universe, companies are trying to make sense of the universe revolving around the earth. They’re forced to rely on an array of borrowed best practices, probabilistic tools, and tips and tricks that have worked for other companies, but which can’t guarantee success. As you look at innovation through the lenses of the Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Job to Be Done. It may seem like a small distinction—just a few minutes of arc—but it matters a great deal. In fact, it changes everything. ~ Clayton M Christensen,
1411:The boy was gripping a lantern in his right hand. Perhaps he had taken it from the butler’s office. He might have looked awkward, but he moved like a cat. Cristian didn’t even sense him approach.
The boy raised the lantern high above his head. Cristian fumbled with the lock on the door, his shaking left hand trying to work the mechanism while his right arm held the dagger to Flora’s throat.
The boy took a step.
Then another.
He was almost within reach.
The door swung open. Cristian started to turn.
“Now!” Cass screamed.
The boy slammed the lantern hard against Cristian’s skull, and Cass heard the same crunching sound she’d heard when she’d hit him with the fireplace poker. He slumped to the ground, unconscious. The dagger fell to the floor with a clatter. Flora landed on her hands and knees, shaking and sobbing.
Luca thundered down the servants’ stairs, skidding to a stop as he witnessed the chaos. Bortolo and Narissa were right behind him. “Cass, what happened?” Luca asked.
The servants were weeping. The boy who had knocked out Cristian looked a bit dazed himself. The lantern hung limply from his right hand.
“He saved us.” Cass gestured at the boy.
Luca only then recognized the crumpled form on the floor. “Cristian,” he said. Turning to Narissa, he added, “Send for the Town Guard immediately.”
Narissa hurried toward the front of the house. Cristian groaned, his eyelids fluttering. Flora stumbled back from him, one hand clutching her throat.
Luca placed the sole of his boot on Cristian’s neck. “Someone get some rope,” he barked. Turning to the sandy-haired boy, he asked, “Who are you?”
“Matteo Querini.” The boy set the lantern on the kitchen counter and frowned at Cristian. “Where I come from, a man does not hold a blade to a lady’s throat.” He turned to Cass. “Signorina Caravello, I presume? I’m here to assume control of the estate. Sorry. I was a bit delayed in my arrival.”
“On the contrary.” Cass dipped into a shallow curtsy. “I’d say you arrived just in time. ~ Fiona Paul,
1412:The psychological significance of the doctrine of predestination is a twofold one. It expresses and enhances the feeling of individual powerlessness and insignificance. No doctrine could express more strongly than this the worthlessness of human will and effort. The decision over man's fate is taken completely out of his own hands and there is nothing man can do to change this decision. He is a powerless tool in God's hands. The other meaning of this doctrine, like that of Luther's, consists in its function to silence the irrational doubt which was the same in Calvin and his followers as in Luther. At first glance the doctrine of predestination seems to enhance the doubt rather than silence it. Must not the individual be torn by even more torturing doubts than before to learn that he was predestined either to eternal damnation or to salvation before he was born? How can he ever be sure what his lot will be? Although Calvin did not teach that there was any concrete proof of such certainty, he and his followers actually had the conviction that they belonged to the chosen ones. They got this conviction by the same mechanism of self-humiliation which we have analyzed with regard to Luther's doctrine. Having such conviction, the doctrine of predestination implied utmost certainty; one could not do anything which would endanger the state of salvation, since one's salvation did not depend on one's own actions but was decided upon before one was ever born. Again, as with Luther, the fundamental doubt resulted in the quest for absolute certainty, but though the doctrine of predestination gave such certainty, the doubt remained in the background and had to be silenced again and again by an ever-growing fanatic belief that the religious community to which one belonged represented that part of mankind which had been chosen by God. ~ Erich Fromm,
1413:People say things move more slowly in situations like this, and they’re right. My mind watched the action in the microseconds that followed as if it were watching a movie in slow motion. The instant I saw the pilot chute, my arms flew to my sides and I straightened my body into a head dive, bending ever so slightly at the hips. The verticality gave me increased speed, and the bend allowed my body to add first a little, then a blast of horizontal motion as my body became an efficient wing, sending me zipping past Chuck just in front of his colorful blossoming Para-Commander parachute. I passed him going at over 150 miles per hour, or 220 feet per second. Given that speed, I doubt he saw the expression on my face. But if he had, he would have seen a look of sheer astonishment. Somehow I had reacted in microseconds to a situation that, had I actually had time to think about it, would have been much too complex for me to deal with. And yet . . . I had dealt with it, and we both landed safely. It was as if, presented with a situation that required more than its usual ability to respond, my brain had become, for a moment, superpowered. How had I done it? Over the course of my twenty-plus-year career in academic neurosurgery—of studying the brain, observing how it works, and operating on it—I have had plenty of opportunities to ponder this very question. I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess. I realize now that the real answer to that question is much more profound. But I had to go through a complete metamorphosis of my life and worldview to glimpse that answer. This book is about the events that changed my mind on the matter. They convinced me that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain is, it was not my brain that saved my life that day at all. What sprang into action the second Chuck’s chute started to open was another, much deeper part of me. A part that could move so fast because it was not stuck in time at all, the way the brain and body are. ~ Eben Alexander,
1414:Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What ~ Ted Chiang,
1415:For an immeasurable period of time, hours, days, weeks, it seemed, Celia had been struggling against tides of anguish, sinking deeper and deeper into a dreadful sea, whose waves broke at ever shorter intervals until at last there was no respite, but an endless torment that drowned and broke and shattered her to nothing. There was no longer any such person as Celia Bryant in the living world. All that remained was an anonymous hulk, a bleeding rag of flesh in a universe of pain. Her brain had long ago ceased to function. Only somewhere, at the centre of torture, an inexorable core of consciousness persisted.

Hours ago, years ago, she had thought: 'This is too much. No one could bear such agony and go on living.' It seemed that something in her must break; that she must either die or fall into oblivion. Yet somehow she had gone on bearing everything. She had not died. She had not lost consciousness. All that she had lost was the sense of her personal integrity. As a human being she was obliterated; her mind was dispersed. she could not any longer envisage an end of torment. 'Not only not to hope:not even to wait. Just to endure.'

At last, in some region utterly remote, a new thing came into being, words were spoken, and strangely, incredibly, the words had significance. That which had once been Celia could not grasp their meaning because somewhere else a woman's voice was crying out lamentably. Nevertheless, she heard a man speaking, and with a new searing pain there pierced her also a thin shaft of hope, the first premonitory pang of deliverance.

Thereafter she seemed to fall into a black and quiet place, a dark hole of oblivion, where she lay as at the bottom of a deep well. Slowly, painfully, the disintegrated fragments of her being reassembled themselves. By long and difficult stages she returned to some sort of normality. Her brain, her senses, all the strained mechanism of her body and mind, reluctantly began to function once more. The miracle for which she no longer hoped had actually come to pass: there was an end of pain. ~ Anna Kavan,
1416:When one looks at the numbers, the situation becomes even more perplexing. The effect of lambda grows steadily with respect to the familiar Newtonian force of gravity as the Universe gets bigger. If it is only recently becoming the dominant force, after billions of years of expansion of the Universe, it must have started out enormously smaller than the Newtonian force. The distance of that final minimum energy level in Figure 8.14 from the zero line in order to explain the value of lambda inferred from the supernova observations is bizarre: roughly 10^-120 - that is, 1 divided by 10 followed by 119 zeros! This is the smallest number ever encountered in science. Why is it not zero? How can the minimum level be tuned so precisely? If it were 10 followed by just 117 zeros, then the galaxies could not form. Extraordinary fine tuning is needed to explain such extreme numbers. Extraordinary fine tuning is needed to explain such extreme numbers. And, if this were not bad enough, the vacuum seems to have its own defence mechanism to prevent us finding easy answers to this problem. Even if inflation does have some magical property which we have so far missed that would set the vacuum energy exactly to zero when inflation ends, it would not stay like that. As the Universe keeps on expanding and cooling it passes through several temperatures at which the breaking of a symmetry occurs in a potential landscape, rather like that which occurs in the example of the magnet that we saw at the beginning of the chapter. Every time this happens, a new contribution to the vaccum energy is liberated and contributes to a new lambda term that is always vastly bigger than our observation allows. And, by 'vastly bigger' here, we don't just mean that it is a few times bigger than the value inferred from observations, so that in the future some small correction to the calculations, or change in the trend of the observations, might make theory and observation fit hand in glove. We are talking about an overestimate by a factor of about 10 followed by 120 zeros! You can't get much more wrong than that. ~ John D Barrow,
1417:Shaking, I pushed at him and managed to turn my head long enough to gasp, “I can’t. No. That’s enough, Jack.”
He stopped at once. But he kept me against him, his chest moving hard and fast.
I couldn’t look at him. My voice was hoarse as I said, “That shouldn’t have happened.”
“I’ve wanted this since the first second I saw you.” His arms tightened, and he bent over me until his mouth was close to my ear. Gently he whispered, “You did, too.”
“I didn’t. I don’t.”
“You need some fun, Ella.”
I let out an incredulous laugh. “Believe me, I don’t need fun, I need—” I broke off with a gasp as he pressed my hips closer to his. The feel of him was more than my dazzled senses could handle. To my mortification, I hitched up against him before I could stop myself, heat and instinct winning out over sanity.
Feeling the reflexive response, Jack smiled against my scarlet cheek. “You should take me on. I’d be good for you.”
“You are so full of yourself . . . and you would not be good for me, with your steaks and power tools and your attention-deficit libido, and . . . I’ll bet you’re a card-carrying member of the NRA. Admit it, you are.” I couldn’t seem to shut up. I was talking too much, breathing too fast, jittering like a wind-up toy that had been wound to the limits of its mechanism.
Jack nuzzled into a sensitive place behind my ear. “Why does that matter?”
“Is that a yes? It must be. God. It matters because— stop that. It matters because I would only go to bed with a man who respected me and my views. My—” I broke off with an inarticulate sound as he nibbled lightly at my skin.
“I respect you,” he murmured. “And your views. I think of you as an equal. I respect your brains, and all those big words you like to use. But I also want to rip your clothes off and have sex with you until you scream and cry and see God.” His mouth dragged gently along my throat. I jerked helplessly, muscles jolting with pleasure, and his hands gripped my hips, keeping me in place. “I’m gonna show you a good time, Ella. Starting with some take-no-prisoners sex. The kind when you can’t remember your own name after. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
1418:Let the center be your home: To be centered is considered desirable; when they feel distracted or scattered, people often say, “I lost my center.” But if there is no person inside your head, if the ego’s sense of I, me, mine is illusory, where’s the center? Paradoxically, the center is everywhere. It is the open space that has no boundaries. Instead of thinking of your center as a defined spot—the way people point to their hearts as the seat of the soul—be at the center of experience. Experience isn’t a place; it’s a focus of attention. You can live there, at the still point around which everything revolves. To be off center is to lose focus, to look away from experience or block it out. To be centered is like saying “I want to find my home in creation.” You relax into the rhythm of your own life, which sets the stage for meeting yourself at a deeper level. You can’t summon the silent witness, but you can place yourself close to it by refusing to get lost in your own creation. When I find myself being overshadowed by anything, I can fall back on a few simple steps: • I say to myself, “This situation may be shaking me, but I am more than any situation.” • I take a deep breath and focus my attention on whatever my body is feeling. • I step back and see myself as another person would see me (preferably the person whom I am resisting or reacting to). • I realize that my emotions are not reliable guides to what is permanent and real. They are momentary reactions, and most likely they are born of habit. • If I am about to burst out with uncontrollable reactions, I walk away. As you can see, I don’t try to feel better, to be more positive, to come from love, or to change the state I’m in. We are all framed by personalities and driven by egos. Ego personalities are trained by habit and by the past; they run along like self-propelled engines. If you can observe the mechanism at work without getting wrapped up in it, you will find that you possess a second perspective, one that is always calm, alert, detached, tuned in but not overshadowed. That second place is your center. It isn’t a place at all but a close encounter with the silent witness. ~ Deepak Chopra,
1419:-jeez, these guys, with their on-again, off-again rela­tionships, lutgen said;
-Yeah, Dave said: now you see them, now you see them once more;
-They're virtual insects!, Jurgen said;
-Virtually innumerable, said Dave;
-I wonder, though, if we haven't got it wrong, Jurgen said: I mean, I wonder if maybe these guys' natural condition isn't to be lit up-if their ground state isn't actually when they're glowing;
-Hm, said Dave: so what they're actually doing is turning off their lights­
-Right: momentarily going under;
-Flashing darkness­
-Projecting their inner voids­
-Their repeating, periodic depressions ...
-So then, I suppose, we should really call them douse bugs---;.
-Exactly...
-Or nature's faders---;.
-Flying extinguishers­
-Buzzing snuffers-!
-Or maybe­
-Or maybe, despite what it looks like, maybe they really are glowing constantly, Jurgen said: but, through some malign unknown mechanism, their everlasting light is peri­odically swallowed up by un-understood atmospheric forces;
-So then they're being occluded­
-Rudely occluded­
-Denied their God-given right to shine ...
-So that, I suppose, would make them-o horror-victims­
-Yeah: victims of predatory darkness­
-Of uncontrollable flares of night;
-So it isn't bioluminescence, but eco-eclipsis­
-Exactly: ambient effacement­
-Nature's station-identification­
-Ongoing lessons in humility ...
-In fact, that might explain the nits' efficiency factor, Jurgen Said: you know, these guys burn so cleanly that they produce what's known in the trade as cold light they put together this real slow oxidation reaction within these little cell-structures called photocytes, using a really weird enzyme and substrate that're, like, named for the devil; and the result is virtually 100% efficient: almost no heat is lost at all...
-So, in fact, these folks should be our heroes­
-Exactly: our role models­
-Our ego ideals---;.
-Hosts of syndicated talk shows­
-Spokes-things for massive advertising campaigns---;.
-In fact, children should be forced to leave their families and go be raised by them­-MacArthur winners, all... ~ Evan Dara,
1420:There is some quite trivial, distant noise; a sound, moreover, which has nothin to do with me, to which there is not the slightest need for me to pay any attention; yet it suffices to wake me, and in no gentle way, either, but savagely, violently, shockingly, like an air raid alarm. The wheels, my masters, are already vibrating with incipient motion; the whole mechanism is preparing to begin the monotonous, hateful functioning of which I am the dispirited slave.

I began to feel that if I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should suddenly become mad, scream, perpetrate some shocking act of violence in the open street. But worst of all was the knowledge that the laws of my temperament would forbid me even a relief of this kind. I was inexorably imprisoned behind my own determination to display no emotion whatever.

Now I saw that I was in a street which I did not know very well. Night had fallen, the lights glowed mistily through a thin haze.

It was as though, in some mysterious way, I had become the central point around which the night scene revolved. People walking on the pavement looked at me as they passed. Some with pity, some with detached interest, some with more morbid curiosity. Some appeared to make small, concealed sights, but whether these were intended for warning or encouragement I could not be sure. The windows lighted or unlighted, were like eyes more or less piercing, but all focused upon me. The houses, the traffic, everything in sight, seemed to be watching to see what I would do.

To wait — with no living soul in whom to confide one's doubt, one's fears, one's relentless hope. Some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.

Coiling itself round me it knows I cannot escape. Imprisoned in its very fabric, I am like a small worm, a parasite, which the host harbors not altogether unwillingly.

A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point. When this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure. No matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. ~ Anna Kavan,
1421:Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool. ~ Al Gore,
1422:Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave.

Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death.

Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light.

There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace. ~ Jeff Long,
1423:Haya', in Arabic, conveys the meaning of shame, though the root word of haya ’ is closely associated with life and living. The Prophet stated, “Every religion has a quality that is characteristic of that religion. And the characteristic of my religion is haya, an internal sense of shame, which includes bashfulness and modesty.

Most adults alive today have heard it said when they were children, “Shame on you!” Unfortunately, shame has come to be viewed as a negative word, as if it were a pejorative. Parents are now advised never to “shame a child,” never correct a child’s behavior by causing an emotional response. Instead, the current wisdom suggests that people always make the child feel good regardless of his or her behavior. Eventually, what this does is disable
naturally occurring deterrents to misbehavior.

Some anthropologists divide cultures into shame and guilt cultures. They say that guilt is an inward
mechanism and shame an outward one. With regard to this discussion, guilt alludes to a human mechanism that produces strong feelings of remorse when someone has done something wrong, to the point that he or she needs to rectify the matter.

Most primitive cultures are not guilt-based, but shame-based, which is rooted in the fear of bringing shame upon oneself and the larger family. What Islam does is honor the concept of shame and take it to another level altogether—to a rank in which one feels a sense of shame before God. When a person acknowledges and realizes that God is fully aware of all that one does, says, or thinks, shame is elevated to a higher plane, to the unseen world
from which there is no cover. In fact, one feels a sense of shame even before the angels. So while Muslims comprise a shame-based culture, this notion transcends shame before one’s family—whether one’s elders or parents— and
admits a mechanism that is not subject to the changing norms of human cultures. It is associated with the knowledge and active awareness that God is all-seeing of what one does—a reality that is permanent. The nurturing of this realization deters one from engaging in acts that are displeasing and vulgar. This is the essence of the noble prophetic teachings. ~ Hamza Yusuf,
1424:Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of old structures after the 2008 crisis. New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past ten years, which the media has dubbed the ‘sharing economy’. Buzzterms such as the ‘commons’ and ‘peer-production’ are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this means for capitalism itself. I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a massive change in what governments do. This must in turn be driven by a change in our thinking about technology, ownership and work itself. When we create the elements of the new system we should be able to say to ourselves and others: this is no longer my survival mechanism, my bolt-hole from the neoliberal world, this is a new way of living in the process of formation. In the old socialist project, the state takes over the market, runs it in favour of the poor instead of the rich, then moves key areas of production out of the market and into a planned economy. The one time it was tried, in Russia after 1917, it didn’t work. Whether it could have worked is a good question, but a dead one. Today the terrain of capitalism has changed: it is global, fragmentary, geared to small-scale choices, temporary work and multiple skill-sets. Consumption has become a form of self-expression – and millions of people have a stake in the finance system that they did not have before. With the new terrain, the old path is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that work only when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework, and the postcapitalist sector might coexist with the market sector for decades. But it is happening." (from "PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future" by Paul Mason) ~ Paul Mason,
1425:At noon one day Will Hamilton came roaring and bumping up the road in a new Ford. The engine raced in its low gear, and the high top swayed like a storm-driven ship. The brass radiator and the Prestolite tank on the running board were blinding with brass polish. Will pulled up the brake lever, turned the switch straight down, and sat back in the leather seat. The car backfired several times without ignition because it was overheated. “Here she is!” Will called with a false enthusiasm. He hated Fords with a deadly hatred, but they were daily building his fortune. Adam and Lee hung over the exposed insides of the car while Will Hamilton, puffing under the burden of his new fat, explained the workings of a mechanism he did not understand himself. It is hard now to imagine the difficulty of learning to start, drive, and maintain an automobile. Not only was the whole process complicated, but one had to start from scratch. Today’s children breathe in the theory, habits, and idiosyncracies of the internal combustion engine in their cradles, but then you started with the blank belief that it would not run at all, and sometimes you were right. Also, to start the engine of a modern car you do just two things, turn a key and touch the starter. Everything else is automatic. The process used to be more complicated. It required not only a good memory, a strong arm, an angelic temper, and a blind hope, but also a certain amount of practice of magic, so that a man about to turn the crank of a Model T might be seen to spit on the ground and whisper a spell. Will Hamilton explained the car and went back and explained it again. His customers were wide-eyed, interested as terriers, cooperative, and did not interrupt, but as he began for the third time Will saw that he was getting no place.

“Tell you what!” he said brightly. “You see, this isn’t my line. I wanted you to see her and listen to her before I made delivery. Now, I’ll go back to town and tomorrow I’ll send out this car with an expert, and he’ll tell you more in a few minutes than I could in a week. But I just wanted you to see her.”

Will had forgotten some of his own instructions. He cranked for a while and then borrowed a buggy and a horse from Adam and drove to town, but he promised to have a mechanic out the next day. ~ John Steinbeck,
1426:So,” Marlboro Man began over dinner one night. “How many kids do you want to have?” I almost choked on my medium-rare T-bone, the one he’d grilled for me so expertly with his own two hands.
“Oh my word,” I replied, swallowing hard. I didn’t feel so hungry anymore. “I don’t know…how many kids do you want to have?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Six or so. Maybe seven.”
I felt downright nauseated. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, my body preparing me for the dreaded morning sickness that, I didn’t know at the time, awaited me. Six or seven kids? Righty-oh, Marlboro Man.
Righty…no.
“Ha-ha ha-ha ha. Ha.” I laughed, tossing my long hair over my shoulder and acting like he’d made a big joke. “Yeah, right! Ha-ha. Six kids…can you imagine?” Ha-ha. Ha. Ha.” The laughter was part humor, part nervousness, part terror. We’d never had a serious discussion about children before.
“Why?” He looked a little more serious this time. “How many kids do you think we should have?”
I smeared my mashed potatoes around on my plate and felt my ovaries leap inside my body. This was not a positive development. Stop that! I ordered, silently. Settle down! Go back to sleep!
I blinked and took a swig of the wine Marlboro Man had bought me earlier in the day. “Let’s see…,” I answered, drumming my fingernails on the table. “How ’bout one? Or maybe…one and a half?” I sucked in my stomach--another defensive move in an attempt to deny what I didn’t realize at the time was an inevitable, and jiggly, future.
“One?” he replied. “Aw, that’s not nearly enough of a work crew for me. I’ll need a lot more help than that!” Then he chuckled, standing up to clear our plates as I sat there in a daze, having no idea whether or not he was kidding.
It was the strangest conversation I’d ever had. I felt like the roller coaster had just pulled away from the gate, and the entire amusement park was pitch-black. I had no idea what was in front of me; I was entering a foreign land. My ovaries, on the other hand, were doing backflips, as if they’d been wandering, parched, in a barren wasteland and finally, miraculously, happened upon a roaring waterfall. And that waterfall was about six feet tall, with gray hair and bulging biceps. They never knew they could experience such hope. ~ Ree Drummond,
1427:The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badlyI thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
109
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
- if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels- until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
~ Elizabeth Bishop,
1428:Neo-Darwinism and Mutations

In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the
"Modern Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly
known, Neo-Darwinism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo-
Darwinism added mutations, which are distortions formed
in the genes of living beings due to such external factors
as radiation or replication errors, as the "cause of favorable
variations" in addition to natural mutation.

Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world
is Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living
beings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous
complex organs of these organisms (e.g., ears, eyes,
lungs, and wings) underwent "mutations," that is, genetic
disorders. Yet, there is an outright scientific fact that totally
undermines this theory: Mutations do not cause living
beings to develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful.
The reason for this is very simple: DNA has a very complex
structure, and random effects can only harm it. The
American geneticist B. G. Ranganathan explains this as
follows:

First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly,
most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather
than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random
change in a highly ordered system will be for the
worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake
were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building,
there would be a random change in the framework of
the building which, in all probability, would not be an
improvement.

Not surprisingly, no mutation example, which is useful,
that is, which is observed to develop the genetic code, has
been observed so far. All mutations have proved to be
harmful. It was understood that mutation, which is presented
as an "evolutionary mechanism," is actually a
genetic occurrence that harms living things, and leaves
them disabled. (The most common effect of mutation on
human beings is cancer.) Of course, a destructive mechanism
cannot be an "evolutionary mechanism." Natural
selection, on the other hand, "can do nothing by itself," as
Darwin also accepted. This fact shows us that there is no
"evolutionary mechanism" in nature. Since no evolutionary
mechanism exists, no such any imaginary process called
"evolution" could have taken place. ~ Harun Yahya,
1429:The Case of the Eyeless Fly

The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)? ~ Arthur Koestler,
1430:The simplest type of computational loop occurs when the system, at some stage, arrives back in exactly the same state as it had been in on a previous occasion. With no additional input it would then simply repeat the same computation endlessly. It would not be hard to devise a system that, in principle (though perhaps very inefficiently), would guarantee to get out of loops of this kind whenever they occur (by, say, keeping a list of all the states that it had been in previously, and checking at each stage to see whether that state has occurred before). However, there are many more sophisticated types of 'looping' that are possible. basically, the loop problem is the one that the whole discussion of Chapter 2 (particularly 2.1-2.6) was all about; for a computation that loops is simply one that does not stop. An assertion that some computation actually loops is precisely what we mean by a Pi-1 sentence (cf. 2.10, response to Q10). Now, as part of the discussion of 2.5, we saw that there is no entirely algorithmic way of deciding whether a computation will fail to stop-i.e. whether it will loop. Moreover, we conclude from the discussion above that the procedures that are available to human mathematicians for ascertaining that certain computations do loop-i.e. for ascertaining the truth of Pi1-sentences-lie outside algorithmic action.

Thus we conclude that indeed some kind of 'non-computational intelligence' is needed if we wish to incorporate all humanly possible ways of ascertaining for certain that some computation is indeed looping. It might have been thought that loops could be avoided by having some mechanism that gauges how long a computation has been going on for, and it 'jumps out' if it judges that the computation has indeed been at it for too long and it has no chance of stopping. But this will not do, if we assume that the mechanism whereby it makes such decisions is something computational, for then there must be the cases where the mechanism will fail, either by erroneously coming to the conclusion that some computation is looping when indeed it is not, or else by not coming to any conclusion at all (so that the entire mechanism itself is looping). One way of understanding this comes from the fact that the entire system is something computational, so it will be subject to the loop problem itself, and one cannot be sure that the system as a whole, if it does not come to erroneous conclusions, will not itself loop. ~ Roger Penrose,
1431:Two large trials of antioxidants were set up after Peto’s paper (which rather gives the lie to nutritionists’ claims that vitamins are never studied because they cannot be patented: in fact there have been a great many such trials, although the food supplement industry, estimated by one report to be worth over $50 billion globally, rarely deigns to fund them). One was in Finland, where 30,000 participants at high risk of lung cancer were recruited, and randomised to receive either ß-carotene, vitamin E, or both, or neither. Not only were there more lung cancers among the people receiving the supposedly protective ß-carotene supplements, compared with placebo, but this vitamin group also had more deaths overall, from both lung cancer and heart disease. The results of the other trial were almost worse. It was called the ‘Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial’, or ‘CARET’, in honour of the high p-carotene content of carrots. It’s interesting to note, while we’re here, that carrots were the source of one of the great disinformation coups of World War II, when the Germans couldn’t understand how our pilots could see their planes coming from huge distances, even in the dark. To stop them trying to work out if we’d invented anything clever like radar (which we had), the British instead started an elaborate and entirely made-up nutritionist rumour. Carotenes in carrots, they explained, are transported to the eye and converted to retinal, which is the molecule that detects light in the eye (this is basically true, and is a plausible mechanism, like those we’ve already dealt with): so, went the story, doubtless with much chortling behind their excellent RAF moustaches, we have been feeding our chaps huge plates of carrots, to jolly good effect. Anyway. Two groups of people at high risk of lung cancer were studied: smokers, and people who had been exposed to asbestos at work. Half were given 3-carotene and vitamin A, while the other half got placebo. Eighteen thousand participants were due to be recruited throughout its course, and the intention was that they would be followed up for an average of six years; but in fact the trial was terminated early, because it was considered unethical to continue it. Why? The people having the antioxidant tablets were 46 per cent more likely to die from lung cancer, and 17 per cent more likely to die of any cause,* than the people taking placebo pills. This is not news, hot off the presses: it happened well over a decade ago. ~ Ben Goldacre,
1432:I’m also really sorry that I’ve been so rude to you. I’m not normally. I don’t know where all the sarcasm comes from.”
Ren raised an eyebrow.
“Okay. I have a cynical, evil side that is normally hidden. But when I’m under great stress or extremely desperate, it comes out.”
He set down my foot, picked up the other one, and began massaging it with his thumbs. He didn’t say anything, so I continued, “Being cold-hearted and nasty was the only thing I could do to push you away. It was kind of a dense mechanism.”
“So you admit you were trying to push me away.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“And it’s because you’re a radish.”
Frustrated, I said, “Yes! Now that you’re a man again, you’ll find someone better for you, someone who complements you. It’s not your fault. I mean, you’ve been a tiger so long that you just don’t know how the world works.”
“Right. And how does the world work, Kelsey?”
I could hear the frustration in his voice but pressed on. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but you could be going out with some supermodel-turned-actress. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
Angrily, he shouted, “Oh, yes, indeed I am paying attention! What you are saying is that I should be a stuck-up, rich, shallow, libertine who cares only about wealth, power, and bettering my status. That I should date superficial, fickle, pretentious, brainless women who care more about my connections than they do about me. And that I am not wise enough, or up-to-date enough, to know who I want or what I want in life! Does that sum it up?”
I squeaked out a small, “Yes.
“You truly feel this way?”
I flinched. “Yes.” Ren leaned forward. “Well, you’re wrong, Kelsey. Wrong about yourself and wrong about me!”
He was livid. I shifted uncomfortably while he went on.
“I know what I want. I’m not operating under any delusions. I’ve studied people from a cage for centuries, and that’s given me ample time to figure out my priorities. From the first moment I saw you, the first time I heard your voice, I knew you were different. You were special. The first time you reached your hand into my cage and touched me, you made me feel alive in a way I’ve never felt before.”
“Maybe it’s all just a part of the curse. Did you ever think of that? Maybe these aren’t your true feelings. Maybe you sensed that I was the one to help you, and you’ve somehow misinterpreted your emotions.”
“I highly doubt it. I’ve never felt this way about anyone, even before the curse. ~ Colleen Houck,
1433:Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac. ~ Victor Hugo,
1434:One can readily imagine in what terms a man of today would speak if called upon to make a pronouncement on the only religion ever to have introduced a radical formula of salvation: "The quest for deliverance can be justified only if one believes in the transmigration, in the endless vagrancy of the self, and if one aspires to halt it. But for us who do not believe in it, what are we to halt? This unique and negligible duration? It is obviously not long enough to deserve the effort an escape would require. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare consists in the termination of this one, this nightmare. Give us another one, we would be tempted to clamor, so that our disgraces will not conclude too soon, so that they may, at their leisure, hound us through several lives.

Deliverance answers a necessity only for the person who feels threatened by a surfeit of existence, who fears the burden of dying and redying. For us, condemned not to reincarnate ourselves, what's the use of struggling to set ourselves free from a nonentity? to liberate ourselves from a terror whose end lies in view? Further more, what's the use of pursuing a supreme unreality when everything here-below is already unreal? One simply does not exert oneself to get rid of something so flimsily justified, so precariously grounded.

Each of us, each man unlucky enough not to believe in the eternal cycle of births and deaths, aspires to a superabundance of illusion and torment. We pine for the malediction of being reborn. Buddha took exorbitant pains to achieve what? definitive death - what we, on the contrary, are sure of obtaining without meditations and mortifications, without raising a finger." ...

That's just about how this fallen man would express himself if he consented to lay bare the depths of his thought. Who will dare throw the first stone? Who has not spoken to himself in this way? We are so addicted to our own history that we would like to see it drone on and on, relentlessly. But whether one lives one or a thousand lives, whether one has at one's disposal a single hour or all of time, the problem remains the same: an insect and a god should not differ in their manner of viewing the fact of existence as such, which is so terrifying (as only miracles can be) that, reflecting on it, one understands the will to disappear forever so as not to have to consider it again in other existences. This is what Buddha emphasized, and it seems doubtful he would have altered his conclusion had he ceased to believe in the mechanism of transmigration. ~ Emil M Cioran,
1435:As a special branch of general philosophy, pathogenesis had never been explored. In my opinion it had never been approached in a strictly scientific fashion--that is to say, objectively, amorally, intellectually.

All those who have written on the subject are filled with prejudice. Before searching out and examining the mechanism of causes of disease, they treat of 'disease as such', condemn it as an exceptional and harmful condition, and start out by detailing the thousand and one ways of combating it, disturbing it, destroying it; they define health, for this purpose, as a 'normal' condition that is absolute and immutable.

Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.

Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope.

What convention calls health is, after all, no more than this or that passing aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction, a special case already experienced, recognized, defined, finite, extracted and generalized for everybody's use. Just as a word only finds its way into the Dictionary Of The French Academy when it is well worn stripped of the freshness of its popular origin or of the elegance of its poetic value, often more than fifty years after its creation (the last edition of the learned Dictionary is dated 1878), just as the definition given preserves a word, embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is noble, hypocritical and arbitrary--a pose it never assumed in the days of its vogue, while it was still topical, living and meaningful--so it is that health, recognized as a public Good, is only the sad mimic of some illness which has grown unfashionable, ridiculous and static, a solemnly doddering phenomenon which manages somehow to stand on its feet between the helping hands of its admirers, smiling at them with its false teeth. A commonplace, a physiological cliche, it is a dead thing. And it may be that health is death itself.

Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet. ~ Blaise Cendrars,
1436:Ocean Acidification is sometimes referred to as Global Warming's Equally Evil Twin. The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes... No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean Acidification played a role in at least 2 of the Big Five Extinctions: the End-Permian and the End-Triassic. And quite possibly it was a major factor in a third, the End-Cretaceous. ...Why is ocean acidification so dangerous? The question is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Depending on how tightly organisms are able to regulate their internal chemistry, acidification may affect such basic processes as metabolism, enzyme activity, and protein function. Because it will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis—many plant species are apt to benefit from elevated CO2 levels—and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.

Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. (The term calcifier applies to any organism that builds a shell or external skeleton or, in the case of plants, a kind of internal scaffolding out of the mineral calcium carbonate.)...

Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to organisms that build shells or exoskeletons. Imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive, and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve. This is why the limpets that wander too close to the vents at Castello Aragonese end up with holes in their shells.

According to geologists who work in the area, the vents have been spewing carbon dioxide for at least several hundred years, maybe longer. Any mussel or barnacle or keel worm that can adapt to lower pH in a time frame of centuries presumably already would have done so. “You give them generations on generations to survive in these conditions, and yet they’re not there,” Hall-Spencer observed. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert,
1437:30. Take the same position as heretofore and visualize a Battleship; see the grim monster floating on the surface of the water; there appears to be no life anywhere about; all is silence; you know that by far the largest part of the vessel is under water; out of sight; you know that the ship is as large and as heavy as a twenty-story skyscraper; you know that there are hundreds of men ready to spring to their appointed task instantly; you know that every department is in charge of able, trained, skilled officials who have proven themselves competent to take charge of this marvelous piece of mechanism; you know that although it lies apparently oblivious to everything else, it has eyes which see everything for miles around, and nothing is permitted to escape its watchful vision; you know that while it appears quiet, submissive and innocent, it is prepared to hurl a steel projectile weighing thousands of pounds at an enemy many miles away; this and much more you can bring to mind with comparatively no effort whateveR But how did the battleship come to be where it is; how did it come into existence in the first place? All of this you want to know if you are a careful observer.
   31. Follow the great steel plates through the foundries, see the thousands of men employed in their production; go still further back, and see the ore as it comes from the mine, see it loaded on barges or cars, see it melted and properly treated; go back still further and see the architect and engineers who planned the vessel; let the thought carry you back still further in order to determine why they planned the vessel; you will see that you are now so far back that the vessel is something intangible, it no longer exists, it is now only a thought existing in the brain of the architect; but from where did the order come to plan the vessel? Probably from the Secretary of Defense; but probably this vessel was planned long before the war was thought of, and that Congress had to pass a bill appropriating the money; possibly there was opposition, and speeches for or against the bill. Whom do these Congressmen represent? They represent you and me, so that our line of thought begins with the Battleship and ends with ourselves, and we find in the last analysis that our own thought is responsible for this and many other things, of which we seldom think, and a little further reflection will develop the most important fact of all and that is, if someone had not discovered the law by which this tremendous mass of steel and iron could be made to float upon the water, instead of immediately going to the bottom, the battleship could not have come into existence at all. ~ Charles F Haanel, The Master Key System,
1438:In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present.

More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that na individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.

Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. And George A. Sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of "learned meaninglessness." He himself remembered a therapist who said, "George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act."

One must generalize such a criticism. In principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism. ~ Viktor E Frankl,
1439:Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust. ~ Matt Ridley,
1440:The modern distinction is that the poet appeals to the imagination and not to the intellect. But there are many kinds of imagination; the objective imagination which visualises strongly the outward aspects of life and things; the subjective imagination which visualises strongly the mental and emotional impressions they have the power to start in the mind; the imagination which deals in the play of mental fictions and to which we give the name of poetic fancy; the aesthetic imagination which delights in the beauty of words and images for their own sake and sees no farther. All these have their place in poetry, but they only give the poet his materials, they are only the first instruments in the creation of poetic style. The essential poetic imagination does not stop short with even the most subtle reproductions of things external or internal, with the richest or delicatest play of fancy or with the most beautiful colouring of word or image. It is creative, not of either the actual or the fictitious, but of the more and the most real; it sees the spiritual truth of things, - of this truth too there are many gradations, - which may take either the actual or the ideal for its starting-point. The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.

   This is the true, because the highest and essential aim of poetry; but the human mind arrives at it only by a succession of steps, the first of which seems far enough from its object. It begins by stringing its most obvious and external ideas, feelings and sensations of things on a thread of verse in a sufficient language of no very high quality. But even when it gets to a greater adequacy and effectiveness, it is often no more than a vital, an emotional or an intellectual adequacy and effectiveness. There is a strong vital poetry which powerfully appeals to our sensations and our sense of life, like much of Byron or the less inspired mass of the Elizabethan drama; a strong emotional poetry which stirs our feelings and gives us the sense and active image of the passions; a strong intellectual poetry which satisfies our curiosity about life and its mechanism, or deals with its psychological and other "problems", or shapes for us our thoughts in an effective, striking and often quite resistlessly quotable fashion. All this has its pleasures for the mind and the surface soul in us, and it is certainly quite legitimate to enjoy them and to enjoy them strongly and vividly on our way upward; but if we rest content with these only, we shall never get very high up the hill of the Muses.

   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,
1441:BBQ Grills

There are a number of gas grills which might be obtainable to the market. Grill professionals from different manufactures point out that the grills can either be propane and none propane BBQ grills can be found. Once the necessity to purchase the brand new grill to switch the outdated one, one has to contemplate security components and the mobility of the grill. Gas out of doors grill are ideal for cooking out that saves the consumer an ideal deal on gas vitality giant, future-laden fuel grills have taken over the barbecue backyard what one has to keep in mind is that a better worth doesn’t guarantee performance.

Gasoline grills make the most of propane or natural gasoline as gasoline. They're accessible in various textures and sizes. The commonest type of such a grill is the Cart Grill design mannequin. Infrared grills, however, produce built-in grills infrared warmth to cook dinner meals and are fueled using propane or pure gas. Charcoal bbq grills use charcoal briquettes because the gas supply and it generates high ranges of warmth. Electrical grills are much smaller in dimension and they can be simply placed in the kitchen. They offer nice convenience however are expensive to function compared to the other grill types.

A grill is cooking gear that cooks by directly exposing meals to heat. The floor where the meals is placed is an open rack with a source of warmth beneath it. There are a number of forms of grills relying on the type of warmth source used.A barbeque grill is a grill that uses charcoal or wooden as the heat supply. Food produced from BBQ grills have gotten attribute grill marks made by the racks where they had been resting throughout cooking. BBQ grills are often used to cook dinner poultry meat. However they will also be used to cook dinner other forms of meat in addition to fish.

Manufactures recommendation the grill customers to depart the grill open when u have completed grilling. The fueled propane grill finally ends up burning itself out after the fuel has been used up within the tank. Typically the regulator can develop a leak which may shortly empty the propane bottle. There are significant variations between the grills fueled by pure gases and the ones with propane. Selecting the best grill all is determined by your self upon the uniqueness of the product.one has to take into concern the security points associated to natural gases.

Choosing a good quality barbeque grill could be quite a difficult job. Due to this fact, it is crucial that you understand the advantages and features of the different types of bbq grills. In addition, while making your alternative, you want to consider several features. Test the essential options of the grill including the heat management mechanism, ash cleanup and different points that affect the feel and taste of the food. Guantee that the grill framework accommodates a protecting coating for preventing rust. ~ Greg Bear,
1442:The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker’s more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you.
In short when a Peacemaker’s bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you don’t curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette one-handed then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh.
Another thing about the Peacemaker: because of the very heavy and varying trigger pressure required to operate the semi-automatic mechanism, it can be wildly inaccurate unless held in a strong and steady hand. There was no such hope here. The hand that held the Colt, the hand that lay so lightly yet purposefully on the radio-operator’s table, was the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen. It was literally motionless. I could see the hand very clearly. The light in the radio cabin was very dim, the rheostat of the angled table lamp had been turned down until only a faint pool of yellow fell on the scratched metal of the table, cutting the arm off at the cuff, but the hand was very clear. Rock-steady, the gun could have lain no quieter in the marbled hand of a statue. Beyond the pool of light I could half sense, half see the dark outline of a figure leaning back against the bulkhead, head slightly tilted to one side, the white gleam of unwinking eyes under the peak of a hat. My eyes went back to the hand. The angle of the Colt hadn’t varied by a fraction of a degree. Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety-pins. ~ Alistair MacLean,
1443:he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science. ~ Charles Darwin,
1444:SLEIGHT OF MIND IN ILLUMINATION
Only those forms of illumination which lead to useful behaviour changes deserve to be known as such. When I hear the word "spirituality", I tend to reach for a loaded wand. Most professionally spiritual people are vile and untrustworthy when off duty, simply because their beliefs conflict with basic drives and only manage to distort their natural behaviour temporarily. The demons then come screaming up out of the cellar at unexpected moments.

When selecting objectives for illumination, the magician should choose forms of self improvement which can be precisely specified and measured and which effect changes of behaviour in his entire existence. Invocation is the main tool in illumination, although enchantment where spells are cast upon oneselves and divination to seek objectives for illumination may also find some application.

Evocation can sometimes be used with care, but there is no point in simply creating an entity that is the repository of what one wishes were true for oneself in general. This is a frequent mistake in religion. Forms of worship which create only entities in the subconscious are inferior to more wholehearted worship, which, at its best, is pure invocation. The Jesuits "Imitation of Christ" is more effective than merely praying to Jesus for example.

Illumination proceeds in the same general manner as invocation, except that the magician is striving to effect specific changes to his everyday behaviour, rather than to create enhanced facilities that can be drawn upon for particular purposes. The basic technique remains the same, the required beliefs are identified and then implanted in the subconscious by ritual or other acts. Such acts force the subconscious acquisition of the beliefs they imply.

Modest and realistic objectives are preferable to grandiose schemes in illumination.

One modifies the behaviour and beliefs of others by beginning with only the most trivial demands. The same applies to oneselves. The magician should beware of implanting beliefs whose expression cannot be sustained by the human body or the environment. For example it is possible to implant the belief that flight can be achieved without an aircraft. However it has rarely proved possible to implant this belief deeply enough to ensure that such flights were not of exceedingly short duration. Nevertheless such feats as fire-walking and obliviousness to extreme pain are sometimes achieved by this mechanism.

The sleight of mind which implants belief through ritual action is more powerful than any other weapon that humanity possesses, yet its influence is so pervasive that we seldom notice it. It makes religions, wars, cults and cultures possible. It has killed countless millions and created our personal and social realities. Those who understand how to use it on others can be messiahs or dictators, depending on their degree of personal myopia. Those who understand how to apply it to themselves have a jewel beyond price if they use it wisely; otherwise they tend to rapidly invoke their own Nemesis with it. ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Kaos,
1445:The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way.

The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money.

The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale.

George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy. ~ Mark Blyth,
1446:Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11 ~ Mark R Levin,
1447:But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain.

Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision. ~ E L Doctorow,
1448:During these uninterrupted peregrinations of mine from place to place, and almost continuous and intense reflection about this, I at last formed a preliminary plan in my mind.   Liquidating all my affairs and mobilizing all my material and other possibilities, I began to collect all kinds of written literature and oral information, still surviving among certain Asiatic peoples, about that branch of science, which was highly developed in ancient times and called " Mehkeness ", a name signifying the " taking away-of-responsibility ", and of which contemporary civilisation knows but an insignificant portion under the name of " hypnotism ", while all the literature extant upon the subject was already as familiar to me as my own five fingers.   Collecting all I could, I went to a certain Dervish monastery, situated likewise in Central Asia and where I had already stayed before, and, settling down there, I devoted myself wholly to the study of the material in my possession.   After two years of thorough theoretical study of this branch of science, when it became necessary to verify practically certain indispensable details, not as yet sufficiently elucidated by me in theory, of the mechanism of the functioning of man's subconscious sphere, I began to give myself out to be a " healer " of all kinds of vices and to apply the results of my theoretical studies to them, affording them at the same time, of course, real relief.   This continued to be my exclusive preoccupation and manifestation for four or five years in accordance with the essential oath imposed by my task, which consisted in rendering conscientious aid to sufferers, in never using my knowledge and practical power in that domain of science except for the sake of my investigations, and never for personal or egotistical ends, I not only arrived at unprecedented practical results without equal in our day, but also elucidated almost everything necessary for me.   In a short time, I discovered many details which might contribute to the solution of the same cardinal question, as well as many secondary facts, the existence of which I had scarcely suspected.   At the same time, I also became convinced that the greater number of minor details necessary for the final elucidation of this question must be sought not only in the sphere of man's subconscious mentation, but in various aspects of the manifestations in his state of waking consciousness.   After establishing this definitely, thoughts again began from time to time to " swarm " in my mind, as they had done years ago, sometimes automatically, sometimes directed by my consciousness,—thoughts as to the means of adapting myself now to the conditions of ordinary life about me with a view to elucidating finally and infallibly this question, which obviously had become a lasting and inseparable part of my Being.   This time my reflections, which recurred periodically during the two years of my wanderings on the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, resulted in a decision to make use of my exceptional, for the modern man, knowledge of the so-called " supernatural sciences ", as well as of my skill in producing different " tricks " in the domain of these so-called " sciences ", and to give myself out to be, in these pseudo-scientific domains, a so-called " professor-instructor ". ~ G I Gurdjieff,
1449:Heightened capacity for visual imagery and fantasy “Was able to move imaginary parts in relation to each other.” “It was the non-specific fantasy that triggered the idea.” “The next insight came as an image of an oyster shell, with the mother-of-pearl shining in different colors. I translated that in the idea of an interferometer—two layers separated by a gap equal to the wavelength it is desired to reflect.” “As soon as I began to visualize the problem, one possibility immediately occurred. A few problems with that concept occurred, which seemed to solve themselves rather quickly…. Visualizing the required cross section was instantaneous.” “Somewhere along in here, I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched the circuit flipping through its paces….” “I began visualizing all the properties known to me that a photon possesses and attempted to make a model for a photon…. The photon was comprised of an electron and a positron cloud moving together in an intermeshed synchronized helical orbit…. This model was reduced for visualizing purposes to a black-and-white ball propagating in a screwlike fashion through space. I kept putting the model through all sorts of known tests.” 5. Increased ability to concentrate “Was able to shut out virtually all distracting influences.” “I was easily able to follow a train of thought to a conclusion where normally I would have been distracted many times.” “I was impressed with the intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and exuberance with which I could proceed toward the solution.” “I considered the process of photoconductivity…. I kept asking myself, ‘What is light? and subsequently, ‘What is a photon?’ The latter question I repeated to myself several hundred times till it was being said automatically in synchronism with each breath. I probably never in my life pressured myself as intently with a question as I did this one.” “It is hard to estimate how long this problem might have taken without the psychedelic agent, but it was the type of problem that might never have been solved. It would have taken a great deal of effort and racking of the brains to arrive at what seemed to come more easily during the session.” 6. Heightened empathy with external processes and objects “…the sense of the problem as a living thing that is growing toward its inherent solution.” “First I somehow considered being the needle and being bounced around in the groove.” “I spent a productive period …climbing down on my retina, walking around and thinking about certain problems relating to the mechanism of vision.” “Ability to grasp the problem in its entirety, to ‘dive’ into it without reservations, almost like becoming the problem.” “Awareness of the problem itself rather than the ‘I’ that is trying to solve it.” 7. Heightened empathy with people “It was also felt that group performance was affected in …subtle ways. This may be evidence that some sort of group action was going on all the time.” “Only at intervals did I become aware of the music. Sometimes, when I felt the other guys listening to it, it was a physical feeling of them listening to it.” “Sometimes we even had the feeling of having the same thoughts or ideas.” 8. Subconscious data more accessible “…brought about almost total recall of a course that I had had in thermodynamics; something that I had never given any thought about in years.” “I was in my early teens and wandering through the gardens where I actually grew up. I felt all my prior emotions in relation to my surroundings. ~ James Fadiman,
1450:THE WAND
   THE Magical Will is in its essence twofold, for it presupposes a beginning and an end; to will to be a thing is to admit that you are not that thing.
   Hence to will anything but the supreme thing, is to wander still further from it - any will but that to give up the self to the Beloved is Black Magick - yet this surrender is so simple an act that to our complex minds it is the most difficult of all acts; and hence training is necessary. Further, the Self surrendered must not be less than the All-Self; one must not come before the altar of the Most High with an impure or an imperfect offering. As it is written in Liber LXV, "To await Thee is the end, not the beginning."
   This training may lead through all sorts of complications, varying according to the nature of the student, and hence it may be necessary for him at any moment to will all sorts of things which to others might seem unconnected with the goal. Thus it is not "a priori" obvious why a billiard player should need a file.
   Since, then, we may want "anything," let us see to it that our will is strong enough to obtain anything we want without loss of time.
   It is therefore necessary to develop the will to its highest point, even though the last task but one is the total surrender of this will. Partial surrender of an imperfect will is of no account in Magick.
   The will being a lever, a fulcrum is necessary; this fulcrum is the main aspiration of the student to attain. All wills which are not dependent upon this principal will are so many leakages; they are like fat to the athlete.
   The majority of the people in this world are ataxic; they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have no real will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others. The victim wobbles from one to the other (and it is no less wobbling because the movements may occasionally be very violent) and at the end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been achieved; except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious: the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision. Such an one is torn limb from limb by Choronzon.
   How then is the will to be trained? All these wishes, whims, caprices, inclinations, tendencies, appetites, must be detected, examined, judged by the standard of whether they help or hinder the main purpose, and treated accordingly.
   Vigilance and courage are obviously required. I was about to add self-denial, in deference to conventional speech; but how could I call that self-denial which is merely denial of those things which hamper the self? It is not suicide to kill the germs of malaria in one's blood.
   Now there are very great difficulties to be overcome in the training of the mind. Perhaps the greatest is forgetfulness, which is probably the worst form of what the Buddhists call ignorance. Special practices for training the memory may be of some use as a preliminary for persons whose memory is naturally poor. In any case the Magical Record prescribed for Probationers of the A.'.A.'. is useful and necessary.
   Above all the practices of Liber III must be done again and again, for these practices develop not only vigilance but those inhibiting centres in the brain which are, according to some psychologists, the mainspring of the mechanism by which civilized man has raised himself above the savage.
   So far it has been spoken, as it were, in the negative. Aaron's rod has become a serpent, and swallowed the serpents of the other Magicians; it is now necessary to turn it once more into a rod.
   ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, The Wand,
1451: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,
1452:With the best of intentions, the generation before mine worked diligently to prepare their children to make an intelligent case for Christianity. We were constantly reminded of the superiority of our own worldview and the shortcomings of all others. We learned that as Christians, we alone had access to absolute truth and could win any argument. The appropriate Bible verses were picked out for us, the opposing positions summarized for us, and the best responses articulated for us, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle through two thousand years of theological deliberations and debates but could get right to the bottom line on the important stuff: the deity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the role and interpretation of Scripture, and the fundamentals of Christianity. As a result, many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with the answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore. So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong. In short, we never learned to doubt. Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue. Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them. If I’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot. I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time. We can say, as Tennyson said, Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.15 I sometimes wonder if I might have spent fewer nights in angry, resentful prayer if only I’d known that my little systems — my theology, my presuppositions, my beliefs, even my fundamentals — were but broken lights of a holy, transcendent God. I wish I had known to question them, not him. What my generation is learning the hard way is that faith is not about defending conquered ground but about discovering new territory. Faith isn’t about being right, or settling down, or refusing to change. Faith is a journey, and every generation contributes its own sketches to the map. I’ve got miles and miles to go on this journey, but I think I can see Jesus up ahead. ~ Rachel Held Evans,
1453:We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie. ~ Ed Catmull,
1454:There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations. ~ Francis Fukuyama,
1455:Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other:
"A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy.
Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in.
A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory.
If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception.
Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field.
The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field?
Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God. ~ Lynne McTaggart,
1456:My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without.
Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.
[…] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence. ~ Ren Girard,
1457: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,
1458:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,
1459:A Lyrical Drama, In Four Acts.
Audisne haec amphiarae, sub terram abdite?

ACT I
Scene.A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea andIone are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the Scene, morning slowly breaks.
Prometheus.
Monarch of Gods and Dmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!
The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's wingd hound, polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,
The ghastly people of the realm of dream,
Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind:
While from their loud abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.
And yet to me welcome is day and night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead
The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom
As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.
Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin
Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains,
Whose many-voicd Echoes, through the mist
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell!
Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air,
Through which the Sun walks burning without beams!
And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poisd wings
Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss,
As thunder, louder than your own, made rock
The orbd world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.
First Voice
(from the Mountains).
Thrice three hundred thousand years
O'er the Earthquake's couch we stood:
Oft, as men convulsed with fears,
We trembled in our multitude.
Second Voice
(from the Springs).
Thunderbolts had parched our water,
We had been stained with bitter blood,
And had run mute, 'mid shrieks of slaughter,
Thro' a city and a solitude.
Third Voice
(from the Air).
I had clothed, since Earth uprose,
Its wastes in colours not their own,
And oft had my serene repose
Been cloven by many a rending groan.
Fourth Voice
(from the Whirlwinds).
We had soared beneath these mountains
Unresting ages; nor had thunder,
Nor yon volcano's flaming fountains,
Nor any power above or under
Ever made us mute with wonder.
First Voice.
But never bowed our snowy crest
As at the voice of thine unrest.
Second Voice.
Never such a sound before
To the Indian waves we bore.
A pilot asleep on the howling sea
Leaped up from the deck in agony,
And heard, and cried, 'Ah, woe is me!'
And died as mad as the wild waves be.
Third Voice.
By such dread words from Earth to Heaven
My still realm was never riven:
When its wound was closed, there stood
Darkness o'er the day like blood.
Fourth Voice.
And we shrank back: for dreams of ruin
To frozen caves our flight pursuing
Made us keep silencethusand thus
Though silence is as hell to us.
The Earth.
The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills
Cried, 'Misery!' then; the hollow Heaven replied,
'Misery!' And the Ocean's purple waves,
Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds,
And the pale nations heard it, 'Misery!'
Prometheus.
I heard a sound of voices: not the voice
Which I gave forth. Mother, thy sons and thou
Scorn him, without whose all-enduring will
Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove,
Both they and thou had vanished, like thin mist
Unrolled on the morning wind. Know ye not me,
The Titan? He who made his agony
The barrier to your else all-conquering foe?
Oh, rock-embosomed lawns, and snow-fed streams,
Now seen athwart frore vapours, deep below,
Through whose o'ershadowing woods I wandered once
With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes;
Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now
To commune with me? me alone, who checked,
As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer,
The falsehood and the force of him who reigns
Supreme, and with the groans of pining slaves
Fills your dim glens and liquid wildernesses:
Why answer ye not, still? Brethren!
The Earth.
                   They dare not.
                   Prometheus.
Who dares? for I would hear that curse again.
Ha, what an awful whisper rises up!
'Tis scarce like sound: it tingles through the frame
As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike.
Speak, Spirit! from thine inorganic voice
I only know that thou art moving near
And love. How cursed I him?
The Earth.
               How canst thou hear
Who knowest not the language of the dead?
Prometheus.
Thou art a living spirit; speak as they.
The Earth.
I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven's fell King
Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain
More torturing than the one whereon I roll.
Subtle thou art and good, and though the Gods
Hear not this voice, yet thou art more than God,
Being wise and kind: earnestly hearken now.
Prometheus.
Obscurely through my brain, like shadows dim,
Sweep awful thoughts, rapid and thick. I feel
Faint, like one mingled in entwining love;
Yet 'tis not pleasure.
The Earth.
            No, thou canst not hear:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
Only to those who die.
Prometheus.
            And what art thou,
O, melancholy Voice?
The Earth.
           I am the Earth,
Thy mother; she within whose stony veins,
To the last fibre of the loftiest tree
Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,
Joy ran, as blood within a living frame,
When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud
Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy!
And at thy voice her pining sons uplifted
Their prostrate brows from the polluting dust,
And our almighty Tyrant with fierce dread
Grew pale, until his thunder chained thee here.
Then, see those million worlds which burn and roll
Around us: their inhabitants beheld
My spherd light wane in wide Heaven; the sea
Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire
From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow
Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven's frown;
Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains;
Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads
Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled:
When Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and worm,
And Famine; and black blight on herb and tree;
And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass,
Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds
Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry
With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained
With the contagion of a mother's hate
Breathed on her child's destroyer; ay, I heard
Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not,
Yet my innumerable seas and streams,
Mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air,
And the inarticulate people of the dead,
Preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate
In secret joy and hope those dreadful words,
But dare not speak them.
Prometheus.
             Venerable mother!
All else who live and suffer take from thee
Some comfort; flowers, and fruits, and happy sounds,
And love, though fleeting; these may not be mine.
But mine own words, I pray, deny me not.
The Earth.
They shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
And all that faith creates or love desires,
Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade,
'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains; all the gods
Are there, and all the powers of nameless worlds,
Vast, sceptred phantoms; heroes, men, and beasts;
And Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom;
And he, the supreme Tyrant, on his throne
Of burning gold. Son, one of these shall utter
The curse which all remember. Call at will
Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter,
Hades or Typhon, or what mightier Gods
From all-prolific Evil, since thy ruin
Have sprung, and trampled on my prostrate sons.
Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge
Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades,
As rainy wind through the abandoned gate
Of a fallen palace.
Prometheus.
          Mother, let not aught
Of that which may be evil, pass again
My lips, or those of aught resembling me.
Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear!
Ione.
My wings are folded o'er mine ears:
  My wings are crossd o'er mine eyes:
Yet through their silver shade appears,
  And through their lulling plumes arise,
A Shape, a throng of sounds;
  May it be no ill to thee
O thou of many wounds!
Near whom, for our sweet sister's sake,
Ever thus we watch and wake.
Panthea.
The sound is of whirlwind underground,
  Earthquake, and fire, and mountains cloven;
The shape is awful like the sound,
  Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven.
A sceptre of pale gold
  To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud
His veind hand doth hold.
Cruel he looks, but calm and strong,
Like one who does, not suffers wrong.
Phantasm of Jupiter.
Why have the secret powers of this strange world
Driven me, a frail and empty phantom, hither
On direst storms? What unaccustomed sounds
Are hovering on my lips, unlike the voice
With which our pallid race hold ghastly talk
In darkness? And, proud sufferer, who art thou?
Prometheus.
Tremendous Image, as thou art must be
He whom thou shadowest forth. I am his foe,
The Titan. Speak the words which I would hear,
Although no thought inform thine empty voice.
The Earth.
Listen! And though your echoes must be mute,
Gray mountains, and old woods, and haunted springs,
Prophetic caves, and isle-surrounding streams,
Rejoice to hear what yet ye cannot speak.
Phantasm.
A spirit seizes me and speaks within:
It tears me as fire tears a thunder-cloud.
Panthea.
See, how he lifts his mighty looks, the Heaven
Darkens above.
Ione.
       He speaks! O shelter me!
       Prometheus.
I see the curse on gestures proud and cold,
And looks of firm defiance, and calm hate,
And such despair as mocks itself with smiles,
Written as on a scroll: yet speak: Oh, speak!
Phantasm.
Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind,
  All that thou canst inflict I bid thee do;
Foul Tyrant both of Gods and Human-kind,
  One only being shalt thou not subdue.
Rain then thy plagues upon me here,
Ghastly disease, and frenzying fear;
And let alternate frost and fire
Eat into me, and be thine ire
Lightning, and cutting hail, and legioned forms
Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms.
Ay, do thy worst. Thou art omnipotent.
  O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power,
And my own will. Be thy swift mischiefs sent
  To blast mankind, from yon ethereal tower.
Let thy malignant spirit move
In darkness over those I love:
On me and mine I imprecate
The utmost torture of thy hate;
And thus devote to sleepless agony,
This undeclining head while thou must reign on high.
But thou, who art the God and Lord: O, thou,
  Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe,
To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow
  In fear and worship: all-prevailing foe!
I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse
Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse;
Till thine Infinity shall be
A robe of envenomed agony;
And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain,
To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.
Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this Curse,
  Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good;
Both infinite as is the universe,
  And thou, and thy self-torturing solitude.
An awful image of calm power
Though now thou sittest, let the hour
Come, when thou must appear to be
That which thou art internally;
And after many a false and fruitless crime
Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and time.
Prometheus.
Were these my words, O Parent?
The Earth.
                They were thine.
                Prometheus.
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;
Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
The Earth.
Misery, Oh misery to me,
That Jove at length should vanquish thee.
Wail, howl aloud, Land and Sea,
The Earth's rent heart shall answer ye.
Howl, Spirits of the living and the dead,
Your refuge, your defence lies fallen and vanquishd.
First Echo.
Lies fallen and vanquishd!
Second Echo.
Fallen and vanquishd!
Ione.
Fear not: 'tis but some passing spasm,
The Titan is unvanquished still.
But see, where through the azure chasm
Of yon forked and snowy hill
Trampling the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet, that glow
Under plumes of purple dye,
Like rose-ensanguined ivory,
A Shape comes now,
Stretching on high from his right hand
A serpent-cinctured wand.
Panthea.
'Tis Jove's world-wandering herald, Mercury.
Ione.
And who are those with hydra tresses
And iron wings that climb the wind,
Whom the frowning God represses
Like vapours steaming up behind,
Clanging loud, an endless crowd
Panthea.
These are Jove's tempest-walking hounds,
Whom he gluts with groans and blood,
When charioted on sulphurous cloud
He bursts Heaven's bounds.
Ione.
Are they now led, from the thin dead
On new pangs to be fed?
Panthea.
The Titan looks as ever, firm, not proud.
First Fury.
Ha! I scent life!
Second Fury.
         Let me but look into his eyes!
         Third Fury.
The hope of torturing him smells like a heap
Of corpses, to a death-bird after battle.
First Fury.
Darest thou delay, O Herald! take cheer, Hounds
Of Hell: what if the Son of Maia soon
Should make us food and sportwho can please long
The Omnipotent?
Mercury.
        Back to your towers of iron,
And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail,
Your foodless teeth. Geryon, arise! and Gorgon,
Chimra, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends
Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine,
Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate:
These shall perform your task.
First Fury.
                Oh, mercy! mercy!
We die with our desire: drive us not back!
Mercury.
Crouch then in silence.
            Awful Sufferer!
To thee unwilling, most unwillingly
I come, by the great Father's will driven down,
To execute a doom of new revenge.
Alas! I pity thee, and hate myself
That I can do no more: aye from thy sight
Returning, for a season, Heaven seems Hell,
So thy worn form pursues me night and day,
Smiling reproach. Wise art thou, firm and good,
But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife
Against the Omnipotent; as yon clear lamps
That measure and divide the weary years
From which there is no refuge, long have taught
And long must teach. Even now thy Torturer arms
With the strange might of unimagined pains
The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell,
And my commission is to lead them here,
Or what more subtle, foul, or savage fiends
People the abyss, and leave them to their task.
Be it not so! there is a secret known
To thee, and to none else of living things,
Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven,
The fear of which perplexes the Supreme:
Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne
In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer,
And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane,
Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart:
For benefits and meek submission tame
The fiercest and the mightiest.
Prometheus.
                 Evil minds
Change good to their own nature. I gave all
He has; and in return he chains me here
Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun
Split my parched skin, or in the moony night
The crystal-wingd snow cling round my hair:
Whilst my belovd race is trampled down
By his thought-executing ministers.
Such is the tyrant's recompense: 'tis just:
He who is evil can receive no good;
And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost,
He can feel hate, fear, shame; not gratitude:
He but requites me for his own misdeed.
Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks
With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.
Submission, thou dost know I cannot try:
For what submission but that fatal word,
The death-seal of mankind's captivity,
Like the Sicilian's hair-suspended sword,
Which trembles o'er his crown, would he accept,
Or could I yield? Which yet I will not yield.
Let others flatter Crime, where it sits throned
In brief Omnipotence: secure are they:
For Justice, when triumphant, will weep down
Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs,
Too much avenged by those who err. I wait,
Enduring thus, the retributive hour
Which since we spake is even nearer now.
But hark, the hell-hounds clamour: fear delay:
Behold! Heaven lowers under thy Father's frown.
Mercury.
Oh, that we might be spared: I to inflict
And thou to suffer! Once more answer me:
Thou knowest not the period of Jove's power?
Prometheus.
I know but this, that it must come.
Mercury.
                   Alas!
Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?
Prometheus.
They last while Jove must reign: nor more, nor less
Do I desire or fear.
Mercury.
           Yet pause, and plunge
Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight,
Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;
Perchance it has not numbered the slow years
Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved?
Prometheus.
Perchance no thought can count them, yet they pass.
Mercury.
If thou might'st dwell among the Gods the while
Lapped in voluptuous joy?
Prometheus.
              I would not quit
This bleak ravine, these unrepentant pains.
Mercury.
Alas! I wonder at, yet pity thee.
Prometheus.
Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven,
Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene,
As light in the sun, throned: how vain is talk!
Call up the fiends.
Ione.
          O, sister, look! White fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!
Mercury.
I must obey his words and thine: alas!
Most heavily remorse hangs at my heart!
Panthea.
See where the child of Heaven, with wingd feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
Ione.
Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes
Lest thou behold and die: they come: they come
Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death.
First Fury.
                  Prometheus!
                  Second Fury.
Immortal Titan!
Third Fury.
        Champion of Heaven's slaves!
        Prometheus.
He whom some dreadful voice invokes is here,
Prometheus, the chained Titan. Horrible forms,
What and who are ye? Never yet there came
Phantasms so foul through monster-teeming Hell
From the all-miscreative brain of Jove;
Whilst I behold such execrable shapes,
Methinks I grow like what I contemplate,
And laugh and stare in loathsome sympathy.
First Fury.
We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
When the great King betrays them to our will.
Prometheus.
Oh! many fearful natures in one name,
I know ye; and these lakes and echoes know
The darkness and the clangour of your wings.
But why more hideous than your loathd selves
Gather ye up in legions from the deep?
Second Fury.
We knew not that: Sisters, rejoice, rejoice!
Prometheus.
Can aught exult in its deformity?
Second Fury.
The beauty of delight makes lovers glad,
Gazing on one another: so are we.
As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers
The areal crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round,
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.
Prometheus.
I laugh your power, and his who sent you here,
To lowest scorn. Pour forth the cup of pain.
First Fury.
Thou thinkest we will rend thee bone from bone,
And nerve from nerve, working like fire within?
Prometheus.
Pain is my element, as hate is thine;
Ye rend me now: I care not.
Second Fury.
               Dost imagine
We will but laugh into thy lidless eyes?
Prometheus.
I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer,
Being evil. Cruel was the power which called
You, or aught else so wretched, into light.
Third Fury.
Thou think'st we will live through thee, one by one,
Like animal life, and though we can obscure not
The soul which burns within, that we will dwell
Beside it, like a vain loud multitude
Vexing the self-content of wisest men:
That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,
And foul desire round thine astonished heart,
And blood within thy labyrinthine veins
Crawling like agony?
Prometheus.
           Why, ye are thus now;
Yet am I king over myself, and rule
The torturing and conflicting throngs within,
As Jove rules you when Hell grows mutinous.
Chorus of Furies.
From the ends of the earth, from the ends of the earth,
Where the night has its grave and the morning its birth,
     Come, come, come!
Oh, ye who shake hills with the scream of your mirth,
When cities sink howling in ruin; and ye
Who with wingless footsteps trample the sea,
And close upon Shipwreck and Famine's track,
Sit chattering with joy on the foodless wreck;
     Come, come, come!
Leave the bed, low, cold, and red,
Strewed beneath a nation dead;
Leave the hatred, as in ashes
  Fire is left for future burning:
It will burst in bloodier flashes
  When ye stir it, soon returning:
Leave the self-contempt implanted
In young spirits, sense-enchanted,
  Misery's yet unkindled fuel:
  Leave Hell's secrets half unchanted
   To the maniac dreamer; cruel
  More than ye can be with hate
    Is he with fear.
     Come, come, come!
We are steaming up from Hell's wide gate
And we burthen the blast of the atmosphere,
But vainly we toil till ye come here.
Ione.
Sister, I hear the thunder of new wings.
Panthea.
These solid mountains quiver with the sound
Even as the tremulous air: their shadows make
The space within my plumes more black than night.
First Fury.
Your call was as a wingd car
Driven on whirlwinds fast and far;
It rapped us from red gulfs of war.
Second Fury.
From wide cities, famine-wasted;
Third Fury.
Groans half heard, and blood untasted;
Fourth Fury.
Kingly conclaves stern and cold,
Where blood with gold is bought and sold;
Fifth Fury.
From the furnace, white and hot,
In which
A Fury.
     Speak not: whisper not:
I know all that ye would tell,
But to speak might break the spell
Which must bend the Invincible,
The stern of thought;
He yet defies the deepest power of Hell.
A Fury.
Tear the veil!
Another Fury.
       It is torn.
       Chorus.
              The pale stars of the morn
Shine on a misery, dire to be borne.
Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn.
Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for man?
Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran
Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever,
Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever.
  One came forth of gentle worth
  Smiling on the sanguine earth;
  His words outlived him, like swift poison
   Withering up truth, peace, and pity.
  Look! where round the wide horizon
   Many a million-peopled city
  Vomits smoke in the bright air.
  Hark that outcry of despair!
  'Tis his mild and gentle ghost
   Wailing for the faith he kindled:
  Look again, the flames almost
   To a glow-worm's lamp have dwindled:
The survivors round the embers
Gather in dread.
    Joy, joy, joy!
Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,
And the future is dark, and the present is spread
Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.
Semichorus I.
Drops of bloody agony flow
From his white and quivering brow.
Grant a little respite now:
See a disenchanted nation
Springs like day from desolation;
To Truth its state is dedicate,
And Freedom leads it forth, her mate;
A legioned band of linkd brothers
Whom Love calls children
Semichorus II.
              'Tis another's:
See how kindred murder kin:
'Tis the vintage-time for death and sin:
Blood, like new wine, bubbles within:
  Till Despair smothers
The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants win.
[All the Furies vanish, except one.
Ione.
Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan
Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart
Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep,
And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves.
Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him?
Panthea.
Alas! I looked forth twice, but will no more.
Ione.
What didst thou see?
Panthea.
           A woful sight: a youth
With patient looks nailed to a crucifix.
Ione.
What next?
Panthea.
     The heaven around, the earth below
Was peopled with thick shapes of human death,
All horrible, and wrought by human hands,
And some appeared the work of human hearts,
For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles:
And other sights too foul to speak and live
Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear
By looking forth: those groans are grief enough.
Fury.
Behold an emblem: those who do endure
Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap
Thousandfold torment on themselves and him.
Prometheus.
Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow
Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tears!
Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death,
So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix,
So those pale fingers play not with thy gore.
O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak,
It hath become a curse. I see, I see,
The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just,
Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee,
Some hunted by foul lies from their heart's home,
An early-chosen, late-lamented home;
As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind;
Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells:
SomeHear I not the multitude laugh loud?
Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms
Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles,
Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood
By the red light of their own burning homes.
Fury.
Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans;
Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind.
Prometheus.
Worse?
Fury.
   In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.
Prometheus.
Thy words are like a cloud of wingd snakes;
And yet I pity those they torture not.
Fury.
Thou pitiest them? I speak no more!
[Vanishes.
Prometheus.
                   Ah woe!
Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, for ever!
I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear
Thy works within my woe-illumd mind,
Thou subtle tyrant! Peace is in the grave.
The grave hides all things beautiful and good:
I am a God and cannot find it there,
Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge,
This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.
The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul
With new endurance, till the hour arrives
When they shall be no types of things which are.
Panthea.
Alas! what sawest thou more?
Prometheus.
               There are two woes:
To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one.
Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords, they
Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry;
The nations thronged around, and cried aloud,
As with one voice, Truth, liberty, and love!
Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven
Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear:
Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.
This was the shadow of the truth I saw.
The Earth.
I felt thy torture, son; with such mixed joy
As pain and virtue give. To cheer thy state
I bid ascend those subtle and fair spirits,
Whose homes are the dim caves of human thought,
And who inhabit, as birds wing the wind,
Its world-surrounding aether: they behold
Beyond that twilight realm, as in a glass,
The future: may they speak comfort to thee!
Panthea.
Look, sister, where a troop of spirits gather,
Like flocks of clouds in spring's delightful weather,
Thronging in the blue air!
Ione.
              And see! more come,
Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,
That climb up the ravine in scattered lines.
And, hark! is it the music of the pines?
Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall?
Panthea.
'Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.
Chorus of Spirits.
From unremembered ages we
Gentle guides and guardians be
Of heaven-oppressed mortality;
And we breathe, and sicken not,
The atmosphere of human thought:
Be it dim, and dank, and gray,
Like a storm-extinguished day,
Travelled o'er by dying gleams;
Be it bright as all between
Cloudless skies and windless streams,
Silent, liquid, and serene;
As the birds within the wind,
As the fish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man's own mind
Float through all above the grave;
We make there our liquid lair,
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent
Through the boundless element:
Thence we bear the prophecy
Which begins and ends in thee!
Ione.
More yet come, one by one: the air around them
Looks radiant as the air around a star.
First Spirit.
On a battle-trumpet's blast
I fled hither, fast, fast, fast,
'Mid the darkness upward cast.
From the dust of creeds outworn,
From the tyrant's banner torn,
Gathering 'round me, onward borne,
There was mingled many a cry
Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory!
Till they faded through the sky;
And one sound, above, around,
One sound beneath, around, above,
Was moving; 'twas the soul of Love;
'Twas the hope, the prophecy,
Which begins and ends in thee.
Second Spirit.
A rainbow's arch stood on the sea,
Which rocked beneath, immovably;
And the triumphant storm did flee,
Like a conqueror, swift and proud,
Between, with many a captive cloud,
A shapeless, dark and rapid crowd,
Each by lightning riven in half:
I heard the thunder hoarsely laugh:
Mighty fleets were strewn like chaff
And spread beneath a hell of death
O'er the white waters. I alit
On a great ship lightning-split,
And speeded hither on the sigh
Of one who gave an enemy
His plank, then plunged aside to die.
Third Spirit.
I sate beside a sage's bed,
And the lamp was burning red
Near the book where he had fed,
When a Dream with plumes of flame,
To his pillow hovering came,
And I knew it was the same
Which had kindled long ago
Pity, eloquence, and woe;
And the world awhile below
Wore the shade, its lustre made.
It has borne me here as fleet
As Desire's lightning feet:
I must ride it back ere morrow,
Or the sage will wake in sorrow.
Fourth Spirit.
On a poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the areal kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
One of these awakened me,
And I sped to succour thee.
Ione.
Behold'st thou not two shapes from the east and west
Come, as two doves to one belovd nest,
Twin nurslings of the all-sustaining air
On swift still wings glide down the atmosphere?
And, hark! their sweet, sad voices! 'tis despair
Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound.
Panthea.
Canst thou speak, sister? all my words are drowned.
Ione.
Their beauty gives me voice. See how they float
On their sustaining wings of skiey grain,
Orange and azure deepening into gold:
Their soft smiles light the air like a star's fire.
Chorus of Spirits.
Hast thou beheld the form of Love?
Fifth Spirit.
                  As over wide dominions
I sped, like some swift cloud that wings the wide air's wildernesses,
That planet-crested shape swept by on lightning-braided pinions,
Scattering the liquid joy of life from his ambrosial tresses:
His footsteps paved the world with light; but as I passed 'twas fading,
And hollow Ruin yawned behind: great sages bound in madness,
And headless patriots, and pale youths who perished, unupbraiding,
Gleamed in the night. I wandered o'er, till thou, O King of sadness,
Turned by thy smile the worst I saw to recollected gladness.
Sixth Spirit.
Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing:
It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air,
But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing
The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear;
Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above
And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet,
Dream visions of areal joy, and call the monster, Love,
And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet.
Chorus.
Though Ruin now Love's shadow be,
Following him, destroyingly,
On Death's white and wingd steed,
Which the fleetest cannot flee,
Trampling down both flower and weed,
Man and beast, and foul and fair,
Like a tempest through the air;
Thou shalt quell this horseman grim,
Woundless though in heart or limb.
Prometheus.
Spirits! how know ye this shall be?
Chorus.
In the atmosphere we breathe,
As buds grow red when the snow-storms flee,
From Spring gathering up beneath,
Whose mild winds shake the elder brake,
And the wandering herdsmen know
That the white-thorn soon will blow:
Wisdom, Justice, Love, and Peace,
When they struggle to increase,
  Are to us as soft winds be
  To shepherd boys, the prophecy
  Which begins and ends in thee.
  Ione.
Where are the Spirits fled?
Panthea.
               Only a sense
Remains of them, like the omnipotence
Of music, when the inspired voice and lute
Languish, ere yet the responses are mute,
Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul,
Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll.
Prometheus.
How fair these airborn shapes! and yet I feel
Most vain all hope but love; and thou art far,
Asia! who, when my being overflowed,
Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine
Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust.
All things are still: alas! how heavily
This quiet morning weighs upon my heart;
Though I should dream I could even sleep with grief
If slumber were denied not. I would fain
Be what it is my destiny to be,
The saviour and the strength of suffering man,
Or sink into the original gulf of things:
There is no agony, and no solace left;
Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more.
Panthea.
Hast thou forgotten one who watches thee
The cold dark night, and never sleeps but when
The shadow of thy spirit falls on her?
Prometheus.
I said all hope was vain but love: thou lovest.
Panthea.
Deeply in truth; but the eastern star looks white,
And Asia waits in that far Indian vale,
The scene of her sad exile; rugged once
And desolate and frozen, like this ravine;
But now invested with fair flowers and herbs,
And haunted by sweet airs and sounds, which flow
Among the woods and waters, from the aether
Of her transforming presence, which would fade
If it were mingled not with thine. Farewell!
END OF THE FIRST ACT.

ACT II
Scene I.
Morning. A lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia alone.
Asia.
From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended:
Yes, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes
Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,
And beatings haunt the desolated heart,
Which should have learnt repose: thou hast descended
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!
O child of many winds! As suddenly
Thou comest as the memory of a dream,
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet;
Like genius, or like joy which riseth up
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The desert of our life.
This is the season, this the day, the hour;
At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine,
Too long desired, too long delaying, come!
How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl!
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains. through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air:
'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not
The olian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn?
[Panthea enters.
               I feel, I see
Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears,
Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.
Belovd and most beautiful, who wearest
The shadow of that soul by which I live,
How late thou art! the spherd sun had climbed
The sea; my heart was sick with hope, before
The printless air felt thy belated plumes.
Panthea.
Pardon, great Sister! but my wings were faint
With the delight of a remembered dream,
As are the noontide plumes of summer winds
Satiate with sweet flowers. I was wont to sleep
Peacefully, and awake refreshed and calm
Before the sacred Titan's fall, and thy
Unhappy love, had made, through use and pity,
Both love and woe familiar to my heart
As they had grown to thine: erewhile I slept
Under the glaucous caverns of old Ocean
Within dim bowers of green and purple moss,
Our young Ione's soft and milky arms
Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair,
While my shut eyes and cheek were pressed within
The folded depth of her life-breathing bosom:
But not as now, since I am made the wind
Which fails beneath the music that I bear
Of thy most wordless converse; since dissolved
Into the sense with which love talks, my rest
Was troubled and yet sweet; my waking hours
Too full of care and pain.
Asia.
              Lift up thine eyes,
And let me read thy dream.
Panthea.
              As I have said
With our sea-sister at his feet I slept.
The mountain mists, condensing at our voice
Under the moon, had spread their snowy flakes,
From the keen ice shielding our linkd sleep.
Then two dreams came. One, I remember not.
But in the other his pale wound-worn limbs
Fell from Prometheus, and the azure night
Grew radiant with the glory of that form
Which lives unchanged within, and his voice fell
Like music which makes giddy the dim brain,
Faint with intoxication of keen joy:
'Sister of her whose footsteps pave the world
With lovelinessmore fair than aught but her,
Whose shadow thou artlift thine eyes on me.'
I lifted them: the overpowering light
Of that immortal shape was shadowed o'er
By love; which, from his soft and flowing limbs,
And passion-parted lips, and keen, faint eyes,
Steamed forth like vaporous fire; an atmosphere
Which wrapped me in its all-dissolving power,
As the warm aether of the morning sun
Wraps ere it drinks some cloud of wandering dew.
I saw not, heard not, moved not, only felt
His presence flow and mingle through my blood
Till it became his life, and his grew mine,
And I was thus absorbed, until it passed,
And like the vapours when the sun sinks down,
Gathering again in drops upon the pines,
And tremulous as they, in the deep night
My being was condensed; and as the rays
Of thought were slowly gathered, I could hear
His voice, whose accents lingered ere they died
Like footsteps of weak melody: thy name
Among the many sounds alone I heard
Of what might be articulate; though still
I listened through the night when sound was none.
Ione wakened then, and said to me:
'Canst thou divine what troubles me to-night?
I always knew what I desired before,
Nor ever found delight to wish in vain.
But now I cannot tell thee what I seek;
I know not; something sweet, since it is sweet
Even to desire; it is thy sport, false sister;
Thou hast discovered some enchantment old,
Whose spells have stolen my spirit as I slept
And mingled it with thine: for when just now
We kissed, I felt within thy parted lips
The sweet air that sustained me, and the warmth
Of the life-blood, for loss of which I faint,
Quivered between our intertwining arms.'
I answered not, for the Eastern star grew pale,
But fled to thee.
Asia.
         Thou speakest, but thy words
Are as the air: I feel them not: Oh, lift
Thine eyes, that I may read his written soul!
Panthea.
I lift them though they droop beneath the load
Of that they would express: what canst thou see
But thine own fairest shadow imaged there?
Asia.
Thine eyes are like the deep, blue, boundless heaven
Contracted to two circles underneath
Their long, fine lashes; dark, far, measureless,
Orb within orb, and line through line inwoven.
Panthea.
Why lookest thou as if a spirit passed?
Asia.
There is a change: beyond their inmost depth
I see a shade, a shape: 'tis He, arrayed
In the soft light of his own smiles, which spread
Like radiance from the cloud-surrounded moon.
Prometheus, it is thine! depart not yet!
Say not those smiles that we shall meet again
Within that bright pavilion which their beams
Shall build o'er the waste world? The dream is told.
What shape is that between us? Its rude hair
Roughens the wind that lifts it, its regard
Is wild and quick, yet 'tis a thing of air,
For through its gray robe gleams the golden dew
Whose stars the noon has quenched not.
Dream.
                     Follow! Follow!
                     Panthea.
It is mine other dream.
Asia.
            It disappears.
            Panthea.
It passes now into my mind. Methought
As we sate here, the flower-infolding buds
Burst on yon lightning-blasted almond-tree,
When swift from the white Scythian wilderness
A wind swept forth wrinkling the Earth with frost:
I looked, and all the blossoms were blown down;
But on each leaf was stamped, as the blue bells
Of Hyacinth tell Apollo's written grief,
O, follow, follow!
Asia.
          As you speak, your words
Fill, pause by pause, my own forgotten sleep
With shapes. Methought among these lawns together
We wandered, underneath the young gray dawn,
And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains
Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind;
And the white dew on the new-bladed grass,
Just piercing the dark earth, hung silently;
And there was more which I remember not:
But on the shadows of the morning clouds,
Athwart the purple mountain slope, was written
Follow, O, follow! as they vanished by;
And on each herb, from which Heaven's dew had fallen,
The like was stamped, as with a withering fire;
A wind arose among the pines; it shook
The clinging music from their boughs, and then
Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts,
Were heard: O, follow, follow, follow me!
And then I said: 'Panthea, look on me.'
But in the depth of those belovd eyes
Still I saw, follow, follow!
Echo.
               Follow, follow!
               Panthea.
The crags, this clear spring morning, mock our voices
As they were spirit-tongued.
Asia.
               It is some being
Around the crags. What fine clear sounds! O, list!
Echoes
(unseen).
Echoes we: listen!
We cannot stay:
As dew-stars glisten
Then fade away
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
Hark! Spirits speak. The liquid responses
Of their areal tongues yet sound.
Panthea.
                  I hear.
                  Echoes.
O, follow, follow,
As our voice recedeth
Through the caverns hollow,
Where the forest spreadeth; (More distant.)

O, follow, follow!
Through the caverns hollow,
As the song floats thou pursue,
Where the wild bee never flew,
Through the noontide darkness deep,
By the odour-breathing sleep
Of faint night flowers, and the waves
At the fountain-lighted caves,
While our music, wild and sweet,
Mocks thy gently falling feet,
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
Shall we pursue the sound? It grows more faint And distant.
Panthea.
List! the strain floats nearer now.
Echoes.
In the world unknown
Sleeps a voice unspoken;
By thy step alone
Can its rest be broken;
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
How the notes sink upon the ebbing wind!
Echoes.
O, follow, follow!
Through the caverns hollow,
As the song floats thou pursue,
By the woodland noontide dew;
By the forest, lakes, and fountains,
Through the many-folded mountains;
To the rents, and gulfs, and chasms,
Where the Earth reposed from spasms,
On the day when He and thou
Parted, to commingle now;
  Child of Ocean!
  Asia.
Come, sweet Panthea, link thy hand in mine,
And follow, ere the voices fade away.
Scene II.
A Forest, intermingled with Rocks and Caverns. Asia and Panthea pass into it. Two young Fauns are sitting on a Rock listening.
Semichorus I. of Spirits.
The path through which that lovely twain
Have passed, by cedar, pine, and yew,
And each dark tree that ever grew,
Is curtained out from Heaven's wide blue;
Nor sun, nor moon, nor wind, nor rain,
  Can pierce its interwoven bowers,
Nor aught, save where some cloud of dew,
Drifted along the earth-creeping breeze,
Between the trunks of the hoar trees,
  Hangs each a pearl in the pale flowers
Of the green laurel, blown anew;
And bends, and then fades silently,
One frail and fair anemone:
Or when some star of many a one
That climbs and wanders through steep night,
Has found the cleft through which alone
Beams fall from high those depths upon
Ere it is borne away, away,
By the swift Heavens that cannot stay,
It scatters drops of golden light,
Like lines of rain that ne'er unite:
And the gloom divine is all around,
And underneath is the mossy ground.
Semichorus II.
There the voluptuous nightingales,
Are awake through all the broad noonday.
When one with bliss or sadness fails,
  And through the windless ivy-boughs,
Sick with sweet love, droops dying away
On its mate's music-panting bosom;
Another from the swinging blossom,
  Watching to catch the languid close
Of the last strain, then lifts on high
The wings of the weak melody,
'Till some new strain of feeling bear
The song, and all the woods are mute;
When there is heard through the dim air
The rush of wings, and rising there
Like many a lake-surrounded flute,
Sounds overflow the listener's brain
So sweet, that joy is almost pain.
Semichorus I.
There those enchanted eddies play
Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw,
By Demogorgon's mighty law,
With melting rapture, or sweet awe,
All spirits on that secret way;
As inland boats are driven to Ocean
Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw:
  And first there comes a gentle sound
  To those in talk or slumber bound,
And wakes the destined soft emotion,
Attracts, impels them; those who saw
Say from the breathing earth behind
There steams a plume-uplifting wind
Which drives them on their path, while they
Believe their own swift wings and feet
The sweet desires within obey:
And so they float upon their way,
Until, still sweet, but loud and strong,
The storm of sound is driven along,
Sucked up and hurrying: as they fleet
Behind, its gathering billows meet
And to the fatal mountain bear
Like clouds amid the yielding air.
First Faun.
Canst thou imagine where those spirits live
Which make such delicate music in the woods?
We haunt within the least frequented caves
And closest coverts, and we know these wilds,
Yet never meet them, though we hear them oft:
Where may they hide themselves?
Second Faun.
                 'Tis hard to tell:
I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,
The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again.
First Faun.
If such live thus, have others other lives,
Under pink blossoms or within the bells
Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep,
Or on their dying odours, when they die,
Or in the sunlight of the spherd dew?
Second Faun.
Ay, many more which we may well divine.
But, should we stay to speak, noontide would come,
And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn,
And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs
Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old,
And Love, and the chained Titan's woful doom,
And how he shall be loosed, and make the earth
One brotherhood: delightful strains which cheer
Our solitary twilights, and which charm
To silence the unenvying nightingales.
Scene III.
A Pinnacle of Rock among Mountains.
Asia and Panthea.
Panthea.
Hither the sound has borne usto the realm
Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal,
Like a volcano's meteor-breathing chasm,
Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up
Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth,
And call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy,
That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain
To deep intoxication; and uplift,
Like Mnads who cry loud, Evoe! Evoe!
The voice which is contagion to the world.
Asia.
Fit throne for such a Power! Magnificent!
How glorious art thou, Earth! And if thou be
The shadow of some spirit lovelier still,
Though evil stain its work, and it should be
Like its creation, weak yet beautiful,
I could fall down and worship that and thee.
Even now my heart adoreth: Wonderful!
Look, sister, ere the vapour dim thy brain:
Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,
As a lake, paving in the morning sky,
With azure waves which burst in silver light,
Some Indian vale. Behold it, rolling on
Under the curdling winds, and islanding
The peak whereon we stand, midway, around,
Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests,
Dim twilight-lawns, and stream-illumd caves,
And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist;
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains
From icy spires of sun-like radiance fling
The dawn, as lifted Ocean's dazzling spray,
From some Atlantic islet scattered up,
Spangles the wind with lamp-like water-drops.
The vale is girdled with their walls, a howl
Of cataracts from their thaw-cloven ravines,
Satiates the listening wind, continuous, vast,
Awful as silence. Hark! the rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
Panthea.
Look how the gusty sea of mist is breaking
In crimson foam, even at our feet! it rises
As Ocean at the enchantment of the moon
Round foodless men wrecked on some oozy isle.
Asia.
The fragments of the cloud are scattered up;
The wind that lifts them disentwines my hair;
Its billows now sweep o'er mine eyes; my brain
Grows dizzy; see'st thou shapes within the mist?
Panthea.
A countenance with beckoning smiles: there burns
An azure fire within its golden locks!
Another and another: hark! they speak!
Song of Spirits.
To the deep, to the deep,
  Down, down!
Through the shade of sleep,
Through the cloudy strife
Of Death and of Life;
Through the veil and the bar
Of things which seem and are
Even to the steps of the remotest throne,
  Down, down!
   While the sound whirls around,
  Down, down!
As the fawn draws the hound,
As the lightning the vapour,
As a weak moth the taper;
Death, despair; love, sorrow;
Time both; to-day, to-morrow;
As steel obeys the spirit of the stone,
  Down, down!
   Through the gray, void abysm,
  Down, down!
Where the air is no prism,
And the moon and stars are not,
And the cavern-crags wear not
The radiance of Heaven,
Nor the gloom to Earth given,
Where there is One pervading, One alone,
  Down, down!
   In the depth of the deep,
  Down, down!
Like veiled lightning asleep,
Like the spark nursed in embers,
The last look Love remembers,
Like a diamond, which shines
On the dark wealth of mines,
A spell is treasured but for thee alone.
  Down, down!
   We have bound thee, we guide thee;
  Down, down!
With the bright form beside thee;
Resist not the weakness,
Such strength is in meekness
That the Eternal, the Immortal,
Most unloose through life's portal
The snake-like Doom coiled underneath his throne
  By that alone.
  Scene IV.
The Cave of Demogorgon.
Asia and Panthea.
Panthea.
What viled form sits on that ebon throne?
Asia.
The veil has fallen.
Panthea.
           I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.
Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.
Demogorgon.
         Ask what thou wouldst know.
         Asia.
What canst thou tell?
Demogorgon.
           All things thou dar'st demand.
           Asia.
Who made the living world?
Demogorgon.
              God.
              Asia.
                Who made all
That it contains? thought, passion, reason, will, Imagination?
Demogorgon.
God: Almighty God.
Asia.
Who made that sense which, when the winds of Spring
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one belovd heard in youth alone,
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim
The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers,
And leaves this peopled earth a solitude
When it returns no more?
Demogorgon.
             Merciful God.
             Asia.
And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,
Which from the links of the great chain of things,
To every thought within the mind of man
Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels
Under the load towards the pit of death;
Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate;
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood;
Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech
Is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day;
And Hell, or the sharp fear of Hell?
Demogorgon.
                    He reigns.
                    Asia.
Utter his name: a world pining in pain
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.
Demogorgon.
He reigns.
Asia.
     I feel, I know it: who?
     Demogorgon.
                  He reigns.
                  Asia.
Who reigns? There was the Heaven and Earth at first,
And Light and Love; then Saturn, from whose throne
Time fell, an envious shadow: such the state
Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway,
As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves
Before the wind or sun has withered them
And semivital worms; but he refused
The birthright of their being, knowledge, power,
The skill which wields the elements, the thought
Which pierces this dim universe like light,
Self-empire, and the majesty of love;
For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus
Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter,
And with this law alone, 'Let man be free,'
Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven.
To know nor faith, nor love, nor law; to be
Omnipotent but friendless is to reign;
And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man
First famine, and then toil, and then disease,
Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before,
Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove
With alternating shafts of frost and fire,
Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves:
And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent,
And mad disquietudes, and shadows idle
Of unreal good, which levied mutual war,
So ruining the lair wherein they raged.
Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes
Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers,
Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth, fadeless blooms,
That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings
The shape of Death; and Love he sent to bind
The disunited tendrils of that vine
Which bears the wine of life, the human heart;
And he tamed fire which, like some beast of prey,
Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath
The frown of man; and tortured to his will
Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,
And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms
Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.
He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe;
And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven,
Which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind
Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song;
And music lifted up the listening spirit
Until it walked, exempt from mortal care,
Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound;
And human hands first mimicked and then mocked,
With moulded limbs more lovely than its own,
The human form, till marble grew divine;
And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see
Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.
He told the hidden power of herbs and springs,
And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep.
He taught the implicated orbits woven
Of the wide-wandering stars; and how the sun
Changes his lair, and by what secret spell
The pale moon is transformed, when her broad eye
Gazes not on the interlunar sea:
He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs,
The tempest-wingd chariots of the Ocean,
And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then
Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed
The warm winds, and the azure aether shone,
And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen.
Such, the alleviations of his state,
Prometheus gave to man, for which he hangs
Withering in destined pain: but who rains down
Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while
Man looks on his creation like a God
And sees that it is glorious, drives him on,
The wreck of his own will, the scorn of earth,
The outcast, the abandoned, the alone?
Not Jove: while yet his frown shook Heaven, ay, when
His adversary from adamantine chains
Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare
Who is his master? Is he too a slave?
Demogorgon.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil:
Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no.
Asia.
Whom calledst thou God?
Demogorgon.
            I spoke but as ye speak,
For Jove is the supreme of living things.
Asia.
Who is the master of the slave?
Demogorgon.
                 If the abysm
Could vomit forth its secrets. . . But a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;
For what would it avail to bid thee gaze
On the revolving world? What to bid speak
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these
All things are subject but eternal Love.
Asia.
So much I asked before, and my heart gave
The response thou hast given; and of such truths
Each to itself must be the oracle.
One more demand; and do thou answer me
As mine own soul would answer, did it know
That which I ask. Prometheus shall arise
Henceforth the sun of this rejoicing world:
When shall the destined hour arrive?
Demogorgon.
                    Behold!
                    Asia.
The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingd steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward.
Demogorgon.
       These are the immortal Hours,
Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee.
Asia.
A spirit with a dreadful countenance
Checks its dark chariot by the craggy gulf.
Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer,
Who art thou? Whither wouldst thou bear me? Speak!
Spirit.
I am the shadow of a destiny
More dread than is my aspect: ere yon planet
Has set, the darkness which ascends with me
Shall wrap in lasting night heaven's kingless throne.
Asia.
What meanest thou?
Panthea.
          That terrible shadow floats
Up from its throne, as may the lurid smoke
Of earthquake-ruined cities o'er the sea.
Lo! it ascends the car; the coursers fly
Terrified: watch its path among the stars
Blackening the night!
Asia.
           Thus I am answered: strange!
           Panthea.
See, near the verge, another chariot stays;
An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire,
Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim
Of delicate strange tracery; the young spirit
That guides it has the dove-like eyes of hope;
How its soft smiles attract the soul! as light
Lures wingd insects through the lampless air.
Spirit.
My coursers are fed with the lightning,
They drink of the whirlwind's stream,
And when the red morning is bright'ning
They bathe in the fresh sunbeam;
They have strength for their swiftness I deem,
Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.
I desire: and their speed makes night kindle;
I fear: they outstrip the Typhoon;
Ere the cloud piled on Atlas can dwindle
We encircle the earth and the moon:
We shall rest from long labours at noon:
Then ascend with me, daughter of Ocean.
Scene V.
The Car pauses within a Cloud on the top of a snowy Mountain. Asia, Panthea, and the Spirit of the Hour.
Spirit.
On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire;
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire:
They shall drink the hot speed of desire!
Asia.
Thou breathest on their nostrils, but my breath
Would give them swifter speed.
Spirit.
                Alas! it could not.
                Panthea.
Oh Spirit! pause, and tell whence is the light
Which fills this cloud? the sun is yet unrisen.
Spirit.
The sun will rise not until noon. Apollo
Is held in heaven by wonder; and the light
Which fills this vapour, as the areal hue
Of fountain-gazing roses fills the water,
Flows from thy mighty sister.
Panthea.
                Yes, I feel
                Asia.
What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale.
Panthea.
How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee;
I feel but see thee not. I scarce endure
The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change
Is working in the elements, which suffer
Thy presence thus unveiled. The Nereids tell
That on the day when the clear hyaline
Was cloven at thine uprise, and thou didst stand
Within a veind shell, which floated on
Over the calm floor of the crystal sea,
Among the gean isles, and by the shores
Which bear thy name; love, like the atmosphere
Of the sun's fire filling the living world,
Burst from thee, and illumined earth and heaven
And the deep ocean and the sunless caves
And all that dwells within them; till grief cast
Eclipse upon the soul from which it came:
Such art thou now; nor is it I alone,
Thy sister, thy companion, thine own chosen one,
But the whole world which seeks thy sympathy.
Hearest thou not sounds i' the air which speak the love
Of all articulate beings? Feelest thou not
The inanimate winds enamoured of thee? List!
[Music.
Asia.
Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his
Whose echoes they are: yet all love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God:
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still, after long sufferings,
As I shall soon become.
Panthea.
            List! Spirits speak.
            Voice in the Air, singing.
Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them;
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds ere they divide them;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee,
But thy voice sounds low and tender
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,
As I feel now, lost for ever!
Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
Asia.
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound:
Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music's most serene dominions;
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course, without a star,
But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided:
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.
We have passed Age's icy caves,
And Manhood's dark and tossing waves,
And Youth's smooth ocean, smiling to betray:
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;
A paradise of vaulted bowers,
Lit by downward-gazing flowers,
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee;
Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!
END OF THE SECOND ACT.

ACT III
Scene I.
Heaven. Jupiter on his Throne; Thetis and the other Deities assembled.
Jupiter.
Ye congregated powers of heaven, who share
The glory and the strength of him ye serve,
Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent.
All else had been subdued to me; alone
The soul of man, like unextinguished fire,
Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt,
And lamentation, and reluctant prayer,
Hurling up insurrection, which might make
Our antique empire insecure, though built
On eldest faith, and hell's coeval, fear;
And though my curses through the pendulous air,
Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake,
And cling to it; though under my wrath's night
It climbs the crags of life, step after step,
Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet,
It yet remains supreme o'er misery,
Aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:
Even now have I begotten a strange wonder,
That fatal child, the terror of the earth,
Who waits but till the destined hour arrive,
Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne
The dreadful might of ever-living limbs
Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld,
To redescend, and trample out the spark.
Pour forth heaven's wine, Idan Ganymede,
And let it fill the Ddal cups like fire,
And from the flower-inwoven soil divine
Ye all-triumphant harmonies arise,
As dew from earth under the twilight stars:
Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins
The soul of joy, ye ever-living Gods,
Till exultation burst in one wide voice
Like music from Elysian winds.
                And thou
Ascend beside me, veild in the light
Of the desire which makes thee one with me,
Thetis, bright image of eternity!
When thou didst cry, 'Insufferable might!
God! Spare me! I sustain not the quick flames,
The penetrating presence; all my being,
Like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw
Into a dew with poison, is dissolved,
Sinking through its foundations:' even then
Two mighty spirits, mingling, made a third
Mightier than either, which, unbodied now,
Between us floats, felt, although unbeheld,
Waiting the incarnation, which ascends,
(Hear ye the thunder of the fiery wheels
Griding the winds?) from Demogorgon's throne.
Victory! victory! Feel'st thou not, O world,
The earthquake of his chariot thundering up
Olympus?
[The Car of the Hour arrives. Demogorgon descends, and moves towards the Throne of Jupiter.
    Awful shape, what art thou? Speak!
    Demogorgon.
Eternity. Demand no direr name.
Descend, and follow me down the abyss.
I am thy child, as thou wert Saturn's child;
Mightier than thee: and we must dwell together
Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not.
The tyranny of heaven none may retain,
Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee:
Yet if thou wilt, as 'tis the destiny
Of trodden worms to writhe till they are dead,
Put forth thy might.
Jupiter.
           Detested prodigy!
Even thus beneath the deep Titanian prisons
I trample thee! thou lingerest?
                 Mercy! mercy!
No pity, no release, no respite! Oh,
That thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge,
Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge,
On Caucasus! he would not doom me thus.
Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not
The monarch of the world? What then art thou?
No refuge! no appeal!
           Sink with me then,
We two will sink on the wide waves of ruin,
Even as a vulture and a snake outspent
Drop, twisted in inextricable fight,
Into a shoreless sea. Let hell unlock
Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire,
And whelm on them into the bottomless void
This desolated world, and thee, and me,
The conqueror and the conquered, and the wreck
Of that for which they combated.
                 Ai! Ai!
The elements obey me not. I sink
Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down.
And, like a cloud, mine enemy above
Darkens my fall with victory! Ai, Ai!
Scene II.
The Mouth of a great River in the Island Atlantis.Ocean is discovered reclining near the Shore; Apollo stands beside him.
Ocean.
He fell, thou sayest, beneath his conqueror's frown?
Apollo.
Ay, when the strife was ended which made dim
The orb I rule, and shook the solid stars,
The terrors of his eye illumined heaven
With sanguine light, through the thick ragged skirts
Of the victorious darkness, as he fell:
Like the last glare of day's red agony,
Which, from a rent among the fiery clouds,
Burns far along the tempest-wrinkled deep.
Ocean.
He sunk to the abyss? To the dark void?
Apollo.
An eagle so caught in some bursting cloud
On Caucasus, his thunder-baffled wings
Entangled in the whirlwind, and his eyes
Which gazed on the undazzling sun, now blinded
By the white lightning, while the ponderous hail
Beats on his struggling form, which sinks at length
Prone, and the areal ice clings over it.
Ocean.
Henceforth the fields of heaven-reflecting sea
Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood,
Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn
Swayed by the summer air; my streams will flow
Round many-peopled continents, and round
Fortunate isles; and from their glassy thrones
Blue Proteus and his humid nymphs shall mark
The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see
The floating bark of the light-laden moon
With that white star, its sightless pilot's crest,
Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea;
Tracking their path no more by blood and groans,
And desolation, and the mingled voice
Of slavery and command; but by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices,
And sweetest music, such as spirits love.
Apollo.
And I shall gaze not on the deeds which make
My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse
Darkens the sphere I guide; but list, I hear
The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit
That sits i' the morning star.
Ocean.
                Thou must away;
Thy steeds will pause at even, till when farewell:
The loud deep calls me home even now to feed it
With azure calm out of the emerald urns
Which stand for ever full beside my throne.
Behold the Nereids under the green sea,
Their wavering limbs borne on the wind-like stream,
Their white arms lifted o'er their streaming hair
With garlands pied and starry sea-flower crowns,
Hastening to grace their mighty sister's joy. [A sound of waves is heard.

It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm.
Peace, monster; I come now. Farewell.
Apollo.
                    Farewell.
                    Scene III.
Caucasus. Prometheus, Hercules, Ione, the Earth, Spirits, Asia, and Panthea, borne in the Car with the Spirit of the Hour. Hercules unbinds Prometheus, who descends.
Hercules.
Most glorious among Spirits, thus doth strength
To wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love,
And thee, who art the form they animate,
Minister like a slave.
Prometheus.
            Thy gentle words
Are sweeter even than freedom long desired
And long delayed.
         Asia, thou light of life,
Shadow of beauty unbeheld: and ye,
Fair sister nymphs, who made long years of pain
Sweet to remember, through your love and care:
Henceforth we will not part. There is a cave,
All overgrown with trailing odorous plants,
Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers,
And paved with veind emerald, and a fountain
Leaps in the midst with an awakening sound.
From its curved roof the mountain's frozen tears
Like snow, or silver, or long diamond spires,
Hang downward, raining forth a doubtful light:
And there is heard the ever-moving air,
Whispering without from tree to tree, and birds,
And bees; and all around are mossy seats,
And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass;
A simple dwelling, which shall be our own;
Where we will sit and talk of time and change,
As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged.
What can hide man from mutability?
And if ye sigh, then I will smile; and thou,
Ione, shalt chant fragments of sea-music,
Until I weep, when ye shal smile away
The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed.
We will entangle buds and flowers and beams
Which twinkle on the fountain's brim, and make
Strange combinations out of common things,
Like human babes in their brief innocence;
And we will search, with looks and words of love,
For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last,
Our unexhausted spirits; and like lutes
Touched by the skill of the enamoured wind,
Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new,
From difference sweet where discord cannot be;
And hither come, sped on the charmd winds,
Which meet from all the points of heaven, as bees
From every flower areal Enna feeds,
At their known island-homes in Himera,
The echoes of the human world, which tell
Of the low voice of love, almost unheard,
And dove-eyed pity's murmured pain, and music,
Itself the echo of the heart, and all
That tempers or improves man's life, now free;
And lovely apparitions,dim at first,
Then radiant, as the mind, arising bright
From the embrace of beauty (whence the forms
Of which these are the phantoms) casts on them
The gathered rays which are reality
Shall visit us, the progeny immortal
Of Painting, Sculpture, and rapt Poesy,
And arts, though unimagined, yet to be.
The wandering voices and the shadows these
Of all that man becomes, the mediators
Of that best worship love, by him and us
Given and returned; swift shapes and sounds, which grow
More fair and soft as man grows wise and kind,
And, veil by veil, evil and error fall:
Such virtue has the cave and place around. [Turning to the Spirit of the Hour.

For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. Ione,
Give her that curvd shell, which Proteus old
Made Asia's nuptial boon, breathing within it
A voice to be accomplished, and which thou
Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock.
Ione.
Thou most desired Hour, more loved and lovely
Than all thy sisters, this is the mystic shell;
See the pale azure fading into silver
Lining it with a soft yet glowing light:
Looks it not like lulled music sleeping there?
Spirit.
It seems in truth the fairest shell of Ocean:
Its sound must be at once both sweet and strange.
Prometheus.
Go, borne over the cities of mankind
On whirlwind-footed coursers: once again
Outspeed the sun around the orbd world;
And as thy chariot cleaves the kindling air,
Thou breathe into the many-folded shell,
Loosening its mighty music; it shall be
As thunder mingled with clear echoes: then
Return; and thou shalt dwell beside our cave.
And thou, O, Mother Earth!
The Earth.
               I hear, I feel;
Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along these marble nerves; 'tis life, 'tis joy,
And through my withered, old, and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling. Henceforth the many children fair
Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,
And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged,
And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes,
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom,
Draining the poison of despair, shall take
And interchange sweet nutriment; to me
Shall they become like sister-antelopes
By one fair dam, snow-white and swift as wind,
Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream.
The dew-mists of my sunless sleep shall float
Under the stars like balm: night-folded flowers
Shall suck unwithering hues in their repose:
And men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather
Strength for the coming day, and all its joy:
And death shall be the last embrace of her
Who takes the life she gave, even as a mother
Folding her child, says, 'Leave me not again.'
Asia.
Oh, mother! wherefore speak the name of death?
Cease they to love, and move, and breathe, and speak,
Who die?
The Earth.
    It would avail not to reply:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
But to the uncommunicating dead.
Death is the veil which those who live call life:
They sleep, and it is lifted: and meanwhile
In mild variety the seasons mild
With rainbow-skirted showers, and odorous winds,
And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night,
And the life-kindling shafts of the keen sun's
All-piercing bow, and the dew-mingled rain
Of the calm moonbeams, a soft influence mild,
Shall clothe the forests and the fields, ay, even
The crag-built deserts of the barren deep,
With ever-living leaves, and fruits, and flowers.
And thou! There is a cavern where my spirit
Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain
Made my heart mad, and those who did inhale it
Became mad too, and built a temple there,
And spoke, and were oracular, and lured
The erring nations round to mutual war,
And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee;
Which breath now rises, as amongst tall weeds
A violet's exhalation, and it fills
With a serener light and crimson air
Intense, yet soft, the rocks and woods around;
It feeds the quick growth of the serpent vine,
And the dark linkd ivy tangling wild,
And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms
Which star the winds with points of coloured light,
As they rain through them, and bright golden globes
Of fruit, suspended in their own green heaven,
And through their veind leaves and amber stems
The flowers whose purple and translucid bowls
Stand ever mantling with areal dew,
The drink of spirits: and it circles round,
Like the soft waving wings of noonday dreams,
Inspiring calm and happy thoughts, like mine,
Now thou art thus restored. This cave is thine.
Arise! Appear!
[A Spirit rises in the likeness of a winged child.
       This is my torch-bearer;
Who let his lamp out in old time with gazing
On eyes from which he kindled it anew
With love, which is as fire, sweet daughter mine,
For such is that within thine own. Run, wayward,
And guide this company beyond the peak
Of Bacchic Nysa, Mnad-haunted mountain,
And beyond Indus and its tribute rivers,
Trampling the torrent streams and glassy lakes
With feet unwet, unwearied, undelaying,
And up the green ravine, across the vale,
Beside the windless and crystalline pool,
Where ever lies, on unerasing waves,
The image of a temple, built above,
Distinct with column, arch, and architrave,
And palm-like capital, and over-wrought,
And populous with most living imagery,
Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles
Fill the hushed air with everlasting love.
It is deserted now, but once it bore
Thy name, Prometheus; there the emulous youths
Bore to thy honour through the divine gloom
The lamp which was thine emblem; even as those
Who bear the untransmitted torch of hope
Into the grave, across the night of life,
As thou hast borne it most triumphantly
To this far goal of Time. Depart, farewell.
Beside that temple is the destined cave.
Scene IV.
A Forest. In the Background a Cave. Prometheus, Asia, Panthea, Ione, and the Spirit of the Earth.
Ione.
Sister, it is not earthly: how it glides
Under the leaves! how on its head there burns
A light, like a green star, whose emerald beams
Are twined with its fair hair! how, as it moves,
The splendour drops in flakes upon the grass!
Knowest thou it?
Panthea.
         It is the delicate spirit
That guides the earth through heaven. From afar
The populous constellations call that light
The loveliest of the planets; and sometimes
It floats along the spray of the salt sea,
Or makes its chariot of a foggy cloud,
Or walks through fields or cities while men sleep,
Or o'er the mountain tops, or down the rivers,
Or through the green waste wilderness, as now,
Wondering at all it sees. Before Jove reigned
It loved our sister Asia, and it came
Each leisure hour to drink the liquid light
Out of her eyes, for which it said it thirsted
As one bit by a dipsas, and with her
It made its childish confidence, and told her
All it had known or seen, for it saw much,
Yet idly reasoned what it saw; and called her
For whence it sprung it knew not, nor do I
Mother, dear mother.
The Spirit of the Earth
(running to Asia).
           Mother, dearest mother;
May I then talk with thee as I was wont?
May I then hide my eyes in thy soft arms,
After thy looks have made them tired of joy?
May I then play beside thee the long noons,
When work is none in the bright silent air?
Asia.
I love thee, gentlest being, and henceforth
Can cherish thee unenvied: speak, I pray:
Thy simple talk once solaced, now delights.
Spirit of the Earth.
Mother, I am grown wiser, though a child
Cannot be wise like thee, within this day;
And happier too; happier and wiser both.
Thou knowest that toads, and snakes, and loathly worms,
And venomous and malicious beasts, and boughs
That bore ill berries in the woods, were ever
An hindrance to my walks o'er the green world:
And that, among the haunts of humankind,
Hard-featured men, or with proud, angry looks,
Or cold, staid gait, or false and hollow smiles,
Or the dull sneer of self-loved ignorance,
Or other such foul masks, with which ill thoughts
Hide that fair being whom we spirits call man;
And women too, ugliest of all things evil,
(Though fair, even in a world where thou art fair,
When good and kind, free and sincere like thee),
When false or frowning made me sick at heart
To pass them, though they slept, and I unseen.
Well, my path lately lay through a great city
Into the woody hills surrounding it:
A sentinel was sleeping at the gate:
When there was heard a sound, so loud, it shook
The towers amid the moonlight, yet more sweet
Than any voice but thine, sweetest of all;
A long, long sound, as it would never end:
And all the inhabitants leaped suddenly
Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets,
Looking in wonder up to Heaven, while yet
The music pealed along. I hid myself
Within a fountain in the public square,
Where I lay like the reflex of the moon
Seen in a wave under green leaves; and soon
Those ugly human shapes and visages
Of which I spoke as having wrought me pain,
Passed floating through the air, and fading still
Into the winds that scattered them; and those
From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms
After some foul disguise had fallen, and all
Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise
And greetings of delighted wonder, all
Went to their sleep again: and when the dawn
Came, wouldst thou think that toads, and snakes, and efts,
Could e'er be beautiful? yet so they were,
And that with little change of shape or hue:
All things had put their evil nature off:
I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake
Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined,
I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward
And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries,
With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay
Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky;
So, with my thoughts full of these happy changes,
We meet again, the happiest change of all.
Asia.
And never will we part, till thy chaste sister
Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon
Will look on thy more warm and equal light
Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow
And love thee.
Spirit of the Earth.
       What; as Asia loves Prometheus?
       Asia.
Peace, wanton, thou art yet not old enough.
Think ye by gazing on each other's eyes
To multiply your lovely selves, and fill
With spherd fires the interlunar air?
Spirit of the Earth.
Nay, mother, while my sister trims her lamp
'Tis hard I should go darkling.
Asia.
                 Listen; look!
                 [The Spirit of the Hour enters.
Prometheus.
We feel what thou hast heard and seen: yet speak.
Spirit of the Hour.
Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky and the wide earth,
There was a change: the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed,
As if the sense of love dissolved in them
Had folded itself round the spherd world.
My vision then grew clear, and I could see
Into the mysteries of the universe:
Dizzy as with delight I floated down,
Winnowing the lightsome air with languid plumes,
My coursers sought their birthplace in the sun,
Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil,
Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire;
And where my moonlike car will stand within
A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms
Of thee, and Asia, and the Earth, and me,
And you fair nymphs looking the love we feel,
In memory of the tidings it has borne,
Beneath a dome fretted with graven flowers,
Poised on twelve columns of resplendent stone,
And open to the bright and liquid sky.
Yoked to it by an amphisbaenic snake
The likeness of those wingd steeds will mock
The flight from which they find repose. Alas,
Whither has wandered now my partial tongue
When all remains untold which ye would hear?
As I have said, I floated to the earth:
It was, as it is still, the pain of bliss
To move, to breathe, to be; I wandering went
Among the haunts and dwellings of mankind,
And first was disappointed not to see
Such mighty change as I had felt within
Expressed in outward things; but soon I looked,
And behold, thrones were kingless, and men walked
One with the other even as spirits do,
None fawned, none trampled; hate, disdain, or fear,
Self-love or self-contempt, on human brows
No more inscribed, as o'er the gate of hell,
'All hope abandon ye who enter here;'
None frowned, none trembled, none with eager fear
Gazed on another's eye of cold command,
Until the subject of a tyrant's will
Became, worse fate, the abject of his own,
Which spurred him, like an outspent horse, to death.
None wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines
Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;
None, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart
The sparks of love and hope till there remained
Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed,
And the wretch crept a vampire among men,
Infecting all with his own hideous ill;
None talked that common, false, cold, hollow talk
Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes,
Yet question that unmeant hypocrisy
With such a self-mistrust as has no name.
And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind
As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew
On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,
From custom's evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
And changed to all which once they dared not be,
Yet being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,
Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill shame,
The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,
Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.
Thrones, altars, judgement-seats, and prisons; wherein,
And beside which, by wretched men were borne
Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
Were like those monstrous and barbaric shapes,
The ghosts of a no-more-remembered fame,
Which, from their unworn obelisks, look forth
In triumph o'er the palaces and tombs
Of those who were their conquerors: mouldering round,
These imaged to the pride of kings and priests
A dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
As is the world it wasted, and are now
But an astonishment; even so the tools
And emblems of its last captivity,
Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth,
Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.
And those foul shapes, abhorred by god and man,
Which, under many a name and many a form
Strange, savage, ghastly, dark and execrable,
Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world;
And which the nations, panic-stricken, served
With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love
Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless,
And slain amid men's unreclaiming tears,
Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate,
Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines:
The painted veil, by those who were, called life,
Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread,
All men believed or hoped, is torn aside;
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless?no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
END OF THE THIRD ACT.

ACT IV
Scene.A Part of the Forest near the Cave of Prometheus.Panthea and Ione are sleeping: they awaken gradually during the first Song.
Voice of unseen Spirits.
The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.
  But where are ye?
  A Train of dark Forms and Shadows passes by confusedly, singing.
Here, oh, here:
We bear the bier
Of the Father of many a cancelled year!
Spectres we
Of the dead Hours be,
We bear Time to his tomb in eternity.
Strew, oh, strew
Hair, not yew!
Wet the dusty pall with tears, not dew!
Be the faded flowers
Of Death's bare bowers
Spread on the corpse of the King of Hours!
Haste, oh, haste!
As shades are chased,
Trembling, by day, from heaven's blue waste.
We melt away,
Like dissolving spray,
From the children of a diviner day,
With the lullaby
Of winds that die
On the bosom of their own harmony!
Ione.
What dark forms were they?
Panthea.
The past Hours weak and gray,
With the spoil which their toil
Raked together
From the conquest but One could foil.
Ione.
Have they passed?
Panthea.
         They have passed;
They outspeeded the blast,
While 'tis said, they are fled:
Ione.
Whither, oh, whither?
Panthea.
To the dark, to the past, to the dead.
Voice of unseen Spirits.
Bright clouds float in heaven,
Dew-stars gleam on earth,
Waves assemble on ocean,
They are gathered and driven
By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee!
They shake with emotion,
They dance in their mirth.
  But where are ye?
   The pine boughs are singing
Old songs with new gladness,
The billows and fountains
Fresh music are flinging,
Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;
The storms mock the mountains
With the thunder of gladness.
  But where are ye?
  Ione.
What charioteers are these?
Panthea.
               Where are their chariots?
               Semichorus of Hours.
The voice of the Spirits of Air and of Earth
Have drawn back the figured curtain of sleep
Which covered our being and darkened our birth
In the deep.
A Voice.
      In the deep?
      Semichorus II.
             Oh, below the deep.
             Semichorus I.
An hundred ages we had been kept
Cradled in visions of hate and care,
And each one who waked as his brother slept,
Found the truth
Semichorus II.
          Worse than his visions were!
          Semichorus I.
We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep;
We have known the voice of Love in dreams;
We have felt the wand of Power, and leap
Semichorus II.
As the billows leap in the morning beams!
Chorus.
Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,
Pierce with song heaven's silent light,
Enchant the day that too swiftly flees,
To check its flight ere the cave of Night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds
Which chased the day like a bleeding deer,
And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desert year.
But now, oh weave the mystic measure
Of music, and dance, and shapes of light,
Let the Hours, and the spirits of might and pleasure,
Like the clouds and sunbeams, unite.
A Voice.
                    Unite!
                    Panthea.
See, where the Spirits of the human mind
Wrapped in sweet sounds, as in bright veils, approach.
Chorus of Spirits.
We join the throng
Of the dance and the song,
By the whirlwind of gladness borne along;
As the flying-fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the sea-birds, half asleep.
Chorus of Hours.
Whence come ye, so wild and so fleet,
For sandals of lightning are on your feet,
And your wings are soft and swift as thought,
And your eyes are as love which is veild not?
Chorus of Spirits.
We come from the mind
Of human kind
Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind,
Now 'tis an ocean
Of clear emotion,
A heaven of serene and mighty motion
From that deep abyss
Of wonder and bliss,
Whose caverns are crystal palaces;
From those skiey towers
Where Thought's crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
From the dim recesses
Of woven caresses,
Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses
From the azure isles,
Where sweet Wisdom smiles,
Delaying your ships with her siren wiles.
From the temples high
Of Man's ear and eye,
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy;
From the murmurings
Of the unsealed springs
Where Science bedews her Ddal wings.
Years after years,
Through blood, and tears,
And a thick hell of hatreds, and hopes, and fears;
We waded and flew,
And the islets were few
Where the bud-blighted flowers of happiness grew.
Our feet now, every palm,
Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
And, beyond our eyes,
The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.
Chorus of Spirits and Hours.
Then weave the web of the mystic measure;
From the depths of the sky and the ends of the earth,
Come, swift Spirits of might and of pleasure,
Fill the dance and the music of mirth,
As the waves of a thousand streams rush by
To an ocean of splendour and harmony!
Chorus of Spirits.
Our spoil is won,
Our task is done,
We are free to dive, or soar, or run;
Beyond and around,
Or within the bound
Which clips the world with darkness round.
We'll pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonize:
Death, Chaos, and Night,
From the sound of our flight,
Shall flee, like mist from a tempest's might.
And Earth, Air, and Light,
And the Spirit of Might,
Which drives round the stars in their fiery flight;
And Love, Thought, and Breath,
The powers that quell Death,
Wherever we soar shall assemble beneath.
And our singing shall build
In the void's loose field
A world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield;
We will take our plan
From the new world of man,
And our work shall be called the Promethean.
Chorus of Hours.
Break the dance, and scatter the song;
Let some depart, and some remain.
Semichorus I.
We, beyond heaven, are driven along:
Semichorus II.
Us the enchantments of earth retain:
Semichorus I.
Ceaseless, and rapid, and fierce, and free,
With the Spirits which build a new earth and sea,
And a heaven where yet heaven could never be.
Semichorus II.
Solemn, and slow, and serene, and bright,
Leading the Day and outspeeding the Night,
With the powers of a world of perfect light.
Semichorus I.
We whirl, singing loud, round the gathering sphere,
Till the trees, and the beasts, and the clouds appear
From its chaos made calm by love, not fear.
Semichorus II.
We encircle the ocean and mountains of earth,
And the happy forms of its death and birth
Change to the music of our sweet mirth.
Chorus of Hours and Spirits.
Break the dance, and scatter the song,
Let some depart, and some remain,
Wherever we fly we lead along
In leashes, like starbeams, soft yet strong,
The clouds that are heavy with love's sweet rain.
Panthea.
Ha! they are gone!
Ione.
          Yet feel you no delight
From the past sweetness?
Panthea.
             As the bare green hill
When some soft cloud vanishes into rain,
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water
To the unpavilioned sky!
Ione.
             Even whilst we speak
New notes arise. What is that awful sound?
Panthea.
'Tis the deep music of the rolling world
Kindling within the strings of the waved air
olian modulations.
Ione.
          Listen too,
How every pause is filled with under-notes,
Clear, silver, icy, keen, awakening tones,
Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul,
As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea.
Panthea.
But see where through two openings in the forest
Which hanging branches overcanopy,
And where two runnels of a rivulet,
Between the close moss violet-inwoven,
Have made their path of melody, like sisters
Who part with sighs that they may meet in smiles,
Turning their dear disunion to an isle
Of lovely grief, a wood of sweet sad thoughts;
Two visions of strange radiance float upon
The ocean-like enchantment of strong sound,
Which flows intenser, keener, deeper yet
Under the ground and through the windless air.
Ione.
I see a chariot like that thinnest boat,
In which the Mother of the Months is borne
By ebbing light into her western cave,
When she upsprings from interlunar dreams;
O'er which is curved an orblike canopy
Of gentle darkness, and the hills and woods,
Distinctly seen through that dusk aery veil,
Regard like shapes in an enchanter's glass;
Its wheels are solid clouds, azure and gold,
Such as the genii of the thunderstorm
Pile on the floor of the illumined sea
When the sun rushes under it; they roll
And move and grow as with an inward wind;
Within it sits a wingd infant, white
Its countenance, like the whiteness of bright snow,
Its plumes are as feathers of sunny frost,
Its limbs gleam white, through the wind-flowing folds
Of its white robe, woof of ethereal pearl.
Its hair is white, the brightness of white light
Scattered in strings; yet its two eyes are heavens
Of liquid darkness, which the Deity
Within seems pouring, as a storm is poured
From jaggd clouds, out of their arrowy lashes,
Tempering the cold and radiant air around,
With fire that is not brightness; in its hand
It sways a quivering moonbeam, from whose point
A guiding power directs the chariot's prow
Over its wheeld clouds, which as they roll
Over the grass, and flowers, and waves, wake sounds,
Sweet as a singing rain of silver dew.
Panthea.
And from the other opening in the wood
Rushes, with loud and whirlwind harmony,
A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,
Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass
Flow, as through empty space, music and light:
Ten thousand orbs involving and involved,
Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden,
Sphere within sphere; and every space between
Peopled with unimaginable shapes,
Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deep,
Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl
Over each other with a thousand motions,
Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning,
And with the force of self-destroying swiftness,
Intensely, slowly, solemnly roll on,
Kindling with mingled sounds, and many tones,
Intelligible words and music wild.
With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
Of elemental subtlety, like light;
And the wild odour of the forest flowers,
The music of the living grass and air,
The emerald light of leaf-entangled beams
Round its intense yet self-conflicting speed,
Seem kneaded into one areal mass
Which drowns the sense. Within the orb itself,
Pillowed upon its alabaster arms,
Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil,
On its own folded wings, and wavy hair,
The Spirit of the Earth is laid asleep,
And you can see its little lips are moving,
Amid the changing light of their own smiles,
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream.
Ione.
'Tis only mocking the orb's harmony.
Panthea.
And from a star upon its forehead, shoot,
Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears
With tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined,
Embleming heaven and earth united now,
Vast beams like spokes of some invisible wheel
Which whirl as the orb whirls, swifter than thought,
Filling the abyss with sun-like lightenings,
And perpendicular now, and now transverse,
Pierce the dark soil, and as they pierce and pass,
Make bare the secrets of the earth's deep heart;
Infinite mines of adamant and gold,
Valueless stones, and unimagined gems,
And caverns on crystalline columns poised
With vegetable silver overspread;
Wells of unfathomed fire, and water springs
Whence the great sea, even as a child is fed,
Whose vapours clothe earth's monarch mountain-tops
With kingly, ermine snow. The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythd chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,
The anatomies of unknown wingd things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jaggd alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe
Wrapped deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God
Whose throne was in a comet, passed, and cried,
'Be not!' And like my words they were no more.
The Earth.
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! ha! the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
The Moon.
Brother mine, calm wanderer,
Happy globe of land and air,
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame,
With love, and odour, and deep melody
  Through me, through me!
  The Earth.
Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.
The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses,
And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses,
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse,
Who all our green and azure universe
Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending
A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones,
And splinter and knead down my children's bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending,
Until each crag-like tower, and storied column,
Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn,
My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire;
My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom
Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire:
How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all;
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, love
Burst in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball.
The Moon.
The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
  On mine, on mine!
   Gazing on thee I feel, I know
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
And living shapes upon my bosom move:
Music is in the sea and air,
Wingd clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
  'Tis love, all love!
  The Earth.
It interpenetrates my granite mass,
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,
They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers.
And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being:
With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever,
Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,
Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error,
This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love;
Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven
Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even,
Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move:
Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left,
Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured;
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored.
Man, oh, not men! a chain of linkd thought,
Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!
His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-wingd ship, whose helm
Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm,
Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his dreams pass;
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Ddal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.
The Moon.
The shadow of white death has passed
From my path in heaven at last,
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep;
And through my newly-woven bowers,
Wander happy paramours,
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
  Thy vales more deep.
  The Earth.
As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold
A half unfrozen dew-globe, green, and gold,
And crystalline, till it becomes a wingd mist,
And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
Outlives the moon, and on the sun's last ray
Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst.
The Moon.
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy, and heaven's smile divine;
All suns and constellations shower
On thee a light, a life, a power
Which doth array thy sphere; thou pourest thine
  On mine, on mine!
  The Earth.
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
The Moon.
As in the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
  Full, oh, too full!
   Thou art speeding round the sun
Brightest world of many a one;
Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour
Borne beside thee by a power
Like the polar Paradise,
Magnet-like of lovers' eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
Maniac-like around thee move
Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side
Like a Mnad, round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
In the weird Cadman forest.
Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
Of thy soul from hungry space,
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or a chameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
As a violet's gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a gray and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
Athwart the western mountain it enfolds,
When the sunset sleeps
  Upon its snow
  The Earth.
  And the weak day weeps
   That it should be so.
Oh, gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night,
Through isles for ever calm;
Oh, gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce
The caverns of my pride's deep universe,
Charming the tiger joy, whose tramplings fierce
Made wounds which need thy balm.
Panthea.
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
Out of the stream of sound.
Ione.
               Ah me! sweet sister,
The stream of sound has ebbed away from us,
And you pretend to rise out of its wave,
Because your words fall like the clear, soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph's limbs and hair.
Panthea.
Peace! peace! A mighty Power, which is as darkness,
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight: the bright visions,
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone,
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
Ione.
There is a sense of words upon mine ear.
Panthea.
An universal sound like words: Oh, list!
Demogorgon.
Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul,
Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies,
Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll
The love which paves thy path along the skies:
The Earth.
I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies.
Demogorgon.
Thou, Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
With wonder, as it gazes upon thee;
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth
Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:
The Moon.
I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee!
Demogorgon.
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Dmons and Gods,
Aetherial Dominations, who possess
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness:
A Voice from above.
Our great Republic hears, we are blest, and bless.
Demogorgon.
Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered
A Voice from beneath.
                 Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
Demogorgon.
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
From man's high mind even to the central stone
Of sullen lead; from heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on:
A confused Voice.
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
Demogorgon.
Spirits, whose homes are flesh: ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms, and fish; ye living leaves and buds;
Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes:
A Voice.
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
Demogorgon.
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
A dupe and a deceiver; a decay;
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
All.
Speak: thy strong words may never pass away.
Demogorgon.
This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
Composed at Este, Sept., Oct., 1818 (Act I); at Rome, March - April 6, 1819 (Acts II, III); at Florence, close of 1819 (Act IV). Published by C. and J. Ollier, London, summer of 1820.

Note from Mrs. Shelley: 'On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return. His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. .....Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the law of the world. ....And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in their decay, or gaed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many passages in the Prometheus which show the intense delight he received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and he wrote from Rome, ''My Prometheus Unbound is just finished, and in a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is better than any of my former attempts.'''
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
,

IN CHAPTERS [150/266]



  122 Integral Yoga
   30 Christianity
   17 Science
   10 Occultism
   10 Integral Theory
   7 Psychology
   7 Fiction
   6 Philosophy
   6 Cybernetics
   3 Poetry
   2 Yoga
   1 Theosophy
   1 Mythology
   1 Kabbalah
   1 Hinduism
   1 Education
   1 Alchemy


   96 Sri Aurobindo
   63 The Mother
   54 Satprem
   29 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   17 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   6 Norbert Wiener
   6 H P Lovecraft
   6 Aleister Crowley
   4 Carl Jung
   3 Jorge Luis Borges
   3 Jordan Peterson
   3 A B Purani
   2 Plato
   2 James George Frazer
   2 Friedrich Nietzsche


   26 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   15 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   12 The Future of Man
   11 The Life Divine
   10 The Phenomenon of Man
   9 Agenda Vol 03
   9 Agenda Vol 02
   8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
   7 The Human Cycle
   6 Record of Yoga
   6 Lovecraft - Poems
   6 Cybernetics
   6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   6 Agenda Vol 05
   5 Questions And Answers 1953
   5 Let Me Explain
   5 Essays Divine And Human
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   5 Agenda Vol 06
   4 Liber ABA
   4 Letters On Yoga IV
   3 The Secret Doctrine
   3 Savitri
   3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   3 On the Way to Supermanhood
   3 Maps of Meaning
   3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   3 Essays On The Gita
   3 Agenda Vol 04
   2 Words Of Long Ago
   2 Twilight of the Idols
   2 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   2 The Golden Bough
   2 Some Answers From The Mother
   2 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
   2 Magick Without Tears
   2 Letters On Yoga II
   2 Letters On Yoga I
   2 Labyrinths
   2 Hymn of the Universe
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   2 Agenda Vol 13
   2 Agenda Vol 08
   2 Agenda Vol 01
   2 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah


0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Then we have caught the tail of the Great Possible, we are upon the wayless way, radically in the new, and we flow with the little lizard, the pelican, the big man, we flow everywhere in a world that has lost its old separating skin and its little baggage of habits. We begin seeing otherwise, feeling otherwise. We have opened the gate into an inconceivable clearing. Just a light little vibration that carries you away. Then we begin to understand how it CAN CHANGE, what the mechanism is - a light little mechanism and so miraculous that it looks like nothing. We begin feeling the wonder of a pure little cell, and that a sparkling of joy would be enough to turn the world inside out. We were living in a little thinking fishbowl, we were dying in an old, bottled habit. And then suddenly, all is different. The Earth is free! Who wants freedom?
  It begins in a cell.

0.00 - The Wellspring of Reality, #Synergetics - Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, #R Buckminster Fuller, #Science
  The human brain is a physical mechanism for storing, retrieving, and re-storing again, each special-case experience. The experience is often a packaged concept.
  Such packages consist of complexedly interrelated and not as-yet differentially analyzed phenomena which, as initially unit cognitions, are potentially re-experienceable. A rose, for instance, grows. has thorns, blossoms, and fragrance, but often is stored in the brain only under the single word-rose.

0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Will-in-Power executive in the universe. It was by learning and applying the intimate secrets of this Will-in-Power, its method, its Tantra, that the Tantric Yogin pursued the aims of his discipline, - mastery, perfection, liberation, beatitude. Instead of drawing back from manifested Nature and its difficulties, he confronted them, seized and conquered. But in the end, as is the general tendency of Prakriti, Tantric Yoga largely lost its principle in its machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism still powerful when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.
  We have in this central Tantric conception one side of the truth, the worship of the Energy, the Shakti, as the sole effective force for all attainment. We get the other extreme in the Vedantic conception of the Shakti as a power of Illusion and in the search after the silent inactive Purusha as the means of liberation from the deceptions created by the active Energy. But in the integral conception the Conscious Soul is the Lord, the Nature-Soul is his executive Energy. Purusha is of the nature of Sat, the being of conscious self-existence pure and infinite; Shakti or Prakriti is of the nature of Chit, - it is power of the Purusha's self-conscious existence, pure and infinite. The relation of the two exists between the poles of rest and action. When the Energy is absorbed

0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  the descriptions of complicated mechanisms.
  If you don't want to learn a thing thoroughly, conscientiously

01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
   The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.

01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A mechanism no more or work of Chance,
  But a living movement of the body of God.

01.08 - A Theory of Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The recent science of Psycho-analysis has brought to light certain hidden springs and undercurrents of the mind; it has familiarised us with a mode of viewing the entire psychical life of man which will be fruitful for our present enquiry. Mind, it has been found, is a house divided, against itself, that is to say it is an arena where different and divergent forces continually battle against one another. There must be, however, at the same time, some sort of a resolution of these forces, some equation that holds them in balance, otherwise the mind the human being itselfwould cease to exist as an entity. What is the mechanism of this balance of power in the human mind? In order to ascertain that we must first of all know the fundamental nature of the struggle and also the character of the more elemental forces that are engaged in it.
   There are some primary desires that seek satisfaction in man. They are the vital urges of life, the most prominent among them being the instinct of self-preservation and that of self-reproduction or the desire to preserve one's body by defensive as well as by offensive means and the desire to multiply oneself by mating. These are the two biological necessities that are inevitable to man's existence as a physical being. They give the minimum conditions required to be fulfilled by man in order that he may live and hence they are the strongest and the most fundamental elements that enter into his structure and composition.
  --
   What is the reason of this elaboration, this check and constraint upon the natural and direct outflow of the animal instincts in man? It has been said that the social life of man, the fact that he has to live and move as member of a group or aggregate has imposed upon him these restrictions. The free and unbridled indulgence of one's bare aboriginal impulses may be possible to creatures that live a separate, solitary and individual life but is disruptive of all bonds necessary for a corporate and group life. It is even a biological necessity again which has evolved in man a third and collateral primary instinct that of the herd. And it is this herd-instinct which naturally and spontaneously restrains, diverts and even metamorphoses the other instincts of the mere animal life. However, leaving aside for the moment the question whether man's ethical and spiritual ideals are a mere dissimulation of his animal instincts or whether they correspond to certain actual realities apart from and co-existent with these latter, we will recognise the simple fact of control and try to have a glimpse into its mechanism.
   There are three lines, as the Psycho-analysts point out along which this control or censuring of the primary instincts acts. First, there is the line of Defence Reaction. That is to say, the mind automatically takes up an attitude directly contrary to the impulse, tries to shut it out and deny altogether its existence and the measure of the insistence of the impulse is also the measure of the vehemence of the denial. It is the case of the lady protesting too much. So it happens that where subconsciously there is a strong current of a particular impulse, consciously the mind is obliged to take up a counteracting opposite impulse. Thus in presence of a strong sexual craving the mind as if to guard and save itself engenders by a reflex movement an ascetic and puritanic mood. Similarly a strong unthinking physical attraction translates itself on the conscious plane as an equally strong repulsion.

01.14 - Nicholas Roerich, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The stress of the inner urge to the heights and depths of spiritual values and realities found special and significant expression in his paintings. It is a difficult problem, a problem which artists and poets are tackling today with all their skill and talent. Man's consciousness is no longer satisfied with the customary and the ordinary actions and reactions of life (or thought), with the old-world and time-worn modes and manners. It is no more turned to the apparent and the obvious, to the surface forms and movements of things. It yearns to look behind and beyond, for the secret mechanism, the hidden agency that really drives things. Poets and artists are the vanguards of the age to come, prophets and pioneers preparing the way for the Lord.
   Roerich discovered and elaborated his own technique to reveal that which is secret, express that which is not expressed or expressible. First of all, he is symbolical and allegorical: secondly, the choice of his symbols and allegories is hieratic, that is to say, the subject-matter refers to objects and events connected with saints and legends, shrines and enchanted places, hidden treasures, spirits and angels, etc. etc.; thirdly, the manner or style of execution is what we may term pantomimic, in other words, concrete, graphic, dramatic, even melodramatic. He has a special predilection for geometrical patterns the artistic effect of whichbalance, regularity, fixity, soliditywas greatly utilised by the French painter Czanne and poet Mallarm who seem to have influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist, nor the normality and clarity of the Latin temperament. The prophet, the priest in him was the stronger element and made use of the artist as the rites andceremoniesmudras and chakrasof his vocation demanded. Indeed, he stands as the hierophant of a new cultural religion and his paintings and utterances are, as it were, gestures that accompany a holy ceremonial.

0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  The Divine alone can liberate us from the mechanism of
  universal Nature. And this liberation is indispensable for the

0 1957-10-17, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   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.
   Naturally, all this is a gradual process, but I am hopeful that little by little this new consciousness will grow, gain ground and victoriously resist the old forces of destruction and annihilation, and this Fatality we believed to be so inexorable.

0 1958-12-28, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   Sweet Mother, I indeed suspect that you want to endure, to bear this struggle all alone. Oh, I think I understand a number of things about the mechanism of these attacks and their connection with me, about the Divine Love that embraces all and takes into itself the suffering and the evil of menall this overwhelms me with a sudden understanding. It seems to me that I am seeing and feeling all that you are facing, all that you are taking upon yourself for us. The suffering of the Divine in Matter has been an overwhelming revelation to meAh! I see, I want to fight, I want to be totally on your side; I am now and forever determined.
   But you have enough to do with the higher beasts of prey without still having to fight the little scorpions. I beg of you, Sweet Mother, accept the help that is being offered to you, preserve your strength for the higher struggle. I quite understand that your Love can even go to the scorpions that are attacking you, but it is not forbidden to protect yourself from their venom. You have enough to do on other planes.

0 1961-01-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Yes, I am disrupting their work I know perfectly well that I am disrupting their domination of the world! All these vital beings have taken possession of the whole of Matter (Mother touches her body)life and action and have made it their domain, this is evident. But they are beings of the lower vital, for they seemed artificial they didnt express any higher form, but an entire range of artificial mechanisms, artificial will, artificial organization, all deriving from their own imagination and not at all from a higher inspiration.1 The symbol was very clear.
   And I saw my own domain through them and through it all; I saw my domain: I can see it!, I said. But no sooner would I start on my way than the path would be lost, I no longer saw it, I couldnt see anymore where I was going. It became almost impossible to get my bearings there: hundreds and thousands of people, thingsutter confusion. An incoherent immensity and violent, what violence!
  --
   These seem to be the forces ruling the subconscious mechanisms or reactions of the body: all the automatism produced by evolution and atavismwhat might be termed evolutionary habits. This is the 'descending path,' which started forty years earlier, as Mother said (or the 'physical plunge' referred to by Sri Aurobindo), leading to the pure cellular consciousness.
   Japa: the continuous repetition of a mantra. Mother's mantra is a song of the cells, the sole material or physical process used by her for awakening the cells and stabilizing the Supramental Force in her body.

0 1961-01-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   There is now a kind of VERY PRECISE knowledge of the whole inner mechanism for all thingsand what has to be done materially. This is developing, as a flower blossoms: you see one petal open and then another and then another; it is proceeding like that, slowly, taking its time. Its the same process for the Power.
   To illustrate this, an interesting thing came upyesterday, I think. (All these experiences come to show me the difference, as if to give proof of the change.) Someone had had a dream about me whispered to him by the adverse forces for specific reasons (I wont go into the details). He was much affected by it, so he wrote down the dream and gave it to me. I was carrying his letter along with all the others, as I usually do, but suddenly I knew I had to read it right away: I read it. Then I saw the whole thing with such clarity, precision, accuracy: how it had come about, how the dream had been produced, its effect the whole functioning of all the forces. As I read along and it went on unfolding, I did what was necessary for him (he was present at the time) in order to undo what the adverse forces had done. Then at the end, when I had finished, said everything, explained what it was all about and what had to be done, something SO CATEGORICAL came into me (I cannot verbalize this kind of experience, it is what I call the difference in power: something categorical). I took the letter, uttered a few words (which I wont repeat) and said, You see, its like this: so much for that, and I ripped the letter a first time. Then, thats for that, I tore it a second time and so on. I ripped it up five times and the fifth time I saw that their power was destroyed.

0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   To realize what one has to realize, it is absolutely indispensable to be TOTALLY free of all ties with the ordinary, false consciousness common to material body-consciousness the consciousness of the body-substancederiving from the subconscient and the inconscient. This must not only be mastered (it has been mastered for a long time)but there must be complete independence so that it no longer has the power to provoke any reaction at all. But we arent there yet, its still not like that, and as long as it isnt, we are not on the safe side. But when all the bodys cells, even in their most subconscious reactions, will come to know what I myself know, that the Supreme alone exists, when they will know that, it will be goodnot before. As I told you just now, they still have ordinary reactions: If I have to stay on my feet, (this isnt a thought; Im obliged to use words, but it isnt a thought), If I have to stay on my feet, Im going to get tired; if I do too much, Ill be tired, if I do this, it will have that consequence, if. This stupid, automatic little mechanism. its not yet THAT, not yet That!
   Of course, theres the constant difficulty of all the thoughts coming from outside and from the people you live with. But now the consciousness is such that these outer things are seen objectively (Mother makes a gesture of seeing vibrations coming and stopping before her eyes)automatically I see everything that comes from the surrounding vibrations objectively: far, near, above, below, everywhere. The vibration comes WITH THE KNOWLEDGE. In other words, its not that you see what it is only after it has been received and absorbed: it comes with the knowledge, and this is a great help. This type of perception has considerably increased and become much more precise since that experience [of January 24], much more; it has made a big difference.

0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Once again, Mother's experience coincides with modern science, which is beginning to discover that time and space are not fixed and INDEPENDENT quantitiesas, from the Greeks right up to Newton, we had been accustomed to believe but a four-dimensional system, with three coordinates of space and one of time, DEPENDENT UPON THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA DEVELOPING THEREIN. Such is 'Riemann's Space,' used by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. Thus, a trajectoryi.e., in principle, a fixed distance, a quantity of space to be traversed-is a function of the time taken to traverse it: there is no straight line between two points, or rather the I straight' line is a function of the rate of speed. There is no 'fixed' quantity of space, but rather rates of speed which determine their own space (or their own measure of space). Space-time is thus no longer a fixed quantity, but, according to science, the PRODUCT ... of what? Of a certain rate of unfolding? But what is unfolding? A rocket, a train, muscles?... Or a certain brain which has generated increasingly perfected instruments adapted to its own mode of being, like a flying fish flying farther and farther (and faster and faster) but finally failing back into its own oceanic fishbowl. Yet what would this space-time be for another kind of fishbowl, another kind of consciousness: a supramental consciousness, for example, which can be instantaneously at any point in 'space'there is no more space! And no more time. There is no more 'trajectory': the trajectory is within itself. The fishbowl is shattered, and the whole evolutionary succession of little fishbowls as well. Thus, as Mother tells it, space and time are a 'PRODUCT Of the movement of consciousness.' A variable space-time, which not only changes according to our mechanical equipment, but according to the consciousness utilizing the equipment, and which ultimately utilizes only itself; consciousness, at the end of the evolutionary curve, has become its own equipment and the sole mechanism of the universe.
   ***

0 1961-04-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   No, for the least little thing, the whole mechanism has to be discovered, and discovered in a realm of the most total ignorance, where, really, unconsciousness is the most unconscious and ignorance the most ignorant.
   (silence)

0 1961-06-06, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   How did it happen? (But not just how as in a story: the mechanism). And how will we get out of it?
   You see, all the things that have been told, even all the things Sri Aurobindo has said (he has said the most in Savitri), all that is necessarily (what can it be called?) mental, the super-intellectual spiritualized mind. But it is not THAT! Its a form, its an image, its not the concrete fact.

0 1961-06-24, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   And then one understands all, allall the details. Some things can be understood intellectually or psychologically (which is very good, it has an effect and it helps you), but that always seems so hazy; it works through an imprecision. But now the vibrations mechanism is understoodits MECHANICS; and thus it becomes precise. All these attitudes the yoga recommendsbeginning with action done as offering, then complete detachment from the result (leaving the result to the Lord), then perfect equanimity in all circumstances, all these stages which one understands intellectually, feels sentimentally, and has fully experiencedwell, all this takes on its TRUE MEANING only when it becomes what could be called a mechanical action of vibrationat that point one understands why it must be like it is.
   And these last few days, especially yesterday and this morning, oh! Extraordinary discoveries! We are on the right track.

0 1961-08-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Satprem remembers that a few years earlier Mother had told him about the circumstances of this incident: during her work in trance, Mother discovered the location of the 'mantra of life'the mantra that has the power to create life (and to withdraw it, as well). Theon, an incarnation of the Asura of Death, was of course quite interested and told Mother to repeat this mantra to him. Mother refused. Theon became violently angry and the link was cut (the link that connected Mother to her body). When he realized the catastrophe his anger had caused, Theon grew afraid (for he knew who Mother was) and he then, as Mother recounts, made use of all his power to help her re-enter her body. Later, Mother gave this mantra to Sri Aurobindo... who let it quietly sink into oblivion. For it is not through a mantra that the secret of life (or death) is to be mastered, but through knowledge of the true Powerin other words, ultimately, knowledge of the reality of Matter and the mechanism of death: it is the whole cellular yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Mother.
   Tamas: inertia, obscurity.

0 1961-10-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I must add that the experience came after I had been concentrating for three days (concentrating almost constantly) on finding an explanation for this: why has it become this way? It is impossible to find the why because its the reason asking and this goes beyond reason but what is the mechanism? Finding the mechanism would already be somethingto have the experience of the mechanism. And then came this CONCRETE superposition of the vibration of Love and the reception of hate. But this is exactly what happens! I said. The Lord is All-Love, All-Truth, All-Bliss, All-Deligh tHe is CONSTANTLY like thatand the world, especially the human world, constantly receives him in the other way. And the two things are superposed (Mother covers her left hand with her right).
   Words dont convey anything; it was the experience. I made contact. It was very interesting. It lasted a long time, some two or three days. Since it was also linked to a state of healtha headache that had to be curedit bore its consequences: a crystal clear explanation of illness came. But I must again add something that preceded this.
   This concentration on finding the mechanism sprang from the fact that there were disorders in the body which were vanishing and then reappearingpermanent cure seemed impossible. So I told myself, Somewhere, probably in the subconscient, something must be justifying their presence. Then, after concentrating and searching and concentrating some more, suddenly a memory rose up from the subconscient (a memory which is a kind of continued existence under a certain form), the memory of a particular set of movements and actions (not physical movements, but attitudes) that go back many years and had never attracted my attention. None of it had ever been included in the general clearing-out because, like so many other things, it all seemed to be due to normal, ongoing circumstances. But thats just where I saw (what to call it?) the hue, the taint of Falsehood. Its very subtle. These are very subtle things. But suddenly, oh! It caught hold of me and created a revolution in the whole being. All those vibrations were cast up and transformedan extraordinary thing. It stirred up much more commotion and revolution than I had ever expected. And ah! A relief. Something was clarified, bringing a brilliant, new comprehension, and then quite interesting physical results. Before this, I was really feeling rather poorly, extremely tired, with the impression of a decline into decrepituderelatively speaking! (It was in a very superficial part of the being, but it was enough to be disagreeable.) And all of itpfft! Gone in a single stroke.
   And that very day, I had this experience with the possessed personit all came together. And then afterwards, a sort of mastery over the problem and the impression of a breakthroughan opening up of the WAY to change, which is this enlargement. First, the movement of generosity (not that shriveling movement, but its exact opposite the movement of expansion), and from there you go on to universality, and from universality to Totality.

0 1962-02-24, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Tapas: literally, heat. It is the concentrated energy constituting everythingnot generated by some mechanism, but by the very concentration of the power of Consciousness (chit). In Indian tradition, the world was created by Tapas in the form of an egg the primordial eggwhich broke open from the incubating heat of consciousness-force and gave birth to the world. To "become the tapas of things" is to uncover in one's own material, bodily substance that same formidable, supramental seat of energy (what physicists, following Einstein, call atomic energy: E = mc2), the energy that animates the stone and the bird and the universe for then like can act upon like. Mother was reaching that point.
   ***

0 1962-02-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Ultimately, absolute sincerity is the great deciding factor for those who predict or foresee. Unfortunately, because of peoples curiosity, their insistence and the pressure they exert (which very few can resist), an almost involuntary mechanism of inner imagination comes to add just that small missing element to something not seen with precision or exactness. Thats what causes flaws in prediction. Very few have the courage to say, Ah no, I dont know this, I dont see that, this eludes me. They dont even have the courage to say it to themselves! So then, with a tiny drop of imagination, which acts almost subconsciously, the vision or information gets rounded outit can turn out to be anything at all! Very few people can resist this tendency. I have known many, many psychics, many extraordinarily gifted beings, and only a handful were able to stop just at the point where their knowledge stopped. Or else they embellish. Thats what gives these faculties their slightly dubious quality. One would have to be a great saint, a great sage, and completely free from other peoples influences (I dont speak of those who seek fame: they fall into the most flagrant traps); because even goodwillwanting to satisfy people, please them, help themis enough to distort the vision.
   (Smiling) Are you satisfied? Have I answered everything?

0 1962-03-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The trouble is, the mental mechanism isnt there any more. Before, with the mind working, I would take up this thing or do that thing, but now I dont let it function, so theres nothing to make me move!
   Absolutely. But its a big progress.

0 1962-05-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   If only the mechanism could be found!
   It is plainly something hooked up with other people and reacting to them. But this hook-up is something I cannot undoits the product of years of work, years of universalization, and I am not going to spend my time undoing it now! I dont want to. I dont want to find anything for myself alone; I have no personal interest whatsoever. I havent stayed on for that. I have to find the mechanism. Moreover, I have been doing just the opposite: every time I am in that state I spread it around, I pass it on. But that may be why these old habits come in.
   ***

0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   (A little later, regarding Mothers exclamation: If only the mechanism could be found!)
   Its neither trick nor twist, but something in between.
   There are boxes that can only be opened in a certain way, and if you dont know the way. Some cupboards are like that, too. Its not obvious. It really is a trick, but even more than a trick, a kind of very subtle little mechanism. Like being just on the verge of attaining something, and suddenlyah! You know youve got it!
   ***

0 1962-06-20, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   My own experience is going on in the tiniest details, details imperceptible in themselves but pointing in a certain direction that, increasingly, is this: when you take a wrong attitude, it immediately sets off all the disorders. Almost as if you shift into a wrong gear the image is too rigid, of course, its not really that but we can say that the whole universe is rolling smoothly along and its only when you go like this or like that (Mother indicates a shifting of gears) that disorders arise. You can have a wrong attitude in a number of ways. Its like a slight shifting of gears: things still work (assuming the mechanism to be particularly supple) but they gratethey grate and therefore wear out and deteriorate and break down. But if they were in the true position, there would be no friction.
   The sense of friction doesnt existit disappears, theres no friction. Friction results only from the wrong angle from something, a sort of shift.

0 1962-08-04, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   (Mother listens to a passage from Satprems manuscript concerning the vital and the mechanism by which vibrations enter ones being.)
   What you say about all those things entering through the centers is perfectly correct.

0 1962-09-05, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   For a long, long time, that was also the one thing I felt was worth living forConsciousness. When I met Thon and came to understand the mechanism, I also understood why I wasnt conscious at a certain level. I think Ive told you how I spent ten months one year working to connect two layerstwo layers of consciousness; the contact wasnt established and so I couldnt have the spontaneous experience of a whole spectrum of things. Madame Thon told me, Its because theres an undeveloped layer between this part and that part. I was very conscious of all the gradations: Thon had explained it all in the simplest terms, so you didnt need to be, as I said, a genius to understand. He had made a quadruple division, and each of them was divided into four, and then again into four, making innumerable divisions of the being; but with that mental simplification you could make in-depth psychological studies of your own being. And so by observation and elimination I eventually discovered that between this and that (gesture indicating two levels of Mothers consciousness), there was an undeveloped layerit wasnt conscious. So I worked for ten months on nothing but that: absolutely no results. I didnt care, I kept right on, telling myself, Well, it may take me fifty years to get anywhere, who knows. And then I left for the country (I was living in Paris at the time). I lay down on the grass, and all at once, with the contact of earth and grass, poof! There was a sort of inner explosion the link was established, and full consciousness came, along with all the ensuing experiences. Well, I said to myself, it was worth all the trouble!
   And I am sure thats how the work is done, slowly, imperceptibly, like a chick being formed in the egg: you see the shell, you see only the shell, you dont know whats inside, whether its just an egg or a chick (normally, I meanof course, you could see through with special instruments) and then the beak goes peck-peck! And then cheep! Out comes the chick, just like that. Its the same thing exactly for the contact with the psychic being. For months on end, sometimes years, you may be sitting before a closed door, push, push, pushing, and feeling, feeling the pressure (it hurts!), and theres nothing, no results. Then all at once, you dont know why or how, you sit down and poof! Everything bursts wide open, everything is ready, everything is doneits over, you emerge into a full psychic consciousness and become intimate with your psychic being. Then everything changeseverything changesyour life completely changes, its a total reversal of your whole existence.

0 1962-12-28, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   This cleansing of the middle ground is the whole story of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I had been dredging, dredging, dredging the mire of the subconscious. The supramental light was coming down before November,2 but afterwards all the mud arose and it stopped.3 Once again Sri Aurobindo verified, not individually this time but collectively, that if one pulls down too strong a light, the violated darkness below is made to moan. It is noteworthy that each time Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had some new experience marking a progress in the transformation, this progress automatically materialized in the consciousness of the disciples, without their even knowing anything about it, as a period of increased difficulties, sometimes even revolts or illnesses, as though everything were grating and grinding. But then, one begins to understand the mechanism. If a pygmy were abruptly subjected to the simple mental light of a cultivated man, we would probably see the poor fellow traumatized and driven mad by the subterranean revolutions within him. There is still too much jungle beneath the surface. The world is still full of jungle, thats the crux of the matter in a word; our mental colonization is a minuscule crust plastered over a barely dry quaternary. And the battle seems endless; one digs and digs, said the Rishis, and the deeper one digs, the more the bottom seems to recede: I have been digging, digging. Many autumns have I been toiling night and day, the dawns aging me. Age is diminishing the glory of our bodies. Thus, thousands of years ago, lamented Lopamudra, wife of Rishi Agastya, who was also seeking transformation. But Agastya doesnt lose heart, and his reply is magnificently characteristic of the conquerors the Rishis were: Not in vain is the labor which the gods protect. Let us relish all the contesting forces, let us conquer indeed even here, let us run this battle race of a hundred leadings.
   (Rig-Veda I.179)

0 1963-01-30, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Here, there was some hesitation between de linstant [the instants] and du moment [the moments]. Then he showed me (I cant explain how it takes place), he showed me both words, moment and instant, and he showed me how, compared to moment, instant is mechanical; he said, Its the mechanism of time; moment is full and contains the event. Things of that sort, inexpressible (I put it into words but it loses all its value). Inexpressible, but fantastic! There was some hesitation between instant and moment, I dont know why. Then he showed me instant: instant was dry, mechanical, empty, whereas moment contained all that takes place at every instant. So I wrote moment.
   (Mother reads the end of her translation)

0 1963-05-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   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 1963-10-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Every time a new truth has attempted to manifest upon earth, it has been immediately attacked, corrupted and diverted by pseudo-spiritual forceswhich did represent a certain spirituality at a given time, but precisely the one that the new truth wants to go beyond. To give but one example of those sad spiritual diversions which clutter History, Buddhism was largely corrupted in a sizable part of Asia by a whole Tantric and magic Buddhism. The falsity lies not in the old spirituality which the new truth seeks to go beyond, but in the eternal fact that the Past clings to its powers, its means and its rule. As Mother said in her simple language, Whats wrong is to remain stuck there. And Sri Aurobindo with his ever-present humor: The traditions of the past are very great in their own place, in the past. We could expect the phenomenon to recur today. In India, Tantrism represents a powerful discipline from the Past and it was inevitable that Mother should experience the better and the worse of that system in her attempt to transform all the means and elements of the old earththis Agenda has made abundant mention of a certain X, symbol of Tantrism. Now, as it happens, we are witnessing the same phenomenon of diversion, and today this same Tantrism is seeking to divert the new truth by convincing as many adepts as possible not to say Mothers Mantra, which is too advanced for ordinary mortals, and to say Tantric mantras in its stead. This is purely and simply an attempt to take Mothers place. One has to be quite ignorant of the mechanism of forces not to understand that saying a mantra of the old gods puts you under the influence and into the orbit of precisely that which resists the new truth. Mother had foreseen the phenomenon and forewarned me in the following conversation. Unfortunately, until recently, I always wanted to believe that Tantrism would be converted. Nothing of the sort. It is attempting to take Mothers place and lead astray those who are not sincere enough to want ONE SINGLE THING: the new world.
   ***

0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It made me see something so interesting. Automatically, human thought is always convinced (automatically convinced, anyway) that things must follow the mechanism. For the body, in order to get cured, to change something, they instinctively feel that things have to follow the mechanism. For example, Ive had these last few days an interesting experience concerning a question: What will the form of the superman be like? All the conceptions speak of a man with a more perfect form; but thats only an improvement. And man does represent a radical change from the ape but from what point of view? Not so much because of the form of his body as because of his POWER OVER THE mechanism OF LIFE. So, following this idea, I had a confirmation of what I had seen, that Matter became plastic and obeyed the will. So everyone had a certain amount of matter at his disposal and gave it the forms he liked.
   And I saw that human imagination has great difficulty getting out of a sort of enslavement to the physical machinery. Thats what Sri Aurobindo means here.

0 1964-07-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But from the beginning, Ive seen that he couldnt be cured, because he doesnt really have faith. He has a sort of diluted knowledge that there are forces behind the material forces, but still, for him, the concrete reality is Matter and its mechanism, and so remedies must be mechanical. Because I tried to cure him several times, but there was no receptivity, nonelike a stone, you know.
   Maybe it will be better now?

0 1964-08-05, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   They need a mechanism.
   Yes, but as soon as theres a mechanism, its finished.
   The mechanism may well be very good for the person who found it: its HIS mechanism. But its good only for him.
   As for me, I prefer not to have any mechanism!
   The temptation comes sometimes, but Its far more difficult without, but infinitely more living. All this [the Zen account] seems to me I immediately feel something thats becoming dead and drydry, lifeless.
   They replace life with a mechanism. And then its finished.
   (silence)

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
   Mother is led to carry out all kinds of experiments in her body for the work of Transformation. One of them consists in receiving or taking upon oneself every possible disorder for several hours, several days or several minutes, in one's body, in order to act on them, and, consequently, to act on disorders of the same nature in the worldor on THE Disorder. Mother is thus constantly led to work on the meeting point between the subtle forces behind and the bodily or material mechanisms. In her body it is an uncommon chemistry that takes place, the subtle elements of which she knows better than the gross ones.
   ***

0 1964-11-21, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Except for mechanisms, theres nothing.
   Its good, its a very good sign, it means you are becoming free from your ego.
  --
   Yes, but in that nonexistence, only things without any interest remain: the body, the mechanisms.
   Because thats what remains. But what to do? I tell you, the impression was that there only remained what directly concerns this.

0 1965-03-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   After that, I said to myself, How little we know! How limited all our understanding is in comparison with what IS: the mechanism.
   Well.

0 1965-03-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Its an extraordinarily sensitive mechanism, and with an almost infinite field of receptivity (gesture of gradation).
   My means of knowing people now is also like that. But for a long time now, when I see a photograph, for instance, it hasnt been going through thought at all; there are neither deductions nor intuitions: the photograph causes a vibration somewhere. And funny things happen, too; the other day, they gave me the photograph of a person, so I have a very clear perception: from the place that is touched, from the vibration that responds, I know that this man is used to handling ideas and that he has the self-assurance of someone who teaches. I ask (just to see), What does this man do? They tell me, He is a businessman. I said, Well, he isnt made to be a businessman, he doesnt know the first thing about business! And three minutes after, they tell me, Oh, excuse me, I am sorry, I made a mistake, he is a teacher! (Mother laughs) Thats how it is.

0 1965-04-17, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   All that occult mechanism needs to be developed, but for the consciousness its almost rational.
   That would be the procedure.

0 1965-07-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Well, I am convinced thats how it is, thats all. But the physical mind doesnt believe in that. It believes that thats all very well in the higher realms, but when we are in Matter things follow a law of Matter and are material and mechanical, and there is a mechanism, and when the mechanism and so on and so forth (not with these words, but with this thought). And one has to keep forever working on that, forever saying, Oh, put a stop to all your difficulties, keep quiet!
   Only, the Flame must be there the Flame within, the flame of aspiration and the flame of faith; and then the something that truly wants it to stop. You understand, whether things are this way or that, there is no need for me to present them to my thought and for my thought to accept them; because thats a very dangerous game: when you seek equanimity, you say to yourself, Well, if this and that happens, what will my reaction be? And you go on with the little game, till you say, Its all the same to me. It is a very dangerous game. Its still a way of circling around the goal instead of heading straight for it.

0 1965-10-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Naturally, if the consciousness is warped, it must first be set right, but I am talking about enlightened consciousnesses that live in the Truth, that have aspiration and that wonder why this intensity of aspiration produces such poor resultsnow I know. The poor result is because they dont attach enough importance to those very small things that belong to the subconscious mechanism and because of which in thought you are free, in sentiment you are free, even in impulse you are free, and physically you are a slave.
   One must undo all that, undo it, undo it.
  --
   The fear of the unknown is gone (doubt went away a very long time ago), the fear of the unknown, of the new, the unexpected, is gone; there only remains the mechanism of habit. But it holds on, it clings, oh!
   It will go.

0 1966-10-22, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I have told them several times that they might as well replace this with a nicely designed robot, because this (laughing) doesnt need to be here! A well-designed robot, with a sophisticated mechanism: you press one button for one thing, another button for another thing, and it works!
   You know the situation: I am not alone for ONE MINUTE, not in the twenty-four hours of the day.1 And in addition to the outer crowd there is the inner crowd: from everywhere, constantly, it keeps coming and comingoh, constantly and increasingly. Increasingly. So I am like this (gesture showing a consciousness spread afar), a sort of consciousness that responds, thats all, without any participation. A consciousness that responds like a machine.

0 1967-06-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But now I remember what it was this morning: it was about physical health and balance; because it was like an answer to a sort of call (or prayer or aspiration, anyway, as you like) that I had yesterday evening, and in the night it was as if I was being shown the mechanism to restore harmony in the bodys functioning.
   And I made a special concentration for you, which continued this morning. Now I remember.

0 1967-09-20, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   There is the vision, an extremely complex and at the same time complete vision, that those, for instance, who have tried to explain the power of imagination, of thought or will or faith (all those things: the direct action on matter), the vision that each of those things has caught hold of one little aspect of the Thing, but in the Thing, there are no divisions; its something which, when you perceive or conceive it, is divided into scores of little things, but its essentially (how should I put it?) a way of being, a state of consciousness its a WAY OF BEING, not even a state of consciousness because that implies being conscious OF something and its not that: its a way of being. And that way of being is what, in the human consciousness, expresses itself as Ah, the Divine!by opposition, you understand. Its a PERFECTLY NATURAL and spontaneous way of being but how, how does That become this? How does That become distorted? You constantly, constantly (gesture as of tiny reversals) switch from one to the other, back and forth, over and over again, as if to learnto learn how That becomes this (the mechanism of the passage). To us it looks like (to us, to all this poor consciousness that has gone through innumerable woeful experiences), it looks like a relapse into the old state; therefore its not that. But whats the mechanism?
   In the end, we would have the solution only if we found the how and the why.

0 1968-09-07, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   What I say there is the vision of the mechanism [the occult working of death], and its very true in the sense it was lived like that. But now I am on the other side. All that I say here is part of all the complications of the execution.1
   Very well.

0 1969-10-08, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   When the body is aware of that, then its fine. Its far from having reached perfectionto begin with, its I dont know if its being transformed, thats not visible, but at any rate its functioning depends on the higher Consciousness, it no longer depends on the ordinary mechanism (thats taking place gradually). Well, even in the middle of that, theres a sort of smiling trust as a result of which, even when theres some pain, some discomfort, it doesnt matterit doesnt matter. There is the sense of this Divine Presence, always, everywhere, every moment. That doesnt go away.
   (silence)

0 1970-10-31, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   (Answer:) Not sex exactly, but what might be called the masculine and feminine principle. It is a difficult question [whether sex is altered in rebirth]. There are certain lines the reincarnation follows and so far as my experience goes and general experience goes, one follows usually a single line. But the alteration of sex cannot be declared impossible. There may be some who do alternate. The presence of feminine traits in a male does not necessarily indicate a past feminine birththey may come in the general play of forces and their formations. There are besides qualities common to both sexes. Also a fragment of the psychological personality may have been associated with a birth not ones own. One can say of a certain person of the past, that was not myself, but a fragment of my psychological personality was present in him. Rebirth is a complex affair and not so simple in its mechanism as in the popular idea.
   11 January 1936

0 1971-12-11, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Indeed, the prison is already starting to collapse. The end of a stage of evolution, announced by Sri Aurobindo, is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution.6 Everywhere about us we see this paroxysmal shattering of all the old forms: our borders, our churches, our laws, our morals are collapsing on all sides. They are not collapsing because we are bad, immoral, irreligious, or because we are not sufficiently rational, scientific or human, but because we have come to the end of the human! To the end of the old mechanism for we are on our way to SOMETHING ELSE. The world is not going through a moral crisis but through an evolutionary crisis. We are not going towards a better worldnor, for that matter, towards a worse onewe are in the midst of a MUTATION to a radically different world, as different as the human world was from the ape world of the Tertiary Era. We are entering a new era, a supramental Quinary. We leave our countries, wander aimlessly, we go looking for drugs, for adventure, we go on strike here, enact reforms there, foment revolutions and counterrevolutions. But all this is only an appearance; in fact, unwittingly, we are looking for the new being. We are in the midst of human evolution.
   And Sri Aurobindo gives us the key. It may be that the sense of our own revolution escapes us because we try to prolong that which already exists, to refine it, improve it, sublimate it. But the ape may have made the same mistake amid its revolution that produced man; perhaps it sought to become a super-ape, better equipped to climb trees, hunt and run, a more agile and clever ape. With Nietzsche we too sought a superman who was nothing more than a colossalization of man, and with the spiritualists a super-saint more richly endowed with virtue and wisdom. But human virtue and wisdom are useless! Even when carried to their highest heights they are nothing more than the old poverties gilded over, the obverse of our tenacious misery. Supermanhood, says Sri Aurobindo, is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, genius, saintliness, love, purity or perfection.7 It is SOMETHING ELSE, another vibration of being, another consciousness.

0 1972-01-12, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   For instance, the memory mechanism is gone, but I feel its on purpose. My vision of things would be much less spontaneous and sincere (possibly) if I remembered.
   Yes, I get it.

0 1972-02-01, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The Divine alone can liberate us from the mechanism of universal Nature. And this liberation is indispensable for the birth and development of the new race.
   Only if we give ourselves entirely to the Divine with total trust and gratitude will the difficulties be surmounted.

02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives
  And to a dull usual sense and feeling's beat,

03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  No giant mechanism watched by a soul;
  There creaks no fate-turned huge machinery;

03.05 - Some Conceptions and Misconceptions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The exclusive concentration was the logical and inevitable final term of a movement of separativity and exteriorisation. It had its necessity and utility. Its special function was utilised by Nature for precision and perfection in details of execution in the most material order of reality. Indeed, what can be more exact and accurate than the laws of physics, the mathematical laws that govern the movements of the material particles? Furthermore, if we look at the scientist himself, do we not find in him an apt image of the same phenomenon? A scientist means a specialist the more specialised and restricted his view, the surer he is likely to be in his particular domain. And specialised knowledge means a withdrawal from other fields and viewpoints of knowledge, an ignorance of them. Likewise, a workman who moulds the head of a pin is all concentrated upon that single point of existencehe forgets the whole world and himself in that act whose perfect execution seems to depend upon the measure of his self-oblivion. But evidently this is not bound to be so. A one-pointed self-absorption that is Ignoranceis certainly an effective way of dealing with material objectsthings of Ignorance; but it is not the only way. It is a way or mechanism adopted by Nature in a certain status under certain conditions. One need not always forget oneself in the act in order to do the act perfectly. An unconscious instinctive act is not always best doneit can be done best consciously, intuitively. A wider knowledge, a greater acquaintance with objects and facts and truths of other domains too is being more and more insisted upon as a surer basis of specialisation. The pinpointed (one might almost say geometrically pointed) consciousness in Matter that resolves itself into unconsciousness acts perfectly but blindly; the vast consciousness also acts there with absolute perfection but consciouslyconscious in the highest degree.
   As we have said, super-consciousness does not confine itself to the supreme status alone, to the domain of pure infinity, but it comes down and embraces the most inferior status too, the status of the finite. Precisely because it is infinity, it is not bound to its infinity but can express its infinity in and through infinite limits.

04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But there is a still closer mystery, the mystery of mysteries. There has not been merely a general descent, the descent of a world-force on a higher plane into another world-force on a lower plane; but that there is the descent of the individual, the personal Godhead into and as an earthly human being. The Divine born as a man and leading the life of a man among us and as one of us, the secret of Divine Incarnation is the supreme secret. That is the mechanism adopted by the Divine to cure and transmute human illshimself becoming a man, taking upon himself the burden of the evil that vitiates and withers life and working it out in and through himself. Something of this truth has been caught in the Christian view of Incarnation. God sent upon earth his only begotten son to take upon himself the sins of man, suffer vicariously for him, pay the ransom and thus liberate him, so that he may reach salvation, procure his seat by the side of the Father in Heaven. Man corrupted as he is by an original sin cannot hope by his own merit to achieve salvation. He can only admit his sin and repent and wait for the Grace to save him. The Indian view of Incarnation laid more stress upon the positive aspect of the matter, viz, the role of the Incarnation as the inaugurator and establisher of a new order in lifedharmasasthpanrthya. The Avatar brings down and embodies a higher principle of human organisation, a greater consciousness which he infuses into the existing pattern, individual or collective, which has -served its purpose, has become otiose and time-barred and needs to be remodelled, has been at the most preparatory to something else. The Avatar means a new revelation and the uplift of the human consciousness into a higher mode of being. The physical form he takes signifies the physical pressure that is exerted for the corroboration and fixation of the inner illumination that he brings upon earth and in the human frame. The Indian tradition has focussed its attention upon the Goodreyasand did not consider it essential to dwell upon the Evil. For one who finds and sees the Good always and everywhere, the Evil does not exist. Sri Aurobindo lays equal emphasis on both the aspects. Naturally, however, he does not believe in an original evil, incurable upon earth and in earthly life. In conformity with the ancient Indian teaching he declares the original divinity of man: it is because man is potentially and essentially divine that he can become actually and wholly divine. The Bible speaks indeed of man becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect: but that is due exclusively to the Grace showered upon man, not because of any inherent perfection in him. But in according full divinity to man, Sri Aurobindo does not minimise the part of the undivine in him. This does not mean any kind of Manicheism: for Evil, according to Sri Aurobindo, is not coeval or coterminous with the Divine, it is a later or derivative formation under given conditions, although within the range and sphere of the infinite Divine. Evil exists as a stern reality; even though it may be temporary and does not touch the essential reality, it is not an illusion nor can it be ignored, brushed aside or bypassed as something superficial or momentary and of no importance. It has its value, its function and implication. It is real, but it is not irremediable. It is contrary to the Divine but not contradictory. For even the Evil in its inmost substance carries or is the reality which it opposes or denies outwardly. Did not the very first of the apostles of Christ deny his master at the crucial moment? As we have said, evil is a formation necessitated by certain circumstances, the circumstances changed, the whole disposition as at present constituted changes automatically and fundamentally.
   The Divine then descends into the earth-frame, not merely as an immanent and hidden essencesarvabhtntratm but as an individual person embodying that essencemnu tanumritam. Man too, however earthly and impure he maybe, is essentially the Divine himself, carries in him the spark of the supreme consciousness that he is in his true and highest reality. That is how in him is bridged the gulf that apparently exists between the mortal and the immortal, the Infinite and the Finite, the Eternal and the Momentary, and the Divine too can come into him and become, so to say, his lower self.
   The individual or personal Divine leaves his home of all blissVaikunthaforgets himself and enters into this world of all misery; but this does not mean that he becomes wholly the Man of Misery: he encompasses all misery within himself, penetrates as well into the stuff and substance of all misery, but suffuses all that with the purifying and transforming pressure of his own supreme consciousness. And yet pain and suffering are real, cruelly real, even to the Divine Man. Just as the ordinary human creature suffers and agonises in spite of the divine essence in him, in spite of his other deeper truth and reality, his soul of inalienable bliss, his psychic being, the Divine too suffers in the same way in spite of his divinity. This double line of consciousness, this system of parallels running alongside each other, interacting upon each other (even intersecting each other, when viewed in a frame of infinity) gives the whole secret mechanism of creation, its purpose, its working and its fulfilment. It is nothing else than the gradual replacement or elimination, elevation or sublimation of the elements on one line that are transmuted into those of the other. The Divine enters into the Evil to root out the Evil and plant there or release and fructify the seed of Divinity lying covered over and lost in the depths of dead inconscience.
   The Divine descends as an individual person fundamentally to hasten the evolutionary process and to complete it; he takes the human form to raise humanity to divinity. The fact and the nature of the process have been well exemplified in Sri Ramakrishna who, it is said, took up successively different lines of spiritual discipline and by a supreme and sovereign force of concentration achieved realisation in each line in the course of a few days what might take in normal circumstances years or even lives to do. The Divine gathers and concentrates in himself the world-force, the Nature-Energyeven like adynamo and focuses and canalises it to give it its full, integral and absolute effectivity. And mortal pain he accepts, and swallows the poison of ignorant lifeeven like Nilakantha Shivato transmute it into ecstasy and immortality. The Divine Mother sank into the earth-nature of a human body:

04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances: but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat, the imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation, organisation, stabilisation the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that agestalwarts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams of
   A light that was ne'er on sea or land. . .
  --
   The Romantic Revival was a veritable source movement: it was, one can say, a kind of watershed from where various streams of new creation and fresh adventure flowed down in all directions. Its echoes and repurcussions are met with even today and continue. The next stage that followed naturally and inevitably was man's preoccupation with his sense being, his external, his physical and material personality. It is the age of Naturalism, Realism, Pragmatism, Scientism: it proclaims the birth of the economic man. From the heart and emotions we drop down into the field of the nervous and sensuous existence, from the vital sphere into the sphere of the body. And that is where we are today. It means that we have been made more than ever self-conscious on this plane and of this personality of ours. We have been given and are being given greater knowledge of its mechanism; we are intensively (and extensively too) getting familiar with all the drawbacks and lacunae that are there so that we can remedy them and discover new latent forces too, and re-create and possess a truly "brave new world".
   That is how the spirit of progress and evolution has worked and advanced in the European world. And one can take it as the pattern of human growth generally; but in the scheme described above we have left out one particular phase and purposely. I refer to the great event of Christ and Christianity. For without that European civilisation loses more than half of its import and value. After the Roman Decline began the ebbtide, the trough, the dark shadow of the deepening abyss of the Middle Ages. But even as the Night fell and darkness closed around, a new light glimmered, a star was born. A hope and a help shone "in a naughty world". It was a ray of consciousness that came from a secret cave, from a domain hidden behind and deep within in the human being. Christ brought a leaven into the normal manifest mode of consciousness, an otherworldly mode into the worldly life. He established a living and dynamic contact with the soul, the inner person in man, the person that is behind but still rules the external personality made of mind and life and body consciousness. The Christ revelation was also characteristic in the sense that it came as a large, almost a mass movementthis approach of the soul personality to earthly life. The movement faded or got adulterated, deformed like all human things; but something remained as a permanent possession of man's heritage.

04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or more precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves generically the process with which we are familiar in the domain of industry and is termed synthetic, that is to say, it means the skill and capacity to create the conditions under which a given phenomenon can be repeated at will. Hence it means a perfect knowledge of the process of thingswhich again is a dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually leading to the result and (2) the knowledge that has the power to resolve the result into its antecedent conditions. Thus the knowledge of the mechanism, the detailed working of things, is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific knowledge can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best sense of the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the knowledge of the means (to use a phrase of Aldous Huxley) and the conscious control over either have given humanity a new degree of self-consciousness.
   It can be mentioned here that there can be a knowledge of ends without a corresponding knowledge of means, even there can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over meansperhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree of practical utility. Much of the knowledgeespecially secular and scientificin ancient times was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more instinctive or intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that knowledge the result only, the end that it to say, was the chief aim and concern, the means for attaining the end was, one cannot perhaps say, ignored, but slurred or slipped over as it were: the process was thus involved or understood, not expressed or detailed out. Thus we know of some mathematical problems to which correct solutions were given of which the process is not extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is that there was in fact very little of the process as we know it now the solution was reached per saltum, that is to say, somehow, in the same manner as we find it happening even today in child prodigies.

05.04 - The Measure of Time, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There is very little sense in the common notion that everything is predetermined as to the time when it will happen, that the universal scheme has been all unalterably arranged and mapped out from beforehand, that nothing can change it, all goes according to plan. This is only a human conception, a construction of the mind, a wrong translation in the brain of some fact which is otherwise and elsewhere. The mind divides where there is no division, puts things against each other where there is perfect compatibility and harmony. Determinism and Indeterminism, Free-Will and mechanism are contradictions set up by the mind and have no real objective existence. From a certain view-point, on a certain level of consciousness things appear to move in a rigid frame of mechanistic determinism; from another view-point, on another level, things seem to possess absolute freedom.
   Looked at from the higher source of things, the time-factor itself appears as an illusion. What is true is a certain set of conditions in which forces work themselves out. And in this pattern of conditions, time (along with space) does not give the absolute and fixed frame of reference, as is usually taken for granted, but is a varying background, even if it is not a side-issue or a by-product. The conscious force at work in the world aims at a change in the conditions; it is a work primarily of rearrangement and order. The state of Nature, of actualityof ignorance and inertiais one of chaos. What the Divine Will behind, the Consciousness standing over, does is to develop a cosmos out of that chaos. Things are placed wrongly, at random, pell-mell: they have to be assorted, arranged, docketed, each item in its own place. We know, for example, of the material particle in which the atoms are huddled together, each pointing to a different direction, but when they are arranged in such a way that one half points in one way and the other half the contrary way, we have what is called a magnetised body.

05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The crux of the difficulty is this. We say the observing eye or whatever mechanism is made to function for it, disturbs the process of observation. Now to calculate that degree or measure of disturbance one has to fall back upon another observing eye, and this again has to depend upon yet another behind. Thus there is an infinite regress and no final solution. So, it has been declared, in the ultimate analysis, scientific calculation gives us only the average result, and it is only average calculations that are possible.
   Now we come to the sanctum, the Shekinah, of the problem. For there is a still deeper mystery. And pre-eminently it is an Einsteinian discovery. It is not merely the measuring ray of light, not merely the beam in the eye of the observer that is the cause of interference: the very mind behind the eye is involved in a strange manner. The mind is not a tabula rasa, it comes into the field with certain presuppositionsaxioms and postulates, as it calls themdue to its angle of vision and perhaps to the influence upon it of immediate sense perception. It takes for granted, for example, that light travels in a straight line, that parallels do not meet, indeed all the theorems and deductions of Euclidean geometry. There is a strong inclination in the mind to view things as arranged according to that pattern. Einstein has suggested that the spherical scheme can serve as well or even better our observations. Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry has assumed momentous importance in contemporary scientific enquiry. It is through that scheme that Einstein proposes to find the equation that will subsume the largest number of actual and possible or potential facts and bring about the reconciliation of such irreconcilables as wave and particle, gravitation and electricity.

05.13 - Darshana and Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   There is another concept in Whitehead which seems to be moulded after a parallel concept in Sri Aurobindo: it is with regard to the working out of the process of creation, the mechanism of its dynamism. It is almost a glimpse into the occult functioning of the world forces. Whitehead speaks of two principles that guide the world process, first, the principle of limitation, and second, the principle of ingress. The first one Sri Aurobindo calls the principle of concentration (and of exclusive concentration) by which the infinite and the eternal limits himself, makes himself finite and temporal and infinitesimal, the universal transforms itself into the individual and the particular. The second is the principle of descent, which is almost the corner-stone in Sri Aurobindo's system. There are layers of reality: the higher forces and formulations enter into the lower, work upon it and bring about a change and transformation, purification and redemption. All progress and evolution is due to this influx of the higher, the deeper into , the lower and superficial plane of existence.
   There is one concept in Whitehead which seems rather strange to us; it is surely a product of the brain-mind. God, according to him, is not the creator: he is only the Redeemer, he is a shaper but not the source and origin of things. That is because he thinks that if God is made the creator of the world, he would be held responsible for the evil there. This difficulty comes when one thinks of God too much in the popular anthropomorphic way, like someone seated above the world and passing judgment upon a world which is not his doing. God is perhaps a lover of the world, but not its Mastera certain Christian outlook says. According to Sri Aurobindo, God is a triple reality in his transcendental, cosmic and individual aspect. In creating the world, God creates, that is to say, manifests himself. And Evil is an evolute in the process of God's self-creation through self-limitation: it proceeds to self-annihilation and even self-transmutation in a farther process of God's self-unfoldment in world and Nature.

05.31 - Divine Intervention, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   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.

05.32 - Yoga as Pragmatic Power, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The ordinary man does works, achieves the object he aims at, through processes and means which, however powerful and effective, can be only moderately and approximately so. The amount of time and energy wasted is not proportionate to the result obtained. Man knows to utilise only a fraction of the energy collected in a system: the best of dispositions and organisation can harness just a modicum of the total stock, the rest is frittered away or locked up, whether it is vital energy or mental energy or even physical energy. That is because the central power that drives, the consciousness that controls the whole mechanism is of an inferior quality, of a lower potential. The Yogi views all energy as various forms and gradations of consciousness. So what he proposes, as a good scientist, is to lift up the consciousness and thus raise its potential and effectivity and minimise the waste. The higher the consciousness, the greater the effectivity, that is to say, the pragmatic value. As we rise in the scale there is less and less waste and greater and greater utilisation until we reach a climax, a critical degree, where there is absolutely no waste and where there is the utmost, the total utilisation of the whole energy. This supreme peak of consciousness that is absolute energy Sri Aurobindo names the Supermind. But on lesser levels too the spiritual consciousness is dynamic and effectivepragmatic in a way that the ordinary, limited, externally pragmatic consciousness cannot hope to be.
   Sometimes it is urged that in the worldly affairs we should move according to the worldly procedure, otherwise to import into mundane things spiritual values would merely confuse issues and end in failure in both the fieldsfallen from hence, lost from thence". Of course there are spiritual points of view that go ill with the mundane, as indeed there are mundane considerations that do not match with the spiritual. The two categories of view-point have been succinctly and luminously named by Sri Aurobindo as the Materialist Denial and the Ascetic Refusal.1 But there are other points of view, .other lines of approach which seek a harmony and union between Spirit and Matter, that envisage the marriage of Heaven and Earth.

07.08 - The Divine Truth Its Name and Form, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is the meaning, the thought behind the word that is important. When the thought is powerfully thought, it produces a vibration of which the word is only a carrier, an intermediary. Indeed, you can develop the thought-power to such an extent that you are able to establish a direct material contact with the minimum or even no words at all. Naturally this requires a strong power of concentration. But you will find that the bodily mechanism is only a mechanical means; it is an instrument, but not always important or indispensable.
   When we are conscious of the Divine, do we see Him in all things in some particular form?

1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  Your questions about the Spirit of the Sun, and so on, are to be answered by experience. Intellectual satisfaction is worthless. I have to bring you to a state of mind completely superior to the mechanism of the normal mind.
  A good deal of your letter is rather difficult to answer. You always seem to want to put the cart before the horse. Don't you see that, if I were trying to get you to do something or other, I should simply return you to the kind of answer which I thought would satisfy you, and make you happy? And this would be very easy to do because you have got no clear ideas about anything. For one thing, you keep on using terms about whose significance we are not yet in agreement. When you talk about the "Christian path," do you believe in vicarious atonement and eternal damnation or don't you? A great deal of the confusion that arises in all these questions, and grows constantly worse as fellow-students talk them over the blind leading the blind is because they have no idea of the necessity of defining their terms.

1.00 - PREFACE, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  we will go there helmeted and mechanized, and it will not change a thing for us; we will find ourselves exactly as we are now: helpless children in the face of death, living beings who are not too sure how they live, why they are alive, or where they are going. On the earth, as we know, the times of Cortez and Pizarro are over; one and the same pervasive mechanism stifles us: the trap is closing inexorably. But, as always, it turns out that our bleakest adversities are also our most promising opportunities, and that the dark passage is only a passage leading to a greater light. Hence, with our backs against the wall, we are facing the last territory left for us to explore, the ultimate adventure: ourselves.
  Indeed, there are plenty of simple and obvious signs. This decade's [the 60's] most important phenomenon is not the trip to the moon, but the "trips" on drugs, the student restlessness throughout the world, and the great hippie migration. But where could they possibly go? There is no more room on the teeming beaches, no more room on the crowded roads, no more room in the ever-expanding anthills of our cities. We have to find a way out elsewhere.
  --
  perhaps, live better than we do. Indeed, we must first realize that we can do better than our machines, and that the enormous mechanism that is suffocating us is liable to collapse as quickly as it came into being, provided we are willing to seize on the true power and go down into our own hearts, as methodical, rigorous, and clearheaded explorers.
  Then we may discover that our splendid twentieth century is still the Stone Age of psychology, that, in spite of all our science, we have not yet entered the true science of living, the real mastery of the world and of ourselves, and that there lie before us horizons of perfection,

1.013 - Defence Mechanisms of the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  object:1.013 - Defence mechanisms of the Mind
  author class:Swami Krishnananda
  --
  Chapter 13: Defence mechanisms of the Mind
  The term 'indriya nigrah' means sense-control; 'atma nigrah' means self-control. Both these terms are often thought of as having a synonymous meaning and are used as such, but the term 'self' has a larger connotation than 'sense', as we already know. So the term 'self-control' should mean something much more than what is indicated by the term 'sense-control', because the senses are only a few of the functions of the self and not all the functions, while self-control implies a restriction imposed upon every function of the self, meaning thereby the lower self, which has to be regulated by the principle of the higher self. The self that has to be controlled is any self which is lower than the Universal Self. The degrees of self gradually go on increasing in their comprehensiveness as we rise higher and higher, so that it becomes necessary that at every step the immediately succeeding stage, which is more comprehensive, acts as the governing principle of the category of self just below. An analogy would be the syllabi or curricula of education we do not suddenly jump into the topmost level of studies. There is always a governing principle exercised by systems of education, wherein the immediately succeeding stage determines the needs of the immediately preceding condition. The self, as far as we are concerned at the present moment, can be regarded as that principle of individuality which comprehends all that we regard as 'we', or connected with us.
  --
  A political manoeuvre is adopted by the mind by the manufacture of certain mechanisms psychologically, which are usually called by psychologists as defence mechanisms. These defence mechanisms are very peculiar structures like bulldozers and tanks which we have in armies and public works which the mind manufactures for its stability, security, sustenance and permanent establishment in the world of diversities. These defence mechanisms are terrible machineries which the mind manufactures and keeps secret, unknown to people, like secret weapons which one may wield, not allowing them to come to the knowledge of other people. If everyone knows what weapons we have got, then they won't be effective, because others also may manufacture the same weapons. So we keep our weapons very secret and use them only when they are necessary, in warfare or on a battlefield. Everyone has these weapons, and they are not made of material objects. They are psychological apparatuses which the mind always keeps ready at hand, whenever there is any kind of threat to the psychological security or individual happiness. The adepts who have made deep study of this subject are the psychoanalysts in the Western world and the teachers of yoga in the East, particularly Sage Patanjali; and certain other texts like the Upanishads have made a study of the subtle devices that the mind employs for the purpose of its individual security and permanent satisfaction.
  These mechanisms of the mind are to be studied very well before we try to adopt the method of self-control. Otherwise, we will be pursuing what they call a wild goose chase and we will get nothing out of our efforts. The mind is a terrible trickster, and it cannot be easily tackled by open methods. Frontal attacks will not always succeed, because these mechanisms of the mind are invisible weapons; they are not visible to the eye. The reactions that the mind sets up in respect of persons outside and things around are indications of the presence of these defence mechanisms. Even when these reactions are set up by the mind in respect of externals, the mechanisms are not made visible we see only reactions, and not the source or the cause of the reactions. They will all be kept hidden so that the nature of a person cannot be known, and even when the person sets up a reaction, that nature is kept secret always. That is another device of the mind. Through all of our outward behaviour and conduct, we cannot be studied properly by a mere look at our faces, because we are very secret inside, looking like something else outside. This deep-rooted secrecy of the mental structure has to be dug out and brought to the surface of consciousness before any successful effort can be made in the direction of self-control.

10.17 - Miracles: Their True Significance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Usually, the name 'miracle' is given to something that seems to us "unnatural", that is to say, something that does not, conform to the laws of nature or what we think to be the laws of nature. A man standing in the air without any support or squatting on the waterfeats familiar to the yogisare termed veritable miracles. The famous rope trick is a legendary miracle. Some of these miracles done by yogis are au thentic facts. They apparently seem to violate the prevailing so-called laws of nature, but if we knew the process, the mechanism behind the event because it is not apparent to the external logical mind, if we had a slightly different perception, the whole glamour of a miracle would fall to the ground.
   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.

1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
  its mechanisms was carried ahead through the same great step
  by two men working at about the same time: Charles Darwin52
  --
  while a long thin lizard that has developed the mechanism of
  crawling on its ribs may have a better chance for survival if it
  --
  Darwinian evolution is thus a mechanism by which a more
  or less fortuitous variability is combined into a rather definite
  --
  much better knowledge of the mechanism on which it depends.
  The work of Mendel has given us a far more precise and dis-
  --
  the origin of species, we have a mechanism by means of which
  a fortuitous variability, that of the random motions of the waves
  --
  old controversy between vitalism and mechanism; although this
  was complicated by the desire to conserve in some form or other
  --
  minded, and gives little or no attention to the mechanism of
  this correspondence.
  --
  with the mechanisms of physiology.
  The relation of these mechanisms to time demands careful
  study. It is clear, of course, that the relation input-­output is a
  --
  even mechanisms correspond to the time-­structure of vitalism;
  but as we have said, this victory is a complete defeat, for from

1.01 - The First Steps, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
  Returning to our subject, we come next to Pranayarna, controlling the breathing. What has that to do with concentrating the powers of the mind? Breath is like the fly-wheel of this machine, the body. In a big engine you find the fly-wheel first moving, and that motion is conveyed to finer and finer machinery until the most delicate and finest mechanism in the machine is in motion. The breath is that fly-wheel, supplying and regulating the motive power to everything in this body.
  There was once a minister to a great king. He fell into disgrace. The king, as a punishment, ordered him to be shut up in the top of a very high tower. This was done, and the minister was left there to perish. He had a faithful wife, however, who came to the tower at night and called to her husb and at the top to know what she could do to help him. He told her to return to the tower the following night and bring with her a long rope, some stout twine, pack thread, silken thread, a beetle, and a little honey. Wondering much, the good wife obeyed her husband, and brought him the desired articles. The husb and directed her to attach the silken thread firmly to the beetle, then to smear its horns with a drop of honey, and to set it free on the wall of the tower, with its head pointing upwards. She obeyed all these instructions, and the beetle started on its long journey. Smelling the honey ahead it slowly crept onwards, in the hope of reaching the honey, until at last it reached the top of the tower, when the minister grasped the beetle, and got possession of the silken thread. He told his wife to tie the other end to the pack thread, and after he had drawn up the pack thread, he repeated the process with the stout twine, and lastly with the rope. Then the rest was easy. The minister descended from the tower by means of the rope, and made his escape. In this body of ours the breath motion is the "silken thread"; by laying hold of and learning to control it we grasp the pack thread of the nerve currents, and from these the stout twine of our thoughts, and lastly the rope of Prana, controlling which we reach freedom.

1.02.3.2 - Knowledge and Ignorance, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  necessary mechanism for affirming individuality in the universal
  as a starting-point for this supreme achievement.

1.02 - Groups and Statistical Mechanics, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
  morphic demon or a minute mechanism. When a particle of
  more than average velocity approaches the gate from compart-

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  the stairs, or the elevator once I had learned their location, position, and mechanisms I could take them
  for granted, and presume their irrelevance. Predictable phenomena (read thoroughly explored, and
  --
  The plans we formulate are mechanisms designed to bring the envisioned perfect future into being. Once
  formulated, plans govern our behavior until we make a mistake. A mistake, which is the appearance of a
  --
  hypothesized more than five decades ago that mechanisms of withdrawal and approach (characteristic
  of animals at virtually all levels of the evolutionary scale) provided the foundation for motivation, as such.
  --
  initiating exploratory behavior. This archaic control mechanism would then drive the processes of
  63
  --
  with minimal cognitive effort 196. I dont know what drives the mechanism that determines the appropriate
  level of analysis. Elements of probability and predictability must play a role. It is, after all, increasingly
  --
  derision. Jung was not privy to our knowledge of the mechanisms of inheritance (a limitation necessarily
  shared by all the members of his generation); the idea of collective memories appears impossible
  --
  means to attain such information. This was Jungs approach. The causal mechanism he constructed to
  account for what he found that is, the collective unconscious appears fundamentally untenable, from
  --
  approach mechanisms, evolved to suit the space surrounding the primary deity, embodiment of the
  unknown. The ubiquitous drama of human sacrifice, (proto)typical of primordial religious practice, enacted

1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  At what levels and by what mechanisms does this predeter-
  mined additivity of characteristics show itself in the living being?
  --
  For the purpose of examining the additive mechanism of Life
  in its vital, active form I propose to look in a direction which the
  --
  extrinsic mechanism, superposed at one remove on the transmis-
  sion of life. But Bergson has pointed out the arbitrary nature of the
  --
  there is a single mechanism education.
  All the lines join together, complete themselves and merge.

1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For this discovery by individual free-thought of universal laws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery and the attempt at all possible. In seeking the truth and law of his own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth and law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his freedom in his own interest and that of humanity, must have his whole life and action determined for him at every step and in every point from birth to old age by the well-ordered mechanism of the State.1 We might then have a curious new version, with very important differences, of the old Asiatic or even of the old Indian order of society. In place of the religio-ethical sanction there will be a scientific and rational or naturalistic motive and rule; instead of the Brahmin Shastrakara the scientific, administrative and economic expert. In the place of the King himself observing the law and compelling with the aid and consent of the society all to tread without deviation the line marked out for them, the line of the Dharma, there will stand the collectivist State similarly guided and empowered. Instead of a hierarchical arrangement of classes each with its powers, privileges and duties there will be established an initial equality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps with a subsequent determination of function by experts who shall know us better than ourselves and choose for us our work and quality. Marriage, generation and the education of the child may be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the Shastra. For each man there will be a long stage of work for the State superintended by collectivist authorities and perhaps in the end a period of liberation, not for action but for enjoyment of leisure and personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprastha and Sannyasa Asramas of the old Aryan society. The rigidity of such a social state would greatly surpass that of its Asiatic forerunner; for there at least there were for the rebel, the innovator two important concessions. There was for the individual the freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation of the social for the free spiritual life, and there was for the group the liberty to form a sub-society governed by new conceptions like the Sikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departures from the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic and rigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too, there would grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom and a body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowed to question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, since that would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thus we should have a new typal order based upon purely economic capacity and function, guakarma, and rapidly petrifying by the inhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalistic conventions. And quite certainly this static order would at long last be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led probably by the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism.
  On the other hand, there are in operation forces which seem likely to frustrate or modify this development before it can reach its menaced consummation. In the first place, rationalistic and physical Science has overpassed itself and must before long be overtaken by a mounting flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the human being and open a new vista before mankind. At the same time the Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end; novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being accepted with a significant rapidity, ideas inevitably subversive of any premature typal order of economic rationalism, dynamic ideas such as Nietzsches Will-to-live, Bergsons exaltation of Intuition above intellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a suprarational faculty and a suprarational order of truths. Already another mental poise is beginning to settle and conceptions are on the way to apply themselves in the field of practice which promise to give the succession of the individualistic age of society not to a new typal order, but to a subjective age which may well be a great and momentous passage to a very different goal. It may be doubted whether we are not already in the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle.

1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
   certainly brings it nearer to the Qabalistic conception of things; the old sanctions of a scientific mechanism have nearly all disappeared, and the terms which appeared to the
  Victorians so simple, objective, and intelligible-such as matter, energy, space, etc.-have completely failed to resist analysis. A few modern thinkers, seeing clearly the absolute debacle in which the old positivist science was bound to lead them, the breaking up of this icy expanse of frozen thought, determined at all costs to find a modus vivendi for

1.02 - The Vision of the Past, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  cern the process or practical mechanism whereby it does so/
  These are three propositions which may be briefly de-

1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  certain apparent contradictions in nature such as mechanism and
  liberty, or death and immortality as in the difficulty experienced
  --
  1 As we shall see, this is despite the specifically vital mechanism of multipli-
  cation.

1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Or we shall find that our action does not correspond with the inner light: it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths, still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of our external nature. This is a frequent experience because in such a process the Light and Power come to be selfcontained and unwilling to express themselves in life or to use the physical means prescribed for the Earth and her processes.
  It is as if we were living in another, a larger and subtler world and had no divine hold, perhaps little hold of any kind, upon the material and terrestrial existence.

1.03 - THE EARTH IN ITS EARLY STAGES, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  directed. By the very mechanism of its birth, the film in which
  the ' within ' of the earth was concentrated and deepened emerges

1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  birth to a mere mechanism, must have the effect of increasing the
  variety of choice and the wealth of spontaneity. Anarchic autonomy
  --
  But this mechanism, in such a Universe, begets another property. If
  by the fundamental mechanism of union the elements of con-
  sciousness, drawing together, enhance what is most incommunica-

1.03 - The Tale of the Alchemist Who Sold His Soul, #The Castle of Crossed Destinies, #Italo Calvino, #Fiction
  Now there was still The Wheel of Fortune to interpret, one of the most complicated images in the whole tarot game. It could mean simply that fortune had turned in Faust's direction, but this explanation seemed too obvious for the alchemist's narrative style, always elliptical and allusive. On the other hand, it was legitimate to suppose that our doctor, having got possession of the diabolical secret, conceived a monstrous plan: to change into gold all that was changeable. The wheel of the Tenth Arcanum would then literally mean the toiling gears of the Great Gold Mill, the gigantic mechanism which would raise up the Metropolis of Precious Metal; and the human forms of various ages seen pushing the wheel or rotating with it were there to indicate the crowds of men who eagerly lent a hand to the project and dedicated the years of their lives to turning those wheels day and night. This interpretation failed to take into account all the details of the miniature (for example, the animalesque ears and tails that adorned some of the revolving human figures), but it was a basis for interpreting the following cards of cups and coins as the Kingdom of Abundance in which the City of Gold's inhabitants wallowed. (The rows of yellow circles perhaps evoked the gleaming domes of golden skyscrapers that flanked the streets of the Metropolis.)
  But when would the established price be collected by the Cloven Contracting Party? The story's two final cards were already on the table, placed there by the first narrator: the Two of Swords and Temperance. At the gates of the City of Gold armed guards blocked the way to anyone who wished to enter, to prevent access to the Cloven-hooved Collector, no matter in what guise he might turn up. And even if a simple maiden, like the one in the last card, were to approach, the guards made her halt.

1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
  I came out of the fantasy; I realized that my mechanism had worked wonderfully well, but I was in great confusion as to the meaning of all those things I had seen. The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with
  Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal, I need not seek connections. I was able to link the picture up with the sea of blood I had previously fantasized about. / Though I could not then grasp the significance of the hero killed, soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions" (Analytical Psychology, p. 48). (The killing of Siegfried occurs below in ch. 7.) Jung also anonymously cited and discussed this fantasy in his ETH lecture on

1.04 - Feedback and Oscillation, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
  The operator produced by the whole feedback mechanism is
  then A/(1 + λA). This will be infinite when and only when A = −1/λ.
  --
  collectively as our homeostatic mechanism.
  Our homeostatic feedbacks have one general difference from

1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  that set in motion the vast and intricate mechanism of the world.
  Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have

1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  the process or practical mechanism whereby it does so.
  These are three propositions which may be briefly developed
  --
  accord. Evolution, by the very mechanism of its syntheses, charges itself with
  an ever-growing measure of freedom.
  --
  pseudo-unity. It may establish a mechanism, but it does not achieve
  any fundamental synthesis; and in consequence it engenders no

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  scientist produces evoke fear (and denial, and aggression, as defence mechanisms). The
  206
  --
  accompanies intrapsychic subjugation to the operation of innate, involuntary [episodic, limbic, righthemisphere-governed (?)] mechanisms responsible for the deconstruction and renewal of conditional
  knowledge. This operation manifests itself subjectively in structured mythic experience in spontaneous

1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For the Ishwari Shakti, divine Conscious-Force and World-Mother, becomes a mediatrix between the eternal One and the manifested Many. On one side, by the play of the energies which she brings from the One, she manifests the multiple Divine in the universe, involving and evolving its endless appearances out of her revealing substance; on the other by the reascending current of the same energies she leads back all towards That from which they have issued so that the soul in its evolutionary manifestation may more and more return towards the Divinity there or here put on its divine character. There is not in her, although she devises a cosmic mechanism, the character of an inconscient mechanical Executrix which we find in the first physiognomy of Prakriti, the Nature-Force; neither is there that sense of an Unreality, creatrix of illusions or semi-illusions, which is attached to our first view of Maya. It is at once clear to the experiencing soul that here is a conscious Power of one substance and nature with the Supreme from whom she came. If she seems to have plunged us into the Ignorance and Inconscience in pursuance of a plan we cannot yet interpret, if her forces present themselves as all these ambiguous forces of the universe, yet it becomes visible before long that she is working for the development of the Divine Consciousness in us and that she stands above drawing us to her own higher entity, revealing to us more and more the very essence of the Divine Knowledge, Will and Ananda. Even in the movements of the Ignorance the soul of the seeker becomes aware of her conscious guidance supporting his steps and leading them slowly or swiftly, straight or by many detours out of the darkness into the light of a greater consciousness, out of mortality into immortality, out of evil and suffering towards a highest good and felicity of which as yet his human mind can form only a faint image. Thus her power is at once liberative and dynamic, creative, effective,creative not only of things as they are, but of things that are to be; for, eliminating the twisted and tangled movements of his lower consciousness made of the stuff of the Ignorance, it rebuilds and new-makes his soul and nature into the substance and forces of a higher divine Nature.
  In this Duality too there is possible a separative experience. At one pole of it the seeker may be conscious only of the Master of Existence putting forth on him His energies of knowledge, power and bliss to liberate and divinise; the Shakti may appear to him only an impersonal Force expressive of these things or an attribute of the Ishwara. At the other pole he may encounter the World-Mother, creatrix of the universe, putting forth the Gods and the worlds and all things and existences out of her spirit-substance. Or even if he sees both aspects, it may be with an unequal separating vision, subordinating one to the other, regarding the Shakti only as a means for approaching the Ishwara. There results a one-sided tendency or a lack of balance, a power of effectuation not perfectly supported or a light of revelation not perfectly dynamic. It is when a complete union of the two sides of the Duality is effected and rules his consciousness that he begins to open to a fuller power that will draw him altogether out of the confused clash of Ideas and Forces here into a higher Truth and enable the descent of that Truth to illumine and deliver and act sovereignly upon this world of Ignorance. He has begun to lay his hand on the integral secret which in its fullness can be grasped only when he overpasses the double term that reigns here of Knowledge inextricably intertwined with an original Ignorance and crosses the border where spiritual mind disappears into supramental Gnosis. It is through this third and most dynamic dual aspect of the One that the seeker begins with the most integral completeness to enter into the deepest secret of the being of the Lord of the Sacrifice.
  --
  But still to the seeker standing at the opposite pole of the Duality another line of experience appears which justifies an intuition deeply-seated behind the heart and in our very life-force, that personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their source. A multiple innumerable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.
  This extreme opposition of view from the two poles of one Existence creates no fundamental difficulty for the seeker of the integral Yoga; for his whole experience has shown him the necessity of these double terms and their currents of Energy, negative and positive in relation to each other, for the manifestation of what is within the one Existence. For himself Personality and Impersonality have been the two wings of his spiritual ascension and he has the prevision that he will reach a height where their helpful interaction will pass into a fusion of their powers and disclose the integral Reality and release into action the original force of the Divine. Not only in the fundamental Aspects but in all the working of his sadhana he has felt their double truth and mutually complementary working. An impersonal Presence has dominated from above or penetrated and occupied his nature; a Light descending has suffused his mind, life-power, the very cells of his body, illumined them with knowledge, revealed him to himself down to his most disguised and unsuspected movements, exposing, purifying, destroying or brilliantly changing all that belonged to the Ignorance. A Force has poured into him in currents or like a sea, worked in his being and all its members, dissolved, new-made, reshaped, transfigured everywhere. A Bliss has invaded him and shown that it can make suffering and sorrow impossible and turn pain itself into divine pleasure. A Love without limits has joined him to all creatures or revealed to him a world of inseparable intimacy and unspeakable sweetness and beauty and begun to impose its law of perfection and its ecstasy even amidst the disharmony of terrestrial life. A spiritual Truth and Right have convicted the good and evil of this world of imperfection or of falsehood and unveiled a supreme good and its clue of subtle harmony and its sublimation of action and feeling and knowledge. But behind all these and in them he has felt a Divinity who is all these things, a Bringer of Light, a Guide and All-Knower, a Master of Force, a Giver of Bliss, Friend, Helper, Father, Mother, Playmate in the world-game, an absolute Master of his being, his souls Beloved and Lover. All relations known to human personality are there in the souls contact with the Divine; but they rise towards superhuman levels and compel him towards a divine nature.

1.04 - The Silent Mind, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths, still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of our external nature. . . . It is as if we were living in another, a larger and subtler world and had no divine hold, perhaps little hold of any kind,
  upon the material and terrestrial experience. 33 The only solution is therefore to practice silencing the mind just where it is seemingly the most difficult: on the street, in the subway, at work, everywhere.
  --
  memory, planning, and calculation. In practice, this is a long period of transition, with setbacks and breakthroughs (the feeling is not so much one of setbacks and breakthroughs as of something being veiled and unveiled in turn) as well as a confrontation of the two processes, the old mental mechanism tending constantly to interfere and to recapture its rights, namely, to convince us that we can't do without it; it may also find some support in a sort of laziness whereby we find it easier "to do as usual." On the other hand, this work of disentanglement is powerfully aided, first by the experience of the descending Force,
  which automatically and tirelessly puts our house in order and exerts a quiet pressure on the rebellious mechanism, as if each wave of thought were seized and frozen in place; secondly, by the accumulation of thousands of increasingly perceptible little experiences, which makes us realize that we can do amazingly well without the mind, and are actually better off without it.
  In fact, gradually we discover that there is no necessity to think.

1.04 - Wherefore of World?, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  But if we look more closely at these opposite ideas of a mechanism or of a psychological working, we shall see that they are only a double device which the mind adopts to interpret the riddle and veil its own ignorance. For each of the two theses seems to deny what the other affirms and, nevertheless, they only reveal severally, without knowing it, two aspects of one reality.
  All their oppositions resolve themselves into the dilemma of the consciousness or unconsciousness of the first reasons of things, that is to say, into two conceptions, according to our intellectual preference, of the universal dynamism which the one calls force, the other will.
  --
  To speak of Thought independently of the mechanism of the brain is not, then, less legitimate than to speak of Light independently of our different means of illumination. The only difference is that we have found a formula for the swiftness of Light, while we have not yet succeeded in finding in motion any such equation for Thought.
  But just as the vibratory motion from which Light is horn, can give rise in Nature to many and diverse phenomena without any relation to our visual perceptions, so also the principle of Thought may be at work under different forms and lend itself to manifestations that have no relation to the phenomena of our intellectuality.
  And inversely, if there are different processes capable of producing the effect of luminosity, why should there not be also other means for the manifestation of Intelligence than that which we employ? The forms which thought assumes outside the mechanism of the brain, are to us unknown. But since one principle of Intelligence fills the whole universe, who can say whether worlds do not, like beings, think?
  Before Mind became active in being, its principle existed in the worlds; before it existed in the worlds, it was, in itself, an eternal principle of Mind.

1.05 - Computing Machines and the Nervous System, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
  any single mechanism can satisfy the demands of all of them.
  There is first the memory which is necessary for the carrying
  --
  die. Nevertheless, even a doomed race may show a mechanism
  valid so long as the race lasts. In other words, even the most
  --
  Note that the mechanism of affective tone is itself a feedback
   mechanism. It may even be given a diagram such as shown
  --
  tones given by the separate affective-­tone mechanisms over a
  short interval in the past, according to some rule which we need
  --
  the conditioned reflex operates according to the mechanism I
  have given; I merely say that it could so operate. If, however, we
  assume this or any simular mechanism, there are a good many
  things we can say concerning it. One is that this mechanism
  is capable of learning. It has already been recognized that the
  conditioned reflex is a learning mechanism, and this idea has
  been used in the behaviorist studies of the learning of rats in
  --
  affective-­tone mechanisms to the totalizers. Indeed, the totalizer178
  Chapter V
  --
  tone mechanisms. Now, such messages ''to
  whom it may concern" may well be sent out most efficiently,
  --
  tive. This does not mean that a purely nervous mechanism is
  not capable of affective tone and of learning, but it does mean
  --
  tion of relays and storage mechanisms which the designer hasComputing Machines and the Nervous System
  179
  --
  ing or adding mechanisms, should be in the form of relatively
  standardized assemblages adapted for one particular use and no
  --
  these more general mechanisms the component parts should be
  available in accordance with their general properties, and should

1.05 - Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  establish some semblance of order in this anarchy by organizing all these tiny feudal states under its sovereignty. But, in so doing, it veils from us their voices and true workings; there is only one step from sovereignty to tyranny. The supermental mechanisms are totally obstructed; or if something of the superconscious voices manages to get through, it is immediately distorted, diluted, and obscured.
  Similarly, the submental mechanisms become atrophied, depriving us of spontaneous senses that were very useful at an earlier stage of our evolution and could still be. Other minorities of our being line up in rebellion, while still others secretly accumulate their little power,
  waiting for the first opportunity to fly in our faces. But the seeker who has silenced his mind will begin to discern all these states in their bare reality, without their mental veneer; he will feel, at various levels of his being, certain centers of concentration, or nodes of force, each with its own particular vibratory quality or frequency. We have all experienced, at least once in our lives, vibrations radiating at different levels of our being and with different densities; a great revelatory vibration, for example, when a veil seems to be suddenly rent and we are shown a whole vision of truth, without words, without our even knowing exactly what the revelation consists of; something simply vibrates, which makes the world inexplicably wider, lighter, and clearer; or heavier vibrations of anger or fear, vibrations of desire,

1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  hypnotic treatment, although the inner mechanisms of such a tie were not
  understood. It now turns out that the nature of the tie in question

1.05 - The Activation of Human Energy, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  psychological mechanism of action) is the condition; that
  we shall not imagine the movement that beckons us forward

1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in and through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for continually the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation. Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this' defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On the other side. Science and Art and the knowledge of life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
     A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expressions-all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  above the level of imaginary impact mechanisms (p. 211). In analyzing the Newtonian conception of
  force, Richard Westfall arrives at the conclusion that modern science is the result of the wedding of the
  --
  Vinogradova, O. (1961). The orientation reaction and its neuropsychological mechanisms. Moscow:
  Academic Pedagogical Sciences.
  --
  H.W. (1949). The precise mechanisms by which such regulation take place are still under debate.
  456
  --
  special regulatory mechanisms. This is so at all levels of development, from the elementary regulators of motivation
  (needs and interests) up to will for affectivity and from perceptual and sensorimotor regulations up to operations for

1.05 - The New Consciousness, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  In that tranquil clarity behind, we stumble in fact upon a second level of confusion, a deeper one (this is truly a descending path). As our mental machinery grows quieter, we appreciate the extent to which it covered everything up all existence, the least gesture, the slightest flutter of an eyelash, the tiniest vibration, like a voracious and ever-growing hydra and we see the bizarre fauna it concealed starting to appear in broad daylight. This is no longer an arena but a teeming swamp seething with all sorts of psychological microbes: a throng of minuscule reflexes like the jerks of the pulses, thousands of desires, complete with the larger speckled fish of our instinctive idiosyncrasies, our innate tastes and distastes, our natural affinities and the whole discordant play of our sympathies and antipathies, attractions and repulsions a mechanism that goes back to the Precambrian era, a massive residue of the habit of devouring one another, a huge multifarious vortex in which selective affinities are scarcely more than an extension of gustatory affinities. Thus, there is not only a mental machinery but also a vital one. We desire and we want. Unfortunately, we want all sorts of contradictory things, which mix with our neighbor's contradictory wills, forming a blind mixture; and we do not even know if the triumph of today's little will is not preparing tomorrow's downfall, or whether this satisfied desire, this austere and righteous virtue, that noble taste, that well-intentioned altruism or stern ideal is not working some disaster worse than the evil we were trying to cure. All this vital hodgepodge, adorned with mental labels and justifications, which philosophizes and spouts its wonderful and faultless reasons, now appears in its true colors, we could say, in the quiet little clearing where we have taken our position. And here, too, we gradually apply the same process of demechanization. Instead of rushing headlong into our sensations and emotions, our tastes and distastes, our certainties and uncertainties, like the animal into its claws (but without its deftness), we take a step back, we pause and let the torrent abate, we rein in the reflex, the peremptory judgment, the mixed or less mixed emotion at any rate, it is a mixture for the clear little stream flowing in the background, the undeceivable ray of sunlight: suddenly the rhythm is broken, the water no longer clear, the ray fragmented. These breaks, these interferences, these jarring intrusions become more and more unbearable. It is like a sudden lack of oxygen, a sinking into mud, an intolerable blindness, the shattering of a little song behind, which made life smooth and vast and rhythmical, like a great prairie wafted by a breeze from elsewhere.
  For there is really a rhythm of truth behind, and around and everywhere, a vast and tranquil flowing, a space of weightless time in which the days and hours and years seem to follow the unalterable movement of the stars and moons, rising and falling like a tide from the depths of time, harmonizing with the movement of the whole, and filling this present little fleeting second with an eternity of being.

1.06 - A Summary of my Phenomenological View of the World, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  panying mechanism of 'reproduction', the rise of complexity
  on earth increases its pace phyletically (the genesis of species

1.06 - Gestalt and Universals, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
  chapter is the possibility of assigning a neural mechanism to
  Locke's theory of the association of ideas. According to Locke,
  --
  input into the two motors of a twinscrew mechanism would
  give us a very adequate negatively phototropic control for a little
  --
  must by now be familiar to the reader, that living mechanisms
  tend to have a much smaller space scale than the mechanisms
  best suited to the techniques of human artificers, although, on
  --
  cial mechanism an enormous advantage in speed over the living
  organism.
  --
  a mechanism by which we tend to pull them into the proper
  orientation.
  --
  a pickup for the centering and focusing-­directing mechanism of
  the eye.
  --
  the visual mechanism by accommodation but even tends to
  enhance its sensitivity. This is true whether the contrast between
  --
  after all a highly generalized mechanism. It leaves us the impres-
  sion that we are here dealing with a special mechanism which is
  not merely a temporary assemblage of general-­purpose elements
  --
  Thus, part of his normal visual mechanism is accessible to
  him. On the other hand, he has lost more than his eyes: he has

1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  have seen, of the mechanism of planetization) that ahead of, or
  rather in the heart of, a universe prolonged along its axis of com-

1.06 - Quieting the Vital, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Having brought this mechanism to light, we will have found, at the same time, the true method toward vital mastery, which is not surgical but calming; the vital predicament is not overcome by struggling vitally against it, which can only exhaust our energies without exhausting its universal existence, but by taking another position and neutralizing it through silent peace: If you get peace, Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple, then to clean the vital becomes easy. If you simply clean and clean and do nothing else, you go very slowly for the vital gets dirty again and has to be cleansed a hundred times. The peace is something that is clean in itself, so to get it is a positive way of securing your object. To look for dirt only and clean is the negative way.63
  The Adverse Forces There is yet another difficulty. The vibrations coming from people or 60

1.06 - The Breaking of the Limits, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Indeed, we feel quite silly. All of a sudden we step into an incredible landscape where little lights seem to twinkle softly everywhere, winking gleefully, almost mischievously at us, as if doors were opening up on every side, drops of treasure were glistening like dew everywhere. All at once, everything seems to follow another law, to live according to another rhythm, as though our eyes had seen wrongly for centuries and now they are seeing correctly, the world becomes true, everything is revealed, everything is a revelation! We could almost say, Let it be this way, for the circumstance to become exactly as we have seen it at that instant, to obey our command, to adhere inexplicably, as if there were perfect, instantaneous coincidence between matter and the look that opened up in us everything is possible, everything becomes possible. It looks like a miracle, but it is not a miracle. There is no miracle, only connections we do not grasp. And the experience is repeated until we grasp it. It is fleeting, whimsical, and eludes us when we try to capture it; it depends on something else. And we come back again and again to that something else, which seems like nothing, which is simple as a smile, light as a breeze, yielding as a flower in the sun maybe that is what total openness is, a kind of assent full of sunshine, to everything, at every second? But, first, there is always a blossoming inside, something that opens up and communicates instantly and directly with matter, as if the point of truth in us had joined and touched the same points of truth in matter. It all flows without breaks; what it wants here, in this point of self, is also wanted there, in that point of matter, because it is one and the same substance, one and the same will, one and the same global self, one and the same rhythm. Fabulous horizons open up before us for a second, then disappear. The seeker has stumbled upon an elusive secret that holds the marvel of the new world in seed as certainly as the first thought of the ape held the seed of Einstein's marvels but this is an unfettered marvel, completely free and independent of all external mechanisms, a kind of spontaneous springing out from within. He has put his finger on the third golden rule of the passage: From within outward. Life is no longer the result of a manipulation of external phenomena, an addition and combination of different kinds of matter by the power of the mental machinery, but the unfolding of an inner phenomenon that manipulates matter's truth by the inner truth an unfolding of the truth in truth and by the truth.
  And once again we are struck by the same phenomenon. These fleeting little bursts have nothing to do with big things, the sensational and earthshaking affairs of men. They are humble miracles, one could say meticulous miracles of detail, as if the real key were there in the little stumbling everyday trifle caught by surprise, at ground level, as if, in fact, a victory won over a minute point of matter were more pregnant with consequences than all the trips to the moon and the huge revolutions of men which in the end revolutionize nothing.

1.06 - THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  world was a complex mechanism of agents, an agent (a "subject") lay
  at the root of all things. Man projected his three "inner facts of

1.06 - The Objective and Subjective Views of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The principle of subjectivism entering into human thought and action, while necessarily it must make a great difference in the view-point, the motive-power and the character of our living, does not at first appear to make any difference in its factors. Subjectivism and objectivism start from the same data, the individual and the collectivity, the complex nature of each with its various powers of the mind, life and body and the search for the law of their self-fulfilment and harmony. But objectivism proceeding by the analytical reason takes an external and mechanical view of the whole problem. It looks at the world as a thing, an object, a process to be studied by an observing reason which places itself abstractly outside the elements and the sum of what it has to consider and observes it thus from outside as one would an intricate mechanism. The laws of this process are considered as so many mechanical rules or settled forces acting upon the individual or the group which, when they have been observed and distinguished by the reason, have by ones will or by some will to be organised and applied fully much as Science applies the laws it discovers. These laws or rules have to be imposed on the individual by his own abstract reason and will isolated as a ruling authority from his other parts or by the reason and will of other individuals or of the group, and they have to be imposed on the group itself either by its own collective reason and will embodied in some machinery of control which the mind considers as something apart from the life of the group or by the reason and will of some other group external to it or of which it is in some way a part. So the State is viewed in modern political thought as an entity in itself, as if it were something apart from the community and its individuals, something which has the right to impose itself on them and control them in the fulfilment of some idea of right, good or interest which is inflicted on them by a restraining and fashioning power rather than developed in them and by them as a thing towards which their self and nature are impelled to grow. Life is to be managed, harmonised, perfected by an adjustment, a manipulation, a machinery through which it is passed and by which it is shaped. A law outside oneself,outside even when it is discovered or determined by the individual reason and accepted or enforced by the individual will,this is the governing idea of objectivism; a mechanical process of management, ordering, perfection, this is its conception of practice.
  Subjectivism proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of view of a containing and developing self-consciousness. The law here is within ourselves; life is a self-creating process, a growth and development at first subconscious, then half-conscious and at last more and more fully conscious of that which we are potentially and hold within ourselves; the principle of its progress is an increasing self-recognition, self-realisation and a resultant self-shaping. Reason and will are only effective movements of the self, reason a process in self-recognition, will a force for self-affirmation and self-shaping. Moreover, reason and intellectual will are only a part of the means by which we recognise and realise ourselves. Subjectivism tends to take a large and complex view of our nature and being and to recognise many powers of knowledge, many forces of effectuation. Even, we see it in its first movement away from the external and objective method discount and belittle the importance of the work of the reason and assert the supremacy of the life-impulse or the essential Will-to-be in opposition to the claims of the intellect or else affirm some deeper power of knowledge, called nowadays the intuition, which sees things in the whole, in their truth, in their profundities and harmonies while intellectual reason breaks up, falsifies, affirms superficial appearances and harmonises only by a mechanical adjustment. But substantially we can see that what is meant by this intuition is the self-consciousness feeling, perceiving, grasping in its substance and aspects rather than analysing in its mechanism its own truth and nature and powers. The whole impulse of subjectivism is to get at the self, to live in the self, to see by the self, to live out the truth of the self internally and externally, but always from an internal initiation and centre.
  But still there is the question of the truth of the self, what it is, where is its real abiding-place; and here subjectivism has to deal with the same factors as the objective view of life and existence. We may concentrate on the individual life and consciousness as the self and regard its power, freedom, increasing light and satisfaction and joy as the object of living and thus arrive at a subjective individualism. We may, on the other hand, lay stress on the group consciousness, the collective self; we may see man only as an expression of this group-self necessarily incomplete in his individual or separate being, complete only by that larger entity, and we may wish to subordinate the life of the individual man to the growing power, efficiency, knowledge, happiness, self-fulfilment of the race or even sacrifice it and consider it as nothing except in so far as it lends itself to the life and growth of the community or the kind. We may claim to exercise a righteous oppression on the individual and teach him intellectually and practically that he has no claim to exist, no right to fulfil himself except in his relations to the collectivity. These alone then are to determine his thought, action and existence and the claim of the individual to have a law of his own being, a law of his own nature which he has a right to fulfil and his demand for freedom of thought involving necessarily the freedom to err and for freedom of action involving necessarily the freedom to stumble and sin may be regarded as an insolence and a chimera. The collective self-consciousness will then have the right to invade at every point the life of the individual, to refuse to it all privacy and apartness, all self-concentration and isolation, all independence and self-guidance and determine everything for it by what it conceives to be the best thought and highest will and rightly dominant feeling, tendency, sense of need, desire for self-satisfaction of the collectivity.

1.07 - Cybernetics and Psychopathology, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
  to two or three separate mechanisms. In the case of the use of
  two such mechanisms, their answers are automatically collated
  against each other; and if there is a discrepancy, all data are trans-
  --
  needs replacement. If three separate mechanisms are used for
  each stage and single misfunctions are as rare as they are in fact,
  --
  the three mechanisms, and this agreement will give the required
  result. In this case, the collation mechanism accepts the major-
  ity report, and the machine need not stop; but there is a signal
  --
  clearing mechanism, we shake the machine or, if it is electrical,
  subject it to an abnormally large electrical impulse, in the hope
  --
  they have been buried by a definite mechanism, affective though
  generally involuntary; and that the content of these storedCybernetics and Psychopathology
  --
  be crushed by its weight; a tree is limited by the mechanism
  for transferring water and minerals from the roots to the leaves,

1.07 - On Dreams, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  By these habits, the mental faculties will be led to adapt their mechanism to phenomena of this kind and to exercise on them their attention, their curiosity and power of analysis.
  A kind of intellectualisation of our dreams will then occur, with the double result of making the conscious activities intervene more and more closely in the play of the formerly disorganised activities of the sleeping state, and of progressively increasing their scope by making them more and more rational and instructive.

1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  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 GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  edifice of atoms and varied mechanisms which are found to exist
  in living creatures, the more living they are. How has it happened that,

1.07 - The Psychic Center, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  does not remain, because, although our small surface consciousness makes much of them, they are, after all, of little significance. There is even a spontaneous mechanism that erases the profusion of useless past memories, just as those of the present life soon become eradicated. If we glance behind us, without thinking, what is actually left of our present life? A nebulous mass with perhaps two or three outstanding images; all the rest is blotted out. This is likewise the case for the soul and its past lives. The sifting process is quite extensive.
  Furthermore, this mechanism of oblivion is very wise indeed, because if we were to recall our former lives prematurely, chances are we would be constantly hobbled by these past memories. Our present life is already teeming with so many useless memories that stand in the way of our progress, because they fixate us in the same inner attitude,
  the same contraction, the same refusal or revolt, the same tendency.

1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  Slayer of the Real. Let the disciple slay the Slayer." The theory here is that the mind is but a mechanism for dealing symbolically with impressions, though its construction tempts one to take these impressions for Reality. Conscious thought, hence, is fundamentally false, preventing one from perceiving reality.
  There is but one simple fundamental essential to medita- tion, beyond all dogma and morality, viz. to stop thinking.
  --
  Pantacle. The Wand is the terrestrial symbol of his God- like Will, Wisdom, and Creative Word, his divine force - just as the Sword is his human force, the sharp analytical faculty of the Ruach. It is the mind which is his mechanism for dealing symbolically with impressions, and his capacity for criticism. The Cup is his Understanding, the passive aspect of his Will ; it links him with That which is beyond, on the negative side, being hollow and receptive of the influence descending from on high. The Pantacle is flat, the temple of his Holy Ghost ; of the earth earthy, it is his lower nature, his body. On the altar is a phial of Oil, his aspiration towards a nobler self, towards a higher reality, consecrating him and all it touches to the performance of the
  Great Work. Three other weapons surround the oil, the

1.08 - Independence from the Physical, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  depending on how "removed" the consciousness is from the physical level. This is an opportunity to verify concretely that when consciousness withdraws, force withdraws, because they are one and the same thing. When we faint, the consciousness withdraws also, because we are unable to withstand certain degrees of intensity, and since we have not built a conscious bridge between our various states of being, this involuntary withdrawal results in a void for us. Finally, we notice that remembering his Master, in this case the Mother, was enough to restore order in the disorder of fear, and to enable the young disciple to make the correct movement for reentering his body. By thinking of Mother, he instantly tuned in to the right vibration, which set everything right. This is, roughly speaking, one of the mechanisms of protection or help from Master to disciple.
  viewpoint of the truth of things.95 For the true viewpoint is always that of the Master, the psychic, the spirit in us. Each time we feel an impossibility, a limitation, or a barrier, we can be sure that this represents tomorrow's victory, because without perceiving the obstacle we could not conquer it; we are created to conquer all and live all our dreams, for it is the spirit in us that dreams. In a world where constraints are closing in on us like an iron network, the first of these dreams is perhaps to be able to sail out in the open, unhampered by the body and by boundaries. Then we will no longer need passports;

1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  15:The Lord sees in his omniscience the thing that has to be done. This seeing is his Will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which he sees the all-conscious Mother one with him, takes into her dynamic self and embodies, and executive Nature-Force carries it out as the mechanism of their omnipotent omniscience. But this vision of what is to be and therefore of what is to be done arises out of the very being, pours directly out of the consciousness and delight of existence of the Lord, spontaneously, like light from the Sun. It is not our mortal attempt to see, our difficult arrival at truth of action and motive or just demand of Nature. When the individual soul is entirely at one in its being and knowledge with the Lord and directly in touch with the original Shakti, the transcendent Mother the supreme Will can then arise in us too in the high divine manner as a thing that must be and is achieved by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is then no desire, no responsibility, no reaction; all takes place in the peace, calm, light, power of the supporting and enveloping and inhabiting Divine.
  16:But even before that highest approach to identity is achieved, something of the supreme Will can manifest in us as an imperative impulsion, a God-driven action; we then act by a spontaneous self-determining Force but a fuller knowledge of meaning and aim arises only afterwards. Or the impulse to action may come as an inspiration or intuition, but rather in the heart and body than in the mind; here an effective sight enters in but the complete and exact knowledge is still deferred and comes, if at all, later. But the divine Will may descend too as a luminous single comm and or a total perception or a continuous current of perception of what is to be done into the will or into the thought or as a direction from above spontaneously fulfilled by the lower members. When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can be done in this way, or else a general action may so proceed but only during periods of exaltation and illumination. When the Yoga is perfect, all action becomes of this character. We may indeed distinguish three stages of a growing progress by which, first, the personal will is occasionally or frequently enlightened or moved by a supreme Will or conscious Force beyond it, then constantly replaced and, last, identified and merged in that divine Power-action. The first is the stage when we are still governed by the intellect, heart and senses; these have to seek or wait for the divine inspiration and guidance and do not always find or receive it. The second is the stage when human intelligence is more and more replaced by a high illumined or intuitive spiritualised mind, the external human heart by the inner psychic heart, the senses by a purified and selfless vital force. The third is the stage when we rise even above spiritualised mind to the supramental levels.

1.09 - Man - About the Body, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
  So far the total functions of the body have been stated in detail. But each part of the body is also, in analogy with the effect of the elements in the body, influenced by a specific element, which finds its expression in the polarity of the responsive part of the body. It happens to be a very interesting fact that in the workshop, respectively in the clockwork or mechanism, which is to say in the human organism, some organs, from the inside to the outside, reciprocally own the electrical fluid, and from the outside to the inside they possess the magnetical fluid, which affects the functions in the entire organism in an analogous and harmonious way. In other organs the reverse process takes place, the electrical fluid operating from the outside to the inside, the magnetical one from the inside to the outside. This knowledge of the polar emanation is called in the hermetic art the occult anatomy of the body. And the knowledge of the effect of this occult anatomy is extremely important for every adept who wants to know his body, to influence and to control it.
  I shall therefore describe this occult anatomy of the human body with respect to the electrical and magnetical fluid, that is to say, in the positive and in the negative sphere of action.

1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  collection, of economy and of mechanism--represent a _weak_ age....
  Our virtues are necessarily determined, and are even stimulated, by our

1.09 - Sleep and Death, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  or go into a rage, or feel a movement of rebellion inside us, or a sexual impulse, etc., or even, to take another example of a seemingly different nature, we may trip on the stairs two or three times and almost fall headlong, or contract a violent fever; then we notice that each of these small, very trivial daytime incidents corresponds exactly to another incident, most often symbolic in nature (symbolic, because it is not the fact itself, but a mental transcription when we wake up in the morning), which we experienced the night before: either we were attacked in a "dream" by an enemy, or we were involved in an unhappy turn of event, or else we saw, sometimes very precisely, all the details surrounding the psychological scene that would take place the next day. It would seem that "someone" is perfectly awake in us and very concerned with helping us identify all the why's and hidden mechanisms of our psychological life, all the reasons for our falls as well as progress. For, conversely, we may have a premonition of all the happy psychological movements that will translate the next day into a progress, an opening of consciousness, a feeling of lightness, an inner widening; we remember that the night before we saw a light, an ascent, or a wall or house crumbling (symbolic of our resistance or the mental constructions that were confining us). We are also very struck by the realization that these premonitions are usually not associated with events we deem important on our physical plane, such as the death of a parent or some worldly achievement (although these premonitions also may occur), but with very trivial details, bearing no external importance, yet always very meaningful for our inner progress. This is a sign of the development of our consciousness.
  Instead of unconsciously accepted mental, vital or other vibrations,

1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  a We must first give their place in the mechanism of biologi-
  cal evolution to the special forces released by the psychic phenom-
  --
  organized mechanism. Necessarily following the inflexive tendency
  of the zoological phyla, the mechanical phyla in their turn curve in-
  --
  that, caught in the ramifications of a sightless mechanism, we are
  destined to perish by stifling each other? No; for as the coil grows
  --
  psychic forces through the medium of the mechanisms it has de-
  vised? We have only to consider the evolution of the nervous sys-

1.11 - The Change of Power, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  We have therefore come to a new change of power. A new power such as there has never been since the first anthropoids, a tidal wave of power that has nothing to do with our little philosophical and spiritual meditations of past ages, a worldwide, collective and perhaps universal phenomenon as radically new as the first surge of thought upon the world, when mind took over from the simian order and overthrew all its laws and instinctual mechanisms. But here and this is really the characteristic of the new world being born the power is not a power of abstraction, not a talent for getting a bird's-eye view of things and reducing the scattered data of the world into an equation in order to make a synthesis, which is always wobbly the mind has turned everything into abstraction; it lives in an image of the world, a yellow or blue reflection of the great bubble, like a man inside a glass statue not a discursive and contingent power that only adds and subtracts, not a gathering of knowledge that never makes a whole. It is a direct power of the truth of each instant and each thing harmonized with the total truth of the millions of instants and things, a power to enter the truth of each gesture and each circumstance, which accords with all other gestures and circumstances because Truth is one and the Self is unique, and if this point is touched, everything else is instantly touched, like cell and cell of the same body. It is a tremendous power of concretization of Truth, acting directly upon the same Truth contained in each point of space and each second of time, or rather, compelling each moment, each circumstance, each gesture, each cell of matter to yield its truth, its right note, its own innate power buried under all the layers of our vital and mental accretions a tremendous truing of the world and each being. We could say a tremendous Movement of realization the world is not real! It is a distorted appearance, a mental approximation, which looks more like a nightmare, a black and white translation of something we still have not seized. We do not have our real eyes yet! For, in the end, there is only one reality, and that is the reality of Truth a truth that has grown, that had to protect itself behind walls, to limit and dim itself under one shell or another, one bubble or another, to make itself felt by a caterpillar or a man, then bursts open in its own Sunlight when the wings of the great Self we always were begin to open.
  But this change of power, this transition from the indirect and abstract truths of the mind to the direct and concrete Truth of the great Self is obviously not effected on the summits of the Spirit it has nothing to do with mental gymnastics, just as the other power had nothing to do with the ape's skills. It is effected in a most down-to-earth way, in everyday life, in the minuscule, the futility of the moment, which is futile only to us, if we understand that a speck of dust contains as much truth as the totality of all space, and just as much power. It therefore applies itself to utterly material mechanisms. The play takes place in the substance. Therefore it comes up against age-old resistances, against a bubble that is perhaps the first self-defensive bubble of the protoplasm in its water hole. But in the end resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover,26 and we do not know, finally, if there is a single shadow and pain that does not secretly build up the very power we are trying to manifest. If it emerged too soon, truth would be incomplete, or unbearable for the other animalcules that share our water hole and which would soon disgorge it we are a single human body, we always forget, and our mistakes or slowness are the mistakes and slowness of the world. But if we can win a victory here, in this little point of matter, each of us human beings has a formidable task to carry out, if he understands. Being born in this world is a far more powerful mystery than we had thought.
  For a long time now the seeker has got rid of the mental machinery. He has also brought order to the vital machinery. And if old desires, wills or reactions still come to muddy his clearing, they are rather on the order of a motion-picture images projected onto a screen, out of habit, but without real substance. The seeker has lost the habit of sitting in the screen and identifying with the characters he looks; he is clear; he observes everything; he is centered in his fire which dissipates all those clouds. From then on, another level of entanglement comes more and more to light, another degree of the machine (this is truly a path of descent): a material, subconscious mechanism. But so long as he is not clear, he sees nothing; he cannot unravel those threads which are so intertwined with his habitual activities, and mentalized like all the rest, that they make up an altogether natural web. This material, subconscious mechanism then becomes extremely concrete, like the whirlings of the goldfish in its glass bowl. But let us emphasize that this is not the subconscious small fry of the psychoanalysts those fry belong to the mental bubble; they are merely the reverse of the little surface fellow, the action of his reactions, the knot of his desires, the constriction of his nurtured smallness, the past of his old little story inside a bubble, the goat tether of his small separate ego tied to the social and familial and religious stake, and the countless stakes that tie men inside a bubble. And we strongly suspect that those dreamers simply go on dreaming inside a psychoanalytical bubble, the way others dream inside a religious one of hells and paradises that exist only in man's mental imagination. But, as long as one is inside the bubble, it is implacable and irrefutable; its hells are real hells, its filth real filth, and one is the prisoner of a little bright or dark cloud. So let us say, in passing, that one does not free oneself from the mud by digging in the mud and unwholesomely plowing up the byways of the frontal fellow (one might as well take a bath in dirty water to get clean), one does not free oneself from the bubble by the lights of the bubble, or from evil by a good that is only its reverse, but by a something else that is not of the bubble: a very simple little fire within and everywhere, which is the key to freedom, all freedoms, and to the world.
  This subconscious resistance is very difficult to describe. It has a thousand faces, as many as there are individuals, and for each the color is different, the syndrome, so to say, is different. Each one of us has his particular drama, with its staging, preferred situations, puppetry of Grand Guignol. But it is one and the same puppet show under all colors, one and the same story behind all the words and the same resistance everywhere. It is the resistance, the point that says no. It does not reveal itself immediately; it is elusive, cunning. In fact, we really believe it loves drama. It is its raison d'tre and the salt of its life, and, if it no longer had any drama to grind out, it would make up some it is the dramatist of all excellence. It is perhaps even the great dramatist of all this chaotic and painful life that we see. But each of us harbors his little man of the big man of sorrow,27 as Sri Aurobindo used to call him. The drama of the world will stop when we begin to put a stop to our own little drama. But the clever puppet slips between our fingers. Driven off the mental stage where it ran its explanatory and questioning machinery it is a tireless questioner; it asks questions for the pleasure of asking, and if all its questions were answered, it would come up with more, for it is also a great doubter ousted from the mind, it sinks down one degree further to play its number on the vital stage. There it is on more solid ground. (The further it descends, the stronger it becomes, and all the way down at the bottom, it is the very image of strength, the knot par excellence, the irreducible point, the absolute NO.) We are all more or less familiar with its tricks on the vital stage: its great game of passion and desire, sympathy and antipathy, hate and love but in fact they are the two faces of the same food, and it savors evil as much as good, suffering as much as joy; it is just a way of swallowing in one direction or another. Even charity and philanthropy serves its purpose. It grows fatter either way. The more virtuous it is, the harder it is. Idealism and patriotism, sacred or less sacred causes are its clever victuals. It has mastered the art of dressing itself in superb motives; it can be found at the parties of charity volunteers and Peace conferences but of course Peace never comes, for if by some miracle Peace ever came, or the eradication of all poverty on earth, what would it do for a living? Driven off that stage, it sinks one degree lower and disappears into the dungeons of the subconscious. Not for long. There it begins to become clear, so to say, and show its real face. It has grown very small, very hard, a sort of grinning caricature: the grisly Elf, as Sri Aurobindo calls it.
  --
  If we can catch that painful elf for it is pain itself just before it buries itself completely, it exhibits a whole daily, material and imperceptible mechanism. This is the great resistance to the change of power, the molehill trying to stay the law of Harmony. Therefore it is where the battle is taking place at this moment, in the microcosm and the macrocosm. It is like a caricature (or the more exact face) of all the polished and civilized activities of the brilliant elf of the higher levels: doubt, fear, avidity, self-centeredness, all the contractions, prehensions and apprehensions of the mental pseudopod. It is a minuscule and ridiculous functioning, and, if by chance we notice it, we shrug it off or attach no importance to it. But we are wrong. We look at everything from atop our mental arrogance, as if those trifles were inconsequential. But they have staggering consequences. We do not see it because we live in our logical and symmetrical clouds. But life grates; there is an immense, universal grating whose source lies in those ridiculous little grains of sand. At the level of matter, there are no little things, because everything is made of little things, and that absurd reaction of doubt or fear is the incalculable equivalent of the mental misjudgment that makes us shut the door on a brilliant opportunity. We are constantly shutting the door on Harmony, turning our backs on the miracle, locking out possibilities, and making ourselves sick into the bargain. For, at the material level, this Harmony does not flow in majestic symphonies through the great arteries of the spirit; it uses what it has. It percolates through minuscule channels, fragile filaments quivering within our material consciousness; it enters in droplets, spurts, discrete quanta that look like nothing a passing breath, a flicker of a smile, a wave of ease without reason which change everything. We do not notice the change because we live in our normal chaos, our usual suffocation, but the seeker, who has become a little clearer, begins to notice, to sense those minute changes of density, those sudden obstructions, those minuscule expansions, those air pockets in his material substance. He sees the almost instant effect of a tiny little emanation of doubt, an absurd fear or tensing up without apparent cause, a ridiculous and morbid imagination crossing his atmosphere. He discovers a thousand sly little pulsations, deceitful palpitations, dark impulses in the great material pond. He puts his finger on fear, the great, voracious and retractile Fear which covers the world like the protoplasm inside its gelatine membrane the slightest touch, the least breath of air, the tiniest ray of sun, and it contracts, shuts the door and rolls up into a ball in its membrane. The immediate reaction to everything is NO; then, sometimes, a yes blurted out, as if impelled by the same fear of missing something. He discovers the fantastic morbid and defeatist imagination of matter, as if, for matter, life represented a kind of dreadful invasion from which it had never quite recovered, a fall perhaps from the original bliss of the stone, an irruption of death into its peaceful routine. Everything is liable to bring catastrophe the great catastrophe of Life expectation of the worst, anticipation of the worst, almost a wish and call for the worst, so this tragedy of life may be stopped at last and everything return to the peace and beatific immobility of dust. He discovers how diseases break out, matter decays, substance ages the great difficulty of living, the contraction onto self, the suffocation inside, the hardening of all the little arteries through which a drop of all-curing harmony might have seeped in. He hears his fill of petty whining, small grudges, matter's wounded negations, and above all above all its despairing leitmotif: This is impossible, that is impossible.... For matter, everything is impossible, because the only sure possibility is the inviolable immobility of the stone. Because all movement of life and hope is still a stirring of death. And it shuts the door, turns off the light, refuses the miracle we all refuse the miracle. We are firmly seated atop our cancer, the doubters of the great immortal Harmony, the dwarves of the earth who believe in pain, believe in disease, believe in suffering, believe in death: This is impossible, impossible, impossible....
  So the seeker learns of Harmony. He learns it step by step, by trial and error, tiny little errors that sow disease and confusion. At this stage, the experience no longer takes place in the intellect or heart; it takes place in the body. There is a minute play of sensations, as fleeting as must have been the first quiver of the radiolarian under the temperature changes in the Gulf Stream, and as laden with physical consequences as a storm over the lovely wheat fields of the mind or a typhoon over the murky seas of the vital. We are so dense and blind on our higher levels that we need to be hit over the head to understand that the man in front of us is angry and that murder is lurking in those eyes so transparent. But matter is refined; the more we experience it, the more we discover its incredible receptivity, working in both directions, alas. A hundred times or a thousand times, the seeker is confronted with those microtyphoons, those minute whirlwinds that abruptly overturn the whole equilibrium of the being, becloud everything, give a taste of ashes and despair to the slightest gesture, decompose the air he breathes and decompose everything an instantaneous general decomposition for one second, ten seconds. A hardening of everything. The seeker is suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue; he sees illness coming and it is indeed coming straight at him. Which illness? The Illness. And just behind, lying in wait, death. In one second, ten seconds, one goes straight to the point; one touches the thing. It is right there, irrefutable: the whole mechanism out in the open, like a sudden call of death. Yet, outside, everything is the same. The circumstances are the same, the gestures the same; the sun still shines and the body comes and goes as usual. But everything is changed. It is a flash-death, an instantaneous cholera. Then it vanishes, dissipates like a cloud, one hardly knows why. But if one gives in, one truly falls ill, breaks a leg or has a real accident. And the seeker starts learning the reason for those minuscule reversals of equilibrium. He tracks down a minuscule hell, which is perhaps the first seed of the great million-faced Evil, the first hardening of death's great blissful petrification. Everything is contained there, in a black spark. But the day we catch hold of that tiny poisonous vibration, we will have the secret of immortality, or at least that of the prolongation of life at will. We die because we give in, and we give in in thousands of little instances. The choice between death and immortality must be made again at every instant.
  But this is still a negative and human way of approaching the experience. In fact, the Harmony, the marvelous Harmony that attends to everything, does not want to teach us the laws of hell, even a minute hell. It wants the sunlit law. It flings its typhoons and illnesses at us, casts us down into the black pit, only as much as is necessary for us to learn the lesson, not one minute more. And the second we have recaptured the speck of sun, the little note, the miraculous and tranquil little flowing in the heart of things, everything changes, is cured, tilts into the light an instantaneous miracle. Actually, it is not a miracle. The miracle is everywhere, at each instant; it is the very nature of the universe, its air, its sun, its breathing of harmony. Only we keep blocking the way, putting up our walls, our sciences, our millions of devices that know better than this Harmony. We must learn to let it flow freely, to let go there is no other secret. It does not push us down to crush us or punish us, but to teach us the technique of mastery. It wants us to be the true masters of its solar Secret, to be fully what we have always been, free and kings and joyous, and it will pound and pound our miserable secrets until we are forced to knock at its sunlit door, to open our hands and let its sweetness flow over the world and into our hearts.

1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     After the removal of the veil of ego, the removal of the veil of Nature and her inferior modes that govern our mind, life and body. As soon as the limits of the ego begin to fade, we see how that veil is constituted and detect the action of cosmic Nature in us, and in or behind cosmic Nature we sense the presence of the cosmic Self and the dynamisms of the world-pervading Ishwara. The Master of the instrument stands behind all this working, and even within the working there is his touch and the drive of a great guiding or disposing Influence. It is no longer ego or ego-force that we serve; we obey the World-Master and his evolutionary impulse. At each step we say in the language of the Sanskrit verse, "Even as I am appointed by Thee seated in my heart, so, 0 Lord, I act." But still this action may be of two very different kinds, one only illumined, the other transformed and uplifted into a greater supernature. For we may keep on in the way of action upheld and followed by our nature when by her and her illusion of egoism we were "turned as if mounted on a machine," but now with a perfect understanding of the mechanism and its utilisation for his world purposes by the Master of works whom we feel behind it. This is indeed as far as even many great Yogis have reached on the levels of spiritualised mind; but it need not be so always, for there is a greater supramental possibility. It is possible to rise beyond spiritualised mind and to act spontaneously in the living presence of the original divine Truth-Force of the Supreme Mother Our motion one with her motion and merged in it, our will one with her will, our energy absolved
     in her energy, we shall feel her working through us as the Divine manifest in a supreme Wisdom-Power, and we shall be aware of the transformed mind, life and body only as the channels of a supreme Light and Force beyond them, infallible in its steps because transcendent and total in its knowledge. Of this Light and Force we shall not only be the recipients, channels, instruments, but become a part of it in a supreme uplifted abiding experience.

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Constantly and unknowingly, we receive influences and inspirations from these higher, superconscious regions, which express themselves inside us as ideas, ideals, aspirations, or works of art; they secretly mold our life, our future. Similarly, we constantly and unknowingly receive vital and subtle-physical vibrations, which determine our emotional life and relationship with the world every moment of the day. We are enclosed in an individual, personal body only through a stubborn visual delusion; in fact, we are porous throughout and ba the in universal forces, like an anemone in the sea: Man twitters intellectually (=foolishly) about the surface results and attributes them all to his "noble self," ignoring the fact that his noble self is hidden far away from his own vision behind the veil of his dimly sparkling intellect and the reeking fog of his vital feelings, emotions, impulses, sensations and impressions.183 Our sole freedom is to lift ourselves to higher planes through individual evolution. Our only role is to transcribe and materially embody the truths of the plane we belong to. Two important points, which apply to every plane of consciousness, from the highest to the lowest, deserve to be underscored in order for us better to understand the mechanism of the universe. First, these planes do not depend upon us or upon what we think of them any more than the sea depends on the anemone; they exist independently of man. Modern psychology, for which all the levels of being are mixed together in a so-called collective unconscious, like some big magician's hat from which to draw archetypes and neuroses at random, betrays in this respect a serious lack of vision: first, because the forces of these planes are not at all unconscious (except to us), but very conscious, definitely more so than we are; and secondly, because these forces are not "collective," in the sense that they are no more a human product than the sea is the product of the anemone; it is rather the frontal man who is the product of that Immensity behind. The gradations of consciousness are universal states not dependent on the outlook of the subjective personality; rather the outlook of the subjective personality is determined by the grade of consciousness in which it is organized according to its typal nature or its evolutionary stage.184 Naturally, it is only human to reverse the order of things and put ourselves in the center of the world. But this is not a matter of theory, always debatable, but of experience, which everyone can have. If we go out of our body and consciously enter these planes, we realize that they exist outside us, just as the entire world exists outside Manhattan, with forces and beings and even places that have nothing in common with our earthly world; entire civilizations have attested to this, stating it, engraving it, or painting it on their walls or in their temples, civilizations that were perhaps less ingenious than ours, but certainly not less intelligent.
  The second important point concerns the conscious forces and beings that occupy these planes. Here we must clearly draw a line between the superstition, or even hoax, arising from our "collective" contri bution, and the truth. As usual, the two are closely intermingled.

1.13 - Reason and Religion, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Hellenic ideal was roughly expressed in the old Latin maxim, a sound mind in a sound body. And by a sound body the ancients meant a healthy and beautiful body well-fitted for the rational use and enjoyment of life. And by a sound mind they meant a clear and balanced reason and an enlightened and well-trained mentality,trained in the sense of ancient, not of modern education. It was not to be packed with all available information and ideas, cast in the mould of science and a rational utility and so prepared for the efficient performance of social and civic needs and duties, for a professional avocation or for an intellectual pursuit; rather it was to be cultured in all its human capacities intellectual, moral, aesthetic, trained to use them rightly and to range freely, intelligently and flexibly in all questions and in all practical matters of philosophy, science, art, politics and social living. The ancient Greek mind was philosophic, aesthetic and political; the modern mind has been scientific, economic and utilitarian. The ancient ideal laid stress on soundness and beauty and sought to build up a fine and rational human life; the modern lays very little or no stress on beauty, prefers rational and practical soundness, useful adaptation, just mechanism and seeks to build up a well-ordered, well-informed and efficient human life. Both take it that man is partly a mental, partly a physical being with the mentalised physical life for his field and reason for his highest attribute and his highest possibility. But if we follow to the end the new vistas opened by the most advanced tendencies of a subjective age, we shall be led back to a still more ancient truth and ideal that overtops both the Hellenic and the modern levels. For we shall then seize the truth that man is a developing spirit trying here to find and fulfil itself in the forms of mind, life and body; and we shall perceive luminously growing before us the greater ideal of a deeply conscious self-illumined, self-possessing, self-mastering soul in a pure and perfect mind and body. The wider field it seeks will be, not the mentalised physical life with which man has started, but a new spiritualised life inward and outward, by which the perfected internal figures itself in a perfected external living. Beyond mans long intelligent effort towards a perfected culture and a rational society there opens the old religious and spiritual ideal, the hope of the kingdom of heaven within us and the city of God upon earth.
  But if the soul is the true sovereign and if its spiritual self-finding, its progressive largest widest integral fulfilment by the power of the spirit are to be accepted as the ultimate secret of our evolution, then since certainly the instinctive being of man below reason is not the means of attaining that high end and since we find that reason also is an insufficient light and power, there must be a superior range of being with its own proper powers,liberated soul-faculties, a spiritual will and knowledge higher than the reason and intelligent will,by which alone an entire conscious self-fulfilment can become possible to the human being. We must remember that our aim of self-fulfilment is an integral unfolding of the Divine within us, a complete evolution of the hidden divinity in the individual soul and the collective life. Otherwise we may simply come back to an old idea of individual and social living which had its greatness, but did not provide all the conditions of our perfection. That was the idea of a spiritualised typal society. It proceeded upon the supposition that each man has his own peculiar nature which is born from and reflects one element of the divine nature. The character of each individual, his ethical type, his training, his social occupation, his spiritual possibility must be formed or developed within the conditions of that peculiar element; the perfection he seeks in this life must be according to its law. The theory of ancient Indian cultureits practice, as is the way of human practice, did not always correspond to the theoryworked upon this supposition. It divided man in society into the fourfold orderan at once spiritual, psychic, ethical and economic orderof the Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra,practically, the spiritual and intellectual man, the dynamic man of will, the vital, hedonistic and economic man, the material man; the whole society organised in these four constituent classes represented the complete image of the creative and active Godhead.

1.13 - THE HUMAN REBOUND OF EVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  of Man the evolutionary mechanism undergoes a radical change.
  For Man, by the act of "noospherically" concentrating himself
  --
  are we to envisage the generative mechanism of this "complexifica-
  tion"? It is very certain that matter on Earth is involved in a process

1.14 - The Suprarational Beauty, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For the conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and intelligent understanding of it,these things are only a preliminary clarifying of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,but by an exaltation of the soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities. For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence.
  What has been said of great creative art, that being the form in which normally our highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in life as well as beauty in art. We find that in the end the place of reason and the limits of its achievement are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It helps to enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to a complete insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence, but it cannot justly pretend to give the definitive law for the creation of beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the aesthetic instinct, impulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious satisfaction, but not to it; it has in the end to hand them over to a higher faculty which is in direct touch with the suprarational and in its nature and workings exceeds the intellect.

1.14 - TURMOIL OR GENESIS?, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  nature. Reduced to its basic mechanism it shows itself to be a
  straightforward process of increasing complication whereby Mat-
  --
  "complexity-consciousness" mechanism gains an added impulse,
  acquiring a new dimension through new procedures. It is no longer
  --
  propulsive mechanism of human superevolution. To the Christian,
  for whom the whole process of hominization is merely a paving of

1.15 - Index, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  Morton Prince, "The mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams": A
  Critical Review (1911)

1.15 - The Possibility and Purpose of Avatarhood, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The idea of the Avatar is not indeed indispensable to its scheme, but it comes in naturally into it as a perfectly rational and logical conception. For all here is God, is the Spirit or Self-existence, is Brahman, ekamevadvityam, - there is nothing else, nothing other and different from it and there can be nothing else, can be nothing other and different from it; Nature is and can be nothing else than a power of the divine consciousness; all beings are and can be nothing else than inner and outer, subjective and objective soul-forms and bodily forms of the divine being which exist in or result from the power of its consciousness. Far from the Infinite being unable to take on finiteness, the whole universe is nothing else but that; we can see, look as we may, nothing else at all in the whole wide world we inhabit. Far from the Spirit being incapable of form or disdaining to connect itself with form of matter or mind and to assume a limited nature or a body, all here is nothing but that, the world exists only by that connection, that assumption. Far from the world being a mechanism of law with no soul or spirit intervening in the movement of its forces or the action of its minds and bodies, - only some original indifferent Spirit passively existing somewhere outside or above it, - the whole world and every particle of it is on the contrary nothing but the divine force in action and that divine force determines and governs its every movement, inhabits its every form, possesses here every soul and mind; all is in God and in him moves and has its being, in all he is, acts and displays his being; every creature is the disguised Narayana.
  Far from the unborn being unable to assume birth, all beings
  --
  The Gita explains the ordinary imperfect action of the creature by its subjection to the mechanism of Prakriti and its limitation by the self-representations of Maya. These two terms are only complementary aspects of one and the same effective force of divine consciousness. Maya is not essentially illusion, - the element or appearance of illusion only enters in by the ignorance of the lower Prakriti, Maya of the three modes of Nature,
  - it is the divine consciousness in its power of various selfrepresentation of its being, while Prakriti is the effective force of that consciousness which operates to work out each such self-representation according to its own law and fundamental idea, svabhava and svadharma, in its own proper quality and particular force of working, gun.a-karma. "Leaning - pressing down upon my own Nature (Prakriti) I create (loose forth into various being) all this multitude of existences, all helplessly subject to the control of Nature." Those who know not the Divine lodged in the human body, are ignorant of it because they are grossly subject to this mechanism of Prakriti, helplessly subject to its mental limitations and acquiescent in them, and dwell in an Asuric nature that deludes with desire and bewilders with egoism the will and the intelligence, mohinm prakr.tim sritah..
  For the Purushottama within is not readily manifest to any and every being; he conceals himself in a thick cloud of darkness or a bright cloud of light, utterly he envelops and wraps himself in his Yogamaya.1 "All this world," says the Gita, "because it is bewildered by the three states of being determined by the modes of Nature, fails to recognise me, for this my divine Maya of the modes of Nature is hard to get beyond; those cross beyond it who approach Me; but those who dwell in the Asuric nature of being, have their knowledge reft from them by Maya." In
  --
   other words, there is the inherent consciousness of the divine in all, for in all the Divine dwells; but he dwells there covered by his Maya and the essential self-knowledge of beings is reft from them, turned into the error of egoism by the action of Maya, the action of the mechanism of Prakriti. Still by drawing back from the mechanism of Nature to her inner and secret Master man can become conscious of the indwelling Divinity.
  Now it is notable that with a slight but important variation of language the Gita describes in the same way both the action of the Divine in bringing about the ordinary birth of creatures and his action in his birth as the Avatar. "Leaning upon my own
  --
  "Standing upon my own Nature," it says here, "I am born by my self-Maya, prakr.tim svam adhis.t.haya . . . atmamayaya, I loose forth myself, atmanam sr.jami." The action implied in the word avas.t.abhya is a forceful downward pressure by which the object controlled is overcome, oppressed, blocked or limited in its movement or working and becomes helplessly subject to the controlling power, avasam vasat; Nature in this action becomes mechanical and its multitude of creatures are held helpless in the mechanism, not lords of their own action. On the contrary the action implied in the word adhis.t.haya is a dwelling in, but also a standing upon and over the Nature, a conscious control and government by the indwelling Godhead, adhis.t.hatr devata, in which the Purusha is not helplessly driven by the Prakriti through ignorance, but rather the Prakriti is full of the light and the will of the Purusha. Therefore in the normal birth that which is loosed forth, - created, as we say, - is the multitude of creatures or becomings, bhutagramam; in the divine birth that which is loosed forth, self-created, is the self-conscious self-existent being, atmanam; for the Vedantic distinction between atma and bhutani is that which is made in European philosophy between the Being and its becomings. In both cases Maya is the means of the creation or manifestation, but in the divine birth it is by self-Maya, atmamayaya, not the involution in the lower Maya
  156
  --
  Being controlling consciously its becoming and not lost to selfknowledge in the cloud of the ignorance. It is the Soul born into the body as Lord of Nature, standing above and operating in her freely by its will, not entangled and helplessly driven round and round in the mechanism; for it works in the knowledge and not, as most do, in the ignorance. It is the secret Soul in all coming forward from its governing secrecy behind the veil to possess wholly in a human type, but as the Divine, the birth which ordinarily it possesses only from behind the veil as the
  Ishwara while the outward consciousness in front of the veil is rather possessed than in possession because there it is a partially conscious being, the Jiva lost to self-knowledge and bound in its works through a phenomenal subjection to Nature. The Avatar2 therefore is a direct manifestation in humanity by Krishna the divine Soul of that divine condition of being to which Arjuna, the human soul, the type of a highest human being, a Vibhuti, is called upon by the Teacher to arise, and to which he can

1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The ancients held a different, indeed a diametrically opposite view. Although they recognised the immense importance of the primary activities, in Asia the social most, in Europe the political,as every society must which at all means to live and flourish,yet these were not to them primary in the higher sense of the word; they were mans first business, but not his chief business. The ancients regarded this life as an occasion for the development of the rational, the ethical, the aesthetic, the spiritual being. Greece and Rome laid stress on the three first alone, Asia went farther, made these also subordinate and looked upon them as stepping-stones to a spiritual consummation. Greece and Rome were proudest of their art, poetry and philosophy and cherished these things as much as or even more than their political liberty or greatness. Asia too exalted these three powers and valued inordinately her social organisation, but valued much more highly, exalted with a much greater intensity of worship her saints, her religious founders and thinkers, her spiritual heroes. The modern world has been proudest of its economic organisation, its political liberty, order and progress, the mechanism, comfort and ease of its social and domestic life, its science, but science most in its application to practical life, most for its instruments and conveniences, its railways, telegraphs, steamships and its other thousand and one discoveries, countless inventions and engines which help man to master the physical world. That marks the whole difference in the attitude.
  On this a great deal hangs; for if the practical and vitalistic view of life and society is the right one, if society merely or principally exists for the maintenance, comfort, vital happiness and political and economic efficiency of the species, then our idea that life is a seeking for God and for the highest self and that society too must one day make that its principle cannot stand. Modern society, at any rate in its self-conscious aim, is far enough from any such endeavour; whatever may be the splendour of its achievement, it acknowledges only two gods, life and practical reason organised under the name of science. Therefore on this great primary thing, this life-power and its manifestations, we must look with especial care to see what it is in its reality as well as what it is in its appearance. Its appearance is familiar enough; for of that is made the very stuff and present form of our everyday life. Its main ideals are the physical good and vitalistic well-being of the individual and the community, the entire satisfaction of the desire for bodily health, long life, comfort, luxury, wealth, amusement, recreation, a constant and tireless expenditure of the mind and the dynamic life-force in remunerative work and production and, as the higher flame-spires of this restless and devouring energy, creations and conquests of various kinds, wars, invasions, colonisation, discovery, commercial victory, travel, adventure, the full possession and utilisation of the earth. All this life still takes as its cadre the old existing forms, the family, the society, the nation and it has two impulses, individualistic and collective.

1.17 - Astral Journey Example, How to do it, How to Verify your Experience, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  The whole mechanism of memory depends on joining up independent data. You must go on adding a little to little, always joining the simple impressions by referring them to others which are more general; and so on until the whole of your universe is arranged like the brain and the nervous system. This system in fact, becomes the Universe. When you have got everything properly correlated, your central consciousness understands and controls every tiniest detail. But you must begin at the beginning you go out for a walk, and the first thing you see is a car; that represents the Atu VII, the Chariot, referred to Cancer.
  Then you come to a fishmonger, and notice certain crustacea, very mala chostomous. This comes under the same sign of Cancer. The next thing you notice is an amber-coloured dress in Swan and Edgar's; amber also is the colour of Cancer in the King's Scale. Now then you have a set of three impressions which is joined together by the fact that they all belong to the Cancer class; experience will soon teach that you can remember all three very much more clearly and accurately than you could any one of the three singly.

1.17 - DOES MANKIND MOVE BIOLOGICALLY UPON ITSELF?, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  istic in the mechanisms of heredity and evolution rising to the high-
  est organic types; the existence of a center of indeterminacy at the
  --
  then surely evident that, through a reciprocal mechanism of action
  and reaction, the vision and prevision of this ultimate end, this out-

1.19 - ON THE PROBABLE EXISTENCE AHEAD OF US OF AN ULTRA-HUMAN, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  clearly see the tightly meshed mechanism which from the first, al-
  though more or less obscurely, has governed its development.

1.20 - The End of the Curve of Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In the old infrarational societies, at least in their inception, what governed was not the State, but the group-soul itself evolving its life organised into customary institutions and self-regulations to which all had to conform; for the rulers were only its executors and instruments. This entailed indeed a great subjection of the individual to the society, but it was not felt, because the individualistic idea was yet unborn and such diversities as arose were naturally provided for in one way or another,in some cases by a remarkable latitude of social variation which government by the State tends more and more to suppress. As State government develops, we have a real suppression or oppression of the minority by the majority or the majority by the minority, of the individual by the collectivity, finally, of all by the relentless mechanism of the State. Democratic liberty tried to minimise this suppression; it left a free play for the individual and restricted as much as might be the role of the State. Collectivism goes exactly to the opposite extreme; it will leave no sufficient elbow-room to the individual free-will, and the more it rationalises the individual by universal education of a highly developed kind, the more this suppression will be felt,unless indeed all freedom of thought is negated and the minds of all are forced into a single standardised way of thinking.
  Man needs freedom of thought and life and action in order that he may grow, otherwise he will remain fixed where he was, a stunted and static being. If his individual mind and reason are ill-developed, he may consent to grow, as does the infrarational mind, in the group-soul, in the herd, in the mass, with that subtle half-conscient general evolution common to all in the lower process of Nature. As he develops individual reason and will, he needs and society must give him room for an increasing play of individual freedom and variation, at least so far as that does not develop itself to the avoidable harm of others and of society as a whole. Given a full development and free play of the individual mind, the need of freedom will grow with the immense variation which this development must bring with it, and if only a free play in thought and reason is allowed, but the free play of the intelligent will in life and action is inhibited by the excessive regulation of the life, then an intolerable contradiction and falsity will be created. Men may bear it for a time in consideration of the great and visible new benefits of order, economic development, means of efficiency and the scientific satisfaction of the reason which the collectivist arrangement of society will bring; but when its benefits become a matter of course and its defects become more and more realised and prominent, dissatisfaction and revolt are sure to set in in the clearest and most vigorous minds of the society and propagate themselves throughout the mass. This intellectual and vital dissatisfaction may very well take under such circumstances the form of anarchistic thought, because that thought appeals precisely to this need of free variation in the internal life and its outward expression which will be the source of revolt, and anarchistic thought must be necessarily subversive of the socialistic order. The State can only combat it by an education adapted to its fixed forms of life, an education that will seek to drill the citizen in a fixed set of ideas, aptitudes, propensities as was done in the old infrarational order of things and by the suppression of freedom of speech and thinking so as to train and compel all to be of one mind, one sentiment, one opinion, one feeling; but this remedy will be in a rational society self-contradictory, ineffective, or if effective, then worse than the evil it seeks to combat. On the other hand, if from the first freedom of thought is denied, that means the end of the Age of Reason and of the ideal of a rational society. Man the mental being disallowed the useexcept in a narrow fixed grooveof his mind and mental will, will stop short in his growth and be even as the animal and as the insect a stationary species.
  --
  In the realm of thought that does not matter; for as there the reason does not drive at practice, it is able with impunity to allow the most opposite view-points and systems to exist side by side, to compare them, seek for reconciliations, synthetise in the most various ways, change constantly, enlarge, elevate; it is free to act without thinking at every point of immediate practical consequences. But when the reason seeks to govern life, it is obliged to fix its view-point, to crystallise its system; every change becomes or at least seems a thing doubtful, difficult and perilous, all the consequences of which cannot be foreseen, while the conflict of view-points, principles, systems leads to strife and revolution and not to a basis of harmonious development. The reason mechanises in order to arrive at fixity of conduct and practice amid the fluidity of things; but while mechanism is a sufficient principle in dealing with physical forces, because it is in harmony with the law or dharma of physical Nature, it can never truly succeed in dealing with conscious life, because there it is contrary to the law of life, its highest dharma. While, then, the attempt at a rational ordering of society is an advance upon the comparative immobility and slow subconscient or half-conscient evolution of infrarational societies and the confusedly mixed movement of semi-rational societies, it can never arrive at perfection by its own methods, because reason is neither the first principle of life, nor can be its last, supreme and sufficient principle.
  The question remains whether anarchistic thought supervening upon the collectivistic can any more successfully find a satisfying social principle. For if it gets rid of mechanism, the one practical means of a rationalising organisation of life, on what will it build and with what can it create? It may be contended as against the anarchistic objection that the collectivist period is, if not the last and best, at least a necessary stage in social progress. For the vice of individualism is that in insisting upon the free development and self-expression of the life and the mind or the life-soul in the individual, it tends to exaggerate the egoism of the mental and vital being and prevent the recognition of unity with others on which alone a complete self-development and a harmless freedom can be founded. Collectivism at least insists upon that unity by entirely subordinating the life of the isolated ego to the life of the greater group-ego, and its office may be thus to stamp upon the mentality and life-habits of the individual the necessity of unifying his life with the life of others. Afterwards, when again the individual asserts his freedom, as some day he must, he may have learned to do it on the basis of this unity and not on the basis of his separate egoistic life. This may well be the intention of Nature in human society in its movement towards a collectivist principle of social living. Collectivism may itself in the end realise this aim if it can modify its own dominant principle far enough to allow for a free individual development on the basis of unity and a closely harmonised common existence. But to do that it must first spiritualise itself and transform the very soul of its inspiring principle: it cannot do it on the basis of the logical reason and a mechanically scientific ordering of life.
  Anarchistic thought, although it has not yet found any sure form, cannot but develop in proportion as the pressure of society on the individual increases, since there is something in that pressure which unduly oppresses a necessary element of human perfection. We need not attach much importance to the grosser vitalistic or violent anarchism which seeks forcibly to react against the social principle or claims the right of man to live his own life in the egoistic or crudely vitalistic sense. But there is a higher, an intellectual anarchistic thought which in its aim and formula recovers and carries to its furthest logical conclusions a very real truth of nature and of the divine in man. In its revolt against the opposite exaggeration of the social principle, we find it declaring that all government of man by man by the power of compulsion is an evil, a violation, a suppression or deformation of a natural principle of good which would otherwise grow and prevail for the perfection of the human race. Even the social principle in itself is questioned and held liable for a sort of fall in man from a natural to an unnatural and artificial principle of living.

1.21 - FROM THE PRE-HUMAN TO THE ULTRA-HUMAN, THE PHASES OF A LIVING PLANET, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  No evolutionary mechanism can have any power over a cosmic
  matter if it is entirely passive, less still if it is opposed to it. But the
  --
  the psychic mechanism of evolution would come to a sudden stop,
  undermined and shattered in its very substance, despite all the vi-

1.21 - The Spiritual Aim and Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A society founded upon spirituality will differ in two essential points from the normal human society which begins from and ends with the lower nature. The normal human society starts from the gregarious instinct modified by a diversity and possible antagonism of interests, from an association and clash of egos, from a meeting, combination, conflict of ideas, tendencies and principles; it tries first to patch up an accommodation of converging interests and a treaty of peace between discords, founded on a series of implied contracts, natural or necessary adjustments which become customs of the aggregate life, and to these contracts as they develop it gives the name of social law. By establishing, as against the interests which lead to conflict, the interests which call for association and mutual assistance, it creates or stimulates sympathies and habits of helpfulness that give a psychological support and sanction to its mechanism of law, custom and contract. It justifies the mass of social institutions and habitual ways of being which it thus creates by the greater satisfaction and efficiency of the physical, the vital and the mental life of man, in a word, by the growth and advantages of civilisation. A good many losses have indeed to be written off as against these gains, but those are to be accepted as the price we must pay for civilisation.
  The normal society treats man essentially as a physical, vital and mental being. For the life, the mind, the body are the three terms of existence with which it has some competence to deal. It develops a system of mental growth and efficiency, an intellectual, aesthetic and moral culture. It evolves the vital side of human life and creates an ever-growing system of economic efficiency and vital enjoyment, and this system becomes more and more rich, cumbrous and complex as civilisation develops. Depressing by its mental and vital overgrowth the natural vigour of the physical and animal man, it tries to set the balance right by systems of physical culture, a cumbrous science of habits and remedies intended to cure the ills it has created and as much amelioration as it can manage of the artificial forms of living that are necessary to its social system. In the end, however, experience shows that society tends to die by its own development, a sure sign that there is some radical defect in its system, a certain proof that its idea of man and its method of development do not correspond to all the reality of the human being and to the aim of life which that reality imposes.

1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  Biologists do not agree about the mechanism of the continual
  THE END OF THE SPECIES 301

1.3.5.03 - The Involved and Evolving Godhead, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This world is not an apparent order fortuitously managed by an inexplicable Chance. Neither is it a marvellous mechanism miraculously contrived by a stumblingly fortunate unconscious
  Force or mechanical Necessity. It is not even a structure built according to his fancy or will by an external and therefore necessarily a limited Creator. Mentally conceivable, each of these solutions can explain one side or appearance of things; but it is a greater truth that can alone successfully join all the aspects and illumine all the facts of the enigma.

1.4.01 - The Divine Grace and Guidance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If you would know what is the Divine Grace, it is necessary first to realise that it is something which contradicts the law of the world, for it is outside its normal rule and not of its nature. There is here something which does not seem to govern at all the cosmic action, but only to intervene, and yet it is always there; an element without which this universe would be either a tremendous machine or a fortuitously and yet inexorably ordered chance. For to our observation all here is a process, a mechanism of Ignorance and Inconscience manifesting a precarious consciousness distressed by a nostalgia of Truth that exists somewhere and yet seems to be unseizable and unrealisable, - a mechanism of Law that controls a frightening whirl of Forces, a mechanism of implacable justice measuring things by a mysterious and to us unintelligible balance, a mechanism of evolution with matter and inconscience as its starting point, a precarious and groping life and consciousness as its highest realised term and as its final uncertain poise some possibility of the Divine.
  Our senses can discover no visible presence of the Divine, our intellect can do without any idea of its intervention - but it is another experience than that of the intellect and the senses which once it is there will no longer let us escape from the Presence or refuse to see the intervening Will or Grace.

1.62 - The Fire-Festivals of Europe, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  spinning-wheel, formed part of the mechanism; in Aberdeenshire it
  was called "the muckle wheel"; in the island of Mull the wheel was

1915 04 19p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The entire earthly life of this being, from its very beginning to the present moment, gives it the impression of an unreal dream, very remote from it, having almost no further contact with it; all this outer mechanism is now only a machine which it moves, for such is the will of its central Reality, but it is no longer interested in it, perhaps sometimes even less than the neighbouring mechanism or even the unknown mechanism that will be the product of the earth of tomorrow. But this earth itself is strange to it, and as it is not aware of anything else except the Eternal Silence, all life that has form appears remote and almost unreal to it; it seems strange to it that anyone could desire anything since it does not exist, or prefer one thing to another since neither is there. But at the same time it does not see why it should object to any action whatever it may be, since all actions are equally unreal, and it does not feel the necessity to flee from a world which does not exist and cannot be a burden, since its existence is so inexistent.
   All this gives the feeling of a sort of void full of light, peace, immensity, eluding all form and all definition. It is the Nought, but a Nought which is real and can last eternally, for it is, even while having the perfect immensity of that which is not. Poor words which try to say what silence itself cannot express.

1929-04-21 - Visions, seeing and interpretation - Dreams and dreaml and - Dreamless sleep - Visions and formulation - Surrender, passive and of the will - Meditation and progress - Entering the spiritual life, a plunge into the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  And as you become more and more conscious, you will begin to have the same control over your being at night as you have in the day, perhaps even more. For at night you are free, at least partially, from slavery to the mechanism of the body. The control over the processes of the body-consciousness is more difficult, since they are more rigid, less amenable to change than are the mental or the vital processes.
  In the night the mental and vital, especially the vital, are very active. During the day they are under check, the physical consciousness automatically represses their free play and expression. In sleep this check is removed and they come out with their natural and free movements.

1929-04-28 - Offering, general and detailed - Integral Yoga - Remembrance of the Divine - Reading and Yoga - Necessity, predetermination - Freedom - Miracles - Aim of creation, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  In the plane of matter and on the level of the ordinary consciousness you are bound hand and foot. A slave to the mechanism of Nature, you are tied to the chain of Karma, and there, in that chain, whatever happens is rigorously the consequence of what has been done before. There is an illusion of independent movement, but in fact you repeat what all others do, you echo Natures world-movements, you revolve helplessly on the crushing wheel of her cosmic machine.
  But it need not be so. You can shift your place if you will; instead of being below, crushed in the machinery or moved like a puppet, you can rise and look from above and by changing your consciousness you can even get hold of some handle to move apparently inevitable circumstances and change fixed conditions. Once you draw yourself up out of the whirlpool and stand high above, you see you are free. Free from all compulsions, not only you are no longer a passive instrument, but you become an active agent. You are not only not bound by the consequences of your action, but you can even change the consequences. Once you see the play of forces, once you raise yourself to a plane of consciousness where lie the origins of forces and identify yourself with these dynamic sources, you belong no longer to what is moved but to that which moves.
  --
  It is in this way that what are called miracles happen. The world is made up of innumerable planes of consciousness and each has its own distinct laws; the laws of one plane do not hold good for another. A miracle is nothing but a sudden descent, a bursting forth of another consciousness and its powersmost often it is the powers of the vitalinto this plane of matter. There is a precipitation, upon the material mechanism, of the mechanism of a higher plane. It is as though a lightning flash tore through the cloud of our ordinary consciousness and poured into it other forces, other movements and sequences. The result we call a miracle, because we see a sudden alteration, an abrupt interference with the natural laws of our own ordinary range, but the reason and order of it we do not know or see, because the source of the miracle lies in another plane. Such incursions of the worlds beyond into our world of matter are not very uncommon, they are even a constant phenomenon, and if we have eyes and know how to observe we can see miracles in abundance. Especially must they be constant among those who are endeavouring to bring down the higher reaches into the earth-consciousness below.
  Has creation a definite aim? Is there something like a final end to which it is moving?

1951-03-01 - Universe and the Divine - Freedom and determinism - Grace - Time and Creation- in the Supermind - Work and its results - The psychic being - beauty and love - Flowers- beauty and significance - Choice of reincarnating psychic being, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Instead of an explanation which goes from below upward, it would be wiser to look for an explanation which comes from above downward and rather to conceive that little by little the Consciousness comes down and as it comes down is obscured, and one no longer understands by what mechanism things are done that is what is called a state of ignorance.
   In a picture you need a definite scheme of composition and colour; you have to set a limit, to put the whole thing within a fixed framework; but the limit is illusory, the frame is a mere convention. There is a constant continuation of the picture that stretches beyond any particular frame, and each continuation can be drawn in the same conditions in an unending series of frames. Our aim is this or that, we say, but we know that it is only the beginning of another aim beyond it, and that in its turn leads to yet another.

1953-04-22, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   In order to know things well, one must educate oneself, develop the conscious being. But there are all kinds of different things, there are mental and vital projections exactly as in the cinema; then there are visions you may have if you are exteriorised in the mental and vital regions; the great difference is that these dreams are imposed upon you, you are taken in1 Here a whole passage is missing. Then there are countless dreams without any connection which have no interest. For your brain is like a recording instrument: something comes and strikes hundreds of cells, each thing must strike a small note. Things will strike the brainconvolutions a remembrance, an impression, all kinds of tiny memoriesit depends on your condition. But you have the control, ideas follow each other in accordance with a certain logic; there is also a mechanism which puts memories into movement through contagion, and the movement through contagion is made according to logic (what you call logic). But when you sleep, that faculty usually goes to sleep, so all those little cells are left to themselves and the connectionslike the connections of electric wiresdont work any longer, things come the wrong way round or in any direction at all. You must not look for a meaning. It was a contagion: because this one was vibrating, that other also vibrated, one vibration gives rise to another. Your logic works no longer. And you have fantastic dreams, absurd dreams.
   It is very difficult to put ones mind into repose. The majority of men get up very tired, more tired than when they went to sleep. One must learn how to quieten ones mind, make it completely blank, and then when one wakes up, one feels refreshed. One must relax the whole mind in the pure white silence, then one has the least number of dreams.

1953-05-27, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Words are words. After all, they mean nothing, unless there is something behind. Have you never noticed that when you speak to certain people, you may express yourself quite clearly and yet they understand nothing; and to others you say just two words and they understand immediately? You have not had this experience? No? I have had it often. Therefore, it does not depend upon the external form, the words one speaks, but on the force of the thought one puts into them; and the greater, stronger, more precise and clear the thought-force, the more the chance of what you say being understood by people who are able to receive that force. But if one speaks without thinking, usually it is impossible to understand what he says. It makes a kind of noise, that is all. For example, when you have the habit of speaking with someone, exchanging ideas with him, when between the two of you there is a certain mental adjustment, that is, when you have taken the precaution of saying, When I use this word, I mean this, and the other person has said, When I use that word, I mean that, and so on; when you are used to an interchange, when you have established a kind of contact between brain and braineven if it be only thatyou understand each other quite easily. But with people who come altogether from elsewhere, with whom you have never spoken, you need a little time to adjust and adapt yourself to understand what they mean by the words they use. What is it that makes you understand? It is just the kind of mental sense that is behind the words. When the thought is strongly thought out, there is a powerful vibration and it is that which is sensed; the word is only an intermediary means. You can develop this sense to the point of having a direct mental contact with a minimum of words or even without any words at all; but then you must have a very great force of thought-concentration. And for everything one does, it is like that. When there is a developed consciousness behind, when one has the power to concentrate it, one can do anything at allthis consciousness will act.2 Certainly it is not the bodily mechanism that makes you act; the mechanism is simply an instrument, nothing more. The day you catch that (it is invisible, but you can catch it), and when you catch it and put it into your movement, this movement becomes conscious and you do well whatever you do. The day you do not catch it, it slips from you like water through your fingers; and then you are clumsy, you do not understand, you do not know what to do. Hence, it is not the physical mechanism that counts, it is what is behind.
   From what plane does music generally come?

1953-06-03, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I have already spoken to you of the different planes of consciousness. Well, on the material plane, purely material (when separated from the vital plane), it is an absolute mechanism where consequently all things are linked together; and as I was saying the other day, if you want to find the cause of one thing or what is the result of a thing, you will find another and yet another and you will make an entire tour round the universe. And it is like that, everything is absolutely mechanised. Only, in this purely material plane, there can intervene the vital plane, and it already does intervene in the vegetable kingdom. The vital plane has an altogether different determinism, its own particular determinism. But when you introduce the vital determinism into the determinism of the physical, that produces a kind of combination that changes everything. And above the vital plane there is the mental plane. The mental plane also has its own determinism where all things are linked together rigorously.
   But that is the movement which could be called horizontal. If you take a vertical movement, the mind descending into the vital and the vital descending into the physical, you have there three determinisms that intervene and naturally produce something altogether different. And where the mind has intervened the determinism will necessarily be different from the one where it does not intervene; that is, in the higher animal life there is already a mental determinism which intervenes that is altogether different from the determinism of the vegetable plane.
  --
   That is what I was saying just now. What you have just told me is another way of speaking. I was putting myself in your place and asking: There you are, if you have an aspiration thats sincere enough or a prayer thats intense enough, you can bring down in you Something that will change everything, everythingtruly it changes everything. An example may be given that is extremely limited, very small, but which makes you understand things very well: a stone falls quite mechanically; say, a tile falls; if it gets loose, it will fall, wont it? But if there comes, for example, a vital or mental determinism from someone who passes by and does not want it to fall and puts his hand out, it will fall on his hand, but it will not fall on the ground. So he has changed the destiny of this stone or tile. It is another determinism that has come in, and instead of the stone falling on the head of someone, it falls upon the hand and it will not kill anybody. This is an intervention from another plane, from a conscious will that enters into the more or less unconscious mechanism.
   So the consequences of Karma are not rigorous?

1953-08-05, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Whenever one wants it? Generally not, for one does not know the mechanism of ones being and cannot open the doors at will.
   It is a thing that can be done. It is one of the earliest things that you are taught to do in Yoga: to open the door whenever one wants. It is the result of meditation or concentration or aspiration: all these processes are followed to open the door somewhere.

1953-11-18, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrixthrough identityof the Divine Grace with a perfect knowledgethrough identityof the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.
   And through her mediation each movement of sincere and confident aspiration towards the Divine calls down in response the intervention of the Grace.

1956-06-06 - Sign or indication from books of revelation - Spiritualised mind - Stages of sadhana - Reversal of consciousness - Organisation around central Presence - Boredom, most common human malady, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  So now, what do you want to know? I have explained the mechanism to you; you want me to do it? Is that what you wanted, or did you only want to know how it is done?
  No, Mother, before the class, as we had no questions I opened many books and tried to find something in this way, but I couldnt find anything.

1957-04-17 - Transformation of the body, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  For the moment, our body is simply a doubtful improvement on the animal body, for if we have gained from a certain point of view, we have lost from another. It is certain that from the point of view of purely physical capacities many animals are superior to us. Unless by a special culture and transformation we succeed in really transforming our capacities, it could be said that from the point of view of strength and muscular power a tiger or a lion is far superior to us. From the point of view of agility a monkey is far superior to us; and, for instance, a bird can travel without needing any exterior mechanism or plane, which is not yet possible for us and so on. And we are bound by the animal necessities of the functioning of our organs; so long as we depend, for instance, on material food, on absorbing matter in such a crude form, we shall be quite inferior animals.
  Therefore, I dont want to anticipate what we are going to read, but all this purely animal functioning of our body, all this part which is exactly the same as in animal life that we depend for life on the circulation of the blood and to have blood we need to eat, and so on, and all that this implies these are terrible limitations and bondages! As long as material life depends on that, it is obvious that we wont be able to divinise our life.

1958-02-19 - Experience of the supramental boat - The Censors - Absurdity of artificial means, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  When one looks at the world of men from the supramental consciousness, the predominant feature is a feeling of strangeness, of artificialityof a world that is absurd because it is artificial. This world is false because its material appearance does not at all express the deeper truth of things. There is a kind of disconnection between the appearance and what is within. In this way, a man with a divine power in the depths of his being may find himself in the position of a slave on the external plane. It is absurd! In the supramental world, on the other hand, it is the will which acts directly on the substance and the substance is obedient to this will. You want to cover yourself: the substance you live in immediately takes the form of a garment to cover you. You want to go from one place to another: your will is enough to transport you without needing any conveyance, any artificial device. Thus, the boat in my experience had no need of any mechanism to move it; it was the will which modified the substance according to its needs. When it was time to land, the wharf took shape of itself. When I wanted to send the groups ashore, those who were to land knew it automatically without my having to say a word, and they came up in turn. Everything went on in silence, there was no need to speak to make oneself understood; but the silence itself on board the ship did not give that impression of artificiality it does here. Here, when one wants silence, one must stop talking; silence is the opposite of sound. There the silence was vibrant, living, active and comprehensive, comprehensible.
  The absurd thing here is all the artificial means one must use. Any idiot at all has more power if he has more means to acquire the necessary artifices; whereas in the supramental world, the more conscious one is and the more in touch with the truth of things, the more authority does the will have over substance.

1958-09-10 - Magic, occultism, physical science, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    Occultism is associated in popular idea with magic and magical formulas and a supposed mechanism of the supernatural. But this is only one side, nor is it altogether a superstition as is vainly imagined by those who have not looked deeply or at all at this covert side of secret Nature-Force or experimented with its possibilities. Formulas and their application, a mechanisation of latent forces, can be astonishingly effective in the occult use of mind-power and life-power just as it is in physical Science, but this is only a subordinate method and a limited direction. For mind and life forces are plastic, subtle and variable in their action and have not the material rigidity; they need a subtle and plastic intuition in the knowledge of them, in the interpretation of their action and process and in their application,even in the interpretation and action of their established formulas. An overstress on mechanisation and rigid formulation is likely to result in sterilisation or a formalised limitation of knowledge and, on the pragmatic side, to much error, ignorant convention, misuse and failure. Now that we are outgrowing the superstition of the sole truth of Matter, a swing backward towards the old occultism and to new formulations, as well as to a scientific investigation of the still hidden secrets and powers of Mind and a close study of psychic and abnormal or supernormal psychological phenomena, is possible and, in parts, already visible. But if it is to fulfil itself, the true foundation, the true aim and direction, the necessary restrictions and precautions of this line of inquiry have to be rediscovered; its most important aim must be the discovery of the hidden truths and powers of the mind-force and the life-power and the greater forces of the concealed spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature, and of all that is in connection with the subliminal, including the subconscient and the superconscient, and the use of it as part of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that knowledge.
    The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, pp. 875-77

1958 11 07, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   If you watch yourself in action, you will understand the mechanism of this intolerance and you will immediately be able to put an end to all these useless discussions. This brings us back to what I have already told you once: the contact which you have had with the truth of things, your personal contacta contact which is more or less clear, profound, vast, puremay have given you, as an individual, an interesting, perhaps even a decisive experience; but although this contact may have given you an experience of decisive importance, you must not imagine that it is a universal experience and that the same contact would give others the same experience. And if you understand this, that it is something purely personal, individual, subjective, that it is not at all an absolute and general law, then you can no longer despise the knowledge of others, nor seek to impose your own point of view and experience upon them. This understanding obviates all mental quarrels, which are always totally useless.
   Obviously, the first part of the Aphorism can be taken as advice, but this is not what Sri Aurobindo meant when he wrote it; he wanted to make us conscious of the error we make ourselves but ridicule in others. This is a habit with us, not only in this particular case, but in all cases. It is rather remarkable that when we have a weakness for example a ridiculous habit, a defect or an imperfectionsince it is more or less part of our nature, we consider it to be very natural, it does not shock us. But as soon as we see this same weakness, this same imperfection, this same ridiculous habit in someone else, it seems quite shocking to us and we say, What! Hes like that?without noticing that we ourselves are like that. And so to the weakness and imperfection we add the absurdity of not even noticing them.

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun mechanism

The noun mechanism has 5 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
                  
1. (8) mechanism, chemical mechanism ::: (the atomic process that occurs during a chemical reaction; "he determined unique mechanisms for the photochemical reactions")
2. (3) mechanism, mechanics ::: (the technical aspects of doing something; "a mechanism of social control"; "mechanisms of communication"; "the mechanics of prose style")
3. (2) mechanism ::: (a natural object resembling a machine in structure or function; "the mechanism of the ear"; "the mechanism of infection")
4. mechanism ::: ((philosophy) the philosophical theory that all phenomena can be explained in terms of physical or biological causes)
5. mechanism ::: (device consisting of a piece of machinery; has moving parts that perform some function)


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun mechanism

5 senses of mechanism                        

Sense 1
mechanism, chemical mechanism
   => chemical process, chemical change, chemical action
     => natural process, natural action, action, activity
       => process, physical process
         => physical entity
           => entity

Sense 2
mechanism, mechanics
   => performance, execution, carrying out, carrying into action
     => action
       => act, deed, human action, human activity
         => event
           => psychological feature
             => abstraction, abstract entity
               => entity

Sense 3
mechanism
   => natural object
     => whole, unit
       => object, physical object
         => physical entity
           => entity

Sense 4
mechanism
   => philosophical doctrine, philosophical theory
     => doctrine, philosophy, philosophical system, school of thought, ism
       => belief
         => content, cognitive content, mental object
           => cognition, knowledge, noesis
             => psychological feature
               => abstraction, abstract entity
                 => entity

Sense 5
mechanism
   => device
     => instrumentality, instrumentation
       => artifact, artefact
         => whole, unit
           => object, physical object
             => physical entity
               => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun mechanism

3 of 5 senses of mechanism                      

Sense 1
mechanism, chemical mechanism
   => biochemical mechanism

Sense 3
mechanism
   => barrier
   => transmission mechanism
   => biological clock

Sense 5
mechanism
   => action, action mechanism
   => actuator
   => automaton, robot, golem
   => axis, axis of rotation
   => carriage
   => cartridge ejector, ejector
   => cartridge extractor, cartridge remover, extractor
   => clockwork
   => control, controller
   => cooling system, cooling
   => delayed action
   => drive
   => drive line, drive line system
   => fail-safe
   => film advance
   => gear, gear mechanism
   => homing device
   => hydraulic system
   => ignition, ignition system
   => lock
   => mechanical device
   => radiator
   => rotating mechanism
   => steering linkage
   => steering system, steering mechanism
   => tape drive, tape transport, transport
   => whirler
   => works, workings


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun mechanism

5 senses of mechanism                        

Sense 1
mechanism, chemical mechanism
   => chemical process, chemical change, chemical action

Sense 2
mechanism, mechanics
   => performance, execution, carrying out, carrying into action

Sense 3
mechanism
   => natural object

Sense 4
mechanism
   => philosophical doctrine, philosophical theory

Sense 5
mechanism
   => device




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun mechanism

5 senses of mechanism                        

Sense 1
mechanism, chemical mechanism
  -> chemical process, chemical change, chemical action
   => acylation
   => agglutination, agglutinating activity
   => amylolysis
   => association
   => bluing, blueing
   => calcification
   => catalysis, contact action
   => chelation
   => chemical reaction, reaction
   => chlorination
   => cleavage
   => corrosion, corroding, erosion
   => cracking
   => deamination, deaminization
   => decalcification
   => decarboxylation
   => de-iodination
   => demineralization, demineralisation
   => desalination, desalinization, desalinisation
   => digestion
   => dissociation
   => gasification
   => gassing
   => hydrogenation
   => intumescence, intumescency, swelling
   => inversion
   => iodination
   => mechanism, chemical mechanism
   => nitrification
   => peptization, peptisation
   => photosynthesis
   => polymerization, polymerisation
   => precipitation
   => proteolysis
   => pyrochemical process, pyrochemistry
   => sequestration
   => syneresis, synaeresis
   => synthesis
   => transamination
   => transamination
   => zymosis, zymolysis, fermentation, fermenting, ferment

Sense 2
mechanism, mechanics
  -> performance, execution, carrying out, carrying into action
   => specific performance
   => linguistic performance
   => mechanism, mechanics
   => officiation

Sense 3
mechanism
  -> natural object
   => cocoon
   => body, organic structure, physical structure
   => body, dead body
   => asterism
   => black body, blackbody, full radiator
   => body
   => carpet
   => celestial body, heavenly body
   => consolidation
   => constellation
   => covering, natural covering, cover
   => extraterrestrial object, estraterrestrial body
   => mechanism
   => nest
   => radiator
   => rock, stone
   => sample
   => tangle
   => universe, existence, creation, world, cosmos, macrocosm
   => plant part, plant structure

Sense 4
mechanism
  -> philosophical doctrine, philosophical theory
   => aesthetic, esthetic
   => Aristotelianism, peripateticism
   => conceptualism
   => Confucianism
   => deconstruction, deconstructionism
   => empiricism, empiricist philosophy, sensationalism
   => environmentalism
   => existentialism, existential philosophy, existentialist philosophy
   => determinism
   => formalism
   => hereditarianism
   => idealism
   => intuitionism
   => logicism
   => materialism, physicalism
   => mechanism
   => mentalism
   => nativism
   => naturalism
   => Neoplatonism
   => nominalism
   => operationalism
   => Platonism, realism
   => pragmatism
   => probabilism
   => rationalism
   => realism, naive realism
   => relativism
   => Scholasticism
   => semiotics, semiology
   => sensualism, sensationalism
   => solipsism
   => Stoicism
   => subjectivism
   => Taoism, Daoism
   => teleology
   => traditionalism
   => vitalism

Sense 5
mechanism
  -> device
   => acoustic device
   => adapter, adaptor
   => afterburner
   => agglomerator
   => airfoil, aerofoil, control surface, surface
   => alarm, warning device, alarm system
   => appliance, contraption, contrivance, convenience, gadget, gizmo, gismo, widget
   => applicator, applier
   => aspergill, aspersorium
   => autopilot, automatic pilot, robot pilot
   => bait, decoy, lure
   => billiard marker
   => bird feeder, birdfeeder, feeder
   => blower
   => bootjack
   => breathalyzer, breathalyser
   => breathing device, breathing apparatus, breathing machine, ventilator
   => bubbler
   => buffer, fender
   => catapult, launcher
   => charger, battery charger
   => clip-on
   => comb
   => comforter, pacifier, baby's dummy, teething ring
   => conductor
   => contraceptive, preventive, preventative, contraceptive device, prophylactic device, birth control device
   => converter, convertor
   => corer
   => corrective, restorative
   => crusher
   => cryptograph
   => cutoff
   => dampener, moistener
   => damper, muffler
   => deflector
   => dental appliance
   => depressor
   => detector, sensor, sensing element
   => diestock
   => drive
   => drop forge, drop hammer, drop press
   => elastic device
   => electrical device
   => electronic device
   => energizer, energiser
   => exercise device
   => explosive device
   => fan
   => filter
   => fire extinguisher, extinguisher, asphyxiator
   => flare
   => fumigator
   => gas fixture
   => groover
   => guard, safety, safety device
   => heater, warmer
   => heat exchanger
   => holding device
   => horn
   => hydrofoil, foil
   => imprint
   => indicator
   => instrument
   => interlock, ignition interlock
   => interrupter
   => jig
   => key
   => keyboard
   => Kinetoscope
   => knocker, doorknocker, rapper
   => lift
   => lifting device
   => lighter, light, igniter, ignitor
   => machine
   => magnet
   => mechanism
   => memory device, storage device
   => musical instrument, instrument
   => nest egg
   => noisemaker
   => optical device
   => override
   => paper feed
   => peeler
   => pick, plectrum, plectron
   => power takeoff, PTO
   => prod, goad
   => prompter, autocue
   => pull
   => reflector
   => release, button
   => remote control, remote
   => reset
   => restraint, constraint
   => router
   => runner
   => scratcher
   => shoehorn
   => shoetree
   => shooting stick
   => shredder
   => signaling device
   => snowshoe
   => sounder
   => source of illumination
   => stabilizer, stabiliser
   => stemmer
   => straightener
   => strengthener, reinforcement
   => stylus
   => suction cup
   => support
   => sweatbox
   => synchroflash
   => take-up
   => teaser
   => throwing stick, throwing board, spear thrower, dart thrower
   => tilter
   => tongs, pair of tongs
   => toy
   => trap
   => trigger
   => valve
   => vaporizer, vaporiser
   => ventilator
   => washboard
   => water cooler




--- Grep of noun mechanism
action mechanism
biochemical mechanism
chemical mechanism
defence mechanism
defense mechanism
escape mechanism
firing mechanism
gear mechanism
mechanism
rotating mechanism
servomechanism
steering mechanism
transmission mechanism



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Wikipedia - Escapement -- Mechanism for regulating the speed of clocks
Wikipedia - European Exchange Rate Mechanism -- European system to reduce exchange rate variability after the Euro
Wikipedia - Evolutionary capacitance -- Hypothetical mechanism to activate and deactivate phenotypic effect of accumulated genetic variation
Wikipedia - Exon shuffling -- Molecular mechanism for the formation of new genes
Wikipedia - Extension Mechanisms for DNS
Wikipedia - Feedback mechanism
Wikipedia - FIDO Alliance -- Industry consortium working on authentication mechanisms
Wikipedia - Firing pin -- Part of the firing mechanism in a firearm
Wikipedia - Flexible Mechanisms
Wikipedia - Focal-plane shutter -- Mechanism that controls the exposure time in cameras
Wikipedia - Forbidden mechanism
Wikipedia - Genetic variation -- The concept and mechanisms of variation in alleles of genes
Wikipedia - Gust lock -- Mechanism that locks control surfaces and keeps open aircraft doors in place while the aircraft is parked on the ground
Wikipedia - Hans Stille -- German ocean geologist known for alternative mechanisms of plate tectonics
Wikipedia - Higgs mechanism
Wikipedia - Hunting license -- Regulatory or legal mechanism to control hunting
Wikipedia - Hypercone (spacecraft) -- Spaceflight mechanism
Wikipedia - Implosive consonant -- Group of stop constants involving both ingressive and egressive mechanisms
Wikipedia - Inheritance (object-oriented programming) -- The mechanism of basing an object or class upon another object or class retaining similar implementation
Wikipedia - Innate releasing mechanism
Wikipedia - Insect flight -- Mechanisms and evolution of insect flight
Wikipedia - Institution -- Structure or mechanism of social order and cooperation governing the behaviour of a set of individuals within a given community
Wikipedia - Intellectualization -- Psychological defense mechanism
Wikipedia - Intermittent mechanism -- Device by which motion picture film is advanced
Wikipedia - Internet kill switch -- Single shut off mechanism for all Internet traffic
Wikipedia - IPv6 transition mechanisms
Wikipedia - IPv6 transition mechanism -- Technologies that facilitate the transition of the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6
Wikipedia - Isolating mechanisms
Wikipedia - Isolation (psychology) -- Defence mechanism
Wikipedia - Jeans instability -- Mechanism by which the collapse of interstellar gas clouds causes star formation
Wikipedia - Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation -- United Nations mechanism tasked with monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal Number 6
Wikipedia - Katalin Kariko -- Hungarian biochemist specialized in RNA-mediated mechanisms
Wikipedia - Kill switch -- Safety mechanism to quickly shut down a system
Wikipedia - Knowledge market -- Mechanism for distributing knowledge resources
Wikipedia - Kozai mechanism -- dynamical phenomenon affecting the orbit of a binary system perturbed by a distant third body
Wikipedia - Lane centering -- Mechanism designed to keep a car centered in the lane
Wikipedia - Leveling mechanism
Wikipedia - Logical clock -- Mechanism for capturing chronological and causal relationships
Wikipedia - Market (economics) -- Mechanisms whereby supply and demand confront each other and deals are made, involving places, processes and institutions in which exchanges occur.
Wikipedia - Matchlock -- Firearm mechanism
Wikipedia - Mating type -- Molecular mechanisms that regulate compatibility in sexually reproducing eukaryotes.
Wikipedia - Mechanism (biology)
Wikipedia - Mechanism design
Wikipedia - Mechanism (engineering)
Wikipedia - Mechanism of action of aspirin
Wikipedia - Mechanism of action
Wikipedia - Mechanism of diving regulators -- How the mechanisms of diving regulators work
Wikipedia - Mechanism (philosophy)
Wikipedia - Mechanisms of the English common law -- Legal mechanisms
Wikipedia - Memory hole -- Mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records
Wikipedia - Modified-release dosage -- Mechanism that delivers a drug with a delay after its administration
Wikipedia - Movimiento Nacional -- Nationalist inspired mechanism during Francoist rule in Spain
Wikipedia - NASA Docking System -- Spacecraft docking mechanism
Wikipedia - Neocatastrophism -- Hypothesis that life-exterminating events such as gamma-ray bursts have acted as a galactic regulation mechanism in the Milky Way upon the emergence of complex life
Wikipedia - Parasexual cycle -- Nonsexual mechanism for transferring genetic material without meiosis
Wikipedia - Patent slip -- Mechanism for hauling ships out of water
Wikipedia - Penrose process -- Hypothetical mechanism for extracting energy from rotating black holes
Wikipedia - Percent-encoding -- mechanism for encoding information in a Uniform Resource Identifier
Wikipedia - Percussion cap -- A gunlock mechanism that uses a small metallic cap or cup, usually of copper or brass, containing a shock-sensitive explosive compound that is struck by a hammer to initiate the ignition process of a caplock firearm
Wikipedia - Pharmacodynamics of spironolactone -- Mechanisms of action
Wikipedia - Phase precession -- Neural mechanism
Wikipedia - PID controller -- control loop feedback mechanism
Wikipedia - Power tool -- Tool that is actuated by an additional power source and mechanism other than by hand alone
Wikipedia - Pressure solution -- Rock deformation mechanism involving minerals dissolution under mechanical stress
Wikipedia - Protection mechanism
Wikipedia - Psychological mechanism
Wikipedia - Psychological projection -- Psychological defense mechanism of blaming one's impulses, qualities and actions on others
Wikipedia - Quick return mechanism -- Mechanism to produce a reciprocating motion with different speeds in opposing directions
Wikipedia - Radiobiology -- Study of the scientific principles, mechanisms, and effects of the interaction of ionizing radiation with living matter
Wikipedia - Railway coupling -- Mechanism for connecting rolling stock in a train
Wikipedia - Ray-Dutt twist -- Chemical mechanism for isomerization
Wikipedia - Reaction mechanism
Wikipedia - Reaction progress kinetic analysis -- Methods for determining rate laws of chemical reactions and to elucidate their mechanisms
Wikipedia - Recall Mechanism
Wikipedia - Reciprocity (evolution) -- Mechanisms whereby the evolution of cooperative or altruistic behaviour may be favoured by the probability of future mutual interactions
Wikipedia - Recirculating ball -- Vehicle steering mechanism
Wikipedia - Reflex bradycardia -- Decrease in heart rate in response to the baroreceptor reflex, one of the body's homeostatic mechanisms for preventing abnormal increases in blood pressure.
Wikipedia - Remote procedure call -- Mechanism to allow software to execute a remote procedure
Wikipedia - Reproductive assurance -- Redundant pollination mechanisms in plants
Wikipedia - Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism
Wikipedia - Sandbox (computer security) -- Computer security mechanism for isolating running programs from each other in a highly controlled environment
Wikipedia - Scotch yoke -- Mechanism to convert between rotational and reciprocating motion
Wikipedia - Seesaw mechanism
Wikipedia - Self-destruct -- Mechanism which causes a device to destroy itself
Wikipedia - Self-repair mechanisms
Wikipedia - Sensory stimulation therapy -- Experimental therapy that aims to utilize neural plasticity mechanisms to aid in the recovery of somatosensory function after stroke or cognitive ageing
Wikipedia - Separation of mechanism and policy
Wikipedia - Servo drive -- Electronic amplifier used to power electric servomechanisms
Wikipedia - Servomechanism
Wikipedia - Single-hose -- Mechanism that reduces pressure of a gas supply and provides it to the diver at ambient pressure
Wikipedia - Snake in the tunnel -- Prototype of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism
Wikipedia - Stigmergy -- Social network mechanism of indirect coordination
Wikipedia - Storage effect -- Ecological mechanism enabling species to coexist
Wikipedia - Straight line mechanism
Wikipedia - Strouhal number -- Dimensionless number describing oscillating flow mechanisms
Wikipedia - Sublimation (psychology) -- Type defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior
Wikipedia - Swashplate (aeronautics) -- Mechanism to control angle of attack of helicopter rotor blades
Wikipedia - Swashplate -- Mechanism to convert between reciprocating and rotary motion
Wikipedia - System call -- Mechanism used by an application program to request service from the kernel of the operating system
Wikipedia - TCP Fast Open -- experimental TCP mechanism
Wikipedia - The Mechanism (TV series) -- Brazilian television series
Wikipedia - Tired light -- Class of hypothetical redshift mechanisms
Wikipedia - Torkel Weis-Fogh -- Danish entomologist known for the clap-and-fling insect flight mechanism
Wikipedia - Toy model -- Deliberately simplistic model that can be used to explain a mechanism concisely
Wikipedia - Transmission of COVID-19 -- Mechanisms that spread coronavirus disease 2019
Wikipedia - Treadle -- Mechanism converting reciprocating into rotating motion
Wikipedia - Tribonucleation -- Mechanism for creation of microbubbles
Wikipedia - Trumpism -- Political mechanisms of persuasion, movement and themes of United States president Donald Trump and his followers
Wikipedia - Tuning mechanisms for stringed instruments -- Different types of stringed instrument parts and their methods for tuning stringed instruments
Wikipedia - Turnstile -- Mechanism that allows users to pass at a time
Wikipedia - Types of volcanic eruptions -- mechanisms of eruption
Wikipedia - Unmanned diving -- Diving by mechanisms under the direct or indirect control of remote human operators for observation, data collection or manipulation of the environment using on-board actuator devices
Wikipedia - VDSO -- Linux kernel mechanism
Wikipedia - Veronica Bucket -- Hand Washing Mechanism
Wikipedia - Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism -- A method of making choices that maximises utility
Wikipedia - Wake-on-LAN -- mechanism to wake up computers via a network
Wikipedia - Walden inversion -- Chemical reaction mechanism
Wikipedia - Web cache -- Mechanism for the temporary storage (caching) of web documents
Wikipedia - Web of trust -- Mechanism for authenticating cryptographic keys
Wikipedia - Whippletree (mechanism) -- Mechanism to distribute force evenly through linkages
Wikipedia - Wikipedia:Unified login -- Mechanism for a single login on all public Wikimedia projects
Wikipedia - Windkessel effect -- A mechanism that maintains blood pressure between heart beats
Wikipedia - X video extension -- video output mechanism for the X Window System
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10393473-the-collapse-of-mechanism-and-the-rise-of-sensibility
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12711152-horten-s-miraculous-mechanisms
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12711152-horten-s-miraculous-mechanisms?ac=1&from_search=true\
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13605211-the-kairos-mechanism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17003104-theories-and-mechanisms-of-evolution
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17589809-contractile-mechanisms-in-muscle
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20669.Stress_The_Aging_Brain_And_The_Mechanisms_Of_Neuron_Death
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229896.Ego_and_the_Mechanisms_of_Defense
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31283932-mechanism-2
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34968458-fundamental-reappraisal-of-the-discount-mechanism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35115707-causal-mechanisms-in-the-social-sciences
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39946780-the-ego-and-the-mechanisms-of-defence
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43459658-the-fire-opal-mechanism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/617879.Against_Mechanism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/924913.Social_Mechanisms
Integral World - The Transdarwinian Mechanisms of Subtle and Causal Fields: Toward an Integral Evolutionary Theory, Joe Corbett
Integral World - "Eros in the Kosmos", Mechanism, Metaphor or Something Else?, Frank Visser
selforum - anthropomorphism and mechanism have
dedroidify.blogspot - blasted-mechanism-battle-of-tribes-all
dedroidify.blogspot - daily-dedroidify-antikythera-mechanism
Psychology Wiki - Mechanism_(philosophy)
Psychology Wiki - Neural_mechanisms_behind_shifts_of_attention
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - science-mechanisms
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DefenceMechanismSuperpower
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DefenseMechanismSuperpower
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvoluntarySuicideMechanism
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDestructMechanism
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/TheMechanisms
Once Upon a Time... Life (1987 - 1987) - The series Once Upon a Time... Life used the same characters from the other Once Upon a Time... seasons: the good characters represent the cells that make up the body's systems and defense mechanisms, such as red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets, while the bad characters represent the vi...
Event Horizon(1997) - In this sci-fi/horror scarefest, Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill) is a scientist who has designed a spacecraft called Event Horizon which will explore the outer reaches of space past the planet Neptune; the ship employs a special transport mechanism that, in effect, creates a black hole that the ship ca...
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/"Natural_selection_as_the_mechanism_for_the_transmutation_of_species"_(Charles_Darwin_as_the_first_anti-psychiatric_thinker_timeline)
https://databasemanagement.fandom.com/wiki/Locking_Mechanisms
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Dwarven_Mechanism
https://fisherymanagement.fandom.com/wiki/Fishery_management_mechanisms
https://mancala.fandom.com/wiki/Capturing_(game_mechanism)
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Autonomously_Decisive_Automated_Mechanism_(Earth-616)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Delgorian_locking_mechanism
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Destruct_mechanism
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Mechanism
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Self-destruct_mechanism
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter_mechanism
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Mechanisms
https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Time_Tunnel_(mechanism)
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Self-destruct_mechanism
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Self-destruct_mechanism/Legends
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Tests_for_the_Mechanism_of_Heaven_Sent's_Confession_Dial
https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Mechanisms
Gyo -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Horror -- Gyo Gyo -- Though her trip to Okinawa was supposed to be a lovely excursion to the seaside, college student Kaori Sawahara finds that it is anything but when a horrifying menace emerges from the watery depths. A strange mechanism has taken control of the sea creatures, granting them legs and sending them on land to attack anything in their way. Kaori and her friends—the lustful Erika and the reserved Aki—find themselves caught up in this onslaught, made worse by the creatures' rotting stench of death. -- -- Surviving the first assault, Kaori tries to contact her fiancé Tadashi in Tokyo. However, the call is cut short in what sounds like another fish attack. Fearing for his safety, Kaori leaves for Tokyo. With Erika and Aki contending with the attacks in Okinawa, Kaori rushes to find Tadashi, unaware that the crisis has only just begun. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - Oct 29, 2011 -- 48,530 5.43
Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989) -- -- - -- 6 eps -- Manga -- Action Horror Sci-Fi Super Power -- Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989) Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989) -- Shou and his friend, Tetsurou, stumble upon a strange orb-like mechanism, the Guyver Unit, in the woods. It physically bonds with Shou and turns him into the alien soldier, Guyver. His mission is to protect the Guyver Unit from the Japanese corporation known as Chronos. They are after it and two other units just like it. To retrieve the object, they send out vicious monsters known as Zoanoids. So no one is safe in Shou's life; not even himself. -- -- Licensor: -- Manga Entertainment -- OVA - Sep 25, 1989 -- 10,976 7.12
Senki Zesshou Symphogear XV -- -- Satelight -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Music Sci-Fi -- Senki Zesshou Symphogear XV Senki Zesshou Symphogear XV -- Humanity is finally confronted with the threat of the Custodians—the ancient, sentient species held responsible for cursing humanity to speak different languages thousands of years ago. The Symphogear wielders—Hibiki Tachibana, Tsubasa Kazanari, Chris Yukine, Maria Cadenzavna Eve, Kirika Akatsuki, and Shirabe Tsukuyomi—are sent to the Antarctic in order to retrieve an ancient relic. After securing it and rescuing the scientific staff present there from a Coffin, the automated defense mechanism protecting it, the relic is given to American researchers due to international agreements. -- -- The criminal organization Noble Red, a remnant of the previously fought Bavarian Illuminati, starts targeting the relic. Will the Symphogear wielders and their supporting organization S.O.N.G. be able to foil the plans of the organizations conspiring against them? -- -- 29,286 8.19
Sentou Yousei Yukikaze -- -- Gonzo -- 5 eps -- Novel -- Action Drama Military Psychological Sci-Fi Space -- Sentou Yousei Yukikaze Sentou Yousei Yukikaze -- This full 3DCG digital animation has story takes place in the far future after a pillar of huge fog appeared suddenly in the South Pole. This pillar, known as Jam, is actually a passage for an earth invasion. -- -- In order to oppose the threat, the United Nations established an earth defense mechanism. Fukai Zero is a hero registered to the main force of earth defense and the special 5th flight squadron. His reconnaissance plane, Yukikaze (windblown snow) is the best tactical reconnaissance plane. His job is to collect battle information return safely to the base with the information. But one day when he about to finish his duty, an unidentified machine attacked him... -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment -- OVA - Aug 25, 2002 -- 15,775 7.20
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mechanisms_(engineering)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Kerf_Canceling_Mechanism_(bearing).gif
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_bar_mechanism.png
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geared_Five_Bar_Mechanism.png
AffleckDine mechanism
African Peer Review Mechanism
Airstream mechanism
Algorithmic mechanism design
Ancient Mechanisms
Antikythera mechanism
Applegate mechanism
Aquatic feeding mechanisms
Asbury mechanism
Association for Machines and Mechanisms
Asynchronous communication mechanism
Bayesian-optimal mechanism
Berry mechanism
Blasted Mechanism
Bridge plate (mechanism)
Budget-balanced mechanism
Canadian Committee for the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms
Clean Development Mechanism
Common Berthing Mechanism
Compliant mechanism
Content Assembly Mechanism
Cooperative Mechanisms under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement
Coping Mechanisms
Copying mechanism
CosseeArlman mechanism
Crank (mechanism)
Defence mechanism
Deformation mechanism
Developable mechanism
Direct-drive mechanism
Disease Models & Mechanisms
Dispute mechanism
Distributed algorithmic mechanism design
Double-exchange mechanism
Dwell mechanism
Eccentric (mechanism)
Ei mechanism
Elastic mechanisms in animals
Electrochemical reaction mechanism
European Exchange Rate Mechanism
European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism
European Stability Mechanism
European Union rapid reaction mechanism
Exponential mechanism (differential privacy)
Extension mechanisms for DNS
FischlerSusskind mechanism
Flexible Mechanisms
Focal mechanism
Forbidden mechanism
G7 Rapid Response Mechanism
Gamma-ray burst emission mechanisms
Generalized TTL security mechanism
GIM mechanism
GoldbergerWise mechanism
GreenSchwarz mechanism
Grotthuss mechanism
Higgs mechanism
Hydraulic recoil mechanism
Intermittent mechanism
International Berthing and Docking Mechanism
International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science
International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity
International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals
IPv6 transition mechanism
Kappamechanism
KelvinHelmholtz mechanism
KibbleZurek mechanism
Kozai mechanism
Lamina emergent mechanism
Lepelletier gear mechanism
Leveling mechanism
Lindemann mechanism
Market mechanism
Mechanism
Mechanism (band)
Mechanism design
Mechanism Digital
Mechanism (engineering)
Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification
Mechanism of action
Mechanism of action of aspirin
Mechanism of anoxic depolarization in the brain
Mechanism of autism
Mechanism of diving regulators
Mechanism of sonoluminescence
Mechanism (philosophy)
Mechanism (sociology)
Mechanisms of Development
Mechanisms of mindfulness meditation
Microsoft-specific exception handling mechanisms
Molecular and epigenetic mechanisms of alcoholism
MTR fare adjustment mechanism
Myogenic mechanism
New Economic Mechanism
OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism
Overconstrained mechanism
Participation constraint (mechanism design)
Price mechanism
Pricespecie flow mechanism
Prior-free mechanism
Prior-independent mechanism
Protection mechanism
Quick return mechanism
Reaction mechanism
Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism
ScherkSchwarz mechanism
Scientific Advice Mechanism
Scissors mechanism
Seesaw mechanism
Self-adaptive mechanisms
Self-righting mechanism
Separation of mechanism and policy
Servomechanism
Single Resolution Mechanism
Single Supervisory Mechanism
Stabilisation Tracking Mechanism
Straight line mechanism
Strengthening mechanisms of materials
The Mechanism
The Mechanism (TV series)
Toxicology Mechanisms and Methods
Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism
Tuning mechanisms for stringed instruments
VickreyClarkeGroves mechanism
Virtual breakdown mechanism
Whippletree (mechanism)
Wikipedia talk:Approval mechanism
Zeldovich mechanism



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